May 11, 2020
If you’d like to join me in helping Lakota families and/or rural libraries this year, please read this post. Over 6 weeks in 2019, we raised $2669.94 for the Lakota families, touching 27 lives. What can we do in 2020?
Current total: Lakota, $1,021.58; Rural libraries, $321.62.
Weeks 7 and 8 of shutdown in the Bay Area.
We have a bit of a routine now. Mornings: Walk dogs, feed dogs, breakfast. JB has a lesson online, PiC and I work during that period (I oversee the lesson just as a behavior monitor.) Usually they are released to go hang out with PiC for a snack and games after the lesson unless he has conference calls. Afternoon: Lunch, I wander out after I’ve cleared the critical parts of my work (if I’m lucky). I’m juggling my work, training new staff, giving feedback, overseeing policy issues and questions plus the usual household stuff: ordering supplies, watching our spending, thinking about how to organize our lives a little bit better.
Week 7, Day 1: I had to run an important errand today and it threw my entire work groove out of whack. It took hours to get focused on work again, and before I knew it, I was derailed again by fatigue. Rude.
I did get lucky with the weather though! The sun was shining fiercely enough to be warm even with the usual gusty wintry winds we get through our neighborhood, so I set up camp in the garage for a couple hours to get “beach weather” while working. Ahhhh….. The change of scenery really did my mind and body good. I still felt ill and tired, but it did boost my spirits for a good hour and I’m grateful for it.
Week 7, Day 2:
I had to get checked out today and that was really weird. My second solo outing in two days, after 40 days of being home and around the neighborhood only on short walks, and I was feeling such strangeness of being out and about when the world is so altered. Seeing and talking to people at the doctor’s office was also incredibly strange. Some people were reassuring, some people were brusque and off-putting. Some people were slightly hysterical about the medical building’s policies.
One enormous sigh of relief: The possible crisis with PiC’s job blew over. We will be seeing some changes in May, details still unknown, but I’m so many kinds of grateful that it’s not the layoff that we were concerned about.
I’m thinking about how my mentor used to tease me about my 12 month cash emergency fund. She considered it excessive. It could be excessive for her with her very very stable job but I remember the Great Recession far too clearly not to want an 18-24 month cash fund. THAT was probably too much, though, considering how behind I have been with investing for the future. On the one hand, yes it was important to get off my caboose and invest. The habit was the important thing. On the other hand, considering last year’s high prices, I may have been better served if I had held on to the 18-24 month cash and invested a portion of it this year. Wait. No. That’s not true. In a pandemic, I wouldn’t have been able to let go of the cash and I still wouldn’t have made any inroads into our investing goals. Never mind. Hindsight fails to account for the behavioral changes I needed to make.
Anyway. The point is, if we hadn’t had a year of cash in hand, that concern over PiC’s job earlier this month would have been full blown panic. Facing one income when we need 2 to cover our expenses, less than a year of cash, the stock market down, and being stuck at home during a pandemic? Nope. No way. Eliminating one of those four factors as an issue made a big difference. Going down to one job with 12 months cash would let us hold out for about 18 months before having to sell stocks. If facing a recession and a down market, the longer we can wait to tap those stocks, the better.
Of course I don’t know what the heck the market is doing now or why.
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April 27, 2020
If you’d like to join me in helping Lakota families and/or rural libraries this year, please read this post. Over 6 weeks in 2019, we raised $2669.94 for the Lakota families, touching 27 lives. What can we do in 2020?
Current total: Lakota, $640.74; Rural libraries, $321.62.
Weeks 5 and 6 of shutdown in the Bay Area.
This is a record of our weekdays. Video calls with other kids have been spectacularly Not Fun.
Week 5, Day 1: Most of the time, I’m dropping quick money updates in PiC’s ear. He may listen, he may not, but he knows I’ve got it. Things are exceptionally topsy turvy because he actually asked for a check in on our finances. Since I’m obsessively on top of them, it was easy to give him the birds’ eye view. Basically: we’re on the right track, we have a plan, I tweaked it a bit, but as long as we keep our jobs and incomes, we will be ok. We stash lots of cash in case of job loss, but you know I’m going to worry if we do lose a job. It’s how I’m built.
Jenny got me thinking about the Dragonbox apps as way to incorporate math for the kiddo. I would have to find my iPad and charger though. 😬
PiC has me concerned about his job security. I don’t want to have to add worrying about his job on top of my not sleeping, and my extra heavy workload. I just do not want one more thing on this plate please and thank you. I last resolved to go limp on this one and I am very bad at it.
Week 5, Day 2: This was a particularly grumpy day. JB was defiant and rude and frankly bratty most of the day, and simply could not deal.
