January 8, 2024

Living in the time of pandemic: COVID-19 (188)

Year 4 of COVID in the Bay Area.

Year 4, Day 279: JB’s developed a hacking cough this weekend that’s sounding worse each night. We already did an at-home COVID test but I’ve scheduled a PCR (hopefully a combo with the flu and RSV test as well) for them later this week. They don’t have any other symptoms right now, but PiC is starting to feel a bit of something after being untouched by the last six rounds of viral infections that Smol Acrobat brought home so I’m concerned all around. I’m staying on my antiviral meds as long as I must to fend off the germs. I simply cannot afford to be any more tired than I already am.

*****

The blackberry leaves are turning a beautiful purple now. Yay, it’s still alive! I worry about the plants a lot.

Year 4, Day 280: The rain over the past two weeks supercharged my latest round of potato plants. The first container should have a mess of potatoes to harvest. The second container had two-inch sprouts two weeks ago. After three or four soaking rains came through, those two inchers are a foot tall! This shouldn’t surprise me, this is also how fast our weeds grow, but it’s still cool. Not the weeds, those are nothing but annoying.

*****

I’ve been bumbling around for weeks muttering to myself about needing new travel sized containers for our toiletries. I’ve bought two sets of silicone squeeze bottles over the past ten years and they now both leak. Thankfully I’ve always kept them in plastic bags before adding them to the toiletries bag but the leaks are exasperating. I asked friends for recommendations but nothing really appealed to me. It suddenly hit me that the pile of tiny Palmolive bottles that we keep picking up from Residence Inns over the years – those are 3 oz bottles. I had repurposed one for Smol Acrobat’s body wash, but for some reason it never occurred to me to use them for anything else. We have 8 more of them! This ticks all my boxes: not buying new and repurposing something keeps some plastic out of landfill. I’m eager to test my theory. I’m pretty sure it’ll work fine for the shampoo but I’m less sure about the conditioner which is thicker. (The 3-ounce detail only matters in theory since we’re not planning to fly anytime soon, but I prefer a solution that can be used for all our travels.)

Year 4, Day 281: We’ve moved Smol Acrobat out of their crib and into a big bed. We haven’t done anything with the crib yet so all that means is they started the night in the bed instead of going to bed in the crib, waking up 2-4 hours later screaming until we carry them off to a Big Bed. For their first night, they stayed asleep ALL NIGHT. Will this be replicated again? Only time will tell. Fingers are very crossed.

I am feeling a weird pang about the idea of selling the crib. It cost us a pretty penny years ago and is taking up valuable space.
It’d be good to move it out if we’re done with it. I’m 1000% done with having babies so we have no further use for it if Smol really is moved out. But also, FEELINGS.

*****

Chatting with an aunty, I found out that it costs $200K/year to care for Granny around the clock as she’s in her 90s and bedridden. Gramps saved and invested really well because they can afford it, but that figure set me back on my heels. How do you plan for that? How do you save enough in case you happen to live past the age where you can care for yourself for very long?

Year 4, Day 282: I jinxed it! Well, maybe it wasn’t me. But Smol did NOT do well last night. So the move to the big bed wasn’t the cure-all, alas. It could be that they’re coming down with something, they often sleep badly (more than usual) when they’re not feeling well and JB’s cough hasn’t been good for anyone. JB tested negative for COVID, RSV and flu, at least.

*****

I’m very proud of myself for figuring out how to set up this custom listing for JB’s art shop.

*****
Another aunty chat was several kinds of stress and grief. She has been dealing with my estranged dad and brother through my estrangement. She still has some kind of a relationship with them, and she was filling me in on their latest even though I hadn’t specifically asked. It wasn’t meant in a guilt trip or a mean way. She wanted me to know they were about as ok as they were going to get and insists that I must carry on with my own life, separately, and find my health and happiness. But even though I have no desire to have them back in my life, I still struggle with the grief and frustration related to them. I know it’s so much better for me to be no-contact with them. I also know that my aunty is stepping into the breach to try to get my brother to do the things he needs to do for his housing benefits, and it’s costing her time (and money that she can ill afford). It’s her choice but I was the only person that could get him to do anything, on my say-so. I wasn’t omnipotent, but I could make him do some necessary things. And now I’m gone and she has to resort to bribery to get him to make his appointments. She’s never made much money and now she’s wasting on my brother because I’m not there to do it. Intellectually I know I’m not wrong but I don’t feel right, either. It all makes me very sad. If he wasn’t mentally ill, if he was just the same sociopathic narcissist that my estranged dad is, I’d be so mad at him. But he’s not, and I’m now very sad for the loss of the sibling relationship that we might have had someday.

