Year 5, Day 180: Our Yeti was acting funny a few months back so I contacted Goal Zero to troubleshoot. They couldn’t figure out why it randomly shut itself off either, so they arranged for an exchange. It took us months to actually get to packing it up for shipment but within a week of the arranged pickup with FedEx, the replacement one arrived at our doorstep. FedEx’s tracking system is generally garbage and this was no exception. Most times my deliveries are delayed six times before they get here, annoying but ultimately fine. This time I was notified that a label was made, and that was the status right up until the delivery guy banged on our door like Aragorn announcing Gondor’s call for aid. He was kind enough to deposit it just inside our door rather than just on the front step. I could not have safely hefted that thing by myself. This felt timely since we’re having yet another heat wave this week and PGE has planned blackouts. If things get dire, we may need the Yeti to keep my devices up and running for work.
I felt a need to eat my feelings all day. It was confusing, though, usually I think: I’m so mad I need something sweet/salty/crunchy to soothe my ruffled feathers. Today I just kept trying to think of a snack but nothing suited and I couldn’t figure out what was driving it. Ultimately it was probably overwhelm. I’ve got too many plates and balls and spiky pineapples being juggled all at once, it’s feeling impossible to manage. I’ve just got my fingertips around all of it but it’s precarious. I felt a bit better by the end of the day when I’d burned through several huge piles of backlog.
Year 5, Day 181: It’s heat wave time again. We were just coming down from 90 degrees at 7:30 pm. It’s funny dealing with the heat when all my patterns have finally shifted to living in cold weather. Everyone else in the family copes much worse than I. No one sleeps well and there’s a lot of complaining.
I was utterly unmotivated to cook dinner so when JB asked for takeout, I suggested the burger place. Then on the spur of the moment, we decided to eat on their outside patio since it wasn’t crowded. We rarely ever do that. This might be the fourth time we’ve ever eaten there. (My antipathy for the company of other humans is stronger than ever since 2020.) The best part was getting home at 645 with everyone fed and ready to hop into the shower. We’re usually trying to get dinner on the table or just sitting down by that time. It’s amazing how much less stressful the night feels when dinner is done by or before 7. I still had to work late but it was an early enough start that when Smol Acrobat asked me to lay down with them for a while, I didn’t particularly mind the lost half hour. I managed to dispatch the worst of the pile and log off at 10, off to do the second half of my exercises so really it felt a lot like having it all today.
Now that it’s October, we need to make time for our flu and COVID shots. Every time I think about it, I remind myself: but don’t do it the same time as PiC! Maybe we should get our flu shots separately, too … I will say that the kids really like seeing us get ours, so we often tried to do them all as a family but last year kicking our asses taught us not to pander to their enjoyment.
Year 5, Day 182: It’s been one week of taking the lowest possible dose of this new medicine (an alpha blocker blood pressure med for off label use) to see if this will break my lifelong cycle of intense draining nightmares.
I had terrible side effects the first night (nasal passages felt severely swollen for a few hours), less the second (annoying congestion), weird the third night (congestion didn’t start until I woke up), and none since the fourth dose. As for effectiveness: I still have vivid dreams but none in the past week have been the terrible gripping nightmares that make me wake up screaming or even more tired than when I went to sleep (similar to massive pain nights). So far so good? I’m going to stay at this dose for another two weeks and see if there is any recurrence.
I’ve found three new freckles on my arm. That’s weird. I’m not in the habit of adding freckles to my collection. As teens we used to theorize they were the result of sun damage, based entirely on the frequent appearance of freckles on one friend every time they were sunburned. I wonder what really caused them.
It’s early release all week for JB and PiC has taken the brunt of the past two afternoons. His schedule is more flexible than mine on a good day, and I haven’t had one of those in a while, so I really appreciate his taking the hits.
Dinner: carnitas fried stovetop (premade from Costco), pico de gallo, Mexican rice and chips from the local taqueria, shredded cheese, guacamole (Costco), and a handful of fresh picked green beans (5) and snap peas (3) from the garden. I gave the other 5 green beans to JB to pack for their lunch tomorrow.
Year 5, Day 183: Everyone’s sleep patterns this school year are still very off kilter. Even our earliest riser, Smol Acrobat, is sleeping late, past 7 some days. I enforce an 8-830 bedtime but it’s not doing the trick.
Another scorcher today. I grumble a bit when it’s colder but on days like this, I’m grateful that our house holds in the cold so much that even when it’s 90 degrees outside, as long as the blinds are down and doors and windows stay shut, the cool air stays inside.
I’m glad it’s online so we can attend without leaving the house but I’m still whining that it’s already the next PTA meeting. Really? Already?