I was not in the best form myself and my patience wore thin by the time I hit the 6th repetition of simple instructions that they refused to follow. Thank goodness for the one day of warm sun to at least somewhat offset the high level of grouch of the day.
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April 13, 2020
If you’d like to join me in helping Lakota families and/or rural libraries this year, please read this post. Over 6 weeks in 2019, we raised $2669.94 for the Lakota families, touching 27 lives. What can we do in 2020?
Current total: Lakota, $640.74; Rural libraries, $321.62.
Weeks 3 and 4 of shutdown in the Bay Area.
This is a record of our weekdays. We are attempting to set up the occasional video call with other kids so that they can socialize that way.
Week 3, Day 1: Why are Mondays always just the worst? They just are. It’s not even that I dread work, it’s just the day always starts off with me feeling physically slow and sluggish and often also mentally slow and sluggish. My 5yo coworker also complained of being tired but they mostly didn’t want to leave the cozy bed. Me neither, kiddo. Evidently my Monday woes stem from not feeling well on Sunday carrying over. I had to crash for the morning for a while. JB brought their art to hang out bedside with me and narrated their art projects for an hour. I mumbled barely coherent responses most of that hour, they didn’t care.
Seamus just keeps on trying to force us all to be in the same room together.
Week 3, Day 2: Our leadership has confirmed that they think we should be financially ok for several months and no one should be worried about layoffs and that is a huge relief. I’m so grateful to know that I just have to worry about making it day to day with our million concerns and not about losing this job. I was definitely not lucky in job security during the Great Recession so I have a great deal of empathy for the people losing their jobs now.
Since they could be wrong, since we can only make our best guesses on the information we have now and that keeps changing (and is likely inaccurate), I’m doing a lot of balancing of our budget day to day to both be supportive of the local economy and communities in distress and to bolster our own finances.
We’re looking at all the ways we can put cash back in our pockets: requesting our cash back from cash back sites, submitting requests for our dependent day care reimbursements, following up on FSA reimbursements, requesting refunds for services that won’t be rendered for a while from very large corporations that can bear the costs, filing our federal tax return now (we’re due a small refund).
This cash gathering is to balance our spending ahead on services we won’t be getting from smaller businesses until much later to try and help keep them afloat.
Other places that need help:
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March 30, 2020
If you’d like to join me in helping Lakota families and/or rural libraries this year, please read this post. Over 6 weeks in 2019, we raised $2669.94 for the Lakota families, touching 27 lives. What can we do in 2020?
Current total: Lakota, $640.74; Rural libraries, $321.62.
Week 2 of shutdown in the Bay Area.
This is a record of our weekdays. We are attempting to set up the occasional video call with other kids so that they can socialize that way.
This week’s menu planning: Roast pork shoulder, veggie curry, a rotisserie chicken from Costco. I meant to also make dumplings and tandoori chicken from scratch but PiC surprised me with that rotisserie chicken on our last run to Costco for a few weeks.
Day 1: I was finally mentally ready to get my act together and set up a tentative schedule for JB. I don’t know if we can manage this same thing all week but I like the general outline that gives us some structure and some chances to get work done without having to entertain.
8 am -8:30 am, Breakfast
8:30 am – 9 am, “art lesson” – watching an artist draw something new and copying it
9 am – 10 am, Call with Auntie – practice writing
10 am – 10:30 am, dance party with music
10:30 am – 11:30 am, free choice (probably art)
11:30 am – 12 pm, snack
12:30 pm – 2 pm, walk dogs and have lunch
2 pm – 2:45 pm, rest
2:45 pm – 3:45 pm, solo free choice – aka work at my desk but do not talk to me
3:45 pm – 4:30 pm, numbers/math time – maybe a few worksheets that they enjoy doing. *Note: couldn’t find it. Oh well.
4:30 pm – 5:30 pm, movement of some kind.
5:30 pm – 6 pm, inevitable lost transition time to whining or tiredness
6 pm – 7 pm, dinner (more…)
March 24, 2020
If you’d like to join me in helping Lakota families and/or rural libraries this year, please read this post. Over 6 weeks in 2019, we raised $2669.94 for the Lakota families, touching 27 lives. What can we do in 2020?
Current total: Lakota, $640.74; Rural libraries, $321.62.
Money
Our spending went way (waaaaaay) up this month because of the stocking up on food and medications and the house repair which had nothing to do with the pandemic, just the weather.
The groceries were manageable, I focused on sales and specific recipes to make the most of our food and prevent waste. I also picked up a lot of apples and oranges that will last a few weeks in the fridge to stretch out time between grocery trips.
The real kick in the teeth was the medications and Seamus’s final labwork. I think we spent about $800 all told on his stuff. But we simply cannot risk him going without his pain medications due to any interruption in the supply lines.
