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
Year 6, Day 266: Two little bits of excitement for the day: JB seems to have had an organic sale of one of their art things!
I Mcgyvered a toothbrush duct-taped to a pen to dig out a ton of the lint stuck down in the trap. Feeling Quite Accomplished. It’s not the full cleaning it needs but it’s progress, just like the toaster oven door with 1/5 of the glass clean.
This scene got me right in the gut. As a person whose parents didn’t always like her, as a person who watched grandparents treat her beloved mother with disdain and outright hatred, and as a parent who deeply loves her kids but sometimes finds them insufferable.
Year 6, Day 267: It feels like I’m being responsible and forward thinking when I scan every possible job listing (at least for the title, location, and pay range) to eyeball likely postings daily. But they all depress me. Every high level well-paying job that would roughly one to one replace this job seems to have all the same characteristics of the job I already hate (mostly corporate incompetence, also “number go up” culture). I’ve never been one to turn down a professional challenge, but having been learning how not to create more problems for myself on the personal front has changed my perspective on this career hustling moment.
Applying that awareness to this situation, job hunting feels like it’s now hypervigilance rather than proactively looking for opportunities.
Is this me being tired of the looking? Maybe. I don’t really spend all that much time looking, but it is an entirely deflating however many minutes I spend on it. There’s nothing exciting about having to look and interview and present myself a certain way and all that. It’s absolutely exhausting.
Year 6, Day 268: PF buddy Abby was asking about our retirement plans and I wanted to be hopeful but that healthcare piece remains a wild card. It seems impossible to budget for now that the US government is being run by a pack of wild murderous dingos.
Looking at those example numbers I cited before from someone who is self employed – $17k premiums and $6500 deductible which works out to $24,000 before their insurance covers anything and their situation isn’t even the worst healthcare plan out there – how does one budget for the possibility of somewhere in the neighborhood of $50k – $100k a year (for 4 people) in healthcare premiums and deductibles?? It starts to suggest you’re better off self insuring.
Except you’re not. My family took that route when I was growing up (pre ACA) and it was AWFUL. So that’s a tough needle to thread at the best of times, while we’re currently in what certainly feels like the worst of times. The unsettling part is knowing that it could get a lot worse, because that’s definitely the Republican game plan.
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SmolAc has been slightly under the weather with a cough and sore throat so I made them ginger garlic chicken and ginger garlic rice. They appreciated none of it. But it was really good! So it’s been my lunch for the week. Turns out you can have an easy almost Hainan chicken experience if you lower your standards some.
Year 6, Day 269: My friend challenged my thinking about what kind of savings through investing we can manage in the next two years. I have plans to squeeze out every dollar that I possibly can and put it into our investments but it still seems like it’s so far from enough. So they asked what our gains were in each of the past two years. I went back five years and was really surprised to see that with the exception of 2022, every year since 2021 has seen six digits of growth. We’re still far from my ideal number (which admittedly has been creeping up again in this, the worst timeline) but these numbers are so far from small it’s laughable. And yet, I still think “I won’t be able to save enough in the next year and a half” in case I get laid off.
Whenever the thought about a potential layoff comes up, my action-planning brain hides in a corner. I really really don’t want to have to find another job, all the job hunting notwithstanding. I really want to have enough invested that I can be let off the hook of having to work if I lose this job. But I still want to be able to work on the Lakota families project, to help out folks who need help, to afford some small luxuries like a dozen books a year or to adopt a dog when I’m ready. *wistful sigh* Wishful thinking!
Year 6, Day 270: I had my annual review today. When it was scheduled, I was awash in anxiety for a few hours. Then I got over it. I did my little notes and write up, had a friend take a look for perspective, and gave it a last cursory 2 minute brush up the next day and moved on. Therapy’s done me a world of good, I know my anxiety would have been through the roof about this six years ago.
I know that I put in an extraordinary amount of work last year. An unbelievable number of hours. And despite months of stress and friction and worry and under-resourcing battles, and shitty entitled staff battles, we eked out a win by the end of the year.