Related: The 4th grade is the big fundraising year for the kids’ 5th grade costs like graduation and the like. I’ll fundraise for charitable reasons to help out folks in need, never for personal gain/needs/wants, so I feel VERY weird about this. How do people even do this? I can’t / won’t post it at work like people used to do, I’m a higher-up. Almost everyone is below me in rank, that wouldn’t be right. I don’t feel like I could circulate among friends, either, because it’s not a “good” cause. Once in a while I get fundraising emails from niblings whose parents are wealthy or well off for a school thing or a Scout thing and I don’t mind that. I toss in some money but this I feel completely awkward about. It feels like we should just cough it up and cover the costs ourselves. Does anyone else feel this way (on either side as a parent or as someone being asked for donations) or have another way of looking at it?
Year 5, Day 184: Even with people I like, long work calls leave me into a devolved state where I feel about as human as a Dushegub. Three calls this week was 2 calls too many.
But! I did finally get that appointment with the bank to get some paperwork notarized (more people) and then we took the kids to get their flu and COVID vaccines. They were NOT happy about that at all, not one whit. I let JB know a few hours beforehand, let them get their feelings out (so many feelings), and let them pick their top three treat choices for afterward. They were in a tizzy about it right up until the needle hit their arm and then they remembered it wasn’t that big a deal. “that’s it?” 🤦🏻♀️ Smol Acrobat didn’t handle the needle moment well, they were crying before they even sat down but recovered well enough to get home. Then they hobbled like they’d lost three inches off their leg for the rest of the night. It’s very dramatic. JB was side effect free as far as we could see, Smol was a little off their game and seemed a touch feverish but it wasn’t very bad.
Year 5, Day 166: Trainer time! I’m gaining confidence that I can do exercises without immediately sending myself into CFS / fibro traction and there’s something immensely uplifting about that knowledge.
Arms day is easier for me than legs day, and I attempted to max out my reps again. (spoiler: I was able to lift my arms again the next day. Yay!
TIL the acronym HENRY: High Earning Not Rich Yet. That’s us, since I define “rich” for us as being able to survive long term without our jobs. I’m always acutely aware that it can go away. My Great Recession scars are practically tattoos, they’re always out and always at least a little bit dictating my attitude towards money. We are currently high earning (though at the very bottom of the high earning wage scale in this area and compared to the other professions/industries around here, most daycare parent make multiples of what we both make combined), and we couldn’t maintain this lifestyle on one or no incomes. We splurge now and again, and we give more than we splurge on ourselves most months. There’s plenty of non survival (our survival that is) fat in our spending but I don’t consider it all non-essential. I would really hate to be unable to help folks out. But that’d be part of the reality of losing our incomes due to corporate cuts, along with other belt tightening we’d have to do. Actually, I can’t entirely blame the GR for my continually being on edge: PiC’s employer is going through yet another round this year, did I mention that? This is what, the fifth round this year. No wonder I’m always expecting it. What steams my cauliflower is that the parent corporation is doing Just Fine. They made many-digits of profit last year. Alright, I’d better leave it at that. We’re HENRY. Can’t wait to drop the NRY and the heartburn of waiting out round after round of layoffs, hoping we make it through another one. Between PiC’s income, benefits and the childcare being linked to his employer, we have so many reasons to hold on tight at least until kindergarten starts. Then it’ll be down to the income and benefits. Healthcare is such a huge question, and has the potential for such catastrophic consequences if you have a serious illness, I don’t know if I’ll ever not be nervous about that piece of the financial puzzle.
Year 5, Day 167: Everyone got up late again today. We weren’t late out the door but this waking up early is such a tough nut to crack. Even Smol Acrobat, usually an undesired reliable alarm clock, slept in. There’s something about this school year that’s making it all much more challenging.
Garden harvest: three snap peas, three mini cucumbers, and seven green beans! Our biggest green veg harvest yet!
Work: 👎🏼👎🏼👎🏼👎🏼👎🏼
I’m preparing a brief to get into yet another tiff (of sorts) with corporate on behalf of my team to get them what they deserve. Ahhh there’s nothing like a combination of intense pressing deadlines AND political bullshit to navigate to ring in the fall season! This is just the beginning of this particular advocacy, and it remains to be seen if I have a particularly powerful person on our side or not. That’s what I find out next week – wish me luck?
Year 5, Day 168: Chores day for everyone. JB needed to wash their lunchbox, plan tomorrow’s lunch, grind coffee beans, and put away the new load of laundry. Smol Acrobat is responsible for their own laundry so they had to hang up their own clothes and fold their underwear and put away the utensils. PiC prepared dinner. I assigned the chores, babysat Smol during their chores to help them over the little bumps, then spent two hours submitting FSA claims, and trying to figure out how to earn a few miles for our Alaska mileage accounts.
I ogled these cakes from a local(ish) bakery. I want to try some of their flavors but not at $35 for 1-2 servings. I’m not feeling that level of economically secure.
Year 5, Day 169: This weather cannot make up its mind: one day hot, one day cold, two days hot, two days cold. One day hot, one day cold. Today is Full Winter. Tomorrow’s forecast? Full Summer!?
