About sixteen years ago, I met him for the first time. My trainwreck sibling brought home this adorable puppy he had no business adopting because he had not one thing in his life that wasn’t a mess. I was furious at my sibling – he didn’t even take care of himself, how could he drag
Every time JB is invited to another birthday party, they’re not as frequent as when they were in daycare thank goodness, I sigh a little. Will there ever be a party they won’t want to attend? (No.)
I bought the kids matching jackets and they are absolutely delighted. JB got to pick the color. SmolAc didn’t care what the color was so long as it was the same as JB. They are wearing them everywhere even when it’s not puffer jacket weather. SmolAc has been explaining to everyone: if we wear the same thing, then that means we are twins. But if we do not wear the same thing then we are NOT twins.
Life with Smol Acrobat
This child is annoying me deeply.
Every time I tell them to do a thing: “I don’t want to I don’t know how I’m too tired I need to sweep (sleep) that’s SO MUCH it will take a WONG TIIIIIIME” *whine whine whine*
But if you use a silly voice and anthropomorphize literally anything to tell them to get their chore done they will listen to it 99% better than me telling them.
Me as their stuffed animal: SmolAc! Hurry up and get dressed, you need me to take me to my playdate with Other Stuffie!
Them: Ok!
Me as their ham: SmolAc! Finish the laundry so you can eat me!
Them: Ok!
Me as their shoes: SmolAc! Put me on! I don’t want to be late!
Them: Ok!
Having to explain to them how underwear works for the purposes of folding it: there are three holes. Two are for legs, one is for the waist. If you have a leg hole, the waistband will be on one side of it.
Precious Moments
Apparently SmolAc’s teacher recently had an MRI and told the kids about it. They caught sight of an ad that flashed an image of an MRI machine and they very excitedly told me all about how Teacher got a cut on their face and they had to lay down on a table and get pictures taken and it was “just like dat one. Exactly wike dat.”
Whenever I take JB to pick up SmolAc from the playground, SmolAc insists on a piggyback ride out. I keep waiting for JB to refuse but they still haven’t yet.
SmolAc painstakingly wrote out their wants on the grocery list then turned to me expectantly: can you check tomorrow to see if we have them?
Erm. Well. That’s not grocery lists work. BUT THEY SHOULD. Just imagine: writing what you want on the grocery list and then it appears the next morning! What a service! Maybe we need to develop this idea.
Do you know what an apple cheese is? It’s when you put a swice of apple between two cheeses and you eat it!
Do you know what a finger cheese is? It’s when you put your finger between two cheeses and you eat it.
Year 6, Day 329: Heat wave time! For us, it’s very unlikely to be terrible. Everyone else is getting 90s and 100s. Our forecast is well under those highs so I get to enjoy this as our one random week of “summer” and then we’ll be back to our normally moderate temps.
Money: Most days it feels like we’re losing the neverending slog of people needing help, the list grows exponentially daily, so it was nice to have there two good updates: Nikos: Surgery went well on February 26th, and Niko has slowly been recovering in the hotel room. I’ve been contributing to keep Amber afloat for months and she’s finally starting to get her feet on solid ground. Winifred is a midwife now. Progress, any progress, is welcome and I hope they continue to improve.
Year 6, Day 330: My day is packed. Meetings, work, school meeting, work meeting, friend needs an ear, back to work, back to school to pick up, shovel down dinner, back to school for an evening math activity for the kids. 😵💫
I was deeply annoyed with SmolAc while we tried to get out the door. They eat at a snail’s pace and compounded that with whining they aren’t hungry. Our policy used to be “respect the kid’s intake assessment”. That doesn’t work with SmolAc because “I’m not hungry” actually means “I don’t want to eat this / I’m bored” and in short order they’ll be asking for a snack. They would live on snack foods if they could.
I insisted they eat almost a full serving (for them, that was a quarter of a serving for any other kid) before leaving and once we left, like clockwork the whining for a hot dog started. I refuse to negotiate with the terrorist so we marched them home to finish the perfectly good food we had waiting there.
The event itself was fun for both. JB did fifth grade level activities with their friends and we helped SmolAc try out the kindergarten activities. They impressed a second grade teacher with their penmanship. That was a bit of a surprise for me, too.
