Year 4, Day 363: Yesterday was exhausting. We had to entertain people in three shifts, PiC took the middle one so I could get Smol down for a nap. This morning, I swore off Sunday activities for the foreseeable future. Then PiC reminded me we have a commitment next Sunday. Booo! Boo, past me agreeing to that! Shame! It’s not something I can get out of, or I would immediately.
Ah well. On our walk today, I saw one of our neighborhood crows attacking the local hawk, driving it out of their territory. I’m torn. I love the blackbirds I’m trying to befriend but I also love raptors. It was a surprise that it only took one of them, though.
I was wrong about DST not affecting the humans. We’ve been slugs every morning since the time change. We’ve also had several late nights for various reasons which doesn’t help anyone.
My fingers have been like balloons for the past ten days, swelling up and deflating at random intervals. When they’re swollen, the skin gets extra tight and overstretched, the joints are tender, and my fingers can’t bear weight well. This is very annoying.
Year 4, Day 364: My cup boileth over sort of day.
Get up, medicate Sera 🐶, take her out for a walk immediately. Give her just a little water to start her day or else she’ll retch it up.
Get the kids out the door.
Sit down to inhale breakfast with one hand and work with the other.
Answer questions, triage emails.
Walk Sera, get her bloodwork results, see that they suck. Have feelings. Write to the vet about her poor appetite and incontinence.
Answer more emails, start digging through HR documentation for answers and find more questions.
Walk Sera, grab a salad for lunch, clean the robot vacuum so it can run while I work and try to untangle another mess. Add urine collection and a run to the vet (45 minutes) to the calendar for tomorrow.
Ask JB to start the rice or take Sera out to the yard for a pee before we left the house. They wanted to do the rice, then fussed about getting their jacket sleeves wet. Exasperated, I swap chores with them only now Sera refuses to pee for JB so I have to deal with that myself too as soon as I get done with the rice. But Sera refuses to pee for me too, so then we have to rush out the door while I worry worry worry if she’s having kidney problems between her random incontinence and now refusal to pee when she normally would need to. 🤯
Work frantically through JB’s class, when I would normally be paying attention to the skills they’re practicing so I can help JB later (#guilt), stopping five minutes before class ends.
Head directly home post-haste hoping that Sera didn’t have an accident while we were gone. Immediately walk her so she doesn’t have an accident while I’m prepping dinner. Reheat leftovers for dinner, make Sera’s dinner and serve it up. Work for ten minutes before PiC and Smol Acrobat get home. Check Sera’s weird scab that was torn off last night and bleeding profusely to make sure the bandage didn’t stick and irritate the wound. It didn’t, whew. Smol Acrobat has taken JB’s role of my faithful assistant taking the old bandaging to the trash and asked to cut the bandages and generally were helpful instead of trying to be helpful but only getting in the way.
Underlying it all are issues at work that I’m still working through, processing, and not loving.
Feelings right now
Year 4, Day 365: I was on my own with all 3 critters this morning for the first 45 minutes and boy, getting a toddler to get ready to walk the dog who needs to go out ASAP is not an easy juggle.
Most of yesterday’s checklist rolled over to today, swapping out JB’s lesson for an extra run to the vet to drop off a specimen for testing ($300) and pick up an appetite stimulant ($90). GACK.
That hurts but we’re lucky that we can take care of her to the best of our abilities, I remember a time when I could only afford good care for my dogs when I worked for a vet.
Sera’s added to her list: a wound I’m managing, plus incontinence, this week. Can we apply for a cap on the number of problems per dependent at a time? One or two at a time per critter, please?
My bright spot for the day: the neighborhood corgi was in a good mood and gave me a nose boop and kiss.
Home stuff: PiC thinks we’ll need to do our roof sooner than later because our gutters are a mess and there’s no sense in doing the gutters first and then messing them up when we have to do the roof. Given this year’s uncertainty, I’m going to define “sooner” as maybe in the next five years. I don’t even want to think about how much it’ll cost. But of course that gets my brain thinking about how much it’ll cost. $30k? $40k? 😶🌫️ I’m NOT ready to pay out that cash.
Year 5, Day 1: Sera’s incontinence isn’t due to a bacterial infection so whoop here we go on a third possible long term medication. *pulls face*
Bits and bobs: A raven visited the neighborhood this morning. Wasn’t one of my semi-regulars, those two know me enough to come hop-hop-hopping over to nab the treats I leave before I get five feet away. This one waited for me to get at least twenty feet away before coming to inspect the treats.
JB: “I’ve never been in the snow before!”
Yes you have, you just don’t remember it. Existential question: Did it happen if you don’t remember it? That sent me down a darkish path of remembering dementia and Alzheimer’s.
Smol Acrobat: “Mommy, Sewa is worried inside. Can you check to see if Sewa is ok?”
Yes, I can. I will be spending my entire day checking if Sewa is ok, like I have been doing for the past 80 days.
It’s very annoying to know I was reading a book somewhere on my phone but not remember which book and which app.
It’s also very annoying that I still have lil smokies for fingers. Two solid weeks now of swollen fingers. I’ve done my time, haven’t I?
Year 5, Day 2: My crow duo, the town crier and the scout, came by this morning. I set out dog treats for them and stepped way back to watch their sideways hippity hop approach. They could just divebomb in to fetch them but they’re clearly not ready for that yet. One day, though!
