August 18, 2025

Living in the time of pandemic: COVID-19 (272)

Year 4 of COVID in the Bay Area

Year 6, Day 112: After a really strong start – 8 green bean plants! 8 cucumber plants! A really tall snap pea plant! The garden has petered out. The green beans put out a handful of small beans, maybe 9 total. The cucumbers had half a dozen baby cucumbers per plant, it was going to be glorious. They have all given up on life. 😭 I am very sad about this.

Working out: I’ve graduated to slightly harder exercises this week – exercises with weights. Goblet (which I read at goblin at first) squats; lateral raises with hand weights, and band pullaparts with my weight bands. I was being cheap putting off the weight and band purchases for months. Who knew these would be fun!

Unrelated: I need more wool socks.

Year 6, Day 113: The kids were soaking up their twice-yearly visit with a favorite Uncle so I took advantage of their leaving me alone: free haircut! Hovering upside down over the trash bag, I chopped roughly 4 inches off the length. Hard to see how much is getting lopped while upside down, but fortunately precision isn’t required. Unfortunately the quick and easy 2-ponytails method also gives me a lot of layers. I can live with that for a free haircut. The mop is still too long, though, so a follow up chop of another few inches to bring up the length would be good. Maybe that’ll reduce the layers, too? Much as I hate to ask, I might need a hand with that chunk.

All the dogs I wanted from the seniors-only shelter have been adopted, except the hospice dog. I’d gladly take him if our dog fund were refilled and we had a few more things settled. I’m making real progress on the “few things settling” at work, I’m seeing measurable change already thankfully, so that part may come up sooner than I had hoped but let me not count chickens before they’re hatched. Or cucumbers before they’re full grown. 😒

Year 6, Day 114: I’m reading three books at the same time and it’s jumbled my brain a bit: Seanan McGuire’s Toby Daye series, Kwame Mbalia’s Tristan Strong Destroys the World, and T Kingfisher’s Hemlock and Silver. They’re all good!

A white woman at our local library was gatekeeping the raffle entries for the library summer reading program. She rejected our kids’ multiple reading logs saying they were only allowed to have one raffle entry per kid at all. PiC told me this later, completely puzzled, and I insisted that was complete bullshit. That’s the opposite of the point of the summer reading program!

Today, he asked two dudes working the desk and they were appalled, “What kind of library do you think we are?? Of course you don’t only get one entry! You get as many entrees as they read and fill out logs for!” They sent him home with a stack of entries which he gave to me to fill out because I love forms. I wonder who that woman was and WTF her problem was.

Year 6, Day 115: These 🤬🤬 tariffs. So many small businesses are going to be impacted. The loss of the de minimis tax exemption is summarized here. I might have to cancel my Patreon subscription to Pikaole as he ships from Korea and if it’s an additional $80 every quarter for a package of stickers, that really doesn’t work in our budget. Ugh.

This really sucks. The neighbor’s car was stolen in the dusk right in front of their home. Ugh. It was recovered pretty quickly, thankfully, but I really hate that it happened at all.

I put “Cancel Citi card” on my calendar a month before I really needed to cancel it and it’s a good thing because that can was kicked down the road about 12 times. Not today, though!! The call was made, the card was cancelled. Much rejoicing commenced, no more annual fee for meeee (for a card I don’t need anyway).

Year 6, Day 116: I tried replacing oil and water butter and milk instead of with a box cake mix. Maybe I’ve just lifestyle-inflationed myself out of the box mix life because despite assurances that people can’t tell the difference between the fancied up box mix and a from scratch cake, this one didn’t taste much better.

Whew Friday. I had my massage today and she really dug into all those muscles that I can’t stretch properly or that tighten up so hard during pain bouts that they can’t let go again. It’s therapeutic but I’m wiped out for the rest of the day. One of these days I’ll have a massage when I’m off work.

August 11, 2025

Living in the time of pandemic: COVID-19 (271)

Year 4 of COVID in the Bay Area

Year 6, Day 105: Our town isn’t super walkable but with my ME/CFS, it’s debatable how much I could really walk about running errands anyway. I miss that time in my life when I could, unless I was having a flare-up, walk out the door and to the nearby store to pick up whatever I needed. I do appreciate that most of our routine things are close by. The dentist is 5 minutes away. The doctors are 10-15 minutes away depending on traffic. Groceries are between 5-15 minutes away. That really keeps down the traffic overhead. I was reminded of this when I had to trek as far as 15! whole! miles! away! to run an errand. This is kind of hilarious given my past life in the LA area, or close enough, which meant everything was always 15-75 miles away. My radius has changed dramatically and I like that.

