Year 4, Day 24: The kids have been deeply into building JB’s old magnetiles set and a bin of 40 year old Legos handed down from our friend last summer. This is tempting me to buy a larger set of magnetiles that are on sale. But do I really want another set of magnetiles in the house? Yeeess … we could build taller! wider! more!
Do I want more stuff in the house that I’m constantly decluttering? Dammit. No. The answer is no, self, no more magnetiles. Even though it’s a lot of fun.
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My fibro flare continues. It feels like I’m a walking lava monster. I’m currently theorizing that this is a reaction to the cold-like virus that Smol Acrobat brought home last week. I haven’t had symptoms other than my own green snot, but Smol’s been a dribbly snot factory this entire time. Not that it matters a how or why this flare-up started, I’m just speculating while grumping about pain that drains all my daytime energy and doesn’t let me sleep at night. Rude.
My therapist had offered me this link to guided meditations and we tried a short one. I’ve been pretty jumbled up recently. I know things are ticking off my anxiety (less alone time than usual, my routines have been and will stay upset for at least a month, anticipating an unpleasant upcoming week with unpleasant people, I’m covering for absent staff, etc).
I know that all this transitional stuff knocking off my routine is putting me off my stride. I know what the problem is. But knowing doesn’t dissipate the tension it generates. The stuff still fundamentally sets off my fight or fight reflex which cannot be satisfied, so there’s a self sustaining feedback problem going on. The guided meditation helped a little bit so I’ll be trying to do a short one each day to see if it reminds my body how to let go a little.
~~~~~
I didn’t know that Smol Acrobat knew how to say: handbag, castle, medicine. That was a surprise!
They’ve been trotting around for the past few days saying ohhhkay (in a really mellow tone) to everything and it’s weirdly cute.
Year 3, Day 25: Whoops. So it’s Picture Day for Smol. We don’t usually care about school pictures but in the spirit of fairness, agreed to get a small package for them like we did for JB. One time in their daycare “career” per kid. We had to pay for the package ahead of time (which I thought was sort of silly, and that was foreshadowing for you).
JB absolutely loved their photo shoot but that was pre-COVID, we were able to be there, and toddler JB was a total showboat for the camera.
Poor Smol Acrobat found the whole experience frightening. We couldn’t be there for it. The big flashbulbs were popping. They were separated from their peer group and taken to a strange room with strangers behind big cameras. I was 0% surprised that they cried and refused to take the picture. Poor kid. We decided it wasn’t worth distressing them to try again. We get plenty of candid photos.
~~~~~
I’m happy about two food treats we splurged on: a po’boys and beignets lunch and a stack of banh mi that’ll make three meals for everyone. That cost $109.
I’m equally happy about a surprise Poshmark sale. A perfectly new-with-tags dress I can’t wear leaves my closet and $16 comes back to me. This only thrills me down to my toes so I suppose it’s fair that it’s not much money compared to our spending on food.
Year 3, Day 26: Our wind feels like getting ice water dumped over your head. *shiver*
Testing my physical limits today, to see if I’m through this flare, and the results are mixed. My muscles are still upset, my bones are less so. That’s a bit of progress but I’m still relatively sidelined. So even though I got through my critical work early enough that I could have gone with JB to their library activity, my body was staying planted right here.
I used this time to process an Old Navy return. I’d bought myself a shirt, in addition to clothes for gifts, but it didn’t fit right. Organized more clothes for the Lakota Giving Box I’m filling, I’m hoping to stuff it to the brim with jackets the end of next month. Sent a Coffee on Ko-Fi to an artist because I want to support them a bit but I can’t afford their super high quality jewelry. It’s amazing art but the pieces that are my style are wildly outside my price range.
Who doesn’t feel this tired? While I’ve always had prepper tendencies by nature, after all we’ve already been through, I’m not volunteering to navigate through a post-apocalyptic world.
I posted this on Instagram and it may be the most shared clip of my stand up ever and that’s fun… but also disturbing because thousands of people are saying “SAME” we are not well pic.twitter.com/DVX3FDtS80
Year 3, Day 27: I feel ~100 lbs denser this morning. As if every part of me is exponentially heavier and thus requires more energy to move.
