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.

March 17, 2025

Living in the time of pandemic: COVID-19 (250)

Year 4 of COVID in the Bay Area.

Year 5, Day 323: Sunday was terrible, I had vasovagal syncope from 10 am to 5 pm, no idea why. I feel owed a weekend day, I got nothing done yesterday other than trying to not pass out. But today! Today I feel like a nearly functioning human! As much of one as I can ever feel.

So while I didn’t manage to hit my notes to self to-do list, which is separate from my other two to-do lists, I did:

Make full use of a largely uninterrupted workday, gouging a huge dent in my piled up work. Felt annoyed the whole way through because I’m on hold for so many semi-related things but this is good. This helps me start tomorrow a little less behind the 8-ball than usual.

Finally get to work out again for the first time in more than a week! It freaks me out when I have to go more than a day or two without exercising because I lost conditioning so fast after the December holidays. But today I figured out how to manage longer planks – read three pages of a book. That gets me through the first 40 seconds pretty smoothly. My new range is 47-57 seconds, and I’m shaky on the back half, so this feels like a big win when I needed one on this front.

Tomorrow is going to be much more fractured with early school release and needing to make calls, so Tomorrow me will appreciate Monday me’s efforts.

Year 5, Day 324: Demotivation: 100% today. Might be because I woke up from a dream about losing a key software we use at work and I wasn’t able to come up with an adequate workaround for my anxiety dream brain. Everything I did today came from a deep well of “don’t WANNA”. I still did it, just with poor grace. It comes from being too dog-deprived, I’m pretty sure. My neighborhood dog encounter tally is 0 for the past two weeks and that’s just too long. As a poor attempt at a cure, I ogled some adoption listings and this beautiful girl is up for adoption. She’s 3 years old, good with humans and dogs, and appears to be very good natured. She’s also 120 lbs.

She’s well over my lifting limit of 65 pounds, if 120 lbs is accurate, but her adorable face had me wondering … could I learn/build up to deadlifting 120 pounds? No, the answer is most definitely no. Still. One can sigh.

But like an answer to my prayers, some folks brought their dogs to the kids’ afterschool activity and the dogs hung out with me for half an hour. Darn if that didn’t heal my psychic wounds and bring my spirits right back to fighting form. There’s nothing better than having a dog sprawled out next to you while you’re working, letting you pet them at your leisure.

We came back to a chili and cornbread dinner that took me over a month to prep, 1-2 ingredients at a time. I prepped the peppers and froze them several weeks ago. I made the extra cornbread a few weeks ago and froze that. I gathered the rest of the ingredients over the past two weeks and cooked it yesterday. On a night when we’re usually late and tired and rushed, we ended the night with happy and full bellies. Even if SmolAc WAS a party pooper and claimed not to like it. They probably didn’t, they are not a pleasure to feed.

Year 5, Day 325: You know I’ve been simmering about financial changes needed with the threats to the FDIC and our banking system. Now, on the one hand, I don’t see these billionaires, whose net worths are tied up in the stock market, trying to tank the US stock market. However I DO see them deliberately destroying our banking institutions to push their crypto agenda or to destroy the middle class while they continue to loot the government. So far, everything they’ve done is geared toward destruction. It makes sense to assume their move on the FDIC is just a matter of time. Though if they threaten the livelihoods of the wealthy (not the uber wealthy) by destroying banking, I wonder how those people would respond. Even if they don’t try to tank the stock market, the global community boycotting American products will eventually have an impact, I know my Canadian friends are doing everything they can not to buy American: The Entire World Is Pissed at Trump—and It May Cost the U.S. Big Time.

Anyway, I’m looking to mitigate our risk. I’d opened a brokerage account during the years I didn’t have a 401K. In it, we are heavily invested in domestic stock (Vanguard’s VTSAX) which served us very well for years. I’m changing future contributions to buy VTIAX instead or also. My Roth IRA is also VTSAX, and I may sell VTSAX to buy VTIAX instead in there, it’s such a small amount it seems negligible. In normal times, I’d just stay entirely aggressively in domestic stocks but it’s no longer precedented times. These are relatively mild moves to balance our exposure between domestic and international stocks.

I’m still eking out time to research international bank options as a safe place to lodge a good portion of our cash in case there IS a bank failure. I’m not even sure how this new imaginary risk-mitigated landscape looks, I’m just trying my best to deal.

What, if anything, are y’all doing?

Year 5, Day 326: You’ll be proud, I’m sure, to know that I have learned how to conquer my “I sat in a bean bag too long, am stuck” problem. It only took 3 months of flailing like an upside down turtle to figure out that instead of trying to stand up, the better way to go is to roll to the side onto my knee, and then voila! Freedom! I’ve always said I’m a bit slow on the uptake.

This is my first full week of working out since the whole ER thing and I’m still struggling more than I like but being able to do something every day, even just a little, is a huge relief.

Speaking of flailing like an upside down turtle, metaphorically this time, I’ve been so annoyed at myself for perpetually losing count when I’m doing my reps. Around 4-6 reps, my brain wanders off and I finally snap to attention having done way more than I meant to. It’s not because it feels good, it’s because I literally forgot to stop. It only just occurred to me that the solution is to count DOWN from the target, instead of counting up! Surely I will notice when I run out of numbers. We’ll see if this works.

Year 5, Day 327: There’s a storm rolling through California. Even without looking outside, my bones are telling me it’s dark and stormy. It’s been a long day in a long week in a long … well. I’m really feeling it today.

One money question answered! we did both get bonuses this year. Now I can sit down this weekend to figure some things. I’m hoping to stretch them to cover that cashflow hole I caused with so many donations, and fill in some planned spending buckets for the year. This needs a couple hours of wrangling to figure out all the moving parts.

And another money question answered! We’re due a federal refund and owe CA state taxes; they just about cancel each other out. We come out a little bit ahead. I feel ok about this – I’d have felt very gross paying any more federal tax than we’ve already paid in. Fundamentally I want to pay taxes to fund a better society, that’s our civic duty and it makes sense. But this is so very much not the year that our tax dollars get that result, and it’s hard to see when it will again.