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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January 16, 2023
Year 3 of COVID in the Bay Area.
Year 3, Day 293: We were doing so WELL for a few days there. Smol Acrobat was eating most meals with gusto, they were communicating better and best of all: were not coughing, sneezing, dripping, or burning up. Until today.
Add that to the last three days of terrible sleep (worse than my usual, which is saying something), caused by searing pain in my neck and shoulders, and feeling really shitty about the weekend of conflict with JB which had me feeling like a total parenting failure. I could absolutely cry today.
All I want is a burger, fries, and 16 hours completely alone with my computer, some books, a pile of blankets, and Sera.
Sigh. None of those things are happening, of course. Not on a Monday, not with a sick Smol to tend to. I vented to some friends and sat at my desk, glumly working as fast as I could, wanting to let out the stress with tears but not being able to.
At some point, the thought occurred to me: everything feels very hard right now. Maybe it wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world to give myself a little break. Maybe I can commit to just a little time to myself, sometime this week, if Smol can be away during a school day.
My therapist often says being gentler with myself would help let off a little of the pent-up pressure and I usually don’t know how, but that silent ghost of a promise helped.
I stress ate some candied pecans (why do they sell these by 6 oz bags and not the pound?!), went in on a little lotto pool with a friend, tried to set up Yotta and got rejected, and discovered that Smol can put on their own jacket. I had forgotten they would have learned at daycare by now, so when I asked semi-jokingly “can you put on your coat?” and they said “yes”, well surprise surprise, they can! Only when they’re inclined to.
This tweet thread is timely. Given these two options, if I am transparent at all, I’d almost always opt for emotional transparency instead of vulnerability. I get close to emotional vulnerability here, mostly, and with a very few other people. I think it’s because I am so accustomed to people not showing up when I express a need or a struggle. I expressed it in the past and I was still on my own. So why bother? Why bother and be disappointed when I could just skip that entirely? I understand the flaws in that thinking now but I remember why it developed.
Year 3, Day 294: Treating my pain today is a whole universe away from when I first experienced my chronic pain 27 years ago. None of these factors listed on the tweet below were ever examined back then, most certainly not the trauma bit. It’s not eliminated my pain, this week is a huge reminder of that even if I were inclined to forget, but it makes a big difference. I can function more. The joy is dampened by having developed ME/CFS in the meantime but I can appreciate the reduced pain frequency nonetheless.
Year 3, Day 295: Alas, we did not strike it rich on the Mega Millions, friend and I bought tickets on a lark, so after a terrible night of hysterics and some vomit for Smol (with PiC and I sort of splitting the night), and night sweats and nausea for me, it’s back to the donut factory for both adults this morning. Darn.
Semi-related: My sense of taste is all off this week. Things taste metallic or “chemically” (I don’t know how else to describe it) to me, where they taste perfectly fine to others. This could just be my normal weirdness rather than anything COVID. I go through cycles where potatoes taste bad and carrots taste like soap. No idea why, but I hate it. Last night’s Japanese curry dinner tasted too salty and my berry flavored sparkling water tasted like medicine. 🤷🏻♀️
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Some days I feel all kinds of conflict internally: I want to be up and about, I want to curl up in a ball and hibernate, I want want want. It’s puzzling today because I already let myself lay down for a couple hours today to rest, anticipating another hard night with Smol Acrobat. These feelings make me feel like a child. Shouldn’t I feel like an adult by now, here in my 40th year? What does an adult even feel like?
In fact, that reminds me of a conversation I had with my friend and mentor who is starting a new stage in life and likens it to being like a toddler again: it’s exhausting having feelings, feeling them, and learning how to navigate them. No wonder we get sensory overload and exhausted.
Speaking of lacking emotional vulnerability: I saw a tweet asking for help for a stranger going through medical issues, from a friend of theirs, among many many other Mutual Aid tweets. It struck me, again, that my whole emergency and savings planning revolves around never asking for help. I want to save enough for retirement and for our future health needs, and set very high goals, because I don’t ever want to tell anyone that we need help in an emergency. I spent too many years digging out of financial holes, and getting set back frequently, and I can’t believe or trust that anyone would care enough or be able to help us if we hit the rocks. SMH. My scars run deep.
