June 9, 2025

Living in the time of pandemic: COVID-19 (262)

Year 4 of COVID in the Bay Area.

Year 6, Day 42: I’ve got an executive level meeting invite for a 3 hour meeting this month that requires 14-16 hours of travel. That doesn’t make any sense to me. I’m not a key contributor at this level. I’m very much inclined to skip it since the timing is absolutely terrible for our family. It’s during the one week that I have JB signed up for a camp that requires me to drop off and pick up, it’s right before an exceptionally busy week, it’s right after we onboard another new hire. We cannot have me gallivanting all over the place when my team and my family both need me to be fully present.

In personal news, the whole ICE situation is overwhelming and frustrating. Details have been sparse and unclear. I’m getting information second- and third-hand and can’t be sure that all the information is accurate. Right now it seems like ICE is hopscotching him from state to state without any notifications to the family or letting him call home. I suspect this is intentional to stay ahead of any court orders that his lawyer might be able to file. His lawyer doesn’t seem to be moving fast enough to catch up. I’m not judging the lawyer, I have no idea what’s needed to get motions filed.

I had really hoped that I could at least leave the legal stuff (filings and advice) to the lawyer. The underage child keeps texting me asking for advice that should be directed to the lawyer, IMO. I’ve been pretty clear that I am learning as we go as well and that my only expertise here is in communications. But that only works if I can get information and a lot of the time I’m working with a quarter deck.

Year 6, Day 43: ICE situation: It’s been like pulling teeth to get any of the adults in the family to respond to me or to take actions the past few days. And when they do take actions, they often don’t update me so I have no clue where we are on anything. They were originally responsive but have defaulted to directing everyone to me even when that’s not practical.

I composed termination notices to their scammy lawyers for them to send but they didn’t send it because “we thought you were going to”. Well, no, I cannot cancel contracts on your behalf. So then they finally follow directions to contact the scammy lawyers and panic when the scammy lawyers call them back. “No I won’t talk to you, you go call Revanche.” But I’m not available …. ! We set them up with the press, I got a local reporter interested in doing an exclusive with the family, but they needed to decide who would talk to him. We got them in contact with our Senators’ offices caseworkers, they needed to sign releases to let those staffers get to work.

I’m not family, so I have no standing to be making unilateral decisions for them. Even though I was orchestrating everything for them, I need information and input from them before I can make an informed decision. But I have to ask questions multiple times and the only person responding to me is friend’s underage child. And when they do reply, it’s incomplete or lacks comprehension. I see that they are leaning on me to do what their remaining parent isn’t: making decisions, making judgement calls, figuring out how to bring their missing parent back. I’m not angry or resentful. I’m just recognizing what an impossible position I’m in. I offered them my time and energy in fighting this terrible situation but I always want to be respectful of their autonomy and their right to make the necessary decisions. Unfortunately, and I do understand – there’s a language barrier and likely a legitimate fear of ICE coming after them too, it feels like they’re hoping that I will do everything on their behalf. It’s just that I can’t.

Year 6, Day 44: ICE situation: It looks like we’ve lost this fight. He’s no longer in the ICE database and the family is telling me that he’s now in his home country where he is not safe. I don’t know what else we can do. Once they’ve gotten him out of the USA, they can bar him from reentry for years. I am honestly at a loss. And his kid is distraught, of course. He was their primary breadwinner so this is devastating for him and them both. I knew we faced some really long odds but, still, the final reality is like a cold lump in my stomach. It’s even more disheartening that this is the reality for so many people, regardless of their actual status. The legal retainers have cost them at least $4000, unless they were able to get some of the scammy lawyer’s retainer back, and that was a tough stretch. Even more so now that it looks like he won’t be able to resume working here.

Talking about this with my friends who are also children of immigrants, we feel such shame and indignity and fury at the attitudes that have led us here, particularly from other immigrants. We can just about understand white supremacists, but refugees / immigrants supporting this BS? After they benefited from whatever policies allowed them to come here? Slamming the door in the faces of people who have the same needs that they once faced? That’s hypocrisy and selfishness to the highest degree. It’s shameful. And maybe it’s not guilt precisely that I feel when I reflect on my/our failing to save him from deportation over an administrative error that could have easily been corrected if he had a little more access to his rights and to bilingual assistance; maybe this is survivor’s guilt that it could have been us and it was him and his family. I hate this so much. We’re gathering money to assist the family through this rough patch while they try to navigate their new reality.

There’s going to be a whole lot of hypernormalization going on as we have to keep living our lives knowing this is happening to many families. I’ll be donating money to the local community organization that did help, and looking into sharing the ICE related materials from the Rapid Response network.