But the good parts of this morning: one load of laundry, done! one dental cleaning, done! (I love the dental chair, it’s so soft and cushy) one UPS drop off return, done!
After a couple hours of intense work (and an ill advised 2/3s of a delicious chocolate hazelnut piroshky), naturally, I crashed. Since I couldn’t actually tap out, so I just kept slumping down further in my chair.
Year 3, Day 28: This tweet gave me a good laugh today.
I disagree. Wealthy people might spend less money on attire proportional to their income/cash flow but I do not think that wealthy people, as a group, spend less in absolute dollars consistently enough to make this a rule of thumb. I think spending on clothes is much more related to each person’s inclinations and career and a whole host of other things that aren’t defined by their money.
I have a handful of wealthy friends. The ultra-wealthy think nothing of spending $500-1000 on a single high quality piece of clothing. Or they DO think about it and it’s worth it to them.
If I look at myself as an example of being relatively financially comfortable, my conclusion is the same. I came from being deep in the hole, paying off so many tens of thousands of dollars of debt for my parents, to being reasonably comfortable on our two salaries. Mostly, I dress the same as I did back then. Jeans, t-shirts, and a sweatshirt. I still wear the sweatshirt my cousin gave me back in 2006.
Yes, we can both afford to dress better. No, getting to this level of “rich” did NOT give either of us better taste. We do have a few very high quality pieces. I bought him a nice watch (nowhere near $1000), I bought myself a few pieces of clothing from Elhoffer Design. We both have very warm coats. I do own more cute earrings but that’s more about being able to wear them without an allergic reaction and less about having money.
But other than that? We are walking proof that how you start is often how you carry on. Making enough money to make ends meet and a little more did not come with a magic style boost for either of us, and we don’t mind! He likes his free t-shirts and I like my three identical black sweatshirts I bought during pregnancy and a pair of athleisure pants from ten years ago. Money =/= magic.
Related thought: more generally, if you’re poor and hope to succeed in higher income fields (barring computer / tech because that’s probably a weird industry for dress norms), you probably need to dress more nicely than you might normally. My friend who entered the i-banking field from a non-wealthy background had to drastically upgrade her wardrobe in order to look like she belonged. When I entered management, I had to dress up much more formally to look my age and be taken seriously. Now that I’m senior management, I’m back in my preferred uniform and my reputation speaks far louder than my hoodie.
Anyway I’m not trying to make any academic points here. I just think it’s as silly as the proclamations that only poor people buy new cars or buy new phones or whatever the current faintly derogatory declaration is.
If you earn enough, that’s what is going to make you wealthier, not just abstaining from new technology and looking like a slob.
~~~~~
It was a beautiful sunny, even warm!, day and that went a long way to boosting my mood. I’m soaking it in and holding it as a hedge against next week when I will be dealing with some Unpleasant People TM. Wish me luck?
Year 4, Day 17: Sunday was a perfect beautiful weather day. Smol Acrobat and I took a late morning walk with Sera, and that was the last time I’ve felt close to ok.
I’d missed my Friday’s medications and assumed that’s why I felt off balance Saturday but that was just the beginning of a fibro flare. The rest of Sunday was agonizingly painful. It very much felt like my entire lower body was molten lava and I needed to lay down for hours and nap for an hour just to maintain consciousness all day. This morning was 50/50 whether I’d be plunged back into the lava so I restricted myself to sitting at my desk with extremely short ventures to the kitchen and bathroom. My bones were on a low-medium simmer all day but thankfully the sitting helped enough that it didn’t flare up beyond that.
JB and PiC went on a BART and museum adventure. I was mildly jealous in the abstract but definitely couldn’t have gone. Any walking veered dangerously close to Doing Too Much. I had to rest.
Year 3, Day 18: I hate how I feel in my body after Smol’s arrival. I feel lumpy and heavy. Specifically, I’m carrying too much extra volume in my belly. It’s weird. After JB I also had this problem but it didn’t bother me as much.
