October 27, 2025

Living in the time of pandemic: COVID-19 (282)

Year 4 of COVID in the Bay Area

Year 6, Day 182: I woke up at 5 am with hands curled into claws. My fingers, stiff and swollen, couldn’t be straightened. At first I was confused but then I realized I’d done this to myself. The kids needed outdoor exercise time yesterday but my skeletal pain was so bad, I couldn’t take them to a park. I sat in the yard to play catch with them and have them run relays. Whoops. I could throw and catch yesterday, but that meant giving up the use of both hands for a while today.

I’ve been taking my anti-depressants in the morning for 5? days now. I think(?) it helps a bit with the lack of motivation and the rage during the day. It doesn’t help with the worrying over other people’s lives: bestie’s upcoming biopsy, a friend’s relationship is falling apart in an unexpected and painful way (where it’s not anyone’s fault) but their partner is also acting erratically so I worry about their financial stability especially in this economy. I know of at least two sets of people in my social online circles who are becoming unhoused or on the verge of. I give but I can’t solve these huge problems alone. I also feel so helpless now that I can’t rally any assistance from connections online. This feels weirdly isolating. It’s not about me but it’s miserable seeing so many people’s worlds fall apart.

I found a baggie of cleaned frozen mystery fish that a friend of ours caught. I decided to just bake it with some lemon juice, salt and pepper, and hope for the best. Buuut it was awful. Just terrible. Luckily, after I choked down several bites, I realized what it needed and whipped up a little bowl of mỡ hành from our countertop green onions. It was so much better. Childhood recipe memory to the rescue! This is why I hate cooking fish, I am used to eating really good fish from home recipes but I never learned so everything feels subpar.

Year 6, Day 183: After 4 hours of nightmares and 3 hours of trying to “rest” because I couldn’t force myself to get up predawn to get some work done, I had giant claw hands again today. I popped on my Peculiarity Shop rings for some sensory input that isn’t pain and carried on. Thankfully I had an unplanned and surprise gap in my schedule midday and instead of forcing myself to push through, I laid down for an hour. It made a real difference. I’m trying to be better about finding spots to rest when I feel terrible.

Bright spot, my crow friends visited today! And one of the usual pair is getting VERY brave. It was coming in faster and closer than it’s ever done before, and even hung out waiting for more treats even after we started puttering around in the driveway getting ready to leave. Usually that’s when they take off and put distance between us. Today they either waited on the roof or the car, and even hung on the driveway while I gently tossed treats in their direction.

Year 6, Day 184: Each night I try to sleep, fail miserably, and the next morning I struggle also miserably to stay awake as the sleep was worse than the night before. This week I’ve been trialing a combination of my full dose of prazosin for the nightmare warding, and a time release melatonin in hopes of having more peaceful and maybe prolonged sleep. I can deal with fatigue but that on top of the side effects that come with this much bad sleep, swollen painful hands and wrists plus the All new! Not improved! TMJ like pain because I’m clenching my jaws for hours, are a bit too much. Fingers crossed I can figure out a regimen that helps my body stop making everything bad worse.

SmolAc is aggrieved that they’re being left at TK without any family to keep them company or lovies to cuddle all day every day so each morning, they and JB conduct increasingly dramatic farewells. Bye! Byyeeeeee. Byyyyyyyeeeeeeee! One of these days, they will hit the exact note of melodrama that they are going for.

I defrosted chicken but couldn’t remember what I meant to make with it. PiC decided he’d take that chicken and make fajitas! He had to stop and pick up more ingredients which is a showstopper for me but he did and got dinner together. What a relief.

Year 6, Day 185: 6 lbs of bacon, green and grey. 💔 I don’t know what happened but my bacon all went bad. ☠️😭 Thankfully it was all Zingerman’s bacon, so they were very pleasant about replacing it.

In better news: the prazosin is warding off nightmares and I think I’m getting a handle on when to take it to minimize the side effects now. The extended release melatonin does nothing for me so I’m still waking up 3-5 times a night but it’s more of a muzzy fuzzy waking than the clenched fists-and-face, stress and anxiety dialed up to 12 wakings I’ve been having. Definitely an improvement. My jaw isn’t tender and out of whack which means I can eat! And chew! Glorious! My shoulder and knees are shot but heck I can hobble around with boulder knees, that’s fine.