Year 6, Day 45: We’ve been cramming our necessities into two 2009-era carry-on suitcases. Carry on size-limits have changed since, I’m sure. I looked up the capacity of carry on bags and it’s somewhere between 37-47L. We’ve needed more and/or larger luggage for years as the kids got older but I handwaved it because dropping diapers would open up space. It’s true we don’t have to pack diapers anymore but nevertheless both suitcases are stuffed to the brim when we have to travel for more than 3 days. If we pick up odds and ends while traveling, even expanded it’s not possible to fit everything into the cases anymore.

We have to visit family later this summer and I finally remembered the suitcase situation in time. Macy’s had a sale on my preferred brand, Victorinox with the lifetime guarantee including wear and tear, so I ordered a large suitcase and an attachable tote. The current cases are maybe 50L? capacity. The large case is twice the capacity at about 102L and the tote gives us another 47L. This should finally be enough space to keep everything in the suitcases instead of needing 16 extra tote bags hanging off our arms and suitcase handles. Fingers crossed that packing inflation doesn’t happen. Though I sort of want to start occasionally carrying our own towels because it turns out that I’m fussy about the smell of other people’s towels.

Year 6, Day 46: The rate at which these kids are plowing through my first aid kit’s bandaids this week is much higher than usual. JB with the giant bandage needs, SmolAc with the many small bandage needs. They’re both a LOT more accident prone than usual this week.

I’m mildly annoyed that I keep getting these emails: “Great news! You are pre-qualified for a generator or battery rebate. Prepare for outages, including Public Safety Power Shutoffs (PSPS), with a $300* rebate on the purchase of a qualified generator or battery.”

But we are never eligible! They have our address, they should be able to easily tell if we are truly qualified, and yet they keep wasting my time telling me we’re pre-qualified for a thing we aren’t eligible for. And like a rube, I always go check. Of course, I would love to be eligible for a rebate on something I already want to buy for our disaster prep, but I’m just as glad not to be in a high enough threat area as required to be eligible.

We’re hosting a longtime friend this weekend and we’re all going to be so glad to see them. They are wonderful with the kids and so the kids will hog them as much as humanly possible. It’ll be a miracle if we get any actual adult time to hang out and catch up so we’re just going to plan to feed them well and thank them for being awesome. It’s been one hell of a week.

June 2, 2025

Living in the time of pandemic: COVID-19 (261)

Year 4 of COVID in the Bay Area.

Year 6, Day 35: How many times did I have to remind myself that it was Monday? So many. On the one hand, holiday. On the other hand, much needed day to deal with this truckload of absolute WTFery that landed at my doorstep Sunday. Someone we met several years ago was snatched by ICE and the family’s been at their wit’s end not knowing what to do. They’ve tried retaining lawyers and the first one just gave up and the second one was scammy and useless. I’ve known of the family but they’ve not had any occasion to be familiar with us before yesterday when I heard the news and immediately asked more knowledgeable people for a bit of advice. It’s been a whirlwind of work since: talking to various family members trying to reach a bilingual adult who could answer questions and give me enough information to reach out for help.

Yesterday’s focus was on getting in touch with elected officials’ staffers and getting sufficient information from the family to work with. I was up til midnight on calls and collating information from those calls.

Today’s focus was running down every possible lead for a new lawyer, looking for community org support in dumping the scammy lawyer, and scanning in their paperwork so they have electronic copies. I’ve worked out an agreement with the family that I’d write all the emails, they will do the follow-up phone calls.

We’ve sent out dozens of requests for legal assistance in hopes that one of these sources might have capacity to help.

I feel like a jerk for struggling to feel hope. There are just too many bad things happening in this area right now for me to feel like any of these efforts will pay off. We have to try but knowing that a raft of CA immigration judges were fired as recently as last month and knowing from our House rep’s staffer that ICE frequently deports instead of responding to information requests from Members of Congress, it’s hard to feel like any of these will pan out.

Year 6, Day 36: I spent half the day corresponding with MoC staffers and fielding the email replies from the people we contacted. One person was actually helpful.

We’re combing the area for lawyers, the ones that the local Rapid Response team recommended aren’t answering their phones or if they do answer, they’re too busy to help. The local immigration activist org helped a little. They looked at documents and gave us some basic assessment advice but they’re too overloaded to help. One of the three local attorneys recommended by the Rapid Response team had someone answering phones, everyone else’s numbers just went to voicemail, and I did an intake with them for the family. Then we got a response from a highly recommended firm, that one seemed very promising and we set up an appointment for tomorrow. The local attorney finally got back to us – they’re too busy to take the case. Figures. It’s a hellscape. We’re all on tenterhooks.

Year 6, Day 37: Our neighbor is currently obsessed with the Cascadia Subduction Zone. She’s not concerned for herself, she’s worried for her next two generations. I’ve known and worried about this myself but to the point of buying earthquake insurance, not to the point where she is now: she’s pushing her adult children to sell their homes and move somewhere out of the subduction zone. Hawaii will sink! Alaska will too! We need to MOVE before it happens!