Going no or low carb might help. But I don’t wanna. Pretzels! Girl Scout Cookies! English muffins! They have a firm grip on my heart.
I should do it this month if I’m going to do it. It’d be the easiest time to do it. PiC has some time off this month and is using it as a staycation so he’s running all the errands and doing a lot of cooking.
~~~~~
Speaking of food, Safeway had pork shoulder on sale for $1/lb. We always jump on that. What I didn’t account for was that Safeway doesn’t package them by halves (about 8-10 lbs each). They do the whole shebang, at 16-20 lbs each. We went for it anyway, thankfully it was cut in half at least, and one went into the slow cooker and one went into the oven for a slow roast. Now we just have to make space for some of both in the freezer. I really wish we had room to have a deep freezer.
We kept our old fridge when we moved. That is really luxurious! Buuuut…. my hoarder self, along with my realistic chronic pain and fatigue self, really wishes we had a deep freezer too so that I could stock up on sales and freeze more than a few meals ahead for bad weeks. We can keep about 3 entrees in the freezer along with all the other foods we normally keep in rotation. I tried reminding myself that, without one, we don’t have to worry about the additional energy costs but that is small comfort when we run out of prepped meals. Ah well. We pay in other ways, like for prepared meals from Costco or take out, so it’s not like that saved costs are a strong reason not to. We just don’t have the space for it.
Year 3, Day 19: It’s probably not a good thing that I’ve passed on my mild-to-moderate obsession with Hello Kitty to both kids. This could (will) get expensive.
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I thought my fibro flare up was over yesterday but the brain fog effects are lingering. My short term memory is either not encoding or incredibly hard to access. I’ve missed two scheduled plans this week already. Our lives are a touch too complicated for my taste and current ability but I’ve not forgotten about a therapy appointment in years so that got under my skin.
~~~~~
Using the AT&T Fiber advertising as leverage, I negotiated a reduction in our internet bill that has been steadily creeping up since COVID started. It’s now $55 a month, down from $76. This will help cover my increased pledge for Shep’s move to escape anti-trans legislation.
I also calculated precisely how much I’d need to charge to my Wells Fargo Active Cash Card to redeem the $200 bonus plus the 2% cashback in increments of $25. Between our two cards, we’ll get $450 in bonuses. Most of that’s already been sent out to support friends and folks in crappy financial situations.
On that subject, I’ve been pulling in direct aid support from a wider circle of people back to my primary contacts because so many of my main people are going through very rough waters right now. I may keep the direct giving circle tighter going forward. Many of the wider-range people that I give smaller amounts to haven’t been acknowledging it. I don’t mean thanks, I don’t need that. I mean there’s zero reaction, emoji, anything to indicate the money was seen and received. It makes me wonder if the money is noticed/received/going to the right hands. Rather than worry about whether they’re getting it, I’ll adjust our giving strategy to those who do confirm receipt. It’s a minor thing but it matters.
Year 3, Day 20: Smol Acrobat’s got a fever and green snot and I am also infected. This is the pits. They sleep terribly when they’re sick and that means I don’t sleep with all the wake-ups.
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We’ve been defending against multiple ant invasions this year. Several weeks ago, I stopped one incursion into the kitchen. This week, the ants pressed their advantage by invading three fronts simultaneously, eating holes right through our walls. I watched one push chunks out of the wall in horror and fascination. I hate them in the house so much! I’ve put down boric acid in several places hoping that it wards them off again but am not holding my breath. I’ve wiped down our outlet covers with vinegar in hopes that it’ll deter them from that point of entry. Their three room attack, spread from the front to the back of the house, makes me think that our walls are full of ants. *shudder* 😭
PiC’s pointed out that other people pay for a regular exterminator service and I really don’t want to have to do that. Cross your fingers for us?
~~~~~
In other massively underappreciated efforts, we cleaned Sera’s ears. One of them was a bit infected so I also medicated it. She drooped for an hour after, as usual, and it’s pitiful! But I’ve got to make time to clean them more often.
