April 7, 2025

Living in the time of pandemic: COVID-19 (253)

Year 4 of COVID in the Bay Area.

Year 5, Day 344: I’m having an irrational thing. I set a high retirement contribution rate last year to max it out in the time I had to contribute. Having already tightened the belt to adjust to our much lower cashflow, it made sense to keep that contribution rate this year in case I had to quit in a huff if everything fell apart. (I’m still on the fence about that. Things are supposed to get better but “better” is relative!) I’m suddenly very impatient and want it done. Even though it would cut my take home pay to very little cash, I want to increase my contributions to max it out right now. Why? I don’t know! I am pure impatience.

Ten hours later: Ohhh this is my version of cutting my hair to pretend I have control when I have no control! I am waiting on several important financial things and I can’t do anything about the punkasses who are dragging their feet. That’s why the overwhelming urge to do anything.

Year 5, Day 345: JB has to start a medicated eye drop regimen that runs $100 for a 3 week supply. *faint*

We just had our eye exams and their rate that their myopia is developing is concerning. They’re not willing to do the overnight contact lens therapy, I’m not willing to fight with them over this yet, so we’re starting out with the eyedrops first. If they can get accustomed to that without having a total meltdown every night, maybe we’ll work our way up to the contacts. Maybe. I feel bad for them. They got my aversion to letting anything ever come near the eyeballs but they did not get my good vision.  Their eyesight is worse than mine is right now. This is worrisome.

My eyesight is a touch worse than last year so I need to replace both my computer glasses and the distance glasses I completely forgot to start using when they were prescribed … uh 18 months ago?  I’d prefer to use my own frames which means bringing them to the eye doc and hoping they don’t screw it up. I’ll get a cheap pair from Zenni first to hold me over during that lens replacement time. My computer glasses allowance is only $90 for frames. That is silly low and I don’t want to pay another $250 out of pocket for new frames that won’t fit well with my office headset if at all possible.

Year 5, Day 346: I’m negotiating for a raise right now and the ghost of anxiety is fluttering in the background. Surprisingly, it’s just a friendly little ghost. Even though the negotiations are with an entirely new person I don’t know or have trust built with, which brings all the baggage of their social expectations of women to just take what they’re given if anything, my past 20 years of negotiating raises for myself and for my team and teaching my friends to just go for it has blunted those nerves. Here’s hoping I get an answer (and that it’s yes) this week so I can map out the rest of our budget year.

My tax person has been uncharacteristically slow this year. I KIND of assumed that the WTFness of the world played into that but she didn’t say. Still, she managed to submit our return this week and to my relief given the wanton destruction in DC, the returns appear to be somewhat automated in some way because the money hit our bank today. This covers our CA state tax bill.

Year 5, Day 348: We went on a little adventure. My biggest goal was for us adults to not have to think about what to feed people for at least a whole day.

I have learned some more things about myself on this trip and all of them are: Digital disconnect makes me itch. I prefer to remain in civilization with all the trappings thereof. I hate not having the option of GPS, I hate not being able to download another book from the library when the painsomnia is up. I hate the blanket of cold that comes from having only canvas between me and the rest of the world instead of walls.

My friends and PiC have all gently pushed the idea of camping for years. One of them accidentally made it sound kind of fun but my very gentle brush with the wilderness this week, though I love nature, reminded me that even if my curiosity is piqued, I’m no longer built for such things. This very thin veneer of camping was enough to remind me how I like my creature comforts.

We did have fun! It was dusty and dirty and muddy with one of those single “stall” showers with the showerhead that makes me think of MASH (probably only because I have never been to a real campsite) and I didn’t mind all that, it’s roughly like the barn life I grew up with. But I’m in pain and discomfort daily, who needs to add “roughing it” to the list of challenges? Even with the softest beds, my body was all NOPE til 4 am this morning.

Year 5, Day 348: I forgot to update my spreadsheets for the monthly Net Worth update so I had to do it today. WOW.  The last time I checked VTSAX, it was trending down a bit but nothing alarming. Today? That was a significant drop from Monday to Friday.  It’s not personally alarming because we’re currently very fortunate on multiple axes (and are hyperaware that could change at any time): we’re still accumulating assets – this drop means we’re investing in the same assets at lower prices. We also have W2 income and don’t depend on that money to pay the bills.

Of course you know that I think the bigger picture remains extremely alarming. The executive branch of the government is disappearing people, admitting it, and saying we don’t have to offer due process to SOME people. I would hope that people would realize that if some of us don’t have due process, none of us have due process. The government just has to disappear you and make vague claims that you were suspected of terrorism or some such noise, and refuse to tell anyone where you are. If they can do this to legal residents, and they are doing it and admitting it in open court, then they can do this to citizens just as easily.