I get it. The worst case scenario is really bad. But we have no idea when this might hit and the impossibility of getting a timeline makes that uprooting feel almost unreasonable. They have jobs, multiple kids thriving in different schools, all involved in their various activities. They’d have to start all over if they were to pick up and leave. I’m not arguing with her, I just see that it’s really hard to justify that level of change in the face of a possible terrible natural disaster someday. I don’t doubt that it’s likely coming, we just have no idea when it’s happening.

I got curious and I found a recent study – it must be the press from this that has her in a lather, she hit all the highlights of this study when describing the potential of the disaster.

Year 6, Day 38: We got to the point of having a real lawyer to retain and the ICE pulled a fast one. He was moved in the middle of the night without warning, and without telling notification to his kin where he’s being sent. None of the ICE detention center or field office phone numbers are in service. The locator site is vague and has no information. I’ve been at a loss for what else to do. I keep wishing I’d known about this last week thinking, look at what we’ve been able to muster in 4 days, two of which were weekend/holidays. If we had known when he’d been detained, we could have done more, faster. We were so close.

Eventually it occurred to me that this timing was suspicious. He had an appointment at the detention center with a scammy lawyer that was just there to bilk the family on Friday. We scrambled to get a legit lawyer in place before Friday so they could see him instead. What if they always would have done this? What if it only took this long for them to deport because they knew he didn’t have competent legal counsel in place, they only shipped him out now because his legal representation was supposed to show up. My reddit savvy friend said that’s very likely, they’re seeing this trend reported. And we know their flagrant disregard for due process. People who are legitimately following all the rules and showing up to immigration court are being grabbed from the courts even if they’ve had successful hearings. There is a complete disregard for anyone’s rights.

Now we’re pressing the Congressional staffers to help us find out what happened to him. Where is he??

Year 6, Day 39: I had such a good week and a half without scheduled meetings so of course they all hit all at once. Everyone needed me for a call for big and small reasons and I was scrambling from one call to the next. I didn’t manage to escape the vortex for several hours. Woof.

On the bright side, I have been going through old pictures, tagging a specific set, and remembering some good dog memories. It hurts but it’s also joy. I miss these dogs so much. They were such an integral part of the family. It feels like we have multiple dog shaped holes in our lives everywhere we go.

Frustratingly corporate is still holding up my raise. It’s taking so long I’m starting to think I should just go job-hunting to show that my salary is indeed deeply below market and I have other options. Exceeepptt it’s possible the current economy is such that I don’t have other good options. There were some earlier in the year but now? After all the federal cuts? After all the federal grants pulled across a whole lot of Bay Area specific industries? Our friends here last weekend told us they’ve got friends who have now been out of work for a year and counting, and corporate cuts are continuing to impact their circles. The Microsoft layoff was a huge one – 6000 people. Hawaii Planner has been going through the wringer, interviewing. Maybe being patient and exasperated continues to be the better bet.

I find it offensive that articles refer to these layoffs as “trims fat” btw. What the hell is wrong with y’all? Cutting people because you let crappy AI take over their jobs isn’t trimming fat. Also I’m so sick of the AI race. It’s brought nothing but garbage, fraud, more fraud, and more work for my company with zero gain. The corporation has handed down an edict that we use their crap AI tool because that’s supposed to benefit the company by 15% but it’s certified crap – it never gives the right information and it never identifies the sources of the bad information. So if you’re credulous enough to ask it for factual information and don’t fact check, you get the wrong answer every single time. The only thing worse than my sense of direction!

Sigh. Lots of ups and downs this week but mostly downs. I would really appreciate a shift in the winds.

EDIT TO ADD: I tried to answer N&M’s comment but the WordPress app is acting up. I would have to set up the GFM for fundraising and I don’t have time or bandwidth to manage that right now so if anyone would like to help out, we can use my Lakota links with the note “For Jose” for now:

Venmao: @RK-Tillman
PayPal: ruthtillman@gmail.com
Cashapp: $ruthkt

May 26, 2025

Living in the time of pandemic: COVID-19 (260)

Year 4 of COVID in the Bay Area.

Year 6, Day 28: Last week sucked, and then the weekend was completely draining too but for different reasons. I accidentally set off a PEM crash with my workout Friday night so I woke up in pain and feeling really sick on Saturday. We had plans on Saturday! hate so muchWe weArgh. re taking a couple friends out to an outdoor event for their birthday and there was a chance of petting livestock. I really didn’t want to miss it but it wouldn’t have been responsible of me to go if I was as sick virally as I felt. Thankfully, by noon I could tell that this was all pain-generated ick. Safe to go! Of course while that adventure was fun, it was also a bit of a lot. I was as wrung out by the end of Saturday as at the start. To make matters worse, SmolAc was sick and was complaining of leg pain that was so bad that half their body would tense up like a stiff board when the pain hit. Every 3-5 minutes. I massaged their legs every few minutes until 4 am so they could sleep. Naturally they woke up fresh as a daisy and I was wrecked.