Even though the review was quite positive, it was hard for my brain. I struggled to accept the positive feedback. My brain wanted to undermine it all within 3 hours of the relief. “What if he was just saying that? what if he’s just gassing you up but doesn’t mean a damn word of it and will undermine you later??” it demands. I wanted to be mad, why can’t you let me enjoy this???? But there are reasons. I want to see that in writing for it to be real. It feels like all our massive efforts would only have been recognized under these circumstances – pulling a win out by the end of the year. It feels less than genuine because my boss was largely absent last year, like they’re only basing the judgement on the end result rather than the whole picture. Not that I’m saying that they WERE being disingenuous, it just feels like when people make that “you’re smart” comment – what exactly are you basing that on? What are your objective metrics? While I am perfectly happy writing up my people’s reviews based on their genuine efforts, for myself, my brain simultaneously demands to be recognized for being awesome (because professionally, I am) AND demands extra proof of that awesomeness. My brain is my worst enemy some days. But speaking of metrics, as we’re into the new year, I guess our bonuses (or lack thereof) will be a tangible metric.
1. A fundraiser to help support immigrant parents & families in south Minneapolis who are facing hardship—and in some cases eviction—because they can’t go to work. From Nicole Chung.
We are off a … well. The year has certainly started.
2025 Highlights in Health
Brain therapy – This year’s one big improvement was getting hold of myself when an RSD cycle was starting. The solution, silly as it sounds, was redirecting my thoughts from dwelling on the negative thing that happened. Not arguing with myself to convince myself that it wasn’t as horrible as I felt it was, I just said “yep ok that feels terrible now think about this other thing”. Apparently my RSD brain is like an infant with little to no object permanence. So long as I wave other thoughts at it, we don’t have to live in the Misery Zone.
Massage therapy: I wish I could have one every two weeks but at least my baseline pain has dipped down in the past few years to a lower level so I’m not quite as tense 100% of the time.
COVID and flu prevention: We all got vaccinated as soon as the new shots were available. I continued my maintenance antiviral regimen all year. I added the antihistamine protocol (adding cetizirine and famotidine twice a day when we traveled or were around other people).
Building strength with a trainer: I struggled to maintain consistency all year but my best week of the year was the first week of December. That week, I did a total of: 116 pushups, 68 lateral raises, 112 squats, 2.5 minutes (across multiple) of planks, 108 band pullaparts, 52 calf raises, 64 glute bridges, 92 bicep curls, 108 lying leg raises (every single one felt awful) and 76 hammer curls. It sounds like a lot but, no. That is a lot. It took an entire year to get back to the point where I managed to complete the whole week’s worth of exercises in the week! And this year’s one week of exercises is more than last year’s. After losing steam for the last three weeks, my goal is to rebuild back to this completion rate in the first three months of the year instead of only in the last week, once.
2025 Highlights in Life
Work was, again, 110% terrible. I hate corporations so much. I hate working for one even more. (Though I might well hate being unemployed by one even more than that.) We may have benefits and better pay but it comes at such a high cost to life balance. I’ve worked twice as many hours as any one person should and that stinks.
Parenting has felt tough. There have been small bright spots with the kids that I try to appreciate fully as a bulwark against the grief and sadness during what feels the endless slog of conflicts. I try to remember that overall, the kids are fairly decent humans-in-training. It’s easy to miss the forest for the trees when we’re deep in it but I hope I can always pull back and say that they are good people.
A friend encouraged me to track my reading, for all my love of spreadsheets, I have never felt the need to do this but decided to go ahead and do so anyway just for fun. According to my totally shoddy bookkeeping which likely leaves out quite a few books, I have read at least 105 books this year. I tend not to remember to record re-reads but I think they count and I do a lot of rereading when stressed. Oh, I just noticed that Libby has a timeline thing and shows how many books I’ve read in past years. At least half of my reading was in Kindle, there’s some Kindle overlap in these numbers, but this excludes free or purchased books: 2018, 189; 2019, 137; 2020, 141; 2021, 115; 2022, 113; 2023, 101; 2024, 47. 2024 was hellish in ways that kept me from reading like normal. 2025 wasn’t better, it was just a different bad, in ways that didn’t prevent me reading.
2025 Highlights in Money
We had two full time incomes and did our best to supplement that with little extras, like my $10 in sales of journals and tees.
We ended 2025 with twice as much cash as we started the year with. This was intentional: I plan to max out my 401k as quickly as I can in Q1 2026. Again because my pessimism says: will you even make it through half the year? Who knows! We need that extra cash for cash flow during those high-contribution months.
Our net worth climbed steadily, incrementally.
I invested in my very own 401K for a second year.
I helped JB build their business a little bit more.