Year 4, Day 283: We are discovering the lack of good bike racks around the city as PiC is running more errands on the bike when he can. The renovated park has the best one, the Safeway has the worst ones.

I’m working a theory that Sera 🐶 has been off her food lately because she’s overheated in her dog sweaters. I’m testing it today. She’s been taking no more than a few bites of food at a time and last night was the worst yet, she didn’t eat anything but fish topping and left everything else. She was willing to eat if I scooped it in my hand but that’s not sustainable. This morning’s trial run seemed promising, she didn’t eat her whole breakfast at once but she did return and finish most of it by mid-afternoon.

Target has their BOGO 50% off (so, 25% off each when you buy two) vitamins and supplements.

I spent way too long doing the math on whether I should buy the 100 mg coq10 (I can still hear the infomercials in my head for this and it’s not great) or the 200 mg bottle and also decided I should try increasing my dose to 300 mg / day to see if that helps the fatigue more than 200 mg / day.

$25 – 100 mg 120 count
$12.50 – 100 mg 120 count
16¢ / each
300 mg (3*100 / 3*0.16) = .48/day
240/3= 80 days

$29 – 200 mg 40 cap
$14.50- 200 mg 40 cap
54¢ / each
300 mg (200+100 mg / .54+.16) = 0.70/day.

The differences are clearly negligible but my brain needed that little bit of exercise.

January 1, 2024

Living in the time of pandemic: COVID-19 (187)

Year 4 of COVID in the Bay Area.

Year 4, Day 272: My family isn’t Christian so we had no real reason to do Christmas but our parents enjoyed doing the gifting and the trees early on when we were little so we got those until I was 8? 10?: the trees, the gifts, the time together. Then it all stopped. I know why. My parents worked every single day of the year and were far too tired to add unnecessary extras. I understood but it still kind of stung. I spent years after I got a job working trying to recreate a bit of it, buying gifts for my family and such like, but no one was interested in spending time like that together and so I eventually gave up and sought that with other families. Now, in my turn, I have very little interest in “creating the magic”. We get the kids a few gifts but they get showered with enough gifts from loved ones that it’s all extra bonus.

I don’t feel “Christmas spirit”. If we’re talking about kindness and generosity, that’s something we try to put into practice all year round. This time of year, we go along with the stuff that his family does but none of it appeals to me in any real way. I’m a bit curious what I would enjoy if I could remove what everyone else does and prefers from the equation. Is it nostalgia to want to go back to the days when we didn’t really celebrate Christmas but exchanged some presents and went to the movies with my cousins, or would that actually be fun now?

Year 4, Day 273: Every year winter sets in and I get pushed totally off my game. Why is it so dark so early? Why is it so cold? Although it’s actually less cold during the rainy days. The real question is why am I always taken by surprise by the shift? This happens EVERY YEAR.

But the cold brought out beautiful red leaves on our blackberry bush so that was nice. Here’s hoping it bears fruit when spring comes.

*****

While walking Sera, I started counting our neighbors. There are the really awful ones who picked multiple, daily, petty fights with us when we had a newborn at home. They are either moving or renovating, I’m hoping they’re selling and leaving forever. I’ll never trust them not to be petty horrible liars again. There’s the family we trade package safety with, we text each other to take in packages for us when we’re out and that’s a nice reciprocal favor trading. We see two sets of neighbors at school dropoff and pickups, they’re friendly. There’s a set of dropoff neighbors who won’t ever say hi to us, despite my attempts to at least politely greet them. There’s the nice hippie who always pets Sera 🐶 or waves good morning and the nice old lady who used to always ask after Seamus when she walked her dogs. We don’t know everyone but we know at least a half a dozen now, and that feels a little like the start of a local community.

This doesn’t come easily to me, I’m generally not into socializing, but we’re alone here and it’s important to build some local connections. My friends are all online and sometimes you need local people.

