About sixteen years ago, I met him for the first time. My trainwreck sibling brought home this adorable puppy he had no business adopting because he had not one thing in his life that wasn’t a mess. I was furious at my sibling – he didn’t even take care of himself, how could he drag
If you’d like to join me in helping Lakota families and/or rural libraries this year, please read this post. Over 6 weeks in 2019, we raised $2669.94 for the Lakota families, touching 27 lives. What can we do in 2020?
Current total: Lakota, $1,732.74; Rural libraries, $321.62.
1. Every time I start to think our little $3 hydroponic basil plant is giving up, it stages a comeback! It’s put out several new lovely green stems fluffy with leaves. The odd thing is that these are sprouting out of the very brown stems that are connected to the roots. It’s a strange look but it’s fresh and smells great.
2. Our Lakota balance is creeping up again to nearly $100 between monthly contributions from giving friends and my last infusion. We should be able to help another family soon!
3. LOTS of friends on this list of Plutus Finalists, yay friends!
Challenges this week: Yet another friend has lost their beloved family pet. That’s three friends in as many weeks. My heart breaks for them.
Because I don’t seem to actually understand the meaning of “pace yourself” I am now: working on selling the rental, working on refinancing our primary home, figuring out if we can shift some big items to someone who needs it more, on top of the usual work – managing remote schooling – parenting – dogparenting/dogcare – grind. Deep breath.
The world is … too much. We are awash with Covid, wildfires are everywhere so people and homes are in danger, the air quality is horrible so it’s not safe to take JB out for long isolated walks and hikes and bike rides.
4. We borrowed a hot spot from the school and picked it up just in time so we would have it in time for the second week of school. This is good, we will have three people using the internet at the same time this coming week and I didn’t have confidence in even our upgraded internet to be stable under the heavy usage.
5. PiC and I finally had a meeting of the minds and selected some kid specific organizing aids. Finally!! It’ll come in stages so I started with the small stuff I could manage right away while we wait for the larger basket set to arrive. The key here is to teach JB to independently follow the organizers.
6. A completely satisfying weekend day: breakfast, cleared some household work, JB had a call to hang out with Auntie then I hopped on a call to discuss some supplemental enrichment and organizing plans. We had lunch, walked the dogs, went to pick up supplies and return the second case of the absolutely terrible strawberry mango sparkling water at Target. We also bought a refill on hand sanitizer because we couldn’t find it anywhere else for delivery. How ironic it is that to protect ourselves against Covid we had to go in a crowded store and search for AGES to find it? Everyone was masked, thankfully, but it was unpleasantly packed in there. Still we got what we needed and got out, then I got to work with the printer and tape to customize our personal bottles while JB had their rest time. After which point PiC and I crashed so we abandoned our child, him to nap and me to lay down and they did just fine for an hour doing scratch art and drawing and painting. A whole hour without more than marginally bothering me! We had dinner and crashed out. There were hiccups, there always are, but we made it over the finish and I felt both semi rested and like I’d gotten a lot done.
7. JB is coping really well with online learning, all things considered.
:: How was your week? What meals do you like to make ahead, if any?
If you’d like to join me in helping Lakota families and/or rural libraries this year, please read this post. Over 6 weeks in 2019, we raised $2669.94 for the Lakota families, touching 27 lives. What can we do in 2020?
Current total: Lakota, $1,732.74; Rural libraries, $321.62.
‘I Have Stage Four Cancer, But I Will Not Live Like I’m Dying.’ I can’t help but think that JB’s morbid streak comes from me because when I read articles like this, I think harder about all the ways I have to figure out how to replace all the things that I do in our family should I be out of the picture. But that’s a rather transparently desperate attempt to impose control over something you can’t control. I couldn’t replace PiC with systems and preparation if our roles were reversed. Not by a long shot.
If you’d like to join me in helping Lakota families and/or rural libraries this year, please read this post. Over 6 weeks in 2019, we raised $2669.94 for the Lakota families, touching 27 lives. What can we do in 2020?
Current total: Lakota, $1,732.74; Rural libraries, $321.62.
Weeks 21 and 22 of COVID in the Bay Area.
Week 21, Day 143: Is there a Monday in which I don’t complain about the Mondayness? This was not one of those.
It actually has Friday to blame. This week was like we started with a technology hangover from the previous week: my phone didn’t work, which meant that my primary form of communication with the outside world was disrupted, as was the ability to manage JB’s lessons. I had to spend yet another two hours trying to fix tech that wouldn’t work, and that’s before getting to my actual FT work. Since I had to factory reset the phone, everything I have set up to make the days work more smoothly and makes the most of every minute was gone and it was like grit in my eyes irritating.