The Lakota families project helped so many people.
Financial Checklist for 2026
I need to get our complete set of the documents to trusted friends. It took all of last year to collect copies of everyone’s vital documents and I had to settle for good photocopies for one set. It’s hard to tell whether we could even get official copies of that set given the office doesn’t seem to answer emails or any other communications. I MEANT to send the envelope home with one friend when they were in town but completely forgot. They’ll probably be out here again before I remember to get it in the mail.
Thoughts for 2026
Both of us continue to worry about our job stability in 2026. Mine has to do with completely unrealistic corporate expectations: last year was awful, this year’s worse. PiC’s worried because his employer’s just cutting people left and right and it came awfully close to him in 2025. We’re not ready to retire financially (the damn healthcare problem), though I have the WORST senioritis. If I knew we had a really solid severance, I might be willing to lean hard in that direction. But realistically, we’re hoping that, worst case scenario, we both make it to the end of 2026 employed. That gets us to the end of daycare and the start of kindergarten. I’ll run the numbers on where we should be in terms of emergency cash and investments by then. I don’t know what my company’s layoff calculation is but if PiC’s employer doesn’t change theirs, his would be a reasonably generous severance.
At the same time, we hope to expand JB’s horizons. Whether it’s picking up an instrument or a new sport, or both, we’re thinking of how to budget both the time and money for that. We have floated some ideas to SmolAc as well to offer them the chances to pick either an instrument to explore or a sport but they’re awfully recalcitrant about all ideas. We didn’t force JB into any of their activities, so I hope a little time will allow SmolAc to feel the desire to join something too.
Our money
Same goal: Save more, invest more, give more. Achieve FI in ??? years. Mostly I’ve stopped filling out the FI calculators. It’s too depressing.
(Again) All our expenses will go up next year. The increases are substantial enough that we may start losing ground financially. We can’t expect COL salary increases to keep pace with the expenses, nor can we expect the stock market to continue to perform like it did this year. (Though a friend points out that it usually DOES). I’m looking into what we can do to mitigate rising costs.
Little life things
My monthly call list fell apart mid-year when things at work got extra bad.
Household project: Declutter, donate, organize. ✔️ We’re going for Year 3. I bought myself a third round of Sterilite latching storage boxes for holiday gift transport, for storing next size up clothing for the kids, and organizing the garage better. The garage is looking pretty good all things considered.
No hard pants! Was a time when I lived in jeans but I migrated into my sweats in the pregnancy of SmolAc and only recently relented to wear non-sweats for a work thing once this year. This year however, I’ve acquired a couple pairs of fleece lined joggers and leggings for when the sweats just aren’t warm enough in this frigid house. I was gifted some casual soft linen/cotton pants that will double very well as casual business wear if I’m forced into that nonsense again this year. I even picked up some wide belts to better put together an outfit with my Maya Kern skirts. I might be as well-equipped as I have ever been to avoid wearing hard pants for a full year. Fingers crossed!
Personal project: Learning to sew very basic things has been a mix of fun and frustrating, but ultimately satisfying after I manage to complete a thing. I was working on drawstring bags last year. This year I moved on to cute little Japanese knot bags that I’ll make in various sizes once I feel like I’ve got the hang of them. Maybe sell them with JB at a craft fair if/when we have one next year. I also made a pile of tablecloths in prints that amused me instead of paying roughly the equivalent price for tablecloths I didn’t really care for.
The Lakota Giving project continues, thankfully. I worried that 2025 would be significantly worse than 2024, which was much harder than 2023. A few regular contributors have dropped off but we have managed to help more than half a dozen families directly each year along with masses of community donations.
Year 6, Day 259: You know a thing I miss? When people enjoyed media such that for most books or tv shows or movies, you could Google the title and find at least 5 sites dissecting various plot lines and explaining what happened. Sometimes I can’t hear or understand what’s going on and those explainers were great. I also miss Google working properly but those days are also long done.
Currently steeping in senioritis. All the more ironic that I didn’t have senioritis as a student. Deep breaths. Make it to the end of the year. Focus on things that matter: getting help out to people who need it. Whine to the friend who is currently happily unemployed and doesn’t mind empathizing that I keep having to go to work.
Huh. It’s funny. This is usually where I tell myself that people (and dogs) depend on me as a surefire way to make me shake off the malaise and buckle down. Now the thought just makes me tired and resentful. My brain has evolved past only prioritizing everyone else as survival?
