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
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May 12, 2023
1. I was happy to find out that Staples takes tech recycling, not just the ink cartridges, and they’re giving $10 in rewards for one recycling item per month until mid-June. I have a couple things we hadn’t gotten around to recycling so we dropped off one of those things this weekend and I’ll take an old phone next month. Declutter and a bit of spending money, woo!
2. We FINALLY saw our friends with a new baby, 8 months after the baby was born. We meant to see them the first month after but that coincided with the last several months of being sick all the damn time. Every time I thought we could set something up, BAM, sick again. I worried about jinxing ourselves but decided to ask them for three possible times they’d be free that we could pick from and hope for the best. We made it happen! So much fun was had. So much fun I was wrecked, but fun!
JB adored having a new infant to cuddle. Smol Acrobat was less enthused and more jealous that their big sibling had so enthusiastically ditched them for this new baby. They were fine with the baby if JB wasn’t snuggling them, though!
3. We baked Monday cupcakes! YUM.
Helping Folks!
I’ve been tied up working on setting up a sponsorship for a Lakota family but Bethh asked me to share this. It sounds like these folks could really use a helping hand:
“I visited this school in Kenya – it’s the only school in the region, it’s community-supported and run, and it was just attacked by armed men who looted and burned this sanctuary. They’re going to rebuild but it won’t be easy.” Here’s the Facebook post with the link to help.
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May 9, 2023
When I set up our Synology system, a few years’ worth of photos didn’t transfer over so it’s been on my to do list since, oh, 2020? That’s about right.
Out of the blue, last week, I was hit with the “the moment is now” feeling that lets me actually do something on the list, so I’ve been doing manual photo backup for a week and change. All of 2018 is now uploaded and half of 2019 is too. That takes care of the big gaps. Once that’s done, I’ll have to edit the metadata for a chunk of photos that got relegated to the year 1970. Technology is great but also weird.
This process has brought up a lot of memories. Missing Seamus 🐶 a whole hell of a lot. Seeing the pictures of when he met Smol Acrobat for the first time, and finally realizing he had a “you’re joking” look on his face when he looked up at me after a long sniff. Then he took another long whiff and gave PiC the same look. It might have actually been an “I’m too old for this shit” look. It was an entire world away from when he last deeply sniffed a newborn and immediately claimed JB as his very own. That made me laugh and made me sad all over again. A dog’s love is so sweet. A totally invested clever dog’s love is intense.
The photos from the hospital stay, with occasional videos of Smol Acrobat snoring like the tiniest of frogs, reminded me of how deeply lonely that time was. Just me and my day old baby, with short drop ins from nurses, or PiC checking in because he also had to be home caring for Seamus (who’d only have another couple months with us). Smol Acrobat was so tiny. They’re still small for their age now, so I get to cuddle a smallish kiddo for a little longer.
As much as I will always and forever love cuddling itty bitty infants, I don’t ever want to do any of that again. Pregnancy was weird the first time. It was unbelievably scary, bizarre, unsettling and strange the second time in the first year of COVID during shutdown.
It got me thinking about how much things have changed in the past three, seven, and ten years.
I’ve gotten mighty comfortable in my current job, which was unexpected. This was my risky leap, a decade and change ago, I truly didn’t know what to anticipate.
I’ve become even more of a homebody, unexpectedly thanks to that same risky leap job that has become much more stable than I ever had the nerve to hope for. Travel doesn’t feel appealing anymore, especially with our small circus, but maybe that’ll come back in a few years. We’ll see!
We’ve made new friends because of the kids. Neighbors who never acknowledged our existence before JB came along slowly warmed up to us and some of them became, and stayed, friends. JB makes friends with the whole world but a select few classmates have parents who were open to socializing and we enjoy their company. That’s been a new experience. A lot of parents around here don’t seem to have time to even acknowledge a familiar-from-dropping-off face.
Our relationships with some chosen family has gotten a lot stronger. Our relationships with some family has gotten much more distant.
Feels like lots of new, mostly small, stuff to take the place of things I haven’t done in the past decade:
- Interviewed for a new job (less than zero interest)
- Dated someone new (also less than zero interest)
- Spontaneously agreed to vacation with a friend (semi interested in the abstract, depending on the friend)
- Gone out for drinks (zero interest)
- In the workplace: felt compelled to prove that I’m a good person, really, even if I would dropkick a person in a professional sense for being an asshole. I’ve never been good at pretending to be ok with politics playing assholes and I’ve gotten even worse at hiding it since my job got so comfortable (zero interest: but also I have a couple hypemen colleagues who warn people, ever so congenially, never to fuck with me as I can professionally dropkick them.) I like that the folks in the Kaiju Preservation Society understand you can both be a great person and not mistake that for weakness.
May 8, 2023
Year 4 of COVID in the Bay Area.