Year 6, Day 186: Loads of work stress, but a temporarily reasonable amount of work waiting for me specifically today meant I could take the kids to the Halloween carnival thing at PiC’s work. They’re getting to dress up a few times this year, which is nice, they’re getting a good lot of mileage out of their costumes, and these things are mostly fun. Loads of free food (middling good) that the kids loved: hot dogs, nachos, cupcakes, brownies, rice krispie treats. SmolAc even liked the pasta salad.

Far too much time on my feet though, between 3-6 pm, and I paid dearly for that at night.

*****

I’m thinking about all the stressors of the world, people being on the verge of losing homes, SNAP benefits, having no income during this furlough, etc etc, and if I can scrape up the energy to put together a fundraiser to do mutual aid and the like. I will think on it.

Then I read this from Cat Valente and remember how good it was when we could help folks and maybe we can do this again?

Tiny Adds Up: Unshittification and The Pawshank Redemption

October 20, 2025

Living in the time of pandemic: COVID-19 (281)

Year 4 of COVID in the Bay Area

Year 6, Day 175: Friday me: we won’t need to turn on the heat for another month, it doesn’t get all that cold here.

Today me: Freezing, looking for my cozy socks. Sigh. I wonder how much of this storm is responsible for how terrible I’ve felt for the past several days. I feel this kid’s message. But 7 days, not just 3. I’m so over work and unbelievably high pressure.

We have a table of weird dimensions so when I wanted a replacement tablecloth, an hour of hunting only produced a whole lot of irritation that nothing would fit for a reasonable amount of money. Instead I bought 6 different cotton fabrics ($60) and have sewn 4 lengths of them into 2 tablecloths. One more to go. They aren’t QUITE wide enough to overlap more than a couple inches on the long side so they are almost like overgrown table runners but that’s totally fine. They cover the table enough and they didn’t cost $50 each! Bonus, I picked a fabric with a map of the states on it because I can never remember where all the states are and figured the kids could learn some geography. They haven’t yet but they like playing a game using the states with PiC over dinner so that’s a win. I did just notice they never figure out how to put Hawaii and Alaska in there which is a darn shame.

Year 6, Day 176: PiC is concerned about my stress levels which is … fair. My rage (at work, but contained away from work people) has been consistently high which means my depression is taking over. The problem is I’m not really sure what else I can do about it. I’m on my meds, doing therapy weekly, trying to carve out tiny bits of time for myself to decompress amidst the too muchness of it all. I bought myself juice boxes for tiny doses of juice sugar. I eat when I feel hungry (midmorning) and eat less when I don’t (most meals).

I do know the dead garden and lack of dogs is steadily grinding away at my nerves. The putter in the garden was stabilizing, so is playing with a dog. But the intense pain days and fatigue chasers make it really hard to borrow a big dog and the garden, well. “She’s dead, Jim.”

Except for the potatoes. I’ve been in too much pain to dig potatoes for the past month but today I had wrapped my back in a heating pad for several hours which left me capable enough to dig a small bucket of new potatoes. That digging in the dirt is strangely therapeutic in a small way even if I didn’t come up with as many potatoes as I had wanted to see.

Year 6, Day 177: PiC asks every other day what he can do to lighten my load but he can’t remove this work related Sword of Damocles over my head and everything else is almost inconsequential compared to it. He’s already prepping almost all our meals and handling all the kid dropoffs. The crushing anxiety and fear of what happens if I can’t get this ship to harbor (work), or if the world’s falling apart continues apace and we can’t stop it, preys on my mind every minute of the day.

Courtney Milan said this in her recent newsletter: I went through a period of despair and hopelessness in my late teens and early twenties, spanning the first and second times I failed out of college. I don’t want to go into details, but I often thought that it was impossible for things to get better, and there were some years where it felt like I was right. I wondered, often, if there was any point in hoping, because it would only inevitably lead to disappointment.

The thing that got me out of it was probably, among other things, hormonal changes settling as I came into adulthood, but also because I remember there was a point where, in the throes of despair, I made a decision: maybe everything was hopeless, but there was no way to find out for sure without trying.

So I started with the assumption that things weren’t hopeless, and I asked myself: if things aren’t hopeless, what would I do? And I did that thing, and either it worked, or I would discover that it did not work, and then I would go back and say, “okay, if things aren’t hopeless, I have just learned that a thing did not work. What do I do given that information?”

