July 7, 2025

Living in the time of pandemic: COVID-19 (266)

Year 4 of COVID in the Bay Area.

Year 6, Day 70: We’re scrambling to get everything financially important done today. I hate when month end, quarter end, and first half of the year all clang together like four sets of cymbals. Yes, like the seasonal time changes, this happens every year but like every year, this one feels like the worst.

I did, however, set a small record for myself in how many records I managed to approve/process within the business day. Self congratulatory pats.

Year 6, Day 71: My Synology photos app went off the rails and it’s taken 3 hours to figure out how to fix it. It kept claiming that there was no network connection. If there’s no network connection, how am I connecting to the Internet with every other app?? It wasn’t Synology itself, I can access that and upload/download files easily. It’s not Photos the program, PiC’s mobile connection using the iOS app was updating just fine. It’s just mine that’s being a jerk. Sigh. I hunted through article after article trying to find the fix but nothing posted in the past four years with similar keywords made sense. I finally tried logging out and logging back in. It’s the logical first troubleshooting step. But it wouldn’t let me log back in. 🤦🏻‍♀️ I had to change the password, reset the whole thing from the desktop app, change the password on the app and finally got access again. But it refused to update any of my pictures taken this week. Ugh.

Year 6, Day 72: I have this beautiful row of cucumber plants about 6-8 inches tall but none of them show any inclination to put out flowers of any kind. The one sugar snap pea plant that managed to grow at all, by contrast, is suddenly popping out flowers today. I count 8 flower clusters, and two of them are already shedding the petals as the wee tiny peas are starting to peek out. Exciting! The green bean plants have remained rather spindly so I was losing hope that they would make any beans but today I spotted the world’s tiniest green bean budding from the top of one of the plants.

I’ve checked the watering system and found a couple nozzles had fallen out of the planters so I’ve reset them so we’re not losing precious water to the ground.

Year 6, Day 73: I normally never order fish at a restaurant, aside from fish and chips. American restaurants generally over season or over-something-it like they’re trying to hide that they’re preparing fish, and all that effort takes away from the fundamental deliciousness of the fish itself. My one exception is made for Italian restaurants. They’ll serve a whole deboned fish that always lets the actual fish shine.

I still have happy memories of picking a whole fish to be roasted and deboned at the table in a small hole in the wall place in Florence two decades ago; I’m not so secretly always hoping to repeat that experience. We rarely eat out these days but I recently had the choice between a filet mignon or a whole branzino and jumped at the branzino. Scrumptious.

Year 6, Day 74: I had to rescue a friend, temporarily, from the airport. Their flight delays made me think they’re even more cursed than Nicole and Maggie! Two flights were delayed several times and finally cancelled and the third was delayed. It must have taken 42 hours end to end. I felt so bad for them. All I could do was bring them a snack and keep them company for a bit when it was safe for them to leave the airport. They apologized for messing up any July 4th plans we might have had but I assured them that this year in particular, there’s nothing to celebrate about Independence Day in America. I wish there were.

June 30, 2025

Living in the time of pandemic: COVID-19 (265)

Year 4 of COVID in the Bay Area.

Year 6, Day 63: There’s one thing I hate about our neighborhood. Behind many houses, there’s an easement. Only some backyards actually have access to it. I don’t know if there’s any intentional planting, but I can tell that the birds have spread seeds from some neighbors’ fruit plants along with whatever was there to begin with. There are all KINDS of plants growing behind the fences and they keep coming through the fence and over the fence and *deep sigh* You know what? I paid a hell of a lot of money for a very low maintenance backyard suited to my health needs. Why do I still have to spend a full weekend day trimming back and ripping out the growth that’s not even mine several times a year?? A couple hours of actual work but that took the entire rest of the day and night (plus pain meds, plus a really hot shower, plus a nap, plus more pain meds) to recover. Adding insult to injury, this weekend I find that the deep dark forest behind our fence has put so much pressure on the fence that it’s snapped a board in half. Also, it’s creepy.