I’ve been trying to brush her teeth most days of the week, some weeks are more successful than others, but she especially hates the ear cleaning. Smol Acrobat tried to “help”, so they were entrusted with feeding Sera treats to mollify her while I did the dirty work.
She was unmollified.
We’re going to be at odds for the several days of her ear medication course. I can deal with that.
Year 3, Day 21: All week my stomach has been on strike against breakfast. No matter what I ate, or how little, it transformed into a belly full of knives within half an hour. Just awful. It’s putting me off even trying to eat in the mornings until I’m too hungry to wait any longer.
~~~~~
I had been paaaaaaatiently waiting for our CPA to confirm that our taxes had been filed. We reviewed final details last week, made some tiny corrections, and it’s been silent since then. I assumed she was swamped – though most Californians have an automatic extension – and figured I’d hear soon enough. Instead both CA and Federal refunds landed this morning. Too swamped to email but not to file. In a choice between the two, that’s the right priority!
Uncharacteristically, I dumped them both into our checking account. Usually it goes straight into investments, however, I am looking at the year’s income and outflows plotted out and the spending estimates are currently outstripping the income estimates by A LOT. I didn’t revise the credit card spending (on food and other household supplies) down when I added the $2000+ daycare bill, so that’s one root cause. The overage amount is greater than the total daycare will cost, though. I didn’t really feel like doing the legwork. *hides face*
Correcting the projections isn’t worth the work; our monthly spending fluctuates a lot from month to month. My compromise is to leave it as is, adjusting the amounts in real time, and trusting that we will ultimately spend less than my rough space-holder projections. Meanwhile I’ll keep trimming fat and creating little bits of extra income too.
Year 4, Day 10: Is this all the anxiety from last week landing like a lump of clay in my chest? Maybe. Or maybe it’s fresh anxiety for the week. Who knows?
The past three days, I’ve been randomly dizzy through the day and night. Standing, sitting, laying down, nothing stops the dizzy. It’s not enough to make me fall over, it is enough to make the world spin badly and requires a few moments to try to steady up. That’s a known side effect of the naltrexone they prescribed for off label pain control, but I’m taking such a low dose it seems implausible for it to be the problem. My fingers have also been sausages for a week, that might just be a flare-up situation.
I skipped my dose this morning anyway but it doesn’t seem to have reduced the dizziness, lightheadedness, and now nausea. Not a fan!
~~~~~
I applied for the Wells Fargo credit card for PiC three weeks ago to get the $200 bonus on $1000 spend. They said it would take a little time to approve and approved it a few hours later. The card arrived soon after and I’ve already met the minimum spend.
I applied for myself last week and they again said it would take a little time to approve, but I still haven’t heard back. EXCUSE me. My credit is excellent, what’s the hold up!?
It’ll be some kind of irony if they approve PiC’s but not mine.
Year 4, Day 3: What a MONDAY. My 8 hour night shift with Smol Acrobat was miserable – they were fussy, feverish, and incapable of finding a position to sleep in for more than 20 minutes. We ran late because we didn’t have to get JB out the door by 8 am, so I got 20 minutes of uninterrupted sleep but it pushed everything behind. I forgot my pain meds, my jacket, my daycare parent pass. PiC forgot his daycare parent pass and spilled coffee on himself and in the car. Smol Acrobat was tired and withdrawn by the time we dropped them off, and sobbed when we left which absolutely broke my heart. They haven’t cried at dropoff since the first weeks.
Year 3, Day 361: The weekend rain was light but wrecked my bones pretty well so I’m not thrilled about the storm expected tomorrow.
Someone asked me if I had ever experienced non-joy in the face of things that SHOULD bring me joy. As it happens, that perfectly describes my emotional state lately. It feels like things are going well enough that I should be happy.
Things are dramatically better than they had been even a year ago. I’m FINALLY not coughing up a lung all day, everyday. We finally have full time childcare. We have (so far, knock wood) continued to dodge the COVID bullet even as there are half a dozen reports of cases on campus. PiC is finally getting more exercise time with the childcare. Those are all the shoulds.
