November 21, 2022

Living in the time of pandemic: COVID-19 (129)

Year 3 of COVID in the Bay Area.

Year 3, Day 241: An unfortunate confluence of events for this Monday making it an Extremely Monday Monday. PiC had both overlapping meetings and a time sensitive morning errand to run so all before 9:30 I had to: get two boxes of donations out the door for a pickup, get 2 boxes of donations for shipping out the door. Drop off both kids. Drop off a bag for a friend, and drop off a return shipment at the UPS store. It was all a bit of a scramble, made more challenging by Smol Acrobat’s inexplicable (to me, anyway, I’m sure it made sense to them somehow) angry tantrum as I wrassled them out of the stroller and into the car seat.

It’s super satisfying getting five boxes of stuff out of my house but it was also REALLY hard to focus again when I finally got back to my desk.

We’ve got a heck of a week in front of us so this feels like an inauspicious start, especially when we ended the day with some real parent-child headbutting. I hate that. Not much makes me feel like a bigger failure than letting my kid get under my skin.

I’m sure that feeling is exacerbated by this deep pain flaring up on my right side. It started in my hand at 7 am and by 7 pm, my whole right arm and shoulder were aching.

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November 14, 2022

Living in the time of pandemic: COVID-19 (128)

Year 3 of COVID in the Bay Area.

Year 3, Day 234: I’m trying to put together a backup plan in case Twitter goes belly up. I’ve come to rely on it as the gathering place for many friends and acquaintances and the place where neat information comes up or hilarious interactions cross my path that I otherwise wouldn’t ever have known. I have plenty of one on one connections but there’s something unique about the (highly curated) experience of Twitter as a round the clock no commitment social gathering place that’s been really helpful in easing my health-induced isolation.

It’s my digital pub, and it may well be going away. It’s sad. The process of curating a list so that spoiled brat of a billionaire throwing tantrums and threatening to make it impossible to see your own feed unless you pay means I keep running across old fallow accounts. I hate that because it also makes me sad and I don’t know why when I clearly haven’t talked to the person behind that account in 2, 4, 7 years. It’s a thing that always gets to me: reading comments on my blog from years past, people who touched my life for just a moment and disappeared.

*****

Prices just keep going up at the grocery store and I’m sort of insulated from seeing it because PiC continues to do the majority of our grocery shopping but I pay the bills and see the totals there adding up faster and faster. Making our next to last batch of pasta carbonara was a real shocker. I looked up our favorite bacon (Zingerman’s) and it’s now $19/lb!!! I normally buy a bunch when it’s half that price and freeze it to use throughout the year. We may not get our next year’s batch at these prices.

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November 7, 2022

Living in the time of pandemic: COVID-19 (127)

Year 3 of COVID in the Bay Area.

Year 3, Day 227: Halloween! 🎃

After a trunk or treat, a scavenger hunt playdate, and a school parade, my body was so done this morning that I woke up too late to take JB to school and my brain didn’t even understand that until PiC and JB were almost out the door. Oops 😬 😵‍💫

We still had today’s trick or treating so I cranked that heating pad up as high as it could go as if it were a magic carpet that could transport me out of the Peninsula of Pain I currently live in. It helped take the edge off but only just.

I had to consciously decide to slack off at work: only catch up on the weekend’s work backlog and not care that I didn’t clear my inbox or do every single task that could possibly be done. It’s Monday. I’m tired enough for it to be Friday but it’s only Monday.

*****

Pine Ridge / Lakota giving update

I’m extremely online on Twitter, and here, but that’s it. I don’t Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, or anything else. So the news out of Twitter with the Awful Musk Gland takeover is depressing. It’s my water cooler, my direct connection to the world on terms that I can handle, and I hate that it might all go away soon because he’s a horrible person who is intent on transforming Twitter in bewildering ways likely to render it unusable (like reinstating accounts full of hate). That’s also why I’ll keep a set of the Lakota families updates here as well as the Twitter thread I started on the weekend. If Twitter falls apart, I don’t want to lose our progress.

Day 6 spend: $0
Day 6 balance: $1318

Year 3, Day 228: We’re wrecked from Halloween festivities, and we only did half of the parties and carnivals JB had an invitation to! It was a load of fun but I’m D-O-N-E. Phewwwww.

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