Unfortunately I can’t or I absolutely would, but still practicing naming the thing I feel like even if I can’t: just want to sit here and stare into the middle distance for a few hours doing absolutely nothing. Sadly, nothing in my schedule says: sure, relax. Today I’ve got to run an errand after school, tomorrow I’ve got to attend a school event so that means rescheduling my appointment with the notary to next week. This weekend is all costume making and kid-minding and food-cooking and then next week is chock full of meetings that were postponed from this week. I hate meetings. Loathe them. But these are actually necessary so I suck it up and forge on.
By dinnertime, I slumped over thinking “I am so tired, I can’t take it anymore” which of course leads to “oh no it’s going to be harder next year when JB’s self defense classes are later in the day and then the year after that when Smol Acrobat starts kindergarten and we won’t have childcare after the kindergartener’s early release midday aughhhh….” There’s really no resolution to that particular mental slide. I have no answers. It’s just auughhhh all the way down.
Year 5, Day 170: Well, I’ll be darned. I was dreading the arrival of an envelope from the Passport Services Agency today – we only just submitted our applications last week and the only reason I could think of that they would be sending anything to me so soon after processing payments is that they were rejecting Smol Acrobat’s passport photo. I accidentally sized their head a little too large in the prints relative to the 2″ x 2 ” size and the agent said maaaaaybe they would take it but they might not, and they would mail it back if not. You could knock me down with a feather when I opened it up and found that it was my very own renewed passport! That was less than 2 weeks from submission in the new online system to delivery! Fantastically fast.
Trainer time: It’s arms day again and I’m maxing out my reps while I still can. 24 lateral raises, 18 almost-semi-kinda pushups. I can feel the ache but it’s not terrible.
Money things: PiC mentioned the cascade of upcoming big home maintenance things: getting the roof replaced, and then the gutters, and then (this is really ambitious) finishing the exterior paint which was started seven years ago but never finished. That made me a little nervous so I made a savings bucket in our Ally savings account to start to trickle in cash for big house stuff. I didn’t love how it felt to take the cash from our emergency savings even if we did make up that lost ground over less time than I had feared. At least this way we’ll have some cash set aside specifically for these things. I also made a travel bucket while I was at it. Historically that’s always just come out of cash flow but we also haven’t really done much big travel in the past 5 or so years, it’s easy to cash flow a road trip or three. Bigger travel is going to cost accordingly.
Also looking ahead to 2025 moneywise – I think the 401K contribution limit is expected to go up another $1000. I’ve been plugging in some of this year’s numbers into next year’s spreadsheet and it looks like our cash flow falls over into the negatives by May. Part of this is because spending is high. Well, I guess that’s just really the whole thing: our spending projections are on the high side. Since my takehome pay is hard to calculate for next year, I’m being very conservative about how much that might be for now. I’m also conservative with PiC’s presumed takehome pay for the early part of the year as well. We usually “run out of money” early in the year in the first few drafts of the annual spending projections and we don’t ever actually run out of money in real life but even knowing that, I still hate the early draft feelings of augh the numbers are going negative! And I still have more spending to add! Especially since, in keeping with everything else that keeps going up, our annual property tax bill is now over $12k total so I have to bump up that specific savings bucket. I can’t reduce our property tax or the daycare bill or the mortgage or the half dozen other necessities. I can only reduce the not-survival stuff like giving and travel. Boo. Do not like.
Year 5, Day 159: COVID vaccines are being administered nearby but they still don’t have them for 5 and under so I’m waiting til Smol Acrobat can get vaccinated so the kids can go together for moral support. PiC and I have to remember to do ours separately so we don’t have a simultaneous crash and burn like we did last fall. It was totally unexpected. We’d been relatively ok after all the prior boosters/vax after the very first round so we let our guard down for the Fall 2023 shots. JB was a champ at covering for us but I don’t want them to have to do that again.
Smol Acrobat has been sick for a few days and they finally got me this weekend. It appears to be the standard preschooler congestion/fatigue/cough/ICK virus that circulates every other week, but I tested both of us today and we’re currently negative on COVID. I’ll test again in a few. I had the luxury of being able to rest half the day Sunday because PiC took the kids, but there’s no rest on weekdays between work and school drop off and pick up and activities.
Year 5, Day 160: Operating at about 30% today, having gone to bed early but unable to sleep for physical discomfort and then unable to rest for the psychological warfare my subconscious is waging against the nightmares. PiC heard me shout in my sleep last night, I remember that waking me up too, because of some vampire-ish type of nightmare.
With 9 direct reports, someone always needs something. It gets unwieldy when it’s three somebodies all needing something at the same time. It’s not all handholding, though sometimes (and more lately because of THINGS and REASONS) it is that too. Ultimately I’ve got to make some changes in my department. I don’t love them but reality has set in, especially as at least one person is in crisis and needs me to be really present for them in a way that isn’t sustainable in the long-term the way I’m overloaded now. My hope is that we can support them through the crisis and in the meantime I will be restructuring enough so that I am prepared for future needs. I wish I could have had real support when I was grieving my mom’s sudden death or overwhelmed with my pain and fatigue issues, even if I didn’t know I needed it or how to ask for it, so I’m committed to providing it here.