On the flip side, my brain fog is still thick. My physical self is wracked with pain and fatigue all day and all night. I am still never truly refreshed when I sleep. At best I might be less tired than when I went to sleep but most days I’m even more tired. A tweet has going around about what everyone has accomplished since COVID started and while I don’t begrudge anyone their accomplishments, my mood means that I started feeling rather badly about how I “only” made it through these past three years without getting COVID (knock wood) and how I’ve not published a book or done any of a dozen things I’d have liked to do before 40. I’m also sad about the loss of community, both on Twitter and with dear friends who have fallen out of touch for their own reasons. It’s hard not to feel complicated and unwanted when a chosen family member unchooses you to deal with their own issues. It’s not about you but it’s still sad.
Year 3, Day 354: Weirdly enough, the time change knocked us for a loop more last night and this morning, not on Sunday morning as expected. Probably because Smol needed soothing at 4:30 am, and went back down for another sleep cycle or two before getting up at the equivalent of their usual time instead of an hour earlier than that. Getting everyone to bed an hour later than usual last night was partially a function of how exhausted we were after a long day with two kids playing and fighting all day long. Our heads were ringing with the endless screeches.
~~~~~
All the confusion about my antidepressants refill has finally been straightened out, I think, and my refill for 100 days worth of meds is FINALLY on the way. It took two false starts and three phone calls.
It might be time for me to try that off label naltrexone prescription for my pain. It’s startling to realize that I keep thinking I’m not in that much pain anymore so it’s not worth trying. In reality, most nights my marrow feels like lava. That’s not being pain free.
~~~~~
My first (or the last one was so long ago that history has been erased) successful dinner!
I made a triple batch of chili, baked cornbread, and served both with a spinach salad that PiC picked up. The kids – BOTH OF THEM emphasis mostly for Smol the pickypants – ate up everything I served! No fuss, no fidgets, no frustration.
What do I have to sacrifice to which kitchen god for this to happen every (or most) night? Two thirds of the chili went into the freezer for easy dinners in the next couple of weeks. We’ve got just enough leftover chili to have chili dogs for tomorrow night.
Year 3, Day 347: Guess who has two thumbs and didn’t sleep until 5 am? This guy!
Thanks to painsomnia at its worst. It wasn’t even at the most severe levels of pain, it was just persistent and blocked my ability to find that falling asleep feeling. I did read three books trying to get there.
Needless to say, I was an entire zombie today. Sluggish and drooping at my desk, again grateful that I work remotely and don’t have to care what anyone sees or thinks of me.
I got my work done, answered a dozen texts from family and friends, picked up JB from school, walked Sera, and crawled into bed after making sure that JB knew what their chores were. Since they had scored two rainbow baskets at Target yesterday on the condition that they clean up the mess on their dresser, they were 100% cooperative and cleaned independently while I dozed, Sera at my feet.
Even Smol was a lot more cooperative than usual at dinner because tartar sauce has magical properties. Plop a good blob on their plate for dipping and Smol will willingly eat piles of broccoli. They plowed through a whole proper serving of broccoli entirely under their own steam. Bless that sauce.
Year 3, Day 348: Smol woke up, hysterical, a few hours into the night. PiC went to them and they became MORE hysterical, demanding me. This is unnerving. They get equal time with the two of us, and generally everyone wants PiC. Why am I in such high demand? Anyway, we three ended up passing out in Smol’s room which made for a less than ideal night of sleep.
~~~~~
My brain is, as usual, in search of dopamine. Naturally, I search for it through money and checking off the to do list. MyPoints, I’m about 250 points away from a $25 gift card redemption. Swagbucks, I’m 2200 points away from a $25 gift card redemption. Bing, 2000 points away from a $100 gift card redemption (in 4 increments, I’m just holding out for the multiple redemptions all at once). No joy there.
I did finally wrap up the warranty claim for the second of the kids’ water bottles, and that has shipped. I’m still waiting for the movie tickets trade-in to arrive. That’s due this week. Fingers crossed! You know what I’d really like – to organize a gift area better. I currently use a bin but that’s only good for the gifts without an intended recipient. Maybe it’s time to clear a shelf for the gifts that can be wrapped and bagged up for distribution.