Year 4, Day 38: JB has been sleeping in Smol Acrobat’s room weeknights and the unlooked-for side effect is Smol gets JB up in the morning far earlier than their usual. This has slowly shifted everyone’s waking time earlier. Usually the kids blow that time playing because we can’t get it together, which is fun for them but exponentially less fun for us when we have to interrupt their play to head out. Then everyone is cranky.
This is the first morning we’ve intentionally left as early as possible, like we did last school year, to drop off both kid which means the work day can finally start at a reasonably early hour. If we can make this our new routine, we might all be a little less stressed and cranky by the end of the day.
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It’s May 1st! I don’t know why that feels so portentous or something but it does. Also my neck really hurts and that feels like an ill portent. Why are heads so heavy?
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A few more checklist items for the Wells Fargo account bonuses: setting up the $1000 direct deposits to the new accounts (done), linking those accounts to an outside-Wells account so I can transfer all our money back out later (done), checking if my qualifying spend had posted to the CC yet so I can pay that off (checked, not yet). I LIKE doing these bonus things if I can find the energy, it yields so much ongoing dopamine.
Year 3, Day 39: BOO 5 am wake ups with Smol. I zombie parented for an hour until PiC took over at 6 am. I crawled back into bed, sure I’d regret not staying up, but that rest helped my neck to feel about 70% better. What a huge relief that is!
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May 5, 2023
1. I’m finally allowed to eat broccoli again! Pregnancy took my favorite vegetable from me for three years.
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May 2, 2023
On Money
Income
Our primary income comes from our full time jobs. We have minimal income from investing in index funds and dividend stocks (all reinvested). We earn money on the side to supplement our main incomes. We get a bit of income from Swagbucks, cash back sites (Rakuten, Mr.Rebates) and affiliate links to Bookshop and Amazon sometimes pay a micro-commission to keep the blog running. The sidebar has ways to support the blog and our charitable giving.
Our long term goal is to replace our day job income with passive income before my health prevents me from working. I know from my Mom’s experience that qualifying for or relying on disability is incredibly tough or near impossible here in CA. Aside from that, I aim to do my best to make the most of what we can do while we can.
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Dividend income. We received $223.60 in dividends from the stocks portfolio.
Note to self: We spend way too much at Costco. Our rewards hit about $450 this year.
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Setting the wheels in motion: I applied for two Wells Fargo checking accounts for their $300 bonus. (Not a referral link) If you’re interested, it’s relatively simple as these things go. Open with a minimum of $25, then direct deposit (must be ACH) $1000 within 90 days. If you can float $1000 for 3 months then you will get the $300 and can close the accounts after. I’m using it both to get the $300 bonus but also to redeem my $225 from the Wells Fargo credit card offers I completed earlier this month. These efforts won’t pay out until about the end of July.
I planned to use this money to cover direct aid to friends in a bind, and we also need a bit of extra cash to even out our own cash flow. It’ll all go to some good use.
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May 1, 2023
Year 4 of COVID in the Bay Area.
Year 4, Day 31: Ok. I SAID I would take the year’s finances as it comes instead of reprojecting our spending and saving but someone could have called me on the blatant lie. That’s most certainly not how I work.
As much as I hated doing it, a week of not doing it reminded me that I hate not having a balanced financial roadmap much more.
I’ve subtracted the cost of daycare from our planned monthly savings and reprojected a lower savings rate for the rest of the year. If we end any month with more than expected due to lower spending, I’ll push that to savings too.
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I don’t have the patience for more than a 2-3 minute meditation so I’m sticking with the Body and Sound Meditation (3 mins) in my attempts to recenter my brain and my body.
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After yet another high pain weekend, this being my third week of flare-up, I had no appetite for eating or cooking. PiC’s been handling our food for the past few weeks and was drawing a blank on dinner ideas.
We got Thai takeout but once again my generic Asianness worked against me. I ordered the pad see ew with mild spice, everything else non spicy, to keep the kids from inhaling my favorite dish. I am not Thai but alas, being mistaken for a native is common and means that “mild” for me is the equivalent of a firebomb. One of these days I’ll learn to order under a pseudonym.
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April 28, 2023
1. Being sick for the first 2+ months of the year really trashed my plans to get a lot of medical stuff out of the way early. I’ve been slowly inching my way back to the first quarter goals: Dental cleaning, check! Annual physical and other testing on the calendar, check!
2. I did one guided meditation and one attempt at a self-guided one in the dentist’s chair this week. The latter didn’t actually take but those little 3 minute snippets are helpful in getting
3. Picked up a few adorable papercrafts to support a friend’s crafting venture.
Challenges this week: Facing the reality of our monthly spending being a whole lot more fixed expenses thanks to daycare and having to dramatically reduce our normal spending.
Helping folks: the We Need Diverse Books spring fundraiser didn’t come close to their goal, maybe we can help them out some more?
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