Money: Cigna keeps declining my wellness claim saying that the benefit is not covered for the insured. Except it is a covered benefit! Even their rep sees that it is. So that’s a 25 minute phone call to get my $50 payment. I’m willing to bet that this is some AI-powered bullshit in play. So annoying!
Year 6, Day 331: Summer weather means I get to hang our clothes to dry! As long as I get the timing right. Most of the year it’s too damp.
I can’t believe I missed the book birthday of the 15th Incryptid book: Butterfly Effects! I’ve put it on hold and it’s 8 weeks away. *Grabby hands* I’m working through Discworld again for now to keep my brain busy since all my library books either came in and were read or are on hold for weeks still.
Money: I earned a $50 gift card from our health provider researcher surveys. Chucked that into our internet account to pay a future bill.
Year 6, Day 332: Summer weather means summer smells in the morning that take me back to summer school and grade school days. That hit of baking asphalt rising up to mix with the nip of still cold air, maybe a concrete layer in there with some earthy leafy vegetation. I’d assumed that was mostly a SoCal combination of scents but turns out nope, it can be replicated just enough to make me feel like I should be walking to high school or something. Not that I ever want to relive that period. High school was fine but it’s not something I ever felt any need to go back to. There are a few people I miss from back then that I didn’t manage to stay in touch with but that’s all.
Money: We got a confirmation that bonuses will be paid at the end of March but we don’t know who is getting how much. S’pose that’s enough good news for one day.
Year 6, Day 333: Registration for summer camps feels like a contact sport. The regional animal camp booked solid in under 7 minutes. The number of slots available is low but good grief! Actually registering for anything in the city or county offerings is fraught, they all book up within the first half hour or less. It’s a good thing I’ve honed the ability to type really fast in registration forms but also they really need to offer more services. I do wonder if they’ll be able to offer more advanced swim lessons when they have the new pool built some far off date in the future. JB is at the most advanced level they offer for now and unless we want to enroll them in swim team (no, not really, that’s a 5 night per week commitment), they don’t have a lot more opportunities to hone their skill.
Money: camp registration has taken a chunk of my brain. I found a $50 off code for one camp ($600) but rescheduling to make it work with everyone’s schedules meant the other week of camp was 5 days and full price, so we paid $1126 instead of $1061 for both. It was initially a 4 day camp, then a 5 day, but now it’s 2 5-day camps. That’s fine, I prefer the new schedule that means their friends will be going to the same one and that’s an extra uninterrupted work day for me.
1. We discovered a pickleball court nearby and took the kids to check it out. It’s simple and clean. We played very badly for a while and remembered how much running is involved in a game that requires a net and a court. I decided to stop early before I blew out a knee or something.
3. We tried the just-bake tilapia from Costco and 3/4 of us like it. That’s made fish night a little more interesting, I like having two kinds of fish on the table for variety. Some day I’ll learn how to cook whole fish like my mom used to but for now I can’t wreck a pre-breaded fillet and that’s a quick and easy dinner so I’m grateful for the option.
Year 6, Day 322: I’m so unsettled. Insomnia last night was severe, but the fatigue was mostly at a bit of a distance. I was able to pull some weeds, plant a few seeds, air out the house and do all the laundry, buy gifts, clean and pay bills this weekend. All this was followed up by a nap I didn’t want but sorely needed. It should feel good to have managed as much as I did but instead I just feel like an overshaken bottle of soda. Maybe this is a weird side effect of DST?
Money: We have had Giving money come in since our last support push but I’ve been thoroughly overwhelmed so had to wait a bit to pick our next family from the One Spirit Okini list. This time, I selected a mom whose kid needs clothes and kitted them out with some of each of the requested items (jeans, tees, hoodies, underwear, socks, a pair of shoes). I bought a few pieces in the next size up, too. It sets my mind at ease when I have the next immediate size of clothes on hand and wanted to give a little of that peace to this mom. We also loaded them up with multiples of the requested hygiene items: shampoo/conditioner, body wash, toothpaste/toothbrushes so they ought to be stocked for at least several months.