~~~~~
Lakota Reservation: My friend has gathered a literal truckload of new or like new clothes for us to donate to the Lakota reservation. One box goes to a family and then we’ll have multiple boxes to ship directly. We can use their $20 Giving Box prepaid shipping labels (up to 70 lbs per box, which is a great deal) for the large community donations but I’m running low on the reserved pool of cash to pay for shipping these boxes of clothes. We have enough to send one or two boxes now, I’ll know once I’ve gotten the box for the current family together. For the preservation of sanity, I think we have to limit the number of boxes that we try to ship.
~~~~~
Have you heard Orville Peck sing? A friend introduced me. THAT VOICE!
Year 3, Day 349: Grumble. I sent our tax preparer our stack of documents (digitally speaking) last weekend. She said she’d download everything on Monday. Yay. I’ve been doing my best not to bother her for a week. Today she asked me for access to the files. Which means she hasn’t worked on them at all! Which means I have to restart the clock on being patient all over again. Darnit! I really wanted to know what the damages were.
~~~~~
After reading Paladin’s Hope (affiliate link, LOVE the book/series) again, and also finally agreeing we’d go on a family obligations thing for Spring Break (all work, no fun, barf), my nightmares are out of control. SMH.
I’m going to work on packing while my subconscious does its anxiety thing.
~~~~~
There are a lot of people in the comments ruffled at Tracee Ellis Ross’s privilege but that’s ignoring the point that her message isn’t wrong. It’s true that money lets you actually slow down in a lot of ways. But the lack of money doesn’t mean you should ignore the underlying message.
This line in particular struck home: “I give big, so I have to restore big.” I give big and restore none, most days. I feel that imbalance deeply. This is a habit forged in the worst days of my life. Even if I couldn’t financially afford to stop and take a day off, I could have been learning to put up better boundaries, to value myself as someone worth protecting, or just not to give away everything that’s in me without a thought for replenishment.
All rich women speak like this. I just want someone to be honest about how money allows you to slow down. https://t.co/PX3VsnZVDX
Year 3, Day 350: It’s been extra nippy and damp in between the multiple atmospheric rivers flowing through CA. Another one is meant to come through this weekend and stick around all week. I’m starting to wonder whether my cough and congestion or the weather will clear up first. This is about to hit two months of coughing/congestion and that’s not a record I was looking to set.
~~~~~
Two small Smol yays today: At their midnight waking, they begged to sleep in the big bed with me as they’ve been demanding the past few nights. I hugged them and cuddled them and firmly said no. It took two tries but they finally settled in for the rest of the night in their own crib.
They actually walked to and from JB’s school dropoff location! Walks with them have been one of my least favorite activities because they frequently refuse to use their own perfectly good legs in the absence of a big sibling to chase. It makes a HUGE difference not having to carry 25 lbs of toddler or encourage them to keep walking every two steps, literally, for the love of sweet baby capybaras.
— Caleb Dume’ Simian Stan Account (@pfunk1130) March 1, 2023
Year 3, Day 351: A neighbor I’ve said hi to for the past two years of kid dropoff and pickup tapped me on the shoulder to introduce herself today. I might have struck up a conversation before but she’s often with her husband who appears very standoffish and won’t even do a nod hello of acknowledgement. Didn’t seem worth the effort, so though she seemed perfectly friendly herself, I figured it was safer to just hang back and leave it at nods and hellos. What do normal people do in these situations?
~~~~~
I’ve finally submitted the paperwork for PiC’s Global Entry renewal. Happily it was confirmed we really only need the physical card if driving back to the US from Canada or Mexico so it wasn’t needed for the renewal but I still sure would like to have it back where it belongs. It feels quite careless for me to have misplaced it. With the absolute wreckage that is my desk these days despite my best efforts, I feel even more pressure to get it right with the important stuff. Maybe it’s time to get one of those little business card books to store current and expired cards like this. How do you store important cards that are infrequently used?
Year 4 of COVID in the Bay Area.