Spreadsheet day! I’m torn between wow that’s grown a lot (over 3-4 years), and ALSO dang that’s still so far away (not sure how long it’ll take to get to the “enough” point). The double giant stressors of a possible layoff and the huge shifts at my work are pushing hard on the latter button because I want to feel like I can walk away if things continue to deteriorate and we can’t turn it around. I keep telling myself to wait it out 2-3 years, let’s get Smol Acrobat into public school, and / but it turns out my patience in my 40s is nearly non-existent compared to my patience in my 20s. I don’t want to live like that any longer. I’m very much over the grind of being overworked, underpaid, and constantly fighting political battles. We don’t know for sure if it’ll go that way with the latest changes but it is possible and that possibility makes me very cranky. I want an escape hatch that isn’t “start over at a new workplace”. I want the option of being able to just walk away from all that stress and just deal with the stress at home but not trading it for the stress of being unemployed without sufficient income. It reminds me of PiC’s friend who had his multi-millions in the bank. When confronted with the hiring of a terrible manager from a previous job that he advised against, he just said that’s ok, I don’t need this job and retired.
Year 4, Day 356: Nothing like avoiding any Sunday scaries by being so completely exhausted that you can’t even think ahead to Monday. We overdid it on the weekend and today we need a secondary weekend for recovery. That would be nice, wouldn’t it?
A very small part of it was I finally had the werewithal to pick two Lakota families to help. One family is grieving the loss of a son and have been on the list since January without much help. They were in need of propane, formula, clothes, and diapers for the baby, and clothes for the surviving family. I requested to tackle the propane, formula, diapers and wipes. The second family was almost out of food, and they’re also the home where people keep dropping off dogs that need feeding and care. I put together a giant grocery shop for them while I waited for the information I needed to complete the orders.
I’m annoyed with Costco Pharmacy. They save us a bit of money but I called in a prescription on Saturday and they gave me a choice of picking it up Saturday after 2 pm or Monday after 2 pm. Every time I called for an update, it was “scheduled to be filled”. They didn’t bother to fill it until today after 2 pm. So why offer that option if it wasn’t really an option?? Huff. Thankfully I had enough brainspace to figure out the refills while we still had a week left. I wanted the Saturday pickup because weekday pickups are so much harder for us to squeeze in.
Dinner: Frozen lasagna + yesterday’s leftover meat sauce +plain pasta for Smol Acrobat because the frozen lasagna is a little too spicy for them + 4 leftover ravioli + frozen green beans. Both kids were intensely irritating about eating their green beans but they ate them all in the end and Smol Acrobat even ate all of their pasta and the meat sauce under their own steam. Yesterday the meat sauce was a big frickin’ deal. Today they kept telling me “I am eating my pwotein. Are you happppyyyy?”
Year 4, Day 357: Day 2 of weekend recovery.
My Big Task is mostly completed! I should have done this a long time ago. I knew that I should and had started the process, so I shouldn’t complain, buuuut it’s no fun and I’m going to complain. I’m finally separating my work and personal digital lives from the one computer. It’s just so much more convenient for them to be on the same machine, I could multitask so much more easily, but it’s better to keep them separate so I bought a laptop for household use last year. Several months later, I set up logins for ourselves and the kids. Another several months have now passed and now push has come to shove, changes in our systems mean it’s time for me to fully remove the personal from the professional. The process took hours: moving bookmarks over, backing up the files to our external hard drive and our cloud system to transfer them to the new laptop, and THEN to remove them completely from the work machine. HOURS. So many hours. And errors. And disconnections. And one mysterious failure where the power to the modem and our server both failed even though it was plugged into the Yeti to prevent exactly this loss of power that interrupts file transfers. I’d be tempted to say that I SHOULD have done this in stages but that wouldn’t work so well either because the point is to transfer the full contents of the hard drive at this specific moment in time and carry on working on personal stuff from that date forward entirely in the personal computer. A multi-stage transfer would mean I’d miss files that were changed in the interim period because I’m always doing something.
My personal files are all transferred to the home computer. Now I am practicing typing, the keyboard is just different enough to throw off my typing, and get in the work groove so I can make some decisions about critical software. I despise the Microsoft subscription model so I went looking for and found that we can get an older Word product key from Costco for $150 (plus a $25 Visa back). Or other places, I haven’t looked at them yet. That’s probably the software I’ll need the most.
Year 4, Day 358: Day 3, I think the PEM is finally starting to fade after 2.5 really tough days and nights. My bones still have lava for marrow but the deep and full-ton fatigue has lightened a bit to a more normal load when I’m trying to walk Sera. It’s not quite over yet, though, and this is probably where I accidentally overdo it because I think “I’m ok now!” Reminder to self: not quite yet.
I did one very slow walking set of karaokes on our morning walk and we went on one slightly longer walk midday but that’s it. I’m pacing myself!
Well that and I did the other half of a massive food prep. We got takeout yesterday so with some of my time saved, I cut up 6 lbs of meat and made the nuoc mau for the thit kho. Today the stock pot came out to play. I boiled the meat to clean it, set it to simmering for 3 hours, adding things periodically to end up with a large entree for dinner, two freezer portions for other non cooking weeks, and sent a large portion to our friends for their dinner. I’m satisfied with my performance in the kitchen for once, though I cooked it a little longer than intended and the meat is literally falling apart. Whoops! I really need more childhood recipes that can be frozen for later eating. Most of our recipes weren’t that sort of meal, they were all meant to be enjoyed fresh.