Year 5, Day 161: I’m still feeling under the weather but compared to how I would normally be feeling three days into any virus (steamrollered), this isn’t nearly as bad (very mild congestion, continued fatigue). That first day of rest must have made a real difference because that’s the only difference between the last time I got sick and this. My system is overreacting to the virus today with absolutely delightful (not) mouth sores despite the antivirals, though, and that’s making eating a real trial.
I powered through so much work today in an attempt to keep the decks clear for a shorter day on Friday. We’re going to get the kids their passports and then I get to test out the online passport renewal process that just opened today for myself. Tiny squee of excitement.
Year 5, Day 162: Trainer time! This is the third workout of the week and despite the viral things going on with me, I decided to push my limits a bit. The trainer usually gives me a range, say 3-8 lateral raises, or 2-5 pushups (modified since my wrists can’t handle that pressure). I aim for the middle of the range most of the time, hover at the bottom of the range on bad days. Since good days are far and few between, I figured that a not-bad day is good enough for attempting this. Plus I was emotionally disregulated like WOW this afternoon and the challenge felt like a good way to shake my brain loose of the crankiness. I did 20 modified pushups and 32 lateral raises with light weights. Will I be able to lift my arms tomorrow? NO ONE KNOWS.
Year 5, Day 162: Oops, my updates for this day and Friday were lost to the ether! I won’t fully attempt to recreate them but just the most relevant bits: YES I was able to lift my arms today and it wasn’t a big deal which conversely was a big deal because that’s really cool. I am getting a bit stronger and not getting punished for trying to work out again! That’s such a huge thing.
Year 5, Day 163: This was both a busy day and a good day in that I cleared a lot of work in not a lot of time, so PiC and I were able to have lunch together. We haven’t done that in a very long time. The bad part was we both ate too much and nearly succumbed to food coma! 😀 In the end, we made it through the worst of the comas and finished out the week.
Year 5, Day 152: Reminding myself as much as I legitimately hate almost everything about my job right now, I hate self inflicted injury and being poor more. So don’t quit don’t quit don’t quit. All the department heads are frustrated, and demotivated, right now, and I can’t fix it for myself or for them. I didn’t cause it and it’s not my business to fix, but it’s so EXTRA frustrating that we’re all so unhappy. (Is the strength of my quittiness correlated with my lack of dog? Very possibly.)
Some of the fruits of my shopping spree have started to come in. The Vogmask is a nice alternative mask to have on hand. I’m still primarily wearing the flo-mask but there are times that it isn’t suitable. The IKEA delivery finally arrived so I organized the utensils drawer that has been annoying me for almost a decade. It’s really quite satisfying to see it nice and neat. It led to bagging up a lot of utensils for donation too, which is a good thing to do regularly. I’ll do a more thorough sweep of the plastic utensils that accumulate over time later this week.
Trainer time: this is the start of Week Six! I haven’t been able to do more than three consecutive workouts in more than 20 years and I have missed that so much. I’m not feeling any stronger yet, it’s much too soon for that, but I’m feeling that challenged feeling of striving for something harder than I can do right now without the usual getting knocked on my fibro/CFS ass follow-up and that’s really something. Week SIX. So planks are still harder than they have any right to be, but I’m enjoying the assumption that I will keep doing this and therefore eventually get stronger. The modified pushups and the lateral raises are still very satisfying.
Year 5, Day 153: My goodness the weather has turned. It’s viciously hot in most places but firmly turning into fall here. The heater went on this morning for a spell, I’ve been bumming around in sweatpants instead of shorts. The gloom was so close in that the curtains had to be drawn around 6 pm. I don’t mind exactly, it’s just that weird feeling of living in the shift. But also weather in general is just strange these days. Just last week we rode out a heat wave.
PiC had picked up a precooked Irish stew from Costco and it was perfect for tonight. Smol Acrobat was a bit of a butt about the potatoes but otherwise everyone else was happy with mopping up thick gravy with their carb of choice and the very filling carrots, potatoes and generous meat chunks. It’s probably just cheaper to buy this than to make it from scratch. It’s certainly easier!
Year 5, Day 153: Every morning, when I realize it’s not a “kid activities at the end of the day” I heave a sigh of relief. I’m so relieved that today is one of those. I have a list of things for JB to do when they get home and that’ll buy me a few hours of peace while they tootle around the house.
About five(?) years ago I had a massive allergy attack seeming bout of ridiculously obnoxiously persistent itching. My scalp was a mess. My hands and feet would sprout rash like patterns randomly. Allergy tests revealed no answers so the allergist advised me to stay on a very low dose of antihistamine daily ongoing once all the itching calmed down from the higher dose. A few months ago, having had no flare ups in years, I idly wondered if it had finally settled down enough that I could stop taking them but waved the question away. Long story long: I unintentionally forgot my antihistamine four nights in a row last week because I refilled my pill boxes incompletely and the answer is NOPE. I cannot stop taking them! It’s now been five+ days of non-stop itching even with 20 mg of antihistamine daily. What a terrible unforced error.