I keep wondering if our country and democracy are going to survive this period. It feels absolutely surreal to see people in the PF community taking this administration in stride as if we aren’t in constitutional crisis and as if this new regime isn’t going to do lasting damage. It’s as surreal as still having to go about our everyday lives, raising the kids, making dinner, and dealing with work (both the important stuff and the minutiae). What’s the phrase, fiddling while Rome burns?

March 31, 2025

Living in the time of pandemic: COVID-19 (252)

Year 4 of COVID in the Bay Area.

Year 5, Day 337: I chopped off another 3-4 inches of hair. It’s been down to my waist for over a year and now it’s only halfway down my back. It’s very nearly at a length that I don’t find inconvenient for washing and drying! Naturally, after the second chop, I dreamed about waking to hair going down to my knees. Clearly this too long hair thing has been haunting my psyche. Or the hair has become representative of the unmanageable nature of life now. That’s also true.

Dinner prep! I usually hate executing other people’s ideas but today PiC suggested soba noodles with tofu and tempura shrimp (Costco, frozen) and I had no brain left to come up with my own idea so I threw that together. That was easy. I also boiled the dry udon noodles from the local Korean market to try. They’re not as thick as I’d like but they were a decent noodle. I’d really like the thick Vietnamese rice noodles but I can’t find them anywhere. Granted, I hadn’t looked that hard yet.

It was a really nice day, warm and sunny, and I tried to bask in it as much as I could in the short school run. Trying to soak it all in to store up the energy for the rest of the week.

Year 5, Day 338: So many meetings, so much energy depleted 😭 2 of them were worthwhile, the third definitely was not.

Of the worthwhile chats, I got some traction in my to do list. Not everything I wanted for my team but a start and a commitment to more later in the year. Don’t love it but I can work with that.

I’m behind the 8-ball on my workouts, this is a heavier workout week but I’m a sloth. A slug. The crumpled tissue shoved in a back pocket. I’m so tired! I’m still forcing myself to do exercises every day but they don’t feel anything like good right now.

Year 5, Day 339: We were promised two nice days this week and that’s exactly what we got: no more, no less. I’m grateful. Usually we hear predictions of good weather, or hot weather, I get excited about it, and we are cheated with some low 70s temps. That’s not basking weather at all. But we had a couple nice hot days and our towels and dishes dried really quickly and then it’s back to the gloom and fog before we could get tired of living in the tropics.

We’re living in a kleptocracy now, aren’t we? Thank goodness increasing my depression meds helped because this is such a terrible timeline. I thought the weight of the world was heavy a few years back, this is so much worse. But thanks to the meds, I’m not carrying all the misery in my bones anymore.

Year 5, Day 340: It’s a sad thing when I run out of brain power before I run out of laptop battery power. I’ve been taking advantage of the relatively light meetings schedule this part of the week to cut down my work backlogs and while I made serious inroads in the many many emails piled up, my brain felt like it was withering under all the processing.

I had to cut short one of my powering through work sessions and just watch the kids for a while.

Dinner was unexpectedly fun. We broke out the four year old musubi and onigiri molds, we’ve never actually used them, and made quick spam musubi (no sauce because that would take way too long) and spam onigiri. Spam with a slice of Japanese ginger is excellent. They also made a curry onigiri. We should try it with the sushi rice next time to see if it works better but these were fine with our usual leftover jasmine rice.

Year 5, Day 341: I encountered a crow friend on my walk today, and left it some treats. It hopped over to pick them up pretty quickly after I walked away.

The first poppy bloomed today! The plants have been mostly greenery so this was a happy surprise.

It finally occurred to me to chop off a couple of the 18 inch tall onion-like growths off the garlic plants. We used them to top our tofu.

Also last week me was a genius: I asked PiC to pick up hot dogs from Costco and we had chili dogs for dinner tonight.

It hasn’t been an easy week, nor was it quiet, but I finally finally managed to end the week with a comfortable amount of work done so that Monday won’t be automatically horrible starting with today’s leftover work. We’re going to take a couple days off next week to force some R&R, I’m not going to cook or worry about how to feed people for those days.

Catching up after next week’s fun will be rough, so I really needed to end this week on a decent note before going off.

March 24, 2025

Living in the time of pandemic: COVID-19 (251)

Year 4 of COVID in the Bay Area.