In this spirit, I’m trying a few small things.

• I pulled out the frozen marinated tritip from months ago and cooked it with the new potatoes. That helps the part of my brain that’s sad that I can’t/don’t prep dinner like I used to. Bonus: it was really good.
• PiC has a habit of buying green onions that we don’t remember to use up til it’s too late, frequently. This time, I cut off the greens and stuck the root ends in water. They sprouted magnificently on the first round, a few weeks ago, and I’ve cut them down again. What I learned from this is that I will use green onions if they are always out on the counter. Today I rather haphazardly potted those green onions and they now live on the counter. This gives me plant life.
• I’m taking my anti-depresssants a little earlier in the day. Actually, I’ve always taken them in the evening to make sure I don’t forget but maybe it would be better to take them at the start of the day. I’m not generally aware of my depression overnight, after all!

Year 6, Day 178: Brain fog has finally hit. I noticed that I’d been a little while between fogs last week, so naturally it took over my brain today. It feels like my brain has turned into cotton, or like it’s shutting down and going to sleep without the rest of me.

After an hour of steady decline, I gave myself five minutes to lay down before picking up JB from school and was perplexed to find my synopses were firing more clearly. Rest doesn’t usually help brain fog! Or, does it? I can’t remember trying to rest, only trying to push through. I’ve gotten better at bouncing from one thing to another instead of trying to force a hyper focus that’s unachievable in a fog, but never resting. So after pickup I crawled back into bed and rested another 45 minutes. I wasn’t refreshed as normal people are but it took me a long way toward my baseline. That’s when it occurred to me that it was a combination of actual brain fog and exhaustion exacerbating it. The rest helped with the latter, so I could feel the fog more clearly. Little mysteries. So fun.

Year 6, Day 179: Had myself a mini privileged person panic about money. We’re doing all the “right” things (spending our values, not spending on less important things, using things til they wear out completely, buying quality things so they last, prioritizing saving aggressively and investing aggressively, giving back to the community). The what-ifs (this time: fascism breaks everything) got me. What if we do all the right things and the world goes apocalyptic because the richest people cannot conceive of putting the planet before their profits or their whims, so it’s Mad Max and Thunderdome here in a few or several years. What earthly good would any of our years of discipline and wise management do then? All these years would have been wasted. Well, we enjoy things now but there’s been a lot of frugality where maybe we could have enjoyed things more – I could have had therapy and better health sooner! (Maybe) – if I hadn’t been so deadset on making sure our money foundation was as solid as I could make it these past 20 years.

I talked it over with a PF friend and she said she also has the same fears. Her spouse reminds her that we’ll have much bigger problems than money should Mad Max become reality.

That did not help me even a little, it just opened the door to more doomfears. I have no interest in trying to survive a post-apocalyptic world but I have a responsibility to my family to fight if we do survive. Ugh.

Also, they said, all the rich people are in the market and that’s where their wealth exists so they’re motivated not to let it disappear.

That reassured and also felt gross. I hate that our money is tied up in the same place as people who have a vested interest in the status quo so that we have a vested interest in the status quo when I very much think we need something better than capitalism. But we can’t refuse to play the only game in town on principle, we all have bills to play.

In the end, I’m sad and conflicted about the world we live in.

October 13, 2025

Living in the time of pandemic: COVID-19 (280)

Year 4 of COVID in the Bay Area

Year 6, Day 168: My current form of self indulgence is mangos. For many years, my hands hurt too much to hold, peel, or cut up mangos so unless I was willing to pay exhorbitant prices for the cut fruit (I wasn’t, normally), we weren’t having any. It’s my fruit kinda like watermelon is PiC’s fruit so he’ll buy and prep that but I won’t. My hands still hurt of course but less so now and they are also getting stronger. Enough so that peeling and cutting up mango isn’t the trial that it once was.

My throat has been feeling ick for a few days and I couldn’t make out whether it was viral ick or plain exhausted ick compounding the ME/CFS as it does. Today was the first sign that it might be viral so I’m trying to be mindful and take better care of myself: drinking warm honey lemon water at least and trying to get to bed before midnight despite the pressing workload. I keep covering for my team being out sick and being out for other sad reasons which means my work has been doubled since the start of September. Taking time off really isn’t in the cards yet, they’re not trained enough to get on without me. I’m tired.