The California fire season feels like it’s year round nearly. There are three major fires that I’m aware of right now and at least one of them has forced evacuations of people I know. It was touch and go for the second group / fire but they said the evac orders were cancelled.
Yipes! I forgot it was still a trainer day until 10 pm. I got out of bed to finish the second half of my exercises. I wonder what the problem is with my brain. Originally to avoid setting off the fatigue and pain, we decided on an every other day schedule. The day immediately after I do a workout, I wish it was a workout day again. But the day after that, I forget that it’s a training day. This is consistent whether it’s a weekday or weekend. Maybe I should try four days in a row, ride the momentum? Or maybe two days, skip a day, then two days.
Year 5, Day 155: My Corelle order arrived! I’m a little iffy on the larger serving bowls we bought, they’re much bigger than I envisioned and where am I going to store them? But I am delighted with the little dip bowls and appetizer plates (my picks). Our prior set of dip bowls are down to 3 survivors out of …. 8? maybe? I remember the first one I broke about 8 years ago. Then I broke two more microwaving butter in them. The other 2 were someone else’s fault. The new little bowls are both microwave and dishwasher safe they are adequately protected from me. Not if I drop them, though, RIP first bowl. Originally I’d been yearning for a set of metal dip bowls – it’d take some real doing to break those! Sadly, the only set of metal bowls I liked was out of stock. Happily, Corelle came along with a 40% off Labor Day sale and that brought the price point down to a much more palatable range.
This also got me thinking about how it must be so American to think of holidays synonymously with sales. Do other countries do that nearly as much as we do? Surely not?
Also! I finally did my passport pictures! I have no idea if it’s any good, I can only hope. While I was at it, I did pictures for the kids and printed all that out as well to get moving on their passport applications. JB’s has expired and Smol Acrobat hasn’t had one yet so it’s time if we plan to try any international travel in the next few years. The State department claims that Oct-Dec is their slow period (low volume), let’s test that claim because I know of some people’s applications taking 6-12 months in the past year.
Year 5, Day 156: Oh my stars and garters, to quote the good Doctor Hank McCoy. It’s been a WEEK.
Lots of mutual aid this week. Friends with medical problems, cash crunches of the two digit to four digit varieties, evacuating the SoCal fires, Diane Duane’s book sale, and more. Also getting called on at the last minute to help a high schooler edit some writing. Once an English major, always an English major?
Nightmares every night leave me wrung out and exhausted by morning. Complaining about it at Bluesky caught the attention of someone with similar problems and they dropped me a line letting me know about a medication they’ve used to great effect for eliminating the nightmares. I immediately scheduled an appointment to talk to my doctor about it.
At work, a few small things slowed down just enough for me to catch my breath for a second, then I was pummeled with more personnel problems. It’s of the unfortunate event variety, not a performance issue, but I am going to fight to support and keep someone through a tough personal time. It’s going to land hard on my team but I will find a way to make it work. That’s the right thing to do. There are moments, especially when I hit the 10 pm still at my desk mark, when I wish I was willing to be mediocre at my job. I can draw some lines but that one, I can’t let go.
Year 5, Day 145: I had vague notions of going somewhere with the family today, maybe a BART adventure to … I dunno. And with that stellar planning, instead I:
Finally replaced the older elastic on JB’s school masks. Fresh elastic! Better protection!
Finally ran that load of laundry I’d been planning to do since Wednesday. After helping me put an extra large load of wash into the washer, Smol Acrobat left the garage saying: dat’s enough for today. I should have taken that as a suggestion.
Inspected my plants and planted several more snap peas in hopes they will crowd around the one plant that’s set apart from the others and puny in its solitude.
Discovered that the onions I left in the ground months ago are sprouting new greens, as are the garlic cloves I lazily stuck in the soil and barely covered up. Low effort gardening win!
PiC was struggling with patching a hole in Smol Acrobat’s bike tire so I started weeding, a thing the kids often like to “help” with, and ended up pulling so many weeds. And yet that wasn’t even half of them. Pah.
Prescription for poor judgement/overly ambitious chore tackling: Acetaminophen AND ibuprofen, hot shower, heating pad, a ton of water and a liedown.
Year 5, Day 146: I’m so sore today.
Our Vogmasks arrived! Finally. Happily, everyone’s sizes were correct so I may buy a full set to leave in the car. Inevitably someone will forget their mask at a bad time: they’re all in the wash or the backups are in the other backpack or bag, whatever. We carry them with us almost all the time, it’s that 1-2% of the time when you’re in a rush and didn’t realize you’d set your mask down for a minute and didn’t pick it up again.
JB wanted to beg off self defense today, offering to trade much house cleaning if they were allowed to skip. I really wanted to skip too but they’d missed last week already, plus a bunch over the summer, so I had to put my foot down for both of us. They were disappointed but didn’t complain. I had to lug work along and keep on working there, annoyingly, but still ended my workday at 10 pm. Grumble.
I took a break to make a big batch of spaghetti carbonara for dinner. This was appreciated by everyone but Smol Acrobat who complained: I wike de bacon and de gween beans but I don’t wike da pasta.