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A whole lot of friends discovered they had ADD/ADHD during the pandemic, and I was happy that they were getting treatment that helped. It took Abby’s latest post to make me start wondering if I might have a touch or more of it. I emailed my GP with the list. I am a slow learner!
Weirdly, as I sent it off, I had this bizarre feeling of “no I don’t WANT to have another thing wrong with me!” I was almost embarrassed. I feel so broken. I already have fibromyalgia and ME/CFS.
And yet, I will have to laugh if I end up with another diagnosis, courtesy of blogging friends. So many gifts from Twitter/blogging/the internet.
Year 3, Day 296: Much less overnight hysteria from Smol last night, though they still had multiple wake-up, which was much appreciated because my joints and tendons are furious today. It feels as though iron spikes were driven deep into my joints. It was impossible to find a comfortable position to sleep in that didn’t make it worse. So, that’s fun! /sarcasm
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I’m trying to redeem an expense benefit from an employer today. They offered a small stipend for certain expenses this year so I chose to use it on daycare.
Since daycare won’t take credit cards, we paid in full and followed the directions (I read them three times) to submit a claim for reimbursement with the receipt.
Dear readers, they rejected the claim today because “you paid in full”. Yes, we did, that’s why we’re asking for a reimbursement. Duh? Who asks for a reimbursement when they didn’t pay? That’s a whole other verb. That’s what the whole reimbursement and uploading a receipt process is for, is it not? Annoying. I’ve submitted a help request. Let’s hope someone gets their head out of wherever it’s hiding. I’d like to cross this thing off my list and deploy that money where it can do some good.
January 13, 2023
1. I hope that by the time this goes live, the order will have shipped already. I bought a dear friend something from off their wish list that I normally don’t get to see. It’s a fun extra surprise because their birthday and Christmas are quite far off.
2. Our wonderful regular contributors to the Lakota Giving Project got us in gear to start this year off right. I’ve been working on our first family! Deeply grateful for this community. ❤️❤️❤️
3. I’ve discovered the ability to take long screenshots and to add them to WordPress so I’m sharing tweet threads that way to preserve them in case they go away.
Challenges this week:
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January 10, 2023
As I wrap my head around the fact that it’s January again, I’m preparing for a new year of giving. I’ve recorded the archive of our project on this page.
There’s a lot of uncertainty this year. Without Twitter, my fundraising reach might be next to nothing. Many, if not all, donors came across the project from Twitter. Greg Doucette, who runs a massive campaign each year to feed kids feels the same way. When asked when he’ll start fundraising for this year’s Foodraiser, he replied:
I truly don’t want the demise of Twitter to be the end of this project too but we’ll have to see. I hope that y’all will share, and donate if you’re able, and help us keep this going.
This year’s goals:
- Continue helping 1-2 families a month throughout year.
- Raise $6000 to shop the Thanksgiving-adjacent and weekend sales to supply the community in bulk.
- In March, we’ll start saving large boxes in March for the end of year giveaway. When school lets out and they wash all the left behind clothing, I’m driving over there with an empty car and loading it up with as many good coats and sweaters as we can carry home to ship out. They’re perfectly good clothes, free, and will only cost shipping!
I’ve shipped 30 lbs of clothing, toys and COVID tests to start us off. With three contributions, including our own first donation of the year, we’re at a total of $418.22.
If we can get to $700-800, we’ll be ready to start with our first family of the year! There’s a family of 9 that lives waaay out in the country and hasn’t received any help for a month. I’d like to get them well outfitted.
How you can help (Every penny matters!):
Venmo: @RK-Tillman
PayPal: ruthtillman [@] gmail.com
Cashapp: $ruthkt
Please supply your email address if you’d like updates on where the money goes.
Thank you all for your ongoing support of the Lakota people!
January 9, 2023
Year 3 of COVID in the Bay Area.
Year 3, Day 288: Gas is below $5/gallon. I checked our records and it went below $5.25 around Thanksgiving weekend. What a difference it makes to each fill up total! We’d been nudging $100 for a 3/4 tank at those prices. *shiver*
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We have a break between storms today and I’m trying to make the most of it. I ran out of steam yesterday. We’ve got two more loads of laundry, I’ve got some donations to ship to Allen Youth Center, and I’d like to get Sera a doggy sweater.
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Huzzah! Nicole and Maggie’s comment fixed my problem. Well, got me to fix it. When the block editor was first rolled out, we were able to pick which editor to use for new posts. Then they took that choice away. So I went into the settings but my toggle to turn off block editor was greyed out.