Year 6, Day 323: Time for another grocery takeaway! Once in a while, our neighbors get a badly timed grocery delivery and ask us to come take some produce off their hands. I trotted over today and picked up eggplant, bok choy, avocados, zucchini and some frozen chicken. PiC’s ambitiously saying we should cook all of it when I was going to split it further with another neighbor. We’ll see if we actually manage that but in the meantime, I’m moving along the big sack of apples that I would normally have fed to the dogs to a friend whose dogs can enjoy them. I really wanted to find some horses to share those apples with but I’m not friends with any local horses at the moment. Now that is definitely a problem that needs solving. Anyway these little food shares fire up my gratitude engine. I’m glad to share what we have with our neighbors and that we have enough. And these little extras that we get frees me up to give more to the people who don’t have enough outside of our circles. I like to think of it as a giant community cycle of some kind, maybe concentric circles where we push out help from our center, even if we never meet the people we help outside our local circles.
Year 6, Day 324: Trainer stuff: I’ve been struggling to get back to my “good” performance in working out: completing all sets assigned on my 3-4 days of written workouts. The CFS kicked my ass for several weeks, the depression spiral and suicidal ideation period was another asskicking. Overall time and energy have been hugely scarce on top of all that, and some days had to be rest days.
I have never gone a week without doing some sets but it’s never what I’d call enough. It feels like I’m wasting my trainer’s time because so little progress is made one week to the next. But this is a mental exercise in seeing the service of my trainer as separate from my performance of the workouts. If my body could just consistently improve, I wouldn’t need him to begin with.
Money: I’ve redeemed our Cigna Wellness Incentives for the kids and myself as our dental appointments are all done. That’ll be $150 in our pocket which covers the premium. PiC’s $50 when he does his well check will be profit in our pockets.
Year 6, Day 325: DST is kicking everyone’s asses. SmolAc sat up crying hysterically for an hour? hours? in the middle of the night, I don’t know when it was or how long. Just that I had to cuddle them until they finally settled down and fell asleep at 2 am. I’m so tired.
Work stress: I can taste actual adrenaline, I’m so stressed these days. I hate this.
Money: JB’s friend is asking for bookstore gift cards for their birthday. What’s an appropriate amount to gift kids turning 11-12? I’ve usually spent $20-25 per kid when gifting books or cash for the younger set, usually shopping from Bookoutlet if I can to save some cash. I’m not sure if $25-35 or more makes sense. To add to the confusion, this latest party involves the host telling us that they’re giving the kids $40 worth of credit to use so I have an idea of what they’re spending on the party itself. I don’t usually know that.
Year 6, Day 326: Having a bit of an existential crisis internal scream-fest. The existence and use of AI is destroying my professional world AND destroying the one planet we have and the helplessness I feel about that, though we fight against it daily – literally, is eating my sanity. I was just telling a friend that if all we did was bullshit anyway I could just shrug it off some. But I can’t. The stuff we output actually matters. So, between the massively organized fraud that people are perpetuating and the use of AI to create utter slop in ways that are going to deeply impact (actual real life things I can’t get into here but it’s serious), oh my GAHHHHHH. We are fighting against it, daily, and have been since the first ChatGPT came out. It’s grinding me down.
Money: SmolAc was invited to a birthday party and hah! The stack of books that I bought for the last party they were invited to (but arrived too late) can now be wrapped for this kid’s gifts. MRSP: $40. I paid $22. Stash of gifts, FTW.
1. I’m grateful for our robot vacuum. It’s getting old, it can’t do corners or crevices, and is limited to the wider areas of space but even still it can do the job well enough to save me the energy of running the full vacuum everywhere.
Helping folks: There’s still time to hit up the fandom craft market! This is a fundraiser run by Our Family, Our Fight for the American Immigration Council.
AIC provides legal representation to thousands of people detained by ICE, as well as working legislatively and through the courts to challenge our broken immigration system. They also work in 40 states to help local leaders and communities fight back.
Year 6, Day 315: Day one of solo parenting. PiC is away at a work thing this week. I’ve been bracing myself for this for weeks, telling myself that I would moderate my expectations for work and household stuff. The goal: keep the kids fed, clothed, alive, get them to and from school. Don’t break myself trying to do the impossible.
How we coped: burgers at the local place with outdoor seating. Stern directions to head DIRECTLY for the shower after we got home. Everyone in bed for math tutoring and reading time. SmolAc was happily sandwiched between us “reading” while we painfully inched our way through one equation after another.
From The Diplomat – Callum: You’re a military-industrial complex papered over by a Constitution.
Boy does that description of America hits home especially hard since this administration has been murdering right left and center and has torpedoed all the soft diplomacy we used to do through USAID.