Year 6, Day 260: I FIXED THE PRINTER. I actually fixed it yesterday but the printer refused to admit that I had indeed safelisted it on the ISP for a full 24 hours. Today I went over to give it another piece of my mind, I have so many of them to spare, and saw that the wifi icon was finally lit up. I WIN.
*snoopy victory dance*
Pondering my evening workout selection (in the 8-11 minutes I might have in an evening to squeeze it in, so don’t let me misrepresent this as anything so glamourous as actual workout time), all my muscles responded as if to the Little Red Hen: not I, said the arms. Not I, said the legs!
In the end, everyone got it.
60 squats. 51 band pullaparts. 45 calf raises. 47 bicep curls (5 lbs). Trying to remember if I actually did do that 3rd set of curls or if SmolAc distracted me from them. Probably the latter. I don’t think I’d be able to make it through a full set of 25. Or 15. Or 5. An hour later, my arm was protesting the temerity of picking up a 2 lb weight to put it back in its place. Who’s going to be sorry tomorrow morning? Everyone.
Year 6, Day 261: I’ve been testing two phone cases because the first pick turned out to be awful quality. I really like and prefer the colorful red one (for differentiation more than anything else) but the material was so smooth that it’s slippery. Ms Butterfingers over here doesn’t need any help dropping my phone. But the clear case, which feels a little “stickier” is so similar to others that I worry about the case of the mistaken phone recurring.
Once we were on a trip with friends and after bidding us goodnight, our friend departed for her hotel room. After another hour, PiC and I packed it in as well, only, his phone was missing. We retraced all our steps from the whole day and found nothing. I was a mess thinking of what we’d have to do to get it replaced and set up again while traveling out of the country. The next morning, our friend handed over his phone – they had identical cases and she’d taken his by accident! It’s been ten years and I still remember the heartburn. Maybe I can add some creatively distinguishing paint to the case.
Every so often, when I look at a site and close it after a cursory browse, they get hold of my email address and email me some discount code. I appreciate a discount as much as the next bargain shopper but this is going way too far. I hate that they’re managing to get my email address and contact me. UGH. This is another nudge to move fully to DuckDuckGo.
Year 6, Day 262: It’s about to be Girl Scout cookie season again and a) I’m still recovering from paying the December credit card bills (thanks past me for upping our cash cushion) and b) realizing that not even the thought of stress eating GSCs takes the edge off work stress anymore so my body’s clicked over into an anti-eating mode. That’s not unusual. It tends to be either/or. Now I mostly feel like I have an empty stomach and not hungry at the same time. It’s weird. But what a savings!(?)
I’m getting really irritated by the constant religion dropping that keeps coming into JB’s after school activity. It feels especially insulting in this Christo-fascist period of America and I’ve started researching alternate places and activities to replace this once our prepaid membership runs out instead of renewing. No, I won’t bother telling them why, I don’t think they’re reasonable people about this because reasonable people wouldn’t be dripping their Christianity all over everyone at their workplace that is not a church. In my experience, when the gratuitous God and Devil talk starts, it’s all downhill from there for those of us who aren’t Christians. And even for some of us who are. At least a few Christian friends were appalled when I shared it with them and said they’d be mad enough to leave as well. A secular activity is not the time or place.
Year 6, Day 263: It feels like a minute ago (probably 6 years) we had a new toaster oven and thirty seconds later it was all gucky and the glass door was impossible to see through. I’m told this is normal but am sure that other people’s toaster ovens are shiny and clean. I spotted our brand new can of Barkeeper’s Friend and surely this is the precise kind of thing you use that on? Crossed my fingers and set to work because this glass is embarrassing. Not that anyone sees it but us, but still.
After an hour and three rounds of paste application, that’s several hundred layers of grime removed! One corner of the glass is actually clean! The rest of the grime is still very stubbornly clinging but that has to be another weekend’s project. My hyperfixation wants to work at it until it’s all clean in one go because that would be so satisfying but that’s not worth wrecking my hands, shoulders and/or back for weeks.
1. I sure wish I had any knack for painting at all. These beautiful plastic-free watercolors from Beam Paint are calling my name but for gifts because they’d be wasted on me.
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 $569 in dividends from the stocks portfolio.
