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
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May 22, 2020
If you’d like to join me in helping Lakota families and/or rural libraries this year, please read this post. Over 6 weeks in 2019, we raised $2669.94 for the Lakota families, touching 27 lives. What can we do in 2020?
Current total: Lakota, $1551.58; Rural libraries, $321.62.
1. I learned to play Uno for the very first time this week and it was fun!! I’d forgotten how to just have fun, a little bit.
2. My friend is reading through my archives and texting me quotes. This one made me laugh because I still do this: “Tell me honestly, now, is it really weird that when I sustain a really fantastic-looking injury, I want to show people? I’ve got a newish 1 inch by 2 inch gash across the top of my foot from an altercation with an unfinished edge of a desk, and I had to fight the urge to snap a photo and share it. It’s mostly a morbid fascination that’s probably not shared by the world at large.” We discovered that we both do this thing! I have someone to share war wounds with again!
3. In this moment, I really don’t miss anyone. I know that will change when we get into the summer when we have plans, but at this time of year I normally have my nose to the grindstone so that is feeling a little bit “normal”. Minus all the frustrations of being overloaded with work, cooped up with very few safe outlets because even where things are opening, people refuse to wear masks and I can’t risk catching this thing.
Challenges this week: Therapy was unexpectedly tough. We explored the idea that you can have emotions or feelings without any obligation to act on them. That is a completely foreign concept for me. I’ve always had action and obligation tied to feelings. Growing up, family meant obligation. You were duty bound to love them, which means take care of them, make them proud or add to their reputations by visibly doing well in life and sending money home and caring for them in your old age. Love was nothing BUT duty and action. And in my current life I express and perceive love through action. What does it mean to acknowledge the complexity of loving and hating someone at the same time? To me, it means having conflicting needs to both distance myself and do for them. Which is, of course, not at all ideal.
<– I also have trouble with this idea for myself ….
When thinking of other people, it’s obvious. I don’t love them solely for what they can do for me.
But I do think I have to do things to “earn” or prove my worth for love. It literally doesn’t make any sense to me that someone would choose me as a person they’d like to have in their lives just for the sake of having me around. My utility is my worth. Which is probably not a great thing to believe.
4. They are nowhere near out of the woods but we got a little heartening news – a friend’s cancer is not the worst it could be. So we have some hope for treatment. Please cross your fingers that they come up with an effective treatment plan.
:: How are you keeping healthy and occupied?
May 21, 2020
If you’d like to join me in helping Lakota families and/or rural libraries this year, please read this post. Over 6 weeks in 2019, we raised $2669.94 for the Lakota families, touching 27 lives. What can we do in 2020?
Current total: Lakota, $1551.58; Rural libraries, $321.62.
A Bitches Get Riches primer on applying for unemployment
Julian and Embracing Conflict
Captain Awkward: “How do I set goals if I don’t want anything?” I’m a HUGE goal setter and yet in this present time, even I can’t handle more than the most basic goals beyond “get through this relatively sane however that must happen, help those who need help, teach JB to send mail”.
I grew up on Will Smith in The Fresh Prince, and have long admired his musical and acting talents so I loved this fresh bit of music from him.
NDN Collective: “In South Dakota, checkpoints have been established at the borders of the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, home to the Oglala Sioux Tribe, and on the Cheyenne River Indian Reservation, home to the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe, ensuring that all who enter are vetted, screened, and practicing safe measures to prevent the spread of COVID-19.” These are the folks we are helping in the Giving project this year. I’m really steamed at Governor Noem who is trying to steamroller the tribes’ ability to protect their vulnerable residents.
Ann Mitchell, one of the last WWII codebreakers, has passed.
Diana: “I don’t mean it hasn’t been difficult to switch to this slower pace during an anxiety-prone time with no relief from the tedium that parenting nonstop can be, because that is true; however, we also delighted in the closeness and love we feel for each other with less intrusion from the outside world.”
I wonder what happened to Muschi….
May 18, 2020
If you’d like to join me in helping Lakota families and/or rural libraries this year, please read this post. Over 6 weeks in 2019, we raised $2669.94 for the Lakota families, touching 27 lives. What can we do in 2020?
Current total: Lakota, $1551.58; Rural libraries, $321.62.