Feeling: So glad it’s not Monday anymore, so glad it’s not Thursday yet.
Year 4, Day 359: Taxes are in process. Will update is in process. Which genius thought it was a good idea to do those at the same time??
I thought my diet needed to be adjusted a bit to get to a shape I felt more comfortable in. It was a theory, attempting to lose weight has never been a thing in my life. It wasn’t about the number on the scale, I just hate(d) how my body has changed and feels after two pregnancies. The feet changing sizes is annoying, one changing to be a half size larger than the other is annoying, the stretch marks are intermittently annoying. All annoying but ultimately ignorable. My belly shape isn’t ignorable. Last month, my jeans were intensely uncomfortable after 2-3 hours. So I thought I’d have to figure this out.
I never even tried my lower carb trial since 2024 has been terrible, I didn’t want to give up one gram of carb or sugar. I did add in salads for lunch courtesy of PiC. (I’m terrible at feeding myself when it’s just me during working hours. I’m even worse at eating my vegetables these days so these were a neat fix for both problems.) What’s changed?
I’ve been going out on 5-6 walks a day with Sera since January, that’s the same.
I threw in those karaokes a few days a week recently. I noticed I’m just less hungry during the day but always hungry late at night when I’m too tired to do anything about it. I haven’t put actual effort in but it seems like maybe I’ve gone from a 4.5 month belly to a 3.5 month belly. Soft pants are still the best but the jeans aren’t awful anymore. I’d like to shed another couple inches to feel more myself but we’ll have to see if it happens with my current routine. I’m just trying to keep up with life and Sera’s 🐶 needs and I don’t have the energy to experiment with more.
Year 4, Day 360: Sera had more bloodwork. I’m crossing everything that the results come back looking better. She’s getting balky about these visits, she doesn’t want to go at all anymore. It’s a poke every time and she hates it. And I feel terrible but it’s gotta be done.
PiC usually makes time to do that during the week but couldn’t make it happen so we all went tonight. (I have a Pavlovian need for hot dogs anytime I even think about going to Costco. Anyone else?)
Somehow I managed to get through all my work and a little of my backlog today, so that was good but I was also totally wiped out by the end of the night. I should have reconsidered…well, no. It’s hard for PiC to do Costco with both kids in tow. One or the other is doable but both is just an exhausting combination, plus I needed to run a specific Costco errand as well. So it’s good that I went, I’m just knackered.
*****
I notice that some neighbors never cover their windows. Not even their front facing windows, so people can see into their home day and night. What is that about? It creeps me out on their behalf even though it’s their own privacy they’re giving up.
*****
I grew up loving Tracy Chapman’s Fast Car without ever knowing the name of the song. It came on that radio today with the wrong name: Luke Combs, and JB’s friend started singing it. That was all kinds of confusing so I had to go down the rabbithole. Oh, he’s covering the song. And then I found this and it pulled up all kinds of feelings. What a world we live in.
Year 4, Day 349: A Monday after a time change plus almost a full night of insomnia as I try to fight off Smol’s virus: things could be better.
Insomnia meant that I got to give Libby a try, though, so no ill wind or whatever that saying is. I finished a book of short stories. I don’t love the interface. I don’t hate it either. I like the principle of being able to read an ebook without using Kindle in my attempts to move away from that environment but I’ve hated Kobo’s reader app. I still use it because I’d started buying some of my collections at Kobo, but find the reading experience sticky and aggravating.
A tired Smol Acrobat was mildly cooperative about sitting down to dinner (literally, the sitting down part) but was disappointed we would not (could not) grant their request: can we have a call (A PTA meeting)? We just had one, kiddo.
Year 4, Day 350:Gloom gloom drippy gloom this morning kept everyone glued to their beds well past time. We had to hustle to get JB to school before the last bell so naturally the moods turned sour when JB couldn’t get my ok for getting breakfast at school and their homework checked in the ten minutes we had before hitting the road. Ah well. Mornings are tough.
The kids do karaokes (kar-a-ok-kahs, not the singing kar-a-oh-kee) as part of their PE warm ups and I started doing them when walking Sera. I look as silly as anything but it gets my heart rate up and, for the short distance we normally walk, that’s a small good thing. My knees don’t always agree. But.
My people avoidance continues. We had to grab takeout today and I’d forgotten to order online before like normal. I gritted my teeth and resolved to stand in line and order at the counter like normal people do. We got into the long line and I whipped out my phone and placed the order. By the time the people previously behind us in line placed their orders, ours was being packed. I feel both sheepish and vindicated. But every minute counts? I weakly defend myself since I worked until 11 pm so I could stay awake and take Sera 🐶 for her last walk of the night. And then we start all over again at 7 am. *Flop*
Year 4, Day 351: Rough night for Smol, I had to soothe them from 11-1130 pm, then again from 420-645 am. I was half conscious for the latter. Couldn’t sleep but couldn’t fully wake. Normally PiC takes all the nights but he deserves a break plus he was getting up for the 6 am registration for the kids. It’s hard getting them into the local swim classes but they’re so significantly less expensive than private that it’s worth the pain and effort.