Are your neighbors friendly?

Year 4, Day 274: Drat, I wish I’d defrosted the scallops and shrimp earlier to make seafood pasta. That’s something I don’t feel comfortable defrosting in the microwave – I hate to ruin good seafood.

*****

I used to knock out 270 points on Bing a day easily, maybe 2 minutes of time a day, and it’d add up to $100 in gift card redemptions a year but lately they’ve added so much friction (lower points for activities, not rewarding points for searches) that it’s not worth the amount of time/attention I’d have to spend on it anymore. Alas, I’ll miss that tiny stream of random spending money.

Year 4, Day 275: Therapy was hard this week. Talking about the my need for support with some complicated family dynamics, every part of me still struggles with the idea that I deserve help or support or that I can do hard things with help instead of having to tough it out alone.

Increasingly, though, there’s increasing evidence that doing the opposite of my norm is better for me. My asking for help I don’t ever want to admit I need, or even just acknowledging that I need it, to navigate understanding one complicated relationship after another creates a significant change in my pain. It’s not a straight line from therapy to improvement and it’s not a cure, but I have observed: my flares are less frequent, they last fewer days (where they used to span 2-3 weeks of crippling pain), the high intensity level is lower than it used to be. Even if I wanted to go back to old patterns, I don’t want the pain that goes with it.

Also I am still struggling with internalizing the notion that my offering support can sometimes simply take the form of being there for people without taking any physical action. The need to DO something is so deeply ingrained.

Related, in a fictional way: I put on very old shows that I can mostly ignore during my work day. This week it’s Bones. In the episode where Hodgins learns he has an institutionalized brother he’d never met, he only found out because the bills came due (and he’s no longer rich). Booth offers him a large sum of money to pay for his brother’s stay “until you figure something out”. Hodgins declines, “I’ll take a loan, like the normal person I never was.” That struck me as nonsensical. How is he going to pay that loan back? If he can’t afford the institution fees now, how is he going to afford the fees plus interest if he and Angela make no changes to their jobs and salary? To my mind, this is one of those times you let your friends help your family. It’s not like you’re taking it yourself. Of course, that’s easy for me to say in a hypothetical way. If I were to be offered a large sum of money from a wealthy friend to pay for a family member’s care (can’t speculate on siblings because I already have such a bad history with mine) I wonder if I would still feel the same way. Maybe I would.

What would you do?

Year 4, Day 276: How long-lived are your clothes? How often do you feel the need to replace pieces?

My clothes tend to last roughly 7-9 years before I cycle them out. I’m still using maternity underwear from the first pregnancy, they’re getting threadbare. I could probably stand to get a couple new packs. But maybe not yet. My jeans from 7 years ago died an ignominious death, as my pants generally do. I’ve been wearing hand me down skinny jeans but I hate skinny jeans when my hands are hurting. It’s hard enough pulling them up on a good day, it’s impossible on a bad day. So the current jeans are brand new. Three of my four Target tees, bought 6 years ago to attend a FinCon, have sprouted so many holes even I’m a little embarrassed to wear them anymore so those are out. I replaced them at Comic Con this year with Fat Rabbit Farm shirts. They are much more expensive but also much higher quality, judging by the one I have owned since 2014(?) that’s still in great shape. My hoodies and sweatpants are new from the second pregnancy, er, well, “new”. I guess they’re actually about 3 years old now but they still seem new relative to the rest of my wardrobe.

December 25, 2023

Living in the time of pandemic: COVID-19 (186)

Year 4 of COVID in the Bay Area.

Year 4, Day 265: Brrr. Cold, dark, and rainy. Best for sleeping in, not best for Mondays when you have to get up and get out. I’m eagerly awaiting the last of the gifts I ordered to arrive today, mostly for my furry niblings.

It feels like I must be buying things (cold meds for the kids, shampoo/conditioner/toothpaste, etc for us, gifts for other people that are on their wishlist) to feel better about something but it’s probably more my natural hoarding tendencies kicking in, along with a small side of self-soothing pre holiday anxiety. Generally, they’re all practical things. Even the things I don’t need, just want, aren’t terribly extravagant – all of the Toby Daye series, the few Incryptid books I’m missing, the rest of the Murderbot series, nice pens, cool stamps.