I canceled both our dogwalker and my massage therapy but I paid the former anyway and bought a gift card from the latter to help the business with a bit of income while they have to be shut down. Luckily, my brain therapy is already remote so I will keep that appointment this week.
As much as our budget can bear, I’m trying to anonymously help out folks who have lost their income.
We are both very fortunate that, for the moment, our jobs are relatively safe. We don’t know how long that’ll be the case and I have always planned against the worst case scenario happening and will continue to do so but I won’t forget to be grateful. The not great thing is that PiC had finally located some jobs to apply for and we don’t know if the companies will freeze hiring. I hope not. He’s been unhappy in this job for so long, I sure hope he still has opportunities open. But either way, we know we are so incredibly lucky and we are grateful for our current financial stability however long it lasts.
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March 23, 2020
If you’d like to join me in helping Lakota families and/or rural libraries this year, please read this post. Over 6 weeks in 2019, we raised $2669.94 for the Lakota families, touching 27 lives. What can we do in 2020?
Current total: Lakota, $640.74; Rural libraries, $321.62.
Week 1 of shutdown in the Bay Area.
I haven’t written anything substantial about this because I’ve just been too busy trying to deal.
We had begun taking steps weeks ago. Around March 1st, PiC and I were adding moderate overage to our canned and frozen food stores.
A week later, I started cooking up fresh and frozen stores to make actual meals in case I got sick myself. (Not that PiC wouldn’t care for me but he’d also have JB and the two dogs to care for. That’s a lot for any one adult.) Traffic was noticeably light going to and from work this second week of March, many employees who could were already working from home. Unfortunately since we have no help, and we both had to work full time and on site (PiC), we weren’t prepared to make that shift. Still, it was in our future and I was going through our stores of supplies to create a Treasure Box for JB.
By March 14, I was on the verge of pulling JB out of school. We had planned to spend the weekend finalizing our stock up of our supplies and start to hunker down. Unfortunately, Mother Nature had other plans for us, and we had to spend the whole weekend fixing the house instead. That was frustrating but we were so (so so so) very fortunate to have a couple of friends who were available and willing to come help us with the repairs and with entertaining JB. I haven’t had local friends in a long time and I’m still stunned by their generosity.
By the evening of March 15, I couldn’t justify keeping JB in daycare even if they stayed open. I didn’t want to risk them being exposed to anyone who had been exposed to the germs over the weekend. We made the call when we went to bed.
By Monday when this post goes up, it’ll be Day Ten in calendar days but I’m only recording weekdays.
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November 25, 2019
Mental illness speckles my family tree like leaf mold.
The bipolar uncle who cackled uncomfortably like a cartoon character, his mirth punctuated by random outbursts of rage. The cousin fallen prey to the lure of drugs to quiet his anxiety, lost when the drugs pushed him to suicide instead of helping as he’d hoped. Then his brother couldn’t handle the anger and loss and pain, he was finally diagnosed as bipolar and refused to be treated. Then Mom’s dementia and anxiety and depression, desperately intermingled, trapped her in a dizzying kaleidoscopic world until she passed. My dad was, and remains, a hardcore narcissist. If he doesn’t actually have NPD, his life and choices certainly mimic it very strongly, and he raised a son who was the same.
Mostly this kind of thing is hushed up by the family, as if not talking about it means that it doesn’t exist. That doesn’t work, family. It hasn’t protected any of us.
Some of got lucky. Some of us danced with acute depression and/or anxiety, lasting weeks, or months, admitted it, got help, and finally made it through to the other side. Humbled and a little wiser about the realities, and vagaries, of mental health with some tools to manage that anxiety and depression, we’ve understood the struggle a little better. And some of us who won free still live with the specter, daily.
My brother wasn’t one of “some of us”. He didn’t have a sharp psychotic break. He didn’t step in and out of schizophrenia, managed and not. It was almost a gentle transition. He’d always had delusions of grandeur – he flashed through get rich quick schemes like credit cards. Braggadacio fed his outsize ego which fueled his arrogance in an endless loop.
He never worked harder than when he was trying to dupe me, our parents, or family and friends. He was the first to fall head over heels for the earliest MLM scams of our time, dragging our worried parents and their connections in with him. He managed two quarters at the local state college before dropping out with parking tickets and failing grades trailing in his wake.
He slipped into the warm embrace of true delusions easily, just like he’d done every night when we lay in bed in our shared room, dancing through one imaginary scenario after another. His created world had always been far more desirable than the one we lived in, the one of bills, of hard work, of gritting your teeth and dealing with the daily mundanity that keeps the car running and the water on.
Is it any wonder then, as his delusions deepened, as he swatted away our reality to create a new world for himself where he didn’t have to do any actual work, that it simply wasn’t clear if this wasn’t just another one of his long cons? (more…)