Another set of karaokes for my morningest walk with Sera 🐶. When the kids do them, they’re going at speed, practically flying. It’s almost balletic. Not so for me, progressing up and down the street slowly and clunkily! But so far it gives me the muscles working feeling of a run without the PEM that often follows an attempt to run. Win, I think? We’ll see if the muscle aches pass in a reasonable amount of time.
A customer snarked that they’d appreciate more understanding for their busy schedule and more polite communication because they weren’t being fraudy on purpose. I caught my negative response spiral and reminded myself that just because they didn’t like being told no, doesn’t mean that I was in the wrong for being very clear about the reasons for the no since I’d already explained them in detail just a week ago. I hate how a comment like that, even unwarranted, can knock my emotional equilibrium out of whack. I’m proactively telling myself that a) Just because their feelings got hurt that I was blunt and to the point doesn’t mean I was wrong (especially since I had already explained the exact same thing last week). b) I can do other things instead of dwell on the feeling of being insulted. Managed to redirect the RSD almost entirely! New win for me!
Plus the CWC sent out an update and shared this adorable fawn they’re caring for.
Year 4, Day 352: Observing some complex feelings about money: I have been giving a chunk of cash every week to folks I “know” who ran out of money for the past few weeks or months. I don’t dwell on how much if cash flow still flows. Then I look at something like this and think “oh, like that necklace is cool, but I can’t afford that. It’d be nice if it didn’t feel like it had to be a choice between one or the other but for now, I always choose “friends having food or housing” over getting a pretty. I don’t mind, it’s just an observation.
I also have that “I haven’t given enough” feeling, “people need so much more”. That bashes up against my “we don’t have nearly enough for us to retire safely in 7 years” feeling which is constantly jostling for space again my “what about just doing the best you can for a while and attempting to achieve some balance right now which may mean taking longer to retire??” feelings. I still act allergic to the idea of pulling back the intensity of our savings, especially now when we’re doing well enough to save AND still live comfortably. It feels like taking our good fortune for granted NOT to make hay while the sun shines, y’know? Anyway. That’s just what’s bouncing around my skull.
Year 4, Day 353: It’s official, the layoffs that have been going around and around PiC’s company are going to hit his department anytime starting in two weeks from now through the end of this summer. That’s all we know and that’s doing my heartburn no good. I’ve done up a quick and dirty adjustment to our budget assuming that we lose PiC’s income, benefits, and access to the daycare. I wonder if they’re hurting for money enough to let us stay … no, probably not. The budget balances ok on just my salary if I cut out his income, all our weekly savings, and the cost of daycare. A little ironic that just yesterday I was balancing my feelings. Today it’s the budget. Life! Sure does come at you fast.
It was a hell of a busy day yesterday: meeting after meeting after meeting after crisis after meeting. While I was drowning in all of it, PiC plotted all the plans needed to make it possible for me to take a few hours to have dinner with an old friend on very little notice and I’m so grateful. The last time I went out on my own just for a fun thing was … five years ago? Seven? I honestly can’t remember. I really needed that reprieve. It was a quiet night and bolstered me enough to take the possible layoff news with more calm than I would normally have had.
Today was my day to pay the piper between the hard day yesterday and the hard news this morning. HIGH pain hit me with very little fanfare. I wrapped up in heating pads to try and combat the pain, didn’t even think to take pain meds for several hours because historically they don’t really do much, and settled in to catch up on that pile of work left from last night, catch up on laundry a little more, and try not to leak involuntary tears when my muscles screech. Oof. They burn like I ran a marathon.
Year 4, Day 342: I’ve moved the toothpaste well away from the lotion on the vanity. Just to be sure.
This week has to be an early out the door week. Last week needed to be, too, but we didn’t manage it. My heaviness pinned me to the bed most mornings, too tired after a night of painsomnia and sadness to crawl out earlier. Today was a more promising start. It was physically painful but I got out 20 minutes earlier, closer to my preferred time, and even got JB to school at the earliest possible drop off time. It was a good warmup for tomorrow when we have to get PiC out even earlier so he can make a meeting.
We’ve got work meetings, the PTA this week, and a Sera 🐶 appointment this week. Fingers crossed that no more than that gets added to the calendar.
It was an unusual “only small problems, no giant fraud rings” Monday and I’m fully appreciating it. I’ve got to get back on my management horse tomorrow and deal with some training and staffing things but any reprieve is a good reprieve.
Yesterday I attempted three rounds of planks on my hands instead of my forearms. This is the first time in decades that I’ve tested my hands and wrists this way. For years, any pressure or weight on them would trigger a flare. It’s been a real sinker of my morale because my one strength was upper body strength as the runt in my class. I’m hoping I can build up to some strength and tolerance in them again but this is my warning to myself to skip days in between so I don’t stress them right out of the gate. Tonight, they’re mildly twingy, not quite stiff or painful, so I’m hopeful I can do another short set tomorrow. 🤞
PiC brought home a large slice of the most decadent chocolate cake we’ve ever tasted in our lives. We don’t even like chocolate cake but this was heavenly. It’s from some specialty bakery up too north to be worth the drive so obviously we’ll never get it again. We will have fond memories. 😂
Year 4, Day 343: Well. I got that early wake up. PiC discovered, to our great dismay, that Sera 🐶 had had an accident inside. We’ve been so careful to walk, medicate, feed and water her on a very specific schedule to make her comfortable enough to get through the night. Walks every 2-4 hours starting at 730 depending on her mood/need, meds by 3 pm, last food and water by 8 pm, last late night walk between 10 pm-12 am. 8 weeks without incident. Then I screwed up. So busy with work, I missed her 3 pm meds alarm yesterday, and it threw her enough out of whack that she couldn’t make it through the night. Nothing like a 6 am wake up to go scrub floors together. Sigh.