My other complaint is less about our specific neighborhood. JB’s summer camp this week requires me to take the twistiest, windiest roads, and I hate them so much. Twice a day, every day this week. Why did I do this to myself. This is probably the last, or next to last, year that JB can do the easy summer camp that PiC can do the dropoff and pickups for.

Year 6, Day 64: I didn’t realize this until I started commenting at Hawaii Planner‘s. I thought we were on 6 months with my trainer, and patting myself on my back for this longest record of consistently doing exercise every week since the fibro took over, ever. Even though I have over 40 weeks of records – that math simply didn’t work out in my head. It’s actually coming up on 11 months of consistently working out minus about 4 really bad weeks where I couldn’t do as much as half of my planned workout. It’ll be a year in August. Seeing as how all my previous attempts to work out in the past twenty+ years has ended up with me bedridden for weeks at a time, this is pretty cool.

I’m trying to get all our FSA claims in order and had to ask a pharmacy for a duplicate RX printout for a couple meds that were accidentally shredded in a moment of overzealous cleaning. They offered to fax them to me. I don’t have a fax number, folks, I’m just a normal person.

Year 6, Day 65: Every so often, even after I have eaten a balanced lunch, my glucose levels suddenly crash and it’s a frantic race to get sugar and protein into me before I collapse. This can happen when I’m at home or working at another site, and when I’m out of the house, it’s a real scramble if I didn’t bring snacks for the kids that I could eat. I finally bought a case of protein bars at Costco as an easy/lazy solution to getting caught without calories.

I loaded two bars in every bag I carry, feeling slightly silly about the whole thing. Since then, every single person except me has devoured one or more of those bars already. PiC scarfed one, SmolAc has had two, JB has had two. I’ve taken to carrying three with me at a time now so that there will still be one left for me. My own Devouring Horde.

This whole week has been unsettled. I’m preparing for a big deal work conference, training new people, trying to get my flood of work done, and we keep having people show up at the house with not a lot of warning to work on various bits and pieces. We need the work done and we have some advance notice but it’s still weirdly(?) disruptive having people show up at random times, coming and going, and having to oversee a little of it at least to make sure they’re doing what we asked for. I will be so relieved to have peace and quiet when this is over. I’m mildly annoyed we didn’t schedule this better – during the school year when I have little to no expectation of peace and quiet. I’m supposed to enjoy a few days of a few weeks of uninterrupted quiet!

We had three sets of tradespeople coming and going today and it was just too much. I need peace and quiet, and I need it now please.

Year 6, Day 66: As much as I complain about this week’s summer camp and the twisty windy roads, it IS a nice thing for my brain that I’ve finally mostly memorized the directions to a new place. I have trouble with my memory with the CFS and it’s reassuring when I can learn a new thing and keep it in the noggin.

This mental map won’t be particularly useful to me later, we’re unlikely to do this camp again because the low price tag was accompanied by a rather sad and unimaginative program where the camp managers would either send the kids outside to eat lunch and just “play outside” for 3+ hours at a time but not let them back inside when it was too cold, or send the kids to sit around bored for almost an hour before camp pickup time. I don’t object to kids sitting around bored in principle, but I do object to not providing any sports equipment for them to DO something with that time and energy otherwise why did we pay money for what I could do to them at home? Also it was meant to be a pool-focused program and the kids weren’t getting nearly enough pool time some days, nor did they follow through on activities they advertised.

Year 6, Day 67: TIL that swapping out oil for melted butter, adding an egg, and swapping out water for milk will vastly improve the result of a boxed cake mix! New knowledge brought to you by complaining on Bluesky that Betty Crocker cake mix just doesn’t do the trick for me these days. The cake always tastes like it’s missing something.

I’ve been spending the week glaring at the long list of reimbursements that were processed but still haven’t landed in our bank account. Come on! Land!