I knew they would be the objector but not to what, exactly. It might be the pasta shape. They’re used to ravioli and tortellini and lasagna, I can’t remember the last time we had a long pasta.
Year 5, Day 147: I don’t use TikTok but by golly are there so many cautionary tales about not being such a ???? that you believe everything influencers say to do. The latest is particularly relevant to this blog: “a viral glitch” to deposit a bad check and withdraw cash from that bad check when the bank makes it available immediately. That’s both fraud (knowingly depositing a bad check) and all kinds of setting yourself up for disaster. Have these people never been hit with an overdraft charge? Have they never seen how a single charge, if you don’t have that $30+ plus the money you overdrafted by, snowballs into months and years of financial chaos? It gives me hives just thinking about accidental overdrafts over the years that happened because my checking account was still a delicate ecosystem where being even two pennies off, or having two checks cashed in the wrong order, would set off an overdraft and chain reaction of panic as other bills came due and were processed. Luckily for me, I monitored that stuff obsessively and tweaked my system until I’d built up enough of a cushion that it could withstand any transaction going through in any order. But to be doing this on purpose with money you don’t have?? Noooooo!
Year 5, Day 148: Chatting with my sister about the kids and my fears and things, these things about Curran suddenly resonated so strongly. He built the Pack so his future family would be protected. I’ve worked so hard to build connections outside my bio family to provide my kids with chosen family they can rely on, unlike the bio family that I couldn’t.
He absolutely believed that Mahon would have kicked him out if he hadn’t taken care of the Rampaging Bear situation. My belief in the inevitability of abandonment by all trusted adults is just about ironclad. Still working on it. Chipping away bit by bit.
Also, the aswang from Grimm! Talk about the abusive sort of family obligation traditions.
Musing on bodies: What a terrible idea. The constant need for cleaning, and eating (multiple times a day!), flossing and brushing, dressing and undressing. It’s just maintenance maintenance maintenance. And that’s before taking into account illnesses or allergies or any deviation from a healthy state.
PTA meeting tonight – I forgot about it three times today. And just like that, our October calendar has filled up. Conference week, another PTA meeting, the fall carnival, a birthday party, a second attempt at SDCC registration.
Year 5, Day 149: I’ve been having vivid involved dreams again, not necessarily nightmares but alternate reality types of things. I usually wake up still half in that reality so I remember them pretty clearly, but they are weird.
I feel absurd for even thinking this but I was doing more research on native to CA flowers that aren’t toxic to animals (and people of course) and hopefully perennials. I planted poppies this year since we are currently without dog but that was unsuccessful anyway. I found baby blue eyes and am contemplating splurging on a ridiculous number of seeds (using a gift card!) in hopes they will be easy to grow and will produce the “field full of flowers” impression I’d like to have. $16 on more flower seeds that may come to nothing??
Year 5, Day 138: Starting the week on a low point again. The cumulative effects of the last week, last week, and this weekend were too much. By Sunday mid-morning my body was in shutdown mode. I could feel the fatigue like a sledgehammer hovering over my body. I took a lot more breaks than usual to try and recover enough to take the kids to the part, but it was too late. It was already too late when I woke up, honestly. My body shut down mid-afternoon.
I’m moderately functional today! While not good, I’m MUCH better than yesterday when I was drained to the dregs. I’ve managed to run two loads of laundry and the dishwasher. Update, four loads of laundry and uh, I didn’t realize that the dishes were already clean. 🤦🏻♀️ That and my low score on today’s Duolingo are good indicators that today’s “better” wasn’t back to baseline.
It being our first warm lovely day in a while, the ant colony moved into the kitchen to look for food and water. Took a bit of hunting to find the ant bait we used last time but I dotted the kitchen and crossed my fingers this will take care of them.
This was my first day without massive frustration at work in several months. I’m writing this after I shut down so I couldn’t jinx myself. Here’s hoping it won’t be the only one this week.
Trainer time. It didn’t feel good, just ok, but I was able to break my exercises across the day enough so that I completed all 11 sets without undue fatigue. That’s something!
Year 5, Day 139: If I was going into the negatives on Sunday, which forced the full body shutdown, then I’m hovering at a 2 today. For most of the morning I squeaked by on a trickle of motivation but that just wasn’t going to get me through the day. Finally I remembered I’d been wanting to watch Deadpool, with sound this time, I last watched it in 2017 on a plane without headphones. 🤦🏻♀️ It was very rated-R but it was also what my brain needed to nudge it into gear. Then I remembered the Lego movie existed and that crutch got me the rest of the way through my day.
It wasn’t until the end of the day that I realized I’m likely dragging because yesterday was arm day and maybe I overdid it. This feeling in my shoulders, like mini elephants started nesting in there, finally tipped me off. That ache and fatigue is a direct result of the dozen lateral raises, modified pushups and planks. Better ratchet down the number of reps per set, I can’t keep functioning like a sodden pile of noodles every other day.
We picked a small handful of snap pea tendrils for our salad tonight to encourage them to quit spending energy on tendrils and start making flowers. If it doesn’t work, at least we got to enjoy some part of the plants.