I carefully calibrated her schedule for the rest of the day to take her out six times to empty her bladder sufficiently to make it through tonight. Six walks today, plus four JB pickup and dropoffs, plus work, plus throwing together dinner (part leftover, part baked salmon).
Then I threw in a half hour of reading aloud to JB because I want them to give Diane Duane’s Young Wizards series a chance to see the contrast between the empty calorie racist Harry Potter series and a well written wizarding series recommended by Ursula Vernon. I love anything Vernon writes so I figured her taste in books has to be pretty reliable. Not that I expected it to be like her books, it doesn’t work that way. But she’s a thoughtful person and an author who enjoys reading, that tends to add up to good recommendations. Anyway, Young Wizards starts out a bit more dense than they’re used to so I decided to read it to them and let them ask me all the questions. We’ll see how long I can handle making this additional thing work.
My wrists held up through 3 very short rounds of planks. They twinged after but not terribly and if they recover throughout tomorrow, I can try again on Thursday.
It’s not 9 pm yet and I’m dropping in my tracks. But I still owe some people some answers so back online I go for another 1.5 hours of work, and then I’ve got Sera’s last walk. If I manage to make lights out at 11, that’ll feel almost like a win.
Reading Fiqah’s obituary (gift link) made my sadness feel heavier, albeit clearer. She deserved better than this. She was a good person.
Year 4, Day 344: I had dreams all night that Fiqah was still alive and we were still able to help her. I hate how those dreams about our losses linger in my psyche all day long. I get them with my mom and past dogs, too.
I’m trying to shake that ‘I’m such a downer’ feeling with everything going on and find something joyful. Then I remembered that a friend sent me this pilot of The No 1 Ladies Detective Agency show. I’ve read all the books and didn’t know it was a series! Sadly, there’s only one season, but that might be the pick me up needed. Jill Scott is absolutely perfect as Precious Ramotse.
Also I SHOULD feel triumph over finally figuring out a foreign tax claim back form that took me hours to work on. I’m not feeling it yet but I’m reminding myself that that was big. More than one of PiC’s colleagues weren’t even aware of that tax claim form’s existence so I should also be a little proud for digging deep and finally finding something that refunds a significant amount of money that doesn’t seem to be common knowledge. They’ve asked PiC for a guide which means they’re really asking me. They’ve been good colleagues to him so I’ll save them a bit of legwork but it’ll need to be when I’m a little less tired.
Year 4, Day 345: A friend commented on her burnout and what she described, feeling upset/angry/cynical about the world, our government, the pandemic and the CDC, our future, do we have one??, climate change, it’s all very much how I’m feeling, plus my personal grief from losses this year. It’s all too much and it’s all so heavy.
It’s probably not normal to mentally growl “UGH I HATE YOU” to every email you write, even if it’s well deserved, to fraudy fraudpants customers. It’s probably not normal to feel like giving up after being asked to do even the smallest slightest extra thing. I’m feeling like the proverbial camel and the last straw has been sliding on top of the pile. That’s been a dark cloud hanging over my psyche for months.
My working day was almost entirely derailed by a huge shakeup at work that required hours of follow up. That’s a huge thing I’m processing, interspersed with Sera’s frequent outings, school pick up, after school activity, and then throwing dinner on the table in time to try to listen to the PTA meeting, whew. I was back at my desk to clear off the last remaining things that I needed done before a long day ahead of me tomorrow.
One good bit, though it’s more work for me: JB asked if we could read more So You Want To Be A Wizard tomorrow night. I actually really hate reading out loud but it’ll be worth the sacrifice to encourage them to stretch their reading horizons a little.
Year 4, Day 346: Friend shared this and I couldn’t help but laugh.
PiC got his tax claim forms notarized so I can try to wrap up THAT one small section of taxes. I have to wait another week before I can finalize the package for our tax person to get working on them. I’m really resentful of the one company that went and asked for an extension because I could be DONE by now but they’ve put me two weeks behind. Grumble.
It turns out my tax person may be wrong, and I don’t have to file a tax return for JB to prove they have earned income before I can deposit their business earnings in a Roth IRA for them. They had a handful of sales last year, not enough to need to file a return, so that would be the only reason I’d file. I certainly don’t intend to sign up for extra work if I don’t have to! I am a little excited about opening the Roth once I figure out what’s net after expenses.
I’ve been taking up Sera’s 🐶 water after 8 pm because she’s drinking so much that she’ll be full to bursting before I get up to walk her in the morning. She followed me around as I got ready for bed, and oh my goodness the LOOK I got when I filled my water bottle and didn’t give her any. It was grim. I felt so bad. But I also can’t get up in the middle of the night to take her out, I’m too physically exhausted from the 5-6 walks a day plus everything else I do. I need some unbroken sleep. One wakeup doesn’t equal two ok blocks of sleep for me. It means a splinter of sleep because my anxiety about waking up would prevent me from sleeping, and then I’d be too tired and wired to fall asleep again until just half an hour before needing to get up. My body is like clockwork. Deranged, broken, irrational clockwork.