*****

You know what would have helped this morning? Remembering that I have to generate dopamine before getting into complicated work. Going at it backwards made the work a lot more painful than it needed to be.

Year 4, Day 266: More than 4 hours of sleep after a late night of work and before a very running around day would have been deeply appreciated but it wasn’t in the cards. Smol Acrobat was on the night terrors track and then my body was angry for the next few hours.

So I ran Sera 🐶 out for her walk. I ran JB to school. I ran back to school for their Winter Performance. I ran back home. I had therapy. Then I ran to pick up JB from school. Later I ran them to their class. Then I threw together dinner in 30 minutes: tortellini (3 min boil from Costco), a pot of rice in case the tortellini was rejected, the last of the salad bag, quartered the pound of brussels sprouts and sauteed them in butter, oil and brown sugar (which I added after tasting one and it was disgustingly bitter), heated up the leftover panko chicken.

Of course that’s around the time Smol Acrobat decided they were Very Very Sad/Angry and had to have a screaming fit. JB couldn’t jolly them out of this one so they and I went to sit (lay down on the floor) in their bedroom while they worked it out of their system. By 7 pm I was entirely out of gas. But not out of work!

Year 4, Day 267: We’re four days into the first bout of the rainy season. My toes are perpetually cold, and my overprotective (very kind) neighbors are shocked that I insist on wading out into the wet without an umbrella. This is a holdover when my hands hurt far too much to hold an umbrella, I still avoid using my hands for anything that I don’t absolutely have to, to spare them for the things that are very necessary. A hoodie or a hat will suffice, I’m lucky enough to head back to a warm dry home after I get soaked so it doesn’t bother me.

Most of the year I wonder why we pay for rain boots for the kids, these are the days I’m glad we did. The Crocs rainboots we got for Smol Acrobat are pretty delightful. They’re bright and cheerful, and so lightweight they can tromp around in the rain without losing a boot, unlike the clunky old hand me downs they’ve had. I’m all for hand me downs normally but sometimes it’s better to just buy what you need.

Year 4, Day 268: We’ve bought so many things for other people in a short period of time that I’m having trouble tracking all the charges to my credit card. I’m JUST keeping on top of it with extra spreadsheet notes but the Amazon charges are bizarrely off by a few dollars each. That troubles me. Is this a potential hacking problem or something else? Hopefully it shakes out fine in the end without extra work from me.

In semi-related news, my travel and holiday related anxiety appears to continue to hover at lower levels than historical baselines. I noticed this shift earlier in this year and wondered if it would continue to hold. Instead of big giant holding-breath level anxiety and needing to do things like packing six months out, I find myself managing my cope with smaller actions. Setting up spreadsheets for 2024, paying bills, buying consumable supplies for the household, semi-obsessively checking bank accounts – all of these help me cope with the balance of feeling in control of some things and not in control of other things.

Rosacea: It’s been about a week since I started using the cream. In the morning, I used my micellar water to wash, applied the cream and a bit of lotion. Later I’d put sunblock on top before going outside. In the evening, I used the same. I’m not really sure if it’s making any difference yet. At least one day in the past week my redness flushing and that weird feeling like the reddened skin is thickened flared up pretty seriously. It took a few hours for the effects to settle down some. The feeling like the flaring skin is thickening makes me nervous about longer term developments. My mom struggled with incredibly painful and widespread rosacea and I don’t want it to get that bad. I’ll keep using the cream and observing here how it works.

Year 4, Day 269: The kids being on break plus my working until midnight every night this week = today feels like a very bare minimum kind of day. I don’t want to do anything that doesn’t absolutely have to be done today.

A moment of “we live in the future now”: a cousin texted me asking if she could Zelle me something for the kids for Christmas. Our family tradition is to gift red envelope money but you have to show up to get it. My kids have been out of luck because we haven’t traveled for Lunar New Year since they were born? We don’t make the traditional rounds (in part because time is short and mostly because my feelings about my family are complicated and I didn’t know until last year that they were on my side), so they haven’t gotten any gifts. It’s not an exclusion thing specifically, it’s just how we worked. You give a traditional blessing and they give you the red envelope. My energy has been too limited to make that happen. Anyway, it amuses me to have my elder cousin bring this gifting into the present using technology.