I checked again this week and the toggle is functional! I can write new posts in classic editor! 🎉
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I noticed on Twitter that a player collapsed on the field during the Bills/Bengals game, and the NFL didn’t immediately, or very quickly after, cancel the game. I don’t follow football but this is the kind of stuff that floats up to my attention because it’s something my circles are interested in. It was both not at all surprising that the NFL didn’t have what it took (morality? souls?) to immediately cancel the game and apparently expected both teams to take the field again shortly after, without knowing if a fellow player was ok. I heard that the teams and the team reps told the NFL that the game wouldn’t go on (buzzfeed article). There’s something deeply wrong with parts of our society for that not to be an immediate decision, IMO. And football is such a dangerous game.
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Inspired by the vacation that very much wasn’t, I designed a couple new tees: small body, big feelings (guess who?), big heart big feelings. Tickled by silliness about people being more charmed than sensible: skritches get stitches. (more…)
January 6, 2023
1.Mutual aid needed: GoFundMe for a family whose home was destroyed by fire the week before Christmas.
2. I hope this doesn’t jinx us but Smol Acrobat has willingly and voluntarily (as in, ate it themselves instead of having to be coaxed) eaten full meals three nights this week: a starch, protein and veggie! This is big.
3. In scraping the silver stuff that covers the access code on a Target gift card, a whole chunk of the sticker with the numbers came off too. Unfortunately a chunk that I needed! I wrote down all the numbers I could see clearly and then manually tested every single permutation of numbers to find the access code. I found it!
4. I need to remember this more often. I frequently struggle with seeing my progress when it does happen:
Challenges this week: insomnia is a terrible foe.
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January 4, 2023
“Happy” still feels strange to say right now. It’s been a year, much of which feels divorced from reality, because each day is a week and each week is a month.
The COVID pandemic is still a thing at the end of 2022. We’ve regularly gotten COVID case notifications from the school all year, and I noticed an increase in frequency in the last few months. PiC’s employer is still recommending masking and maintaining certain remote protocols (which I think should be stronger but no one listens to me).
We worked and parented full time all year long and felt every painful minute. This was a hard year for us in a lot of ways, so it’s not just you after all, Nicole & Maggie!
This year felt like another decade.
2022 Highlights in Health
- I continued brain therapy all year. My pain is more manageable even while the ME/CFS plagues me. I still struggled with loneliness and disconnectedness.
- In the last few months of the year, we found a way for PiC to get a lot more regular outdoor time than he got last year. We’re hoping to keep that up in 2023.
- Smol Acrobat’s introduction to daycare and other disease vectors (kids their age) was riddled with germs.
- JB and Sera were reasonably healthy.
The wild cards of COVID and now RSV are still around. Three of us are fully vaxxed and double boosted. Smol Acrobat’s vaxxed but not yet boosted. We continued to be cautious about socializing, avoiding crowds and staying masked around other people.
2022 Highlights in Life
We are still chugging along.
Me: still occasionally forgetting my learned lessons and trying too hard to do all the things and being feelings-avoidant. When I can’t avoid the feelings, I resent that I have to feel them. But on the other hand, I’m doing so much better at avoiding shame spirals when I make mistakes. That’s progress. I didn’t even know I was doing it before and reducing the spiral frequency reduces my pain. I was doing ok with feeling my feelings for a while but after so many losses, and so many complications with family and COVID, I’ve grown so tired of grieving. I’m doing some things I care about: reading, helping people, saving and investing. I’m wishing I could do more of those things and less work for pay.
Socially, we did more this year. We attended a loved one’s wedding, saw two sets of loved ones we haven’t seen in years and I got to meet up an author whose work I really enjoy for a long chat about anything under the sun. That last one was a whole lot of unexpected fun considering my introverted self wasn’t sure that we’d have enough in common to chat for long.
PiC: still working and fitting in his hobbies around the edges of caretaking and household stuff we share. We could use more balance. We’re slowly making space for more balance.