Surprise money: PiC’s coworkers awarded him a hefty chunk of Applause points so he redeemed it for a hefty Visa GC. That’s paying our internet and phone bills!
Year 6, Day 252:Boy did I overestimate my ability to get anything (everything) done today. I’m thoroughly wiped out from all the holiday stuff but now running into the towering to-do list built up by pushing off all kinds of chores until after the holidays. I did fix the external access to our storage server. That got us back on one track and that’s great.
I did not figure out why my printer still refuses to connect to the wifi. It may have to be a mystery that goes forever unsolved if this drags on much longer, PiC is rooting for a replacement at this point. That would sound brilliant if we hadn’t already spent so much money replacing so many other electronics and weren’t entirely shopped out. We still have to make a decision, though. On that and replacing the 14 year old iPad that is so many versions behind that it can’t handle many common apps. We’re considering getting JB set up with Procreate to learn how to do digital art in addition to their other media.
In the absence of arms or a brain willing to work, I’m reduced to paying some early January bills, cleaning up the end of 2025 spreadsheets and moving us into the 2026 spreadsheets. It stinks that I was so busy in the holiday period that I ran out of time to make a last few donations before the end of the year, speaking of money.
If you’ve got half an hour and are interested in how dishwashers work, this YouTube video had me fascinated for a bit. (Admittedly the bar for entertainment is currently quite low.)
Year 6, Day 253: The clothes (hand me downs and new gifts) have been squared away, as has the laundry, huzzah! Returns have been initiated and dropped off, woo!
Now it’s time for (gulp) the toys and other gifts to be homed. I cleaned and tidied and decluttered in December, hoping it would reduce this feeling of being swamped by STUFF but there is still so much stuff. SO much. I’m pushing this off another day. Or week.
Year 6, Day 254: Tis the season of scammers. I nearly got got when I searched for Darn Tough socks sales and found them for 60% off. I picked a bunch, threw them in my cart on my phone so I’d have the list, then went to my laptop to check for cashback. It’s a good thing my purchasing process includes extra steps because I found the site on Rakuten but not the sale prices. Hm. I was pretty sure that it was user error at first but after confused flicking back and forth between the phone and laptop, I noticed “-us” in the URL for the site on my phone. A quick search of the URL and the word legit turned up a Facebook post from Darn Tough pointing out that they only do business at DarnTough.com. A-ha! No cheap non-existent wool socks for me.
We tried to order sandwiches for dinner one night but after a few searches turned up sites with their name but no location where I knew there was a location, I told PiC best not to risk a restaurant search scam, they are super common, and we just drove over to the place to put in our order.
When I needed to order from our local sushi shop, I searched for it online and of course CoPilot puts up a search result with the right name and address, but a completely different site, some “wix” site. That was the quickest and easiest to spot. It’s exhausting that we have to be this much more careful thanks to the slop that’s taking over the Internet.
Year 6, Day 255: Some of my offline friendships are now 20-30 years old. Folks are showing up to gatherings with very grey (and rather distinguished) hair. It’s a touch unsettling to realize we’re all in our 40s and 50s. One of our friends is about to turn 60.
Also unsettling: the number of people I care about who are outsourcing their thinking and writing to ChatGPT (which should spontaneously combust and wither away, I hate it all so much). Your Christmas card? Really? Why?
I’ve gone three more rounds with my printer that steadfastly refuses to work, claiming that the MAC address is being filtered. The MAC address was already manually added to our router’s allowed list, so there’s no reason for it to continue complaining about this! But it persists. It’s possible that the printer will win this standoff and we’ll have to replace the darn thing. That will deeply annoy me since we still have a brand new replacement ink cartridge waiting in the wings.
Year 6, Day 256: Win win: Taking four of JB’s old ratty pencil cases that still worked fine, I organized everything in one of our technology supply drawers and labeled them all. Now we don’t have to bin the plastic and we have the semblance of order in the one drawer. It’s not pretty but who cares, it’s in a shut drawer anyway.
I pieced together a coupon stacking deal at Walgreens for a Tresemme shampoo/conditioner, Garnier shampoo/conditioner, and 2 large Eucerin lotions for $37 after stacking 2 coupon codes and 2 manufacturer coupons. I expect $13 Walgreens cash (which I will need to spend sooner than later) and 3% cashback from MrRebates. That took me back a couple decades to the days of 5% savings accounts and loads of Free After Rebate deals.