“Fairy tales do not tell children the dragons exist. Children already know that dragons exist. Fairy tales tell children the dragons can be killed.” G.K. Chesterton
Unless you’re JB. In which case, every story with a villain is an infomercial for that villain and their scariness. Every morning and evening, I hear a shriek:
Mommy, I’m scared, (evil villain) is going to get me!
I always intended to put JB in self defense classes but I haven’t gotten around to it yet. And now, of course, it’s not possible to start for a while.
The fear bothered me because I realized JB is a freeze on fear kid. As far back as I can remember, I have been a fight on fear kid, which may or may not have been trained into me by a mean older sibling, but this served me well.
I was bullied at every single school I attended. I always had to put some bully in their place when they tried me and things were much better when I was able to do so quickly and decisively. I only ever had to deal with each bully once, they weren’t used to being shut down effectively and violently.
We have now implemented Monster Training. After reading age appropriate books about kids fighting monsters, I proposed that we take turns scaring each other and learning to fight back. The whole goal for me is to teach them to get scared and then act, not just freezing.
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May 15, 2020
If you’d like to join me in helping Lakota families and/or rural libraries this year, please read this post. Over 6 weeks in 2019, we raised $2669.94 for the Lakota families, touching 27 lives. What can we do in 2020?
Current total: Lakota, $1,051.58; Rural libraries, $321.62.
1. PiC and JB teamed up to make me sugar free, gluten free, keto cinnamon rolls and they’re great! I’ve been craving them for months. (Correction: they weren’t keto. They do need to be so I’ll be fiddling with the recipe some more.)
2. My Mother’s Day was spent tackling a part of the yard that has also been bothering me for weeks. I did a big chunk of it on my own in blessed quiet, such a soothing activity to chop and prune back the overgrowth.
Then PiC and JB came out to help for an hour. We got so much more done than I had originally envisioned. My arms may fall off and my back may not work for a week BUT IT IS CLEANED UP. WOOOOO!!
3. We were able to help out a couple more Lakota families (but we ran out of money before I could get the laundry detergent and sheets, sadly).
Challenges this week: JB was really struggling to be human this week. I felt like an anxious pile of sludge, making half my food taste like soap or just nothing.
4. I skipped therapy this week because I’ve been so physically drained and ill that I couldn’t pull myself together to do hard brain work. It was the right call.
5. This bit of genius led to an easy experiment.
I poured the blended ricotta into two small Pyrexes and ended up with two baked ricottas that were pretty good!
It was mostly not sweet (on purpose) and I couldn’t taste the lemon juice or the vanilla. On review, it seems I should have just picked one or the other. Next time I’ll try lemon juice and lemon extract. Next time after that, I’m going to skip the sugar entirely and blend in a little bit of mango if we have it on hand. What flavors would you try?
:: What good things have you enjoyed this week, big or small?
May 14, 2020
If you’d like to join me in helping Lakota families and/or rural libraries this year, please read this post. Over 6 weeks in 2019, we raised $2669.94 for the Lakota families, touching 27 lives. What can we do in 2020?
Current total: Lakota, $659.86; Rural libraries, $321.62.
Because JB hasn’t even started school yet and we’re both enormously lucky enough to be home but working full time, we have taken a similar approach to the notion of homeschooling. I know my friends in other states are worn OUT with homeschooling similar aged children and I just don’t see the value in spending your interminable days with your five year old trying to force them to do schoolwork when we’re all stressed out of our minds. We do have a little schooling happening with a professional, and the rest of the time is JB requesting worksheets, doing art, using their imagination, solving puzzles, learning fractions with food, learning to ride a bike, to be independent, and being creative. The fights are far fewer than when they were in school. Go figure. (Though we are not fight and tantrum free at all.)
Asians and Asian Americans: how to practice allyship with the Black community in our racist society
The real Lord of the Flies: what happened when six boys were shipwrecked for 15 months
I doff my hat to Tami and her handiness. She built a bed for her dogs that’s pretty cool.
Stockdale Paradox
This REALLY resonates with me (whole thread here). I won’t even engage in “what’s the first thing you’re going to do when you get out” thinking because that’s (for me) too close to the “we’re getting out by….” speculation. I cannot do that and still get through this day to day to day stuff.
May 11, 2020
If you’d like to join me in helping Lakota families and/or rural libraries this year, please read this post. Over 6 weeks in 2019, we raised $2669.94 for the Lakota families, touching 27 lives. What can we do in 2020?
