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. I just remembered to inch up our twice-monthly savings rate a little bit.
2. I’m really enjoying PiC’s version of the gluten free turkey and cheese burgers he’s been making for us on Friday nights.
3. We had a brief outdoors masked and distanced no hugging meet up with a couple friends we haven’t talked to for months. It was maybe about ten minutes but it was a nice tiny visit. I can handle socializing in those small increments.
4. I made the mistake of saying that I was a bit more relaxed this week because a lot of the balls I’m juggling are in other people’s hands and that felt like I invited some chaos but I think honestly it’s just the normal ebb and flow of stress, isn’t it? I found myself somewhere on the spectrum of mildly to moderately annoyed without spiraling into anxiety and grouchiness over the bad turns and was able to enjoy that minor moment of peace without spoiling it with looking for something to fuss about. That’s a new thing for me. Brain therapy is good!
Challenges this week: I don’t typically pay attention to celebrity news but the passing of Chadwick Boseman was shattering.
Minor frustration: we’ve only had two pieces of mail go missing in the past several years and both times, it was a check. Both times, they made it as far as being scanned and in our Informed Delivery email but never made it to us. The mail from the IRS telling us we owe them over $5000 found us, though! I guess given the interest they’d charge if we didn’t get that mail, we’re better off getting theirs than not. We’re both still juggling a TON of extra logistics because we’re trying to make time to help a friend and get some home maintenance on the road.
5. We had to make some decisions about furniture this month and we got through all of them without any conflict! We usually have such different tastes and desires and needs that I’m usually at least a little disgruntled by how much time we’ve spent on it but two things made a difference: having a timeline helped force focus and narrowed our choices. And our strategy of having me tell him what my priorities are, him going off shopping and giving me links to look at, and then narrowing it down together is working smoothly these days.
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 recently found out that a friend had Covid and I didn’t know when she was down with is so she shared her blog post. Btw, this is one reason we get along so well: “I work from home. I don’t even want a job if I can’t do it from home. I hate going in the office, I hate the politics involved, but most of all I hate daily socializing with people I’ve already met and yes judged. I already know I’m going to dislike many of the people there because if you’ve worked a lot of jobs like me you can spot the types.”
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 23 and 24 of COVID in the Bay Area.
Week 23, Day 157: JB was really excited for their first day of school. I am really hoping things shift but it bothers me greatly that their teacher keeps harping on how she wants to see them back in the classroom “soon.” It makes me think that the teacher isn’t taking this seriously enough and that she’s getting their hopes up which is rather cruel when we have no idea what’s around the corner. These kids have been through five months of COVID and it feels like she’s dangling bait in front of them with this “soon” commentary. I hope she stops.
I don’t know if this was a happiness hangover thanks to the weekend but despite the numerous challenges of the day, and the Mondayness of the day, I didn’t spend my day infuriated and frustrated as usual.
We had lots of fun on the weekend one day and I spent the other day getting almost my entire to do list done. I finished up all but two items off the remaining list today and caught up on my work backlog.
Things are still grim with various fronts but for the first time in months, a Monday didn’t feel like the Absolute Worst. I’m very grateful.
Week 23, Day 158: Day 2. Oh. My patience from yesterday ran out. Darn! (more…)
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.
Weeks 23 and 24 of COVID in the Bay Area.