PiC has been taking the brunt of the rougher parenting times: covering JB’s week off of school and all the overnights with Smol Acrobat who simply cannot get through any night without a fuss and a cry at least once if not three times a night so that I can get at least a few hours of sleep. I covered last night and the kid kept waking me every half hour with a startle and needing a cuddle before they could sleep again. I’m a zombie today. Or Mombie. They’ve been calling me Bombie for “Mom-Zombie” and I can’t argue.
The A LOT going on this week: Short school days all week for JB.
A parent teacher conference this week.
I’m still constantly monitoring Sera’s health and meds and meals and appetite. I’m constantly worrying over her enlarged abdomen, worrying that it’s her (confirmed) enlarged liver and the mass teaming up to make her sicker.
Work is feeling very hard right now. We discover more problems (fraud) every week and I have to create systemic ways to catch them. Pre-COVID, these would have been just about unthinkable, we’d catch a case once a year, maybe? Now, industry-wide, all bets are off. Hundreds of people are committing various forms of fraud utterly shamelessly. Totally depressing, frustrating and makes everything feel futile. Big changes are brewing as well, and that’s unsettling as all get out.
I’m having real trouble pulling on the memory of joy from the weekend. The garden isn’t stirring up contentment, petting Sera, I’m just full of worry for her. I’d like to just lose myself in a stack of books for a week.
Year 4, Day 336: The brain fog was thicker than pea soup today. I couldn’t even pingpong my way through it as usual (flip from one easy task to another for as long as my attention lasted). Brain was sludgy, kludgy, and sort of drippy. Information would leak a bit from one task over to another to another and none of them ever quite got done because drips and drops of brain isn’t enough. I tried to Angry Snack it off, that also didn’t work. Finally Sera and I went for an early walk to try to walk it off and then I opened all the windows for blasts of cold air. That helped just enough for the gears to move at a minimally acceptable rate. It really stinks when your brain goes incommunicado without permission.
Semi-related: I hate the ending of The Good Place. It’s SO well done and makes me so damn sad! Which is fitting for this week.
Unrelated to anything: I waded through a 98 page document AND sent off the engagement letter to the lawyer to thingie our will/trust/etc. All in the same night. They’ll be getting that done in about two weeks. It went a lot faster when I decided to delay the discussion of what else we’d want and just take care of these essentials now.
Year 4, Day 337: I am full of sadness. Also existential dread. Also anxiety? I’m not sure. It’s weird. On the face of it, we’re in a good place in life right now. The kids do drive us up one wall and down the next but they are fundamentally decent kids (SO FAR, my anxiety demands this caveat). They have friends. Well, friend singular, in Smol Acrobat’s case. We both earn a living wage in an incredibly expensive place so we can afford our moderate lifestyle, but we don’t earn enough that only one of us has to work or both of us could go part-time. We are decidedly medium on this point. We have some community. We say hi to several neighbors, we trade favors with one set. There are big shifts at work (the aforementioned horrible fraudy frauds) and I might last as long as a whole year before I completely lose my patience with the new landscape and have to make some hard decisions. I don’t see people going back to being MORE ethical by choice. That’s a big stressor.
The irrationality of feeling so sad when our fundamental needs of life are met might be the depression speaking. Or the grief. Losing two friends in two months is remarkably sad. I don’t know how to tease out the answer.
I’m trying to balance my sadness out, a little bit at a time. Keeping busy, always. Work is constant, so are kids, so are life things like eating and cleaning.
Organizing sometimes helps. I bought four new large bins from Office Depot (on sale for $34, minus $12 in Rewards, working out to about $7 a bin) to house the kids’ legion of Legos and trains. JB’s train set from their second birthday has real staying power. I asked for a couple spare tracks for Christmas, they’d lost a key piece of track and could no longer form an oval, and they received a box of hand me down spares. as I’d requested but fifteen times more than I asked for!
Distraction thought exercises: what would be a life changing amount of money for me (an absurd amount) and how much would we need to have for me to feel comfortable handing out life changing amounts to people with much lower thresholds?
I’m taking it very literally. Life changing money, enough that I could stop worrying about money entirely for the next 40-50+ years, means so much money because a) baglady syndrome is persistent and b) healthcare.
I keep thinking, could we get to a place where $5000 or $10000 gifts, amounts that could significantly improve a person’s life when they’re experiencing precarity, would be possible for us to give? Without endangering our financial stability? I hope so. I think that’s more possible than the entire broken system getting fixed but that’s a really low bar.
Year 4, Day 338: Bit of good news: the car insurance people finally got their crap together and recalculated the premium for the car that we’ve garaged and just registered as non-operational. My first time ever doing that, by the way. I asked them to do this early January and someone dropped the ball so we got a bill for $400. After a few more emails, the premium is now $60. WHEW. Our insurance is now $1000 every 6 months, because of the new car, for the two cars in use. That’s hard enough to swallow. $400 for the non operational car? No sir no thank you!