A Happy Thing: we’re still using the nasal spray for the kids when they go to daycare/school. For Smol Acrobat, being too little and uncoordinated to mask on their own, and too young to remember on their own, that’s their only daily protection aside from the vaccine. They were resistant the first month but now they’re a champ at letting me do the spray. These small favors are appreciated.
Year 5, Day 140: Thanks to a recommendation from One Sick Vet, I picked up a set of longer term reuseable over-the-ear masks for everyone from Vogmask (20% off until the end of the month). We have disposables on rotation for the kids, JB has a set of cloth masks that are layered with a filter for school, I use the flomask, and PiC rotates between disposables. Everyone has a flomask but I’m the only one who prefers it over all the other mask options. Occasionally I need something over the ear and less bulky, though, and I want to keep a set of good masks on hand as backups for the family when they forget and leave the house without theirs. We’ll try these out and if we like them well enough, I’ll buy a set for the car.
Unhappily, JB came home with all the gastroenteritis symptoms. I’ve made up their sick bed (they get to camp out on the floor when vomit is involved to try to limit the horrific vomit cleanup that still haunts me to this day. Vomit was specifically written out of my parenting contract when I was pregnant with JB, I’m on wound care!), their sick bag, their assortment of fluids and administered Zofran left over from the last time we were the House of Vomit. Every ounce of me is now focused on hoping that it’s only a touch of the stomach flu and not, say, rotavirus. They don’t have a temperature so it’s promising on that front, at least.
With the two viral infections going on, JB’s and Smol Acrobat’s low fever and congestion, I deemed it the better part of valor not to do my full workout today. It felt like wimping out but not wearing myself down to a shadow is the whole point of working with a trainer.
Year 5, Day 141: JB deliberately stayed burritoed in their sick camp this morning well past the time they should have gotten up. I suspected they were a little better than they were letting on but didn’t press the point since I wanted them to be vomit free for at least a full day before sending them back to school. In some ways it was easier for me to have them home sick (or “sick”) than not: I didn’t have to rush to drop off, or pick up, or run them to self defense. I just had meetings, and attempted to shift a mountain of work, and instructed them to eat bland food at intervals. They did crafts, reading and then finally, in the mid afternoon, asked to watch some TV. Their stomach pain was clearly better by then, but I was too busy to care whether they were doing anything educational or productive.
Things at work are really hectic in a different way as the end of our fiscal year looms. I’ve got strategy sessions and plans to deploy and people to keep motivated and in relatively decent morale. Blech. I personally have zero motivation and all the annoyance. But I remind myself daily that we can get through this and see how it looks on the other side. I did, however, see a really interesting job listing that didn’t make me scoff and close it immediately. Unfortunately it’s across a bridge and they want hybrid work, “remote for the right candidate” and I’m leery of any job where remote is considered a special accommodation. I know how quickly and easily those can be yanked. It pays more than my current job but the difference would mean nothing if I had to commute even one day a week. I’d have to figure out after school care and things would get complicated fast. It’s not worth it. 100% remote only!
Year 5, Day 142: Early signs that my birthday is approaching – I got another invitation to join AARP. It’s got me wondering, are the discounts worth it? The PTA discounts aren’t worth a plugged nickel so I’m skeptical about these.
Our heat snap is apparently over! Smol Acrobat and I pulled out our cozy bathrobes after our showers to enjoy some Lego movie together while PiC and JB went to their Back to School Night. Smol Acrobat had wanted to go but I didn’t like the sound of their congestion and their fatigue was enough for me to think it’d be far wiser to be curled up in blankets early. They were slightly befuddled by the change in routine, we ALWAYS have all four of us home where did half the family go? But they really wanted to watch the Lego movie so that helped ease the confusion.
Me, I’m still paying the physical price for using up all available energy plus reserves two weekends ago. At best, I replenish at a trickle, so this recharging may take weeks for me to feel like the sole inhabitant of my body again and not like I’m smuggling a mountain in each limb.
Year 5, Day 131: After issuing a draconian rule to JB last week, up by 7 am and out the door by 8 am, we made it to school without running like our butts were on fire. That bit was good this morning. Smol’s glacial slowness eating breakfast wasn’t.
That segued into a crappy work day where nothing worked as it should BUT I decided to make much of it someone else’s problem rather than trying to fix things myself. If corporate is going to make it impossible for me to be efficient and get shit done like I normally would, then they can bite me. Someone else will deal with it and I will hound them until they do. It’s a small shift but for now it feels better.
It was still a long damn day, though. After helping Smol Acrobat help me hang up their clothes before dinner, I ran clean out of cope and melted to the ground for about 20 minutes. They cuddled with me for a bit and then suggested games “wif no buttons” (quiet, non-battery operated) we could play from a recumbent position. That little breather got me through to dinner. The reports from the DNC were further uplifting, giving me enough fuel to buckle down one more time. I’ve got a bunch of personal stuff to deal with tomorrow so I have to get stuff out of the way now.