Year 6, Day 106: Prepping for the start of school, I’ve been deleting alarms I don’t need anymore. I have weird summer alarms: Find Seanan at 3:30. Get ready at 4:35. Call T and S at 2:50 pm. Sunblock at 12:50 pm. Ella at 12:55 pm. I’ll be reactivating all the boring routines: get up. Therapy. Lunch. Finish what you’re doing, which is the extra reminder before the alarm for school pickup.

I’ve also been having some weird dreams lately. The one I remember is being in line to be fed to a woodchipper but I was a Lego person so it was just sort of funny/ok? So strange. Most other nights I am not having particularly memorable nightmares, instead I’m waking up sometime in the night soaked in sweat. It’s incredibly gross and annoying.

Year 6, Day 107: I had my second dental cleaning for the year with a new hygienist and they were excessively rigorous. My gums are twanging still. I picked up a tube of overpriced Fluoridex to try and support my enamel that’s thinning. The consequences of enamel thinning sounds terrible and like something I would want to hold off as long as possible. I love going to the dentist generally but I have a certain amount of anxiety about my dental health. The irony of some of the bone or gum weirdness is that they said it can be caused by orthodontics. So that’s great. I do one really expensive thing to help my dental health and it causes a whole other long term problem? Rude.

We’re trying organic mango vinaigrette from Trader Joe’s this week. Normally mango anything, sign me up! But this is maybe not the light zingy dressing that I was looking for to wake up a salad. It’s more like an almost pudding that got drizzled on the greens. Tasty, but not sure if we’ll do it again. I want a lemony vinaigrette.

Year 6, Day 108: Good news, y’all, my workaholism is likely cured. I worried it was coming back this year with all the added stressors making me feel like I had to work around the clock. Many days I did work from 7 am to 1 am, with some short breaks in between to do pick up and drop off and eat. Bad habits, definitely. But the -aholism part? Probably not. I woke up every weekday this week (after having had time off) mentally whining like a child: I don’t WANT to get up. I don’t WANT to go to work. I kept it to myself, as I am an adult on the outside, but it’s mildly reassuring that I’m not getting addicted to the work grind again. And this isn’t even the hardest part of the year. There’s nothing specific I’m dreading, I just have a terrible case of the Don’t Wannas.

The bad news, this is really bad timing. A couple years back I figured I was at the peak of my career. I was a little bit wrong only because things happened out of my control that led to my unwanted and unlooked-for elevation. This year I’ll be at my peak and it’s a peak I do not like. But even though I’m emotionally ready to swandive off the career path, we don’t even have enough invested for me to quit in normal times. In these terrible and fascist times? We have to be fighting back and helping the communities being harmed. For that, we need money. It’s not a good time to practice being retired on a shoestring. So here we are.

Year 6, Day 109: The dead mom dreams are back in force. These are the ones where I relive losing her over and over except in completely strange and false scenarios. None of these are how she died but the theme is always I wasn’t there for her. In one of them, her unhinged younger sister was the one to call and tell me, harassingly which is definitely her MO, and it was just all very strange. What is up with my subconscious this week? Might have to start taking those anti-nightmare meds again. I didn’t like the way they tanked my blood pressure (which is historically low) so only take them when things get bad.

On the cooking front this week, we did shockingly well, for us. I cooked pork chops (served with Costco scalloped potatos and a salad) on Tuesday, and Thursday we defrosted a thit kho (served with rice and steamed broccoli) I froze several weeks. We filled in the gaps with leftovers on the between nights. That’s the last of the made ahead foods so now I need to go recipe browsing again to see what foods strike my fancy that is relatively simple and freezes well to make batches of. I’ve been gearing up to make banh khot for ages but that’s a labor and time intensive recipe that’s best fresh, it probably wouldn’t freeze well.

I’d love to hear your favorite comfort food suggestions of anything that would freeze well! Someone mentioned shepherd’s pie, that’s going on the list.

August 4, 2025

Living in the time of pandemic: COVID-19 (270)

Year 4 of COVID in the Bay Area

Year 6, Day 98: For the past two weeks, the weather has been perfectly nice and I have sweated buckets, like I’m powered by an internal nuclear reactor. Nothing else is particularly wrong, so I have no clue what this is about. Meanwhile the most heat sensitive folks, PiC and JB, have been practically frolicking in the mild temps. Bodies continue to be Weird. Well, mine, anyway. Perimenopause?

Also my left shoulder tendon (or ligament, or muscle, I don’t know how one isolates which thing is twanging) has been stressed for three days which is not ideal.

First aid kit debate: hard case or soft zipper pouch? I saw a prepacked first aid kit in a hard case and it triggered my container avarice. Our freebie from Target or Walgreens ages ago is a fabric rectangle zip pouch (has the depth of the hard case but flexibility of fabric) but the inside is shedding plasticky bits everywhere now. I thought maybe a pencil case? But it’s not quite the thing.