Today being Leap Day totally erased the fact that it is also Spreadsheet day today in my mind. I’m glad someone mentioned it on Twitter. I still really like updating our monthly net worth, something about filling in numbers is soothing. We’re so close to a milestone number on the mortgage. Which still has an astounding balance on it, of course, so the milestone is more of a haha-siiiigh. A less good milestone, oh wow that vet appointments are adding up really fast. That’s a $4000 credit card bill I’m eyeballing. Sigh. She’s worth it, I just wish we had a better prognosis. Her poor body condition makes me sad and worried.
Year 4, Day 339: Status: the kind of tired where you get uncomfortably close to putting lotion on your toothbrush.
I had set appointments all through 2024 for massages to try and keep a promise to take better care of myself. My normal rule is never schedule more than one appointment per day, and my massage was scheduled for today, so that should have made for a reasonably good Friday. Naturally the universe cackled at me and pushed JB’s jaw expander out again. Today was the first appointment they had, so my work day was truncated even more. Woof. I had to race through my work to try and get enough work squared away that I wouldn’t have to work late into the night.
Sent some cash to a friend whose bank account is zero until next week because of medical treatments, they need groceries. Venmoed some cash to Tinu. Another friend is dealing with a hospital stay for their kid, I’m buying their dinner tomorrow when they get home. Fingers crossed they’re all able to go home tomorrow.
Spent some time paying bills and sort of balancing the cashflow for the month.
It’s been takeout for us every day this week. Well, takeout, then leftovers. Then takeout and then leftovers. It adds up so fast. But we’ve been running absolutely ragged and that’s before even thinking about cooking. I’m starting to feel like we need stock in Bon Chon Chicken and Super Duper Burger. We mostly buy from local restaurants but the chains get our business too. I’m laying on the floor typing this because I’m too tired to sit up. I’m also trying to sneak in a cuddle with Sera 🐶 who is also laying on the floor but I know she’s just tolerating me laying next to her. She’s not much of a cuddler of humans. She prefers to cuddle other dogs. We did remember that I’d frozen a batch of the meal I cooked last week, though. It freezes so well, I think I’m going to try to make a triple batch, all for freezing soon. I need a few more recipes like this: easy, comforting, goes down well.
Year 4, Day 328: This day’s theme: It’s all a LOT.
Reading up on what Sera might have (probably has) and getting to this part has me wanting to yell cusses: “This is a life-threatening cascade of events and, in fact, a 20-80% mortality rate (depending on the study) has been reported with this disease.” I can’t. She’s sleeping right over there and yelling or cussing would wake her. But I want to.
That’s a huge range but more literature points to a worse prognosis generally than a good one. We have to increase her steroids again and add a second medication to try and stabilize her, and that’s terribly depressing.
My therapist asked if I’m feeling supported by PiC and friends through this and I didn’t understand the words. Support for what? I’m not the one who’s sick. (Well, I am but I have a cough, not something hemolysing my RBC.) All I could do for the past month was take care of her and hope like hell that she’s going to respond to the treatment. I’ve been holding my breath this whole time and probably repressing my feelings with caretaking. Because after that first cry when we discussed all the possible options for why she was jaundiced and anemic, all bad options, I felt the loss of Seamus crashing down on me again. I can’t DO that again. Not so soon.
***** (more…)
Year 4, Day 321: (TMI for those of you who don’t track your pets’ every movement, literally.)
Sera and I had the weirdest morning walk that we’ve ever had. She was wearing her “on a mission (to poop, probably)” face at her “on a mission (to poop, probably)” trotting pace. But she’d already pooped, twice, even! She even did the weird boy-dog attempt to squeeze out a few more drops of pee. She’s never done that before, nor has she basically decided that she was going to go for a much longer walk and I could come along if I wanted but she was GOING. I had to coax her to turn back around to go home. She trotted most of the way back, too.
*****
Every Monday takes a bigger bite out of me than the last. I was grinding my teeth by 10 am facing down the mountain of nonsense work added to my usual overflowing plate. That doesn’t usually happen until I’m asleep. This isn’t a good development.
A friend reminded me that I’m only one person. Then I reminded me I am terrible at pacing myself when faced with a giant list of things to do, maybe work on that by not trying to vanquish everything before noon? I hated my suggestion but reality bites.
I was also having a sensory thing. My fingernails were apparently two millimeters too long, and the way they landed on the keys irritated me beyond all reason. I clipped my nails and that helped a little.
*****
Given my tizzy last week, this was ironic: Sitting down to dinner, Smol Acrobat requested “a call”. A call with whom? “A call wif Wee’s school!” They wanted to listen to a PTA meeting! 🤦🏻♀️😅
Year 4, Day 322: 3 hours of sleep last night thanks to painsomnia. There’s something really insulting about knowing you’re in too much pain to sleep, but also knowing that for every hour you can’t fall asleep, that sleep deprivation will drive the pain higher.
Plus 3 hours of my day taking Sera 🐶 to her consult. Utter and complete wipeout sort of day. I wanted a nap when we got home. I got another hour to work before school pickup and an hour to work before after school activity. I’m so tired I could cry but the pain has ridden with me all day so that’s not a good prospect for a good night of sleep.
JB leapt to be extra helpful when they understood just how depleted I was after we picked up fast food for dinner. They helped prep the rice and my meds and set the table and played with Smol Acrobat as soon as they came home, keeping their spirits up so they didn’t dissolve into the usual post-homecoming sulks because they want to play but it’s dinner time. (Fried chicken on the table won the little one over, truth be told.) They and PiC did their best to pull the nighttime duties from me so I could try to rest. For my part I tried not to feel guilty for needing accommodations / help, and worked on breaking the pain cycle. My bones have increasingly felt like lava for three days, usually it kicks in at night but it lingered all day today, so I used heat and massage gun and heat again. When that didn’t shake it, I turned to my last resort of pain meds cocktail.