Also my downloading during my work day refused to save to the right folder, it kept going to some random folder with 12,000 other files. Awesome. That required another 20 minutes to solve.
If you’d like to join me in helping Lakota families and/or rural libraries this year, please read this post. Over 6 weeks in 2019, we raised $2669.94 for the Lakota families, touching 27 lives. What can we do in 2020?
Current total: Lakota, $1,713.62; Rural libraries, $321.62.
1. We finally caught the edge of a heat wave and part of me was really happy because it’s cold here 98% of the time. I appreciate what we have – we never have to worry about anything melting when we leave it out for example – but I do love a hot day or two once in a while to break it up. I bask in the glory of being too warm because it’s so rare.
2. The hot days also meant we could finally easily bathe the dogs! It’s so hard for Seamus to stand for long periods of time now. On a hot day, he can go for a bit of a walk and hang out and dry quickly. On a cold day, he needs to be blow dried and that’s just so hard on his arthritic joints. All credit goes to PiC on that chore.
3. JB is in really good spirits about the upcoming school year, no matter what form it takes. The nice thing about how hard it’s been up til now – it’s left us all with a complete lack of expectations (other than that it may be a circus). If it’s better than a disaster, great. If not, we’ll figure it out.
4. Speaking of PiC being great, he’s taking the whole first week of school off work so he can be there to oversee and assist. I definitely could not do that even though I had originally really wanted to take the day before and the first day off to be mentally and physically present. My staff needed the time off at the same time and since they booked it first, I wasn’t going to stress the rest of the team with my absence too. We have a lot of flexibility but we still have to get the work done and I have some bigger life balance goals to achieve in the long term so having PiC there instead should do the trick.
Challenges this week: The heat did a number on my hands, much as the rest of me enjoyed it. They were swollen like oven mitts! But it was a small price to pay. We also had another hiccup with the rental and the property manager and that ate up another precious couple of hours of my work time. I ended the week on a low note: with at least half a day of work that I’d have to make up next week or on the weekend. That was disheartening. I like to walk away on a Friday night and know I don’t feel any need to come back until Monday. Also can we take a moment to reflect that we’re five plus months into a pandemic, plus we have heat waves, plus rolling blackouts because PG&E stinks, plus wildfires. I had to shut all the windows that were letting in the cool air, thus avoiding the need to run fans, because of the smoke. There’s a fair bit of coping whiplash in our corner of the world.
5. I made the call to list our rental for sale. It stopped being fun years ago and while I’ve been learning a lot, the biggest things I’ve learned are that I don’t enjoy dealing with an investment that requires me to talk to people. Ever. I also don’t enjoy the people by and large. It was a grand experiment and I still do believe strongly in affordable housing but I also can’t be the one to offer it when we cannot easily absorb the costs of a wrecked property. If we were multiple times richer, that wouldn’t bother me but at this stage in our financial lives, that’s not a hit we can just shrug off without impacting our long term plans. I believe in prompt service and taking really good care of the property for the tenants and that didn’t align with my past sets of tenants. So I’m hugely relieved to have made the decision that it’s ok to end this experiment here and take a part time job off my plate. I don’t know how quickly it will sell but I’m crossing my fingers that it goes for a good price and smoothly and quickly. I’m ready to move on. And that’s ok!
6. We had a distanced and masked activity with a couple of friends. We have seen them a few times since March, just for quick porch and distanced drop offs of food gifts, but nothing like spending actual time together. We haven’t spent time with anyone in five months, really. I didn’t think it bothered me at all, and maybe it doesn’t specifically bother me, but the lack of fun times means I haven’t replenished my spirit in nearly half a year. I’ve just been coping day to day to day to endless day. I couldn’t believe what an enormous difference it made in my ability to breathe and be patient to have even distanced company for a while and be relaxed with friends and laughing over silly things. Even aching from head to toe with the unexpected physical exertion, I had reserves of patience for JB that I have been searching for for months. I both felt elated and bad that I can’t maintain that much patience normally but it’s just an honest indicator of how depleted I’ve been. Whether it was the fun activity or the company or both, we need more of this.
If you’d like to join me in helping Lakota families and/or rural libraries this year, please read this post. Over 6 weeks in 2019, we raised $2669.94 for the Lakota families, touching 27 lives. What can we do in 2020?
Current total: Lakota, $1,713.62; Rural libraries, $321.62.