It’s been really hard watching this country elect a man who is incapable of stringing together two coherent complete sentences in a row, and then have to go through the painful process of seeing him run AGAIN despite January 6th.
The very powerful reproductive freedom segment at the DNC
Year 5, Day 132: Back to the struggle of running late to school. Sigh. I’m setting my alarm 15 minutes early to see if that helps us with incrementally waking up earlier. Cold turkey from summer hours isn’t working. This is one of my scattered days: work, do a personal appointment, work more, do another personal commitment, come back and work late into the night after dinner. And still not make a big enough dent in the piles.
Garden harvest report: this week we picked the One and The Only Blueberry that the bush managed to create! There were originally two but it fell off the bush when it was but a microscopic berry. We cut it in half for the kids. They both declared it amazing.
I also picked all the green beans off the two bush beans that are companions to the blackberry bush. Three one-inch beans! 😂 They were crispety crunchy and JB declared them SO GOOD. The 6 other bush bean plants aren’t doing much, just growing leaves and being green. They’re spindly little things, so it’s hard to imagine them giving up real sized green beans. We’re definitely well past the estimated time to maturity of 2 months. Speaking of the blackberry bush, it’s down to the last 3 berries of this growing period. We probably got about 40 berries all told. The kids kept picking them as they ripened so the count is rough.
Trainer time! He increased my sets to four per exercise this week so I have to not take that as a challenge to also increase my reps. Mostly aiming for the middle or high middle of the reps range. Except for the calf raise, that one feels so easy I maxed out on my first set (10 reps). Then I realized that too is a mistake and eased back on each subsequent set, so the last set was only 4 reps.
Year 5, Day 133: Today was meant to be a”see no one, get tons done” day buuuuut I forgot that it’s a minimum day for JB and they have to go to the orthodontist. Sigh. SO much for that. Though I will say, it’s nice for it to still be quite early when we finish up at the appointment. We had plenty of time left to get a lasagna in the oven AND for me to get more work done. So that was one less point of stress. Much appreciated.
My coworker and I had a long chat about the frustration with our jobs, the external problems that started last fall and how we’re on the verge of rage quitting. He’s got a more versatile skill set, he could switch industries pretty easily whereas I’m more specialized and limited. We agree that things are absolutely maddening right now. We both really like our internal teams, we just hate the parent company teams. And neither of us want to have to go back to any of the places we’ve been before: non-profit, corporate, start up, small family business, academia-adjacent. They got us here and all had their own dysfunctionality, but we don’t want to revisit them.
Easy dinners this week: leftover pizza one night, tofu+soba+Costco tempura shrimp another night, and lasagna tonight. I had every intention of cooking up those chicken thighs but it just doesn’t look like it’s going to happen.
Year 5, Day 134: Most of my joints felt mildly inflamed today. Just enough that everything felt swollen and lumpy. I wasn’t excited to do my workout for the first time since starting, and I didn’t want to take JB to self defense in the afternoon. Admittedly they also didn’t want to go, their tightened braces hurt too much, so it worked out that I was letting both of us off the hook, but that did feel like a bit of a fail.
I think the way my joints felt, no cushions, was a lot the way my brain felt today, no cushion. I’ve been burning the late night oil too many nights in a row and that deepens the usual fatigue dramatically. Instead of being terrible to myself about it when I had trouble re-focusing, or when I decided not to do self defense class, I spent some time packing up a box of COVID tests for our friends. We still get them free from our healthcare provider and they don’t, so I’ve been ordering extra (well within our permitted amounts) to share with friends.
Trainer time! I did do my workout, though. I don’t want to break my streak so early. It felt like a good challenge when I finally got around to it which is why I’ve still been keeping up with it. I started with fewer reps and increased in the third and fourth sets if I felt ok. That felt better than the other way around. Smol Acrobat is sneaking up on me now, gotta go!
Year 5, Day 135: Boy, did we nearly blow it this morning. Everyone slept through their alarms again. I was the first one out of bed 15 minutes before we had to leave for school. It took all day to figure out that, at least for my part, this was likely because I haven’t had any recovery time from the last weekend. I’m not sure why everyone else is dragging. They’re usually a lot more peppy but we have got to reset for next week somehow. How do we get everyone energized and back to their more usual early morning schedules?
I had a delightful visit with our neighbor’s puppy today. I had planned to borrow his older sister but she managed to make herself sick (still crossing my fingers that she will be just fine after all the shenanigans she pulled), so we agreed it’d be Little Brother’s turn today. He was a curious soul, exploring and examining everything he could put his nose to, but it was a polite sort of investigation. He didn’t try to steal anything or chew on anything, he just wanted a really thorough sniff. We went through his commands, and he earned so many treats.
It’s good therapy to have dog time and it’s also a great reminder that if I adopted a dog now, I’m not going to but if I did, I’d be 100% committed to their well being and that can be a lot on top of what we’re already handling. The initial transition period can be so so hard. It was with Sera. I find myself more at peace with taking this time and space for me now without piling on caretaking.