Current total: Lakota, $1,021.58; Rural libraries, $321.62.
Weeks 7 and 8 of shutdown in the Bay Area.
We have a bit of a routine now. Mornings: Walk dogs, feed dogs, breakfast. JB has a lesson online, PiC and I work during that period (I oversee the lesson just as a behavior monitor.) Usually they are released to go hang out with PiC for a snack and games after the lesson unless he has conference calls. Afternoon: Lunch, I wander out after I’ve cleared the critical parts of my work (if I’m lucky). I’m juggling my work, training new staff, giving feedback, overseeing policy issues and questions plus the usual household stuff: ordering supplies, watching our spending, thinking about how to organize our lives a little bit better.
Week 7, Day 1: I had to run an important errand today and it threw my entire work groove out of whack. It took hours to get focused on work again, and before I knew it, I was derailed again by fatigue. Rude.
I did get lucky with the weather though! The sun was shining fiercely enough to be warm even with the usual gusty wintry winds we get through our neighborhood, so I set up camp in the garage for a couple hours to get “beach weather” while working. Ahhhh….. The change of scenery really did my mind and body good. I still felt ill and tired, but it did boost my spirits for a good hour and I’m grateful for it.
Week 7, Day 2:
I had to get checked out today and that was really weird. My second solo outing in two days, after 40 days of being home and around the neighborhood only on short walks, and I was feeling such strangeness of being out and about when the world is so altered. Seeing and talking to people at the doctor’s office was also incredibly strange. Some people were reassuring, some people were brusque and off-putting. Some people were slightly hysterical about the medical building’s policies.
One enormous sigh of relief: The possible crisis with PiC’s job blew over. We will be seeing some changes in May, details still unknown, but I’m so many kinds of grateful that it’s not the layoff that we were concerned about.
I’m thinking about how my mentor used to tease me about my 12 month cash emergency fund. She considered it excessive. It could be excessive for her with her very very stable job but I remember the Great Recession far too clearly not to want an 18-24 month cash fund. THAT was probably too much, though, considering how behind I have been with investing for the future. On the one hand, yes it was important to get off my caboose and invest. The habit was the important thing. On the other hand, considering last year’s high prices, I may have been better served if I had held on to the 18-24 month cash and invested a portion of it this year. Wait. No. That’s not true. In a pandemic, I wouldn’t have been able to let go of the cash and I still wouldn’t have made any inroads into our investing goals. Never mind. Hindsight fails to account for the behavioral changes I needed to make.
Anyway. The point is, if we hadn’t had a year of cash in hand, that concern over PiC’s job earlier this month would have been full blown panic. Facing one income when we need 2 to cover our expenses, less than a year of cash, the stock market down, and being stuck at home during a pandemic? Nope. No way. Eliminating one of those four factors as an issue made a big difference. Going down to one job with 12 months cash would let us hold out for about 18 months before having to sell stocks. If facing a recession and a down market, the longer we can wait to tap those stocks, the better.
Of course I don’t know what the heck the market is doing now or why.
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May 8, 2020
If you’d like to join me in helping Lakota families and/or rural libraries this year, please read this post. Over 6 weeks in 2019, we raised $2669.94 for the Lakota families, touching 27 lives. What can we do in 2020?
Current total: Lakota, $659.86; Rural libraries, $321.62.
1. Finally, a gluten free low carb no sugar bread for me! I replaced the oil with bacon fat, the honey with sugar replacement and just recklessly added walnuts to the dry ingredients. Fabulous. I piled fresh Brie and sugar free jam atop each toasted slice and four slices later, admitted that that was lunch.
2. Someone who loves me decided that I was in need of delicious dumplings and salt and pepper tofu and made that happen. They were right.
Challenges this week: loved ones are getting furloughed or being laid off, and another loved one is undergoing diagnostics for what the doctors suspect is cancer and there’s very little we can to do change their circumstances. We can just be there for them from afar.
3. Jenny reminded me that I love looking at fabrics: jellyfish, constellation animals, and CAT NOODLE. I really wish I were handier with a needle and thread to justify buying these ultra cute fabrics.
4. I also love looking at bento boxes. I’m not all inspired to do any of the work but I adore looking at other people’s creativity and ideas.
5. I’m practicing gratitude: for relatively decent health, for financial stability, for a loving chosen family.
:: How are you keeping healthy and occupied?