Year 5, Day 330: This is going to be an incredibly hard week emotionally. A big change is going into effect and at the same time, I have a complicated management situation that requires more handholding each week than any one of my regulars need in a year. There are compelling reasons for this. I do hope we get through it intact on the other side. I won’t regret doing the right thing even if things don’t work out, but MAN do I hope they work out. I also need to make sure that I pull back enough that I don’t drain myself dry trying to be there for them. There’s also a reorg in the works as well and the changes from that reorg will give us an opportunity to fix longstanding problems and are going to be really sad. I’ve cried sad stress tears between meetings for the past week. At least I’m letting it out.

I think the universe took pity on me because we knew these things were landing this week. I haven’t seen neighborhood dogs for three weeks. This morning, PiC spotted one of them and hailed me before I missed her. Then the beautiful black lab we might see once a week showed up! He was as happy to see me as I was to see him, he took a running leap and tackled me. He’s never done that before and got extra hugs and love for it even as I apologized for encouraging bad manners. We had our other neighbor scheduled to pop by to pick up a treat I had for her, and when I came out to deliver that, my third dog friend showed up! We had a quick game of catch. What a treat for me. The spirit uplift from the trio held me up all day, despite all the Monday frustrations.

Year 5, Day 331: A second game of catch with dog friend, and two giant pitties needed petting. Again, I appreciate the confluence of whatever that’s taking pity on me and my nerves. Dog time is the best therapy. It’s keeping my blood pressure much steadier than it would otherwise be after a day of meetings without any time to get real work done, and then having to get that work done. And then having my wifi cut out on me.

Know something funny though? My “genius” solution to my inability to remember to stop reps during workouts was to count backwards. I did that. It revealed that I can’t count backwards. 20, 19, 18, 16, 15, oh wait 17, 14?

Then I went back to counting normally except my brain was still all turned around so I caught myself counting like Smol Acrobat a few months back: twenty-eight, twenty-nine, twenty-ten, twenty…wait.

I remember how bad I was at math beyond algebra in high school and wonder how much of it was my brain failing to stay on the rails long enough to follow the logic.

Year 5, Day 332: I knew it’d be too much to hope for a third day of dog petting but I hoped anyway. We had a power outage instead. Thankfully it didn’t last too long.

It was a molasses brain kind of day. Everything was slow and sloggy. I could never find my flow state so every single file I reviewed felt like a heavy lift. Every email felt impossible to resolve, even the easy ones, and after 3 hours of processing one stack of work there was still more than half left. That was demoralizing even though it was really because I had twice as much work as usual. I took my computer to bed after dinner vaguely thinking maybe I’d get a thing or two done, I tend to work whenever I’m on the computer even if work wasn’t on the agenda, but this was not that kind of night. Thankfully my only specific goal was to write a handful of words and anything else was bonus.

Whether this is because of emotion overload finally maxing out my brain or because Smol Acrobat’s virus is waging war on me, it’s just not a getting things done kind of day or night.

Year 5, Day 333: Oh. Of course my brain was slow yesterday, I was slowly coming down with a bug. Today was extra rough, not quite brain fog but halfway there, with extra aches and dizziness and greying out episodes. Better than the first time this happened though, didn’t have a near miss again. I just felt bad.

PiC took over my afterschool run, Smol Acrobat and I were two sickies in bed this afternoon.

I read up on IRS Revenue Ruling 2023-2 that changes the way assets are treated if they’re in an irrevocable trust. Our trust is revocable until one of us dies but more importantly at least until 2026, this won’t impact us because we aren’t anywhere near the federal estate tax threshold ($13.61 million). In 2026, it’ll come down to $5M. Maybe we’ll aim for the stars and that threshold, but I have my doubts that we’d be able to grow our assets enough to hit that amount in the next two years barring any big unanticipated changes. My read on the horizon is that all big unanticipated changes are going to be negative for our net worth, not positive.

Year 5, Day 334: This is the hardest day of the week so I’m trying to also remember the good things right now.

The neighbors have custody of a new wee tiny puppy for a week and I got to introduce said puppy to playing with a Chuck it! He was ecstatic.

Q of BraverMountain finished his own personal Iditarod after the race organizers removed him from the official race. So many happy tears for them and Queen Pepe, she who does NOT ride in the dog box because she runs!

I planted four more garlic cloves in the garden last week and three of them are putting down roots. The blueberry bush is starting to put out leaves and already has three beautiful little pink blossoms with more blossom looking buds on a lot of branches. The blackberry bush is starting to show some signs of life, too.

This one isn’t good, just news: I’m keeping an eye on the Mt. Spurr news out of Alaska, we’ve got friends there.