Teaching Isn’t About Managing Behavior: It’s about reaching students where they really are. I don’t understand why teachers aren’t taught to teach this way to begin with, though.
One Frugal Girl is homeschooling this year and researched a lot of interesting resources. We are definitely not homeschooling but we have been managing JB’s remote education through the summer with a combination of one on one lessons given by a teacher, one-off classes online, and lots of reading and recreational writing with us. Their spelling is amazingly creative at this stage and I don’t know if that’s normal but it’s pretty funny. I would love some other creative and fun math resources from a secular company though. We picked up the Singapore math books, and JB loves those in the abstract, but gets distracted easily.
I’m the worst at calmly accepting and sitting with uncertainty, it reminds me too much of the emotional whiplash of my teens and twenties when I was supporting my family and taking all the hits of their decisions. “On the flip side of every good thing is the risk that it will end.” It’s an interesting mental thing I have going on that I always gird myself against the bad times lasting forever and the good things ending unexpectedly. That comes from experiencing the loss of so many loved ones over the course of a decade, and the Great Recession and countless other bad things strung together. Their impact overshadows the very real good things that happened across that same time span. I’m working on it, and it’s progress that I recognize that even bad times surely will come to an end, but boy is it a rough journey.
I absolutely love seeing a beautiful cake (in pictures, not in person since I can’t have them – no beautifully decorated cake is ever GF and sugar free 😭😅) and if you enjoy cake design too, hie thee to Syndesi Desserts!
I had no idea that ice cream shop songs had racist origins, but now that I know, I’m glad to enjoy this new jingle.
golden retriever spotted, purposely laying in the middle of the sidewalk to get pets from strangers. very strategic
(fridaygolden/sassthx IG) pic.twitter.com/8ZDySIi2nm
If you’d like to join me in helping Lakota families and/or rural libraries this year, please read this post. Over 6 weeks in 2019, we raised $2669.94 for the Lakota families, touching 27 lives. What can we do in 2020?
Current total: Lakota, $1,713.62; Rural libraries, $321.62.
Life lessons
We’ve been having a lot of hard conversations with JB about the harsh realities of life. Namely racism: what it is, how it hurts people, how it’s wrong and how we fight against it. Their daycare hasn’t been nearly diverse enough for my taste but their elementary school will be much better and I want them to have a solid understanding of accepting people for who they are based on their actions, not their appearance.
This is nothing new. We’ve been reading “I am Rosa Parks” (Amazon, Indiebound, Bookshop.org), The Youngest Marcher which has been extra hard for me to get through this year (Amazon, Indiebound, Bookshop.org), and Sulwe (Amazon, Indiebound, Bookshop.org) for a while. With all the protests, they have been asking to read The Youngest Marcher every night.
Different bodies
We were picking up takeout when JB said: “There’s something wrong with his eye!” It wasn’t very loud but it was clearly out loud.
I was startled because I hadn’t noticed what they had, but I realized that the fellow bringing us our bags had a drooping eyelid. I told JB: “There may be something different about his body but should we talk about how people look?”
JB: “No.”
Me: “Ok, let’s not do that, please.”
They said said ok, though they still stared for a bit, and then we had a conversation in the car about how treating people with respect means that if they have something different about their bodies, it’s fine to notice but we don’t comment on them. We all have differences (or flaws if we consider them as such), and it’s unkind to point them out and stare. We wouldn’t like it if we had a scar or an injury or something different about us and people were staring, or pointing, or commenting on us.
I’m not sure if I handled it right in the moment. I feel terrible that he may have heard them and felt that we didn’t treat him and the moment respectfully.
Pupdate
Our buddy Seamus has chronic eye problems this year and we had to rush him to the veterinary opthalmologist for an exam when his latest bout with a corneal ulcer was going the wrong way. He’d been on medications for weeks and the darn thing wouldn’t budge. Typically they clear up in 7-10 days. By the 20th day both his regular vet and I were very concerned and it was off to the specialist for us.
That exam showed that it wasn’t quite as bad as we had feared so we still had a chance to head off a surgical treatment. Huge sigh of relief there. We went on an aggressively frequent eye ointment regimen, nine applications a day!
New Skills
JB is currently obsessed with wanting to “be a real dog owner” and wanting to walk the dogs alone. They can walk Seamus who is well mannered and cooperative 98% of the time but takes sudden turns once in a while that they have to watch out for. If Seamus was forceful as he once was about his course corrections I’d never allow it but he’s slow and gentle enough in his old age that he’s safe for JB to walk on a slow ramble. Sera, however, is strong, headstrong, and very reactive. So that’s a hard no to JB wanting to walk Sera. They will have to earn the “real dog owner” cred the hard way: slowly and steadily.