Year 4, Day 323: I can’t recall if I shared this article link with y’all but it has been on my mind since I first read it: A discovery in the muscles of long COVID patients may explain exercise troubles. My fatigue has always puzzled me. I could feel the differing levels so clearly and it always bothered me that I could walk up a hill one day and the next day, be winded halfway up the hill. And the next day, even more winded. It made me feel like I was deconditioned.
I’ve always used the analogy that my tank is never full. Sleep and rest never bring my tank back up to full, they just pull the indicator back up to slightly above the red empty line. It’s clear my body gets depleted over and over at a faster rate than others but what else can you do to refuel it if food and sleep hardly do anything?
These bits hit home:
Among the most striking findings were clear signs that the cellular power plants, the mitochondria, are compromised and the tissue starved for energy.
In his own research, Systrom has found evidence of abnormal oxygen uptake by the skeletal muscles during peak exercise in both long COVID and ME/CFS patients, which indicates there’s a problem with oxygen delivery to the mitochondria.
Most nights I’ve been feeling unbearably tired, dragging myself through the last hours of the evening to collapse into bed. Most mornings I’d roll out of bed because sitting up was too hard, I felt too heavy and exhausted, and I was existing solely through sheer willpower despite my desperation to just quit. Some of that was the weight of some incredibly fraught family conflicts. Finally facing up to them in therapy and out of therapy literally took some of that weight off my body. I could breathe more freely. But I was still, am still, fatigued from things that wouldn’t have fazed old me ten times over. This is now a largely imaginary memory of old me, I guess, of a young me with youth and vitality?
I’ve experimented with increasing my dose of coQ10, one of the supplements the ME/CFS people advised me to add for a few weeks now. I probably should have documented this a little better than just blogging about it but it does seem like the weighty feeling of fatigue overall is a touch lower these days even despite the higher than ever stress levels and feeling like I’m juggling too many balls for any one person at work.
Year 4, Day 324: Enervating day. Ran JB to school, then ran Sera to the vet for bloodwork (1 hour), then worked briefly before diving into 2 back to back conference calls. I just wanted to curl up and nap or cry, or both, when I got off the calls. They weren’t difficult calls, it’s just the amount of energy it takes these days to TALK to people and keep up that professional front takes more than I’ve got in the tank.
Because I’m completely pandering to Sera’s demands these days, I moved my work into the bedroom and worked from bed after hours so that she wouldn’t have to come stare at me in the office, asking me to go to bed, late at night. Somehow 9 pm turned into 10 pm and then turned into 11 pm before I called it quits but it meant that there was a little bit less pressure when things happened to cut into my working hours. As they keep doing.
*****
This year JB has a whole week off next week, instead of two long weekends, and they were going to do a weekend trip to visit family except everyone they meant to visit came down with COVID. We’re scrambling to figure out how to schedule next week, now, but I’m so relieved we heard about it before they left.
*****
PiC gleaned info from a parent volunteer thing he attended: the pair of parents in JB’s year who have been the most prominently active in the PTA until this year were actively recruited for some committee for the fourth grade year and they bowed out saying this is their last year, they’re burned out. I guess that answers one of my questions!
Year 4, Day 325: JB had a fun field trip today but sadness strikes (elsewhere) again. After only 4 hours at daycare, I got a call that Smol Acrobat wasn’t feeling well, had a slight fever, and needed to go home. I dashed out to pick them up and after a long wait while they napped, we made our slow and sad way home. They settled in to read a book with PiC and got a second much needed nap while I worked.
Then found out that a person I respect, though I only knew her online, Fiqah, had died. She’s been ill a long time from Long COVID and suffered greatly in her last months, having to crowdfund for housing and medical care. I’ve known her for… must be over a year?
She was a friend of a friend, when I started to contribute to her crowdfunding regularly for care and other needs, and I developed my own relationship with her directly over time. I never got to know her at her best, only in the worst year and change of her life when she was ill, terminally so, and suffering greatly from the effects of Long COVID. Yet even in her last days, she was still smart, kind, empathetic, and rightfully furious at a world that’s failing all of us. She was a lovely human with incisive wit and intellect, and she deserved so much better. She wished to die housed, and she was when she went, and I’m glad for her but it’s such a basic thing that a person shouldn’t have to HOPE or wish for.
I hate how this world keeps failing good people stuck in the margins while the evil people keep thriving. I hate that we have to continually do the calculus of how many people we can help, and how much, and how often, without endangering our own financial health because we have kids and who has a safety net at the other end of things if not of our own making? I had to decide which of several mutual aid needs we could assist with every month and how much, while still paying our bills. It’s a demoralizing calculation. How do we balance people’s very real needs today against our very real future needs that we have to assume is entirely our own burden to carry? Who knows if anyone will be able to help us when our time comes. More than ever, I feel bereft of community and feel/know we’re on our own when disaster or problems befall us. But these precious people are here, today, and deserve to live and thrive, too. It’s heartbreaking.
Year 4 of COVID in the Bay Area.