Year 6, Day 99: I just realized that the tubing assigned to the sugar snap peas had pulled loose and the plant hasn’t been getting water! No wonder half of it’s suddenly dying 😭 I have to buy more tubing anchors but for the moment, my first task was to (finally) get the netting up on the 6 foot tall stakes. I did (to no one’s surprise) zero research on training the plants to grow on a trellis before now so the plants mostly leaned on a stake or two if they were at the right angle. This was my avoiding setting up a proper trellis but if I can get the plants to grow up the netting and stakes, I can continue avoiding a real trellis for another year!

Year 6, Day 100: Electronics hygiene! I had no idea how much keeping my electronics plugged in, while I’m working, impacted battery life but my one laptop went from 3-4 hours of battery life off charger to 60-90 minutes. It’s older, but not THAT old. There is a good reason for that habit – we kept having power outages so it was always a gamble if I let the battery run down naturally before charging back up. Now that I have a second laptop and the Yeti, I can change my habits. I’ve been super mindful to only charge the backup laptop as needed and my phone only gets charged to 80% most of the time. Their batteries are still in really decent shape, they still work even when run down to as little as 10%. Both the Pixel 6 and laptop only die at 3%, which is a vast improvement over the Pixel 2 that would turn off at 33%.

Year 6, Day 101: When someone who should have some idea of how much free time you have (none. I have negative free time) says something like “just add this half hour (or an hour) activity to your day like I do”, I just want to snap my teeth at them. It’s not like I wasn’t incredibly busy before kids. I was. I also didn’t underestimate how much busier I would be with kids. That’s part of why I didn’t want to have them in my 20s! Added to that, now I’ve got a job that’s tripled in worries and responsibilities with two young kids so no, in fact, it’s not possible for me to “just add an hour” to do a thing I want to do. I promised JB that we would look into a new sport for them this time last year. It’s taken me 12 months to create one gap in my schedule to take them to a new activity. I was interested in it too but homigosh the logistics of making one more thing possible during the school year is simply brainswoggling.

On that note, in two days, I’ve (deeeep breath):

• taken JB on a 2-hour excursion,
• done the laundry,
• collected and organized donation items,
• took out the trash,
• deep cleaned the bathroom vanity,
• directed JB’s room cleaning efforts with very specific targeted tasks (pull all the plushies out of X, canvass the whole house for all pens, pencils, color pencils, markers, crayons and put them in their homes, collect all hygiene related things and put them in their homes, sort through plushies to see which will be moved out),
• then taken JB on a 3-hour errand that’ll net $250 in gift cards in a month,
• coordinated our correspondence (addressed 6 envelopes and stuffed them with goodies, JB’s working on the letters, to family and friends),
• organized Christmas gifts for several niblings,
• set up a cart full of books for another set of niblings,
• hunted down and ordered a new backpack for JB,
• ordered a giant tote bag for our use,
• ordered the garden tubing anchors and set them up when they arrived,
• compulsively checked reporting on work KPIs,
• scrubbed the stove,
• started catching up on my workouts that have been neglected for 3 weeks due to travel (ow, my everything),
• ordered refills of several medications,
• ordered a sink drain cover so I can (briefly) soak and scrub our cast iron range grates,
• unplugged the toilet,
• figured out how to fix our Internet connection (only took 3 hours!),
• took JB to their activity,
• Did our net worth summary,
• Paid all the bills,
• Checked, sorted and recycled the mail.

These were on my 2 days off. PiC took care of dinners because I had no brain left to think about food. Mostly this was what I wanted to get done, so I’m not feeling particularly put out, but I did want to do a few more things that were just for me: baking biscuits or bread, and sewing a simple project. Maybe tomorrow.

Year 6, Day 102: Ah ha! My pencil case idea to replace the first aid kit was a bust, the one I picked was too small. I considered using one of our Costco turkey plastic containers but I’ve already doled them all out: 4 for JB’s art supplies, 2 for Smol Acrobat’s stickers and markers, 1 for my receipts and 2 for masks. I considered buying 4 extra large replacement pencil cases for JB and trade for the turkey containers, then realized it’d be cheaper to just buy myself one extra large pencil case. Duh. But no, that didn’t feel right. PiC suggested a tackle box. No, that didn’t feel right either. Too big, I want this to be small enough to fit in our current cabinets, a tackle box requires too much shelf space. Then I remembered! I bought PiC a washi tape container with removable slats several years ago, I’d bought some for my jewelry, and he’s never used it! It’s still in the garage! I ran to get it and transferred everything over and it all fit! 🎉 Money already spent years ago now being put to good use. I feel so accomplished. Go figure it’s something like this that makes me feel good and not the mile long list of things I’ve gotten done this week.