Precious Moments
I don’t know why either of us thought it’d be for a good reason.
JB: I’m always going to remember this day.
PiC: oh yeah? *hopeful*
JB: Yeah cuz you guys are gonna die before me.
PiC: Oh.
JB: I’m not gonna die before you! Oh, but kids can actually die.
PiC: Uh.
JB: Yeah cuz kids can get very sick when they’re young!
This makes me feel like a transport bus.
JB: I wish I could go to Italy! In person, not in Mommy’s belly. Because in Mommy’s belly, it’s very different.
:: If you had a visible injury or disability, how would you want a parent to address it with their kid while they were still in front of you or within earshot?
If you’d like to join me in helping Lakota families and/or rural libraries this year, please read this post. Over 6 weeks in 2019, we raised $2669.94 for the Lakota families, touching 27 lives. What can we do in 2020?
Current total: Lakota, $1,713.62; Rural libraries, $321.62.
1. I just found $12 owed to PiC looking through the Unclaimed Property site! I was able to put in the claim for him electronically so a bit of typing and his claim is all set. We’ll see if they cough it up in 7-10 days.
2. We’ve been trying to buy local as much as we can, which often means paying a mark up, but we think it’s important to support local businesses. Mostly that means local restaurants but this weekend it meant the local bike shops. Unfortunately, PiC couldn’t get the shop to pick up their phones to find out if they had parts in stock and showing up at the shop that said it was open online revealed that it was not. They wasted a precious hour on an unsuccessful errand so we had to go to the local chain instead. Not that I think the small bike shops here are suffering. The sales in the bike industry around here have skyrocketed with COVID, and he’s reported seeing children’s bikes listed for as much as $800!! Who does that?? But there are quite affluent people in some of the areas surrounding us, so I suppose they’d be willing to pay that kind of money? I guess? I don’t know. The point is he was about to get a couple sets of tires and tubes for JB’s bike for $50. And plus the money we paid for the bike is still less than half the cost of a new one. Even if we’d started with a new bike, I suspect their aggressive riding would have landed us in the bike shop getting new tires sooner or later even if we started with new ones.
3. I went on an organizing fest on Sunday to corral all my jewelry and hair and makeup things into a semblance of order and though I’m grouchy that I ordered the containers literally a couple hours too late and had the price go up by $2 per unit, I’m not letting the $6 “surcharge” over what I had mentally budgeted take away from my triumph of untangling and sorting all those pieces. Most of it is cheap costume jewelry, but most of that has held up well enough that I should wear them more regularly.
Challenges this week: I wiped myself out on the weekend inadvertently. We went on an extra long walk on Saturday and my ensuing fatigue was DEEP. I could hardly summon the will to exist.
4. For the first time in five months, I went to Trader Joe’s with the family. We were lucky, there was no line to get in. We had our hands misted on the way in, stayed well away from others, we were all masked, I got to pick up a new GF item (Norwegian crackers!) to try out. I haven’t missed people very much since they only exacerbate my ever-dominant fatigue, but I have missed the opportunity to see foods on shelves and stimulate the menu brain.
5. I needed to tackle another area of my organizing and I got it done over the weekend. I gathered up my scattered, though reasonably small, costume jewelry collection and hair accessories into these neat crafts storage boxes. The neatness makes me really happy, as does regaining some of our limited counterspace in the bathroom. I really appreciate these small bouts of organizing energy because the end result, even if I spend money to get there, is so satisfying and the neater surroundings helps soothe my otherwise stressed soul.
6. My brain is currently obsessed with make ahead meals. I’ve got some experience putting up lamb stew and chicken stew, I’d like to expand my repertoire to include enchiladas and chili. Enchiladas I can manage just fine but I had to experiment with the chili. I think I’m going to work on a few more batches before I am ready to freeze ahead.
I’m looking for more easy to make, freezer friendly all in one meals to make ahead so we can have at least a week of pre-made meals set aside for the hard days.
I’m hoping for a sale on Pyrex soon. After thinking about it for days, I decided the most environmentally friendly and flexible long term answer to freezing foods ahead of time is glass with lids. I don’t want to do disposable baking pans nor do I want to freeze in foil because that’s apparently imparted a funny taste to some of my frozen foods.
:: How was your week? What meals do you like to make ahead, if any?
Weeks 21 and 22 of COVID in the Bay Area.