Smol Acrobat: we were without childcare for eight months. Six of those months were spent stressing over if and when we’d get a vaccine for Smol Acrobat. Once daycare started, the latter months of the year were spent tending to a sick Smol Acrobat, recovering from being sick, or both. But they do seem to be benefiting from the social aspects of daycare and their words are coming in fast and thick (and garbled). They’re loving their commute and they’re thriving with the enrichment so I’m feeling a lot less anxious about their day to day. I’m just mildly anxious about all the germs. PiC caught the little trouble seeker licking all the toys at pickup. 🤦🏻♀️
JB: attended school through the academic year, camp during the summer, and had two sports activities at different times this year. They love both activities and I suspect they’d love an additional one but we are in agreement that we want to maintain balance.
Our schedule is nothing compared to friends’ kids and we still have zero desire to add anything else.
The kids being out of the house is very good for my need for quiet / quiet time to work and not so good for my immune system.
2022 Highlights in Money
- I ended 2022 with almost the same amount of cash in our checking account as we started, for a second year. There’s something nice and balanced about that. Makes me feel like I’ve got some sort of consistency in our savings and spending.
- Our net worth dropped. The market is doing what it does.
- Related: With some minor adjustments to the recurring amounts in response to all our expenses going up, I stuck to our weekly investing plan. I squeezed every penny I could to pour into investing. We put in 17% of new contributions but ended the year with only 2% more than the start of the year total. Phew.
- I am almost done waiting for my state and federal amendments to be paid. One last refund pending!
- Our iBonds paid some decent interest.
- Collectively, we did an amazing job with our Lakota families project. We fulfilled 17 family requests for aid in the first ten months. In the last two: we shipped 3 cases of gently used items, friends shipped 3 packages of gently used bedding, and the Fall project provided dozens with warm clothes and other necessities.
We continued to be fortunate in having two full time incomes even if PiC had to start working on site. PiC was minimally impacted by recent layoffs, thankfully, and I might never not hold my breath a little when hearing news about layoffs but I hope to unclench my fists a little more each year.
We spent a lot on daycare, direct aid, my therapy, take out a few times a week some weeks, groceries (delivered, once in a rare while), and convenience foods.
For value, the therapy is probably the best thing I spent money on this year. I continue to identify and unpick (or try to) patterns that don’t serve me well. Very close runner up is daycare. This only misses the top spot because of the increased risk of SO MANY germs that comes with the time it bought me to be able to focus on work.
Financial Checklist for 2023
- Update our will and trust to include Smol.
- Change executors to people who have more ability to deal with our mess in case something happens to us.
- Make the important financial documents securely available to the key people.
- Add details on our bequests and set up secondary beneficiaries.
Thoughts for 2023
I self isolated from a large branch of family this year. I struggled with their politics and view of the pandemic which has impacted how I see them. I’ve also put more distance between myself and my chaos-driven loved ones for my sanity. It’s worked, my mental and emotional balance is better, even while it saddens me to deliberately foster distance during a time I’m still feeling lonely. I don’t know what our relationships will look like in 2023. I’d like to find a better balance. But I’m not sure if I’m comfortable seeing them unvaxxed (them) and unmasked (them).
We did reconnect with other family this year with whom we’d fallen a bit out of touch. That was really good and I’d like to keep that connection solid.
Our money
Same same. Save more, invest more, give more. Achieve FI in less than 5-10 years.
Our expenses will be going up:
- Full time childcare is more than our mortgage! We’re still part time. Stomaching that increase will be tough but we should plan for it by around midyear or so.
- We still haven’t committed to a new car and that chip shortage will probably carry into another year of low inventory and high prices but we’d better start saving.
- I’m not sure if we can expect any (minor) increase in PiC’s salary. I hope so, it’ll help offset the sting of inflation and increased daycare costs.
Little life things
A dear friend made me a giant Taylor Swift playlist on request. I’m going to start listening to it in earnest in 2023 now that I don’t have a huge stressful holiday to worry about.
I’m committing to monthly phone calls (anathema though they are to my introvert self) with a couple loved ones who connect best by phone, not text.
I’m resolving to do some little things that will make life a bit more smooth for ourselves. Bigger picture: Declutter, donate, organize. Small specific thing: Print out gift labels for people we regularly gift to since that’s one weak point of my gifting. I’m the worst at gift tags and gift labels. Another specific thing: figure out people’s gifts early in the year.
I hope to expand the Lakota Giving project a little more this year.
:: I hope that 2023 is kinder to all of us. How was your 2022?
January 3, 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 $400 in dividends from the stocks portfolio.
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