Year 6, Day 169: Here’s a subject line that I didn’t expect to see in our email: “Good News: Your Electric Rate Just Went Down”. Apparently “residential electric rates decreased by 2.1%.” I will believe it when I see it.

I didn’t expect that the latest Pixel update, whenever I finally allowed it, would be a good thing at all but I’ve discovered they updated a feature that I had been wanting. I can now pause my alarms for specific date ranges! This is great! When I’m on a different school dropoff/pickup schedule for conference weeks and so on, instead of hoping that I remember to turn the alarms back on when we revert to the standard schedule, I can just set a date range for the alarms to be paused.

Year 6, Day 170: PiC’s employer gets Open Enrollment information ready much earlier than mine so I have dug into the details. They claimed we’d see “an average increase of $34 per month” in medical plan premiums. Ours will go up $70 a month, so about $840 for the year. I expect we may also see prescription costs increase. They’re already up to $30 for 100 day refills through the mail.

Most of their other changes are to fancier plans than ours, so I can ignore those. They always lag on the FSA increases, though, which I suppose is the tradeoff for getting this information early. This year we’ll get the full $3300 contribution limit. We’ll appreciate the increased contribution limit ($7500) for the Dependent Day care for the one year it still comes in useful. Oh wait, that’s not true! It’s also good for camps, after SmolAc is out of daycare. I might actually have to do math to see how much camp costs to see if we’d use the full allotment in 2027, though. Usually no math is required, our childcare and healthcare costs always max out the full contribution amounts.

Year 6, Day 171: Lately, every night I go to sleep nestled in a pile of pillows and every morning I wake up turtled down into my blankets well away from all the pillows. This might be seasonal. This might be a subconscious hiding. Could be a new symptom of cumulative extreme stress. I was so tired today that my face had gone numb and my teeth were uncontrollably chattering despite feeling perfectly warm. A friend surmised this was stress-related which was unsettling. I had to forcibly crank down my work output to a crawl, I could practically feel myself running down to empty, and that helped regain just enough equilibrium to get to the last late night meetings on my books. This fall season is every bit as bad, possibly worse, than I’d anticipated. There’s no hope of better this year, it’s just going to keep getting worse. My only hope now is that all the work we’re putting in these three months will pay off in 2026 when we are better staffed. Fingers, toes, and everything else crossed.

Actually, I was feeling like a failure over how it feels like the end of this year is every bit as bad as last year. I’d come into 2025 determined to make it better. It is still terrible but there’s a difference. Last year, we were just trying to survive 2024. This year is hard because we’re trying to survive 2025 (and not just professionally, we’re now in a world that’s gone absolutely topsy turvy for fascism) but also because we ARE taking steps to prepare ourselves in significant ways before, and for, 2026. I’m working with my partners in leadership, and we’re working truly working together, there’s no infighting with some egotistical powermonger who’s too busy blaming others for his failure. So that gives me a little heart back.

Year 6, Day 172: There’s frost on the windows this morning. I only noticed because folks are talking about finally turning on their furnace for the first time this season. We have frost on windows and/or roofs more often than not since it’s always sort of coldish here so we will likely go another while before we run the heat mostly because our “cold” isn’t very. The season is  turning, though. I noticed that the sun is no longer directly in my eyes driving JB home from after-school activities. Bit of a relief but also a bit foreboding because pretty soon it’ll be dark when we’re driving home.

I’m not sure if the season of early darkness and cold creeping in will help my mental health. Sometimes the need for warm and cozy for the brain also works better in the winter. It’s been feeling hard without canine companions to take the edge off life stresses and losses. It’s been feeling extra hard with trying to continually support folks who are losing ground every day financially in this world, and knowing that I can’t solve any one person’s problems.

Showing SmolAc pictures of the dogs at the rescues, we both really liked a white pittie that had the saddest story. But he needs a canine companion, much like Sera did her first years, so SmolAc asked, can we get TWO dogs? Sadly, I’m not sure we can handle bringing home two dogs at once. They aren’t especially emotionally invested in this. They remember having a dog, they remember Sera, but they don’t viscerally need a dog the way I do. Still, it’s nice to have the chat with them.