Year 6, Day 29: We were meant to see a heat wave this week in Northern California. Our little pocket rarely gets the full predicted temps so at best I’m hoping to get a 10 degree bump for a couple days. When we get as many as 2 warm days, it’s enough to get some seeds to germinate or seedlings to grow a tiny bit more. So far the few warm days we’ve had have coaxed the green beans and a couple cucumber seedlings out at a time. I planted another round of green bean seeds with the potatoes and hope more sugar snap peas might make an appearance later in the summer. They did last year and what a fun yield we had for 3-4 weeks before powdery mildew shut us down.

In organizational news, I’ve been working on filling in spreadsheets with all clothing purchases for myself and the kids, electronics, and some common consumables so I can track how much I paid (and how long the clothes last and their care instructions when the tags are faded). Not everything will be in there, I’m not trying to make this a huge time sink, but whatever I can easily reference online will go in there. It’s just good to have a quick reference.

Year 6, Day 30: The last of our COVID boosters are scheduled this week for all of us ahead of summer crowds, travel, and infectious waves. It continues to feel very weird to be getting boosters for travel, logging air miles from credit card bonuses, and processing refunds for returns while ALSO staring down an existential crisis with our democratic republic under attack and our human rights being eroded every day.

We’ve left public comment on this issue of the FDA deciding unilaterally to reduce access to COVID vaccines, it’s so infuriating. If people don’t want them that’s on them, it’s despicable to limit it for the rest of us who do want that level of protection.

I got my own booster this week and am mildly annoyed that the vaccination clinic is always so balky about it when we have doctor’s orders in the system. Quite sure that our PCP is the one most qualified to say what we should get between the GP and the injection clinic.

I’m worried we won’t get an updated vaccine approved and recommended in the fall for the newest variants. I’m worried about symptoms I already have becoming much worse if I catch it. The brain fog isn’t the same thick fog these days as much as it used to be, it’s more frequently like cookie cutter chomps out of my brain where words I know simply don’t exist anymore.

Year 6, Day 31: I couldn’t get away from work early enough to make it to a family event at SmolAc’s daycare this afternoon but did stop in time to cook dinner from scratch.

I threw together rigatoni carbonara with pan fried broccoli using Penzey’s roasted garlic and Penzey’s Justice seasoning instead of pepper and pepper flakes, and using my precious hoarded Zingerman’s Nueske Applewood smoked bacon. We had cracked black pepper and more grated Parmesan for topping the pasta at the table. It’s a simple meal but awfully good with the right ingredients. I took extra time cooking the bacon to render a lot of the fat and drained it to give the remaining bacon extra crispy edges. This is a very thick cut Bacon so it doesn’t crisp the same way as thin bacon does but it holds up really well for this recipe. I didn’t pay $22/lb. I stocked up when it was last on sale at $12/lb. That’s still pricy enough that I ration it and in between times it stays hidden in the foil bag it shipped in 😆

Year 6, Day 32: Argh. Everyone’s job (at least around my level) got a lot bigger this year and none of us are coping with it super smoothly. We’re managing, but everyone has a week, or an issue, or a department that we hate so much for making our lives so much harder and some days, it’s harder to be at peace with it than others.

Semi-professional wardrobe woes: I hate the current trend of puff sleeves, had to search hours for less offensively puffy sleeves. I had missed the two-week return window on several pairs of pants from Aritzia. ARGH. Two weeks! It was my fault, I had recorded the return rules but I felt terrible one weekend and then was too tired the next weekend to remember. Thankfully the CSR helped me with an exchange so that I could get a full refund and try a different line. The new line arrived today and nope. High rise pants make me look and feel like an overstuffed sausage. So those go back too which should conclude this round of professional wardrobing roulette. That leaves me with two pairs of jeans plus a belt, two pairs of trousers I’ll have to hem carefully for length, and four blouses. That should do for the next year and change. Please be it.

Not professional: I wear my Svaha skirts every summer but only the two twirl skirts (2020 and 2022) fit now. The midi skirt and 3 fit-and-flare dresses (from 2020 and 2018) are too small for me which stinks, I really liked them. I can’t decide if I should sell, donate or keep them for JB. For now, I wanted two more skirts in the rotation. While I don’t love the waistbands that I could see, I really loved the designs, and they tout giant pockets (a must) so I’ve splurged on a few skirts from Maya Kern‘s latest release to try. I hope they’re great quality and look as nice in person as they seem to be online.