Year 6, Day 316: Day two of solo parenting. I had a very tight timetable for dropping off JB and SmolAc this morning to get back in time for a meeting. I made all the runs in exactly 60 minutes and managed to get to my meeting in time. Score! JB had an afterschool activity at school so that bought me an extra hour to “rest” (working from bed). That helped.
Picking up JB late meant that I went straight from school to the orthodontist, then to pick up SmolAc a little earlier than Monday in hopes that we’ll be able to get dinner on the table earlier, get homework done, and get to bed earlier. That’s not how things worked out of course.
We got home much earlier yes, we ate dinner earlier also yes, but JB ran into trouble with their math homework and I had to teach them how to do it step by step, work through several problems, and then figure out how to create a story around how to solve that type of problem that would stick in their brain.
We did not hit the 8 pm bedtime. We did not remember to take out the garbage bins. We definitely did not have 5-7 minutes for my workout. But we survived intact.
Year 6, Day 317: Day three of solo parenting. And there’s my limit! Did the drop-offs this morning again. Kept running into people we know who haven’t seen me in months (PiC has been doing this run to save me time) so they wanted to catch up. It’s touching that they seemed so delighted to see me but that took a whackload of energy. I drove him and felt the exhaustion buzz set into my limbs.
The best encounter was a surprise appearance of our neighbor dogs who nearly shivered out of their skins with excitement when we spotted each other. I adore them and the feeling is mutual and I never walk away from them wondering if they actually like me or if they’re just being polite/friendly like I do with humans.
The one really good thing this week: the crushing suffocating relentless fatigue of the past several weeks has finally lifted. I’d forgotten what it felt like to only have pain without dragging the 1000 lb weight of fatigue with me and it’s so tolerable. My fingers are randomly swollen. My lower back aches. My upper back and shoulders are tight as a drum. And it’s still so much better than being crushed by fatigue. I am grateful. (Update: It lasted one day. I’m still grateful for the experience of that one day.)
Year 6, Day 318: A friend shared that her Asian ex-GF has gone to become a police officer in the Bay Area and my brain stuttered to a stop. WHAT. Really? In the years 2025-2026? That PD is notoriously racist even for police.
It also made me reflect on this scene from The Diplomat that felt similar though I wonder if one could legitimately make the argument the CIA is both a rotten agency AND still does SOME good. I don’t know enough about them to comment on that. I definitely don’t feel like we can make that argument for American police. I don’t know of any police that do any amount of good sufficient to counterbalance even a fraction of the evil they do.
Stuart: How are you not furious? Eidra: Stuart, I am a young tiny Asian American woman at the top of one of the most baldly paternalistic arms of the UG government. I am furious all the time. If I could go after terrorists and human traffickers with an organization that didn’t have an 80 year legacy of racism and human rights violations, I would. Stuart: We should be getting this for the recruitment video. Eidra: There is not another better CIA or America. The ones we have are fucked up. We make compromises. Some days we feel ok about that. Some days we have gin.
Year 6, Day 319: Confusion. The garden faucet has had a slow drip for months. I’d made the mistake of using it and then it wouldn’t shut off completely. I can’t replace it because the jerks here before us installed some kind of bizarre lock on the faucet that our handy friend says has to be cut off if we don’t have a key for it. There is no key for it. I stuck a jug under the drip and have been using that to water the garden until I solve the problem. I went to do the usual garden watering dump today and the jug is empty. The drip has stopped?? Woo!
I haven’t had time to figure out how to fix our oven yet. Maybe it will also mysteriously fix itself? Please?
Small business Jack working as hard as he can to pay his rent, laboring under a heart condition.
Lily Meade and her mother are unhoused and she just lost her second book contract and her agent in succession. I know what it’s like to feel hopeless and I haven’t had to do it under as dire circumstances as she’s in.
Sonia Hale has been trying to get back on her feet after divorcing a domestic abuser.
Also feeding folks.
My friend in Alaska works with a refugee center and the facts are life is super bleak right now. Refugees without green cards are no longer receiving SNAP, refugees are no longer safe from DHS detaining them indefinitely regardless of their status, they will likely lose Medicaid sometime this year. This is despicable. We’re supposed to help people get on their feet and this is disgusting and inhumane. In response to this and many other problems created by this administration, the refugee center is working in with local groups to support local farms and provide food to those who need it: What is Grow Local, Give Local?
I’m adding this to my donation list for next week.
