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
Read MoreJanuary 28, 2022
1. If you’re a direct aid giving type of person, Quiara is good people. Everything in life is getting increasingly expensive and it’s harder to make a very set income stretch.
2. I pulled a batch of Peanut Butter Banana Oatmeal Bars from the freezer, apparently I froze them back in 2020! 😬 They were still perfect though, and JB was Very Concerned that I didn’t remember where the recipe came from. Thank goodness I had blogged about it!
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January 25, 2022
Welcome to our fifth year supporting families on the Pine Ridge Reservation Okini! I never would have thought we’d be doing this five years later but this amazing community really comes together every year and I appreciate y’all deeply!
Some background on this amazing project:
In 2018, a small group of us came together to give holiday gifts to Lakota families. In 2019, I organized, this time earlier in the year, and expanded to include holiday needs.
The goal for 2020 became to make this a year-round project and amid COVID sweeping the world, pregnancy, and a tumultous Presidential election year in the United States, we put $2153.05 to work responding to ten separate requests for aid.
I kicked off 2021 with a boatload of goods to the Allen Youth Center dedicated to helping Lakota youth specifically: diapers, wipes, body soap, shampoo and conditioner. We ended the year with gifts to the Youth Center for the holidays – almost. It turns out that folks had more to give through the end of the year and we helped another family with much needed diapers before I had to take a break.
All told in 2021, we deployed $6606 responding to 18 requests and helping over 60 people. What a year.
This year I am tweaking it a little bit. Last year I sent around a last call for the start of November and then… we just kept rolling anyway! I’m not going to turn down resources to help people, but at some point I do have to take a break.
I will accept donations all year round and the cut off date will only apply to the shopping part. Anything that isn’t spent on 2022 families will roll over to 2023 families.
I hope you can join me and/or share the project!
1. My Ko-Fi page (note: Ko-Fi flows through Paypal so they do take fees out of what you send)
Update: AGSL’s PayPal can’t receive friends and family gifts anymore so we’re updating contribution methods soon!
January 24, 2022
Year 2 of COVID in the Bay Area.Year 2, Day 309: Everyone else has the day off today and I’m jealous. I’m also annoyed because JB’s morning shenanigans wasted an hour of my work time which means I can’t knock off early or take a long lunch time walk with them. Humph.
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Over the weekend, I made a pasta sauce with ground turkey. I set aside half for one meal this week and half to freeze. We also dug up our teeny tiny potato harvest and I think they’re going to become a plate of crispy garlic roast potatoes. Twitter enlightened me to the magic of parboiling and it works!
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My phone continues to mess with me. Adding to the randomly turning off trick, the keyboard has begun to refuse to actually type at a normal speed and inserting random caps locks and spaces at will. That’s less than ideal. I started researching possible replacement phones over the weekend and got really useful info from folks on Twitter. I think I’ve narrowed down my preferred candidates to three Samsungs: S10, S10e and S20.
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I should NOT have eaten that many shrimp chips in one sitting. 😶
Year 2, Day 310: It’s been a solid two weeks on a new supplements regimen and I think it has been doing some good for my fatigue. I was at rock bottom for my annual exam a few months ago. They referred me to a specialist who gave me a whole slew of lifestyle modification recommendations, some of which I already do, and the one that was easiest to act on was adding a lot of supplements to my daily routine. It’s still early yet to know if it really works for me but even with my other heartburn and heart palpitation issues, I’m a step up from my lay on the floor because I’m so steamrollered and hollowed out and can’t breathe mode.
Obviously still deeply fatigued, as one step away from rock bottom is not much and can be reached easily by a little overdoing it but still. It’s a step up that I’m on most days and I’m really grateful for that much. More please.
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PiC fixed our water filter! Three cheers for PiC! It only took a $250 full replacement of parts which apparently has to happen every 3-4 years. 👀
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JB is really into chorizo burritos these days. We only tried it because of a mistake, we were given someone else’s order. But fun surprise for us, they’re good!
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I hate the plastic waste related to this but I’ve had to make some food plastic concessions for our sanity and energy. We have been going through our fresh fruits and veggies too fast, usually running out before the next shopping trip and we’re trying to keep our shopping time minimal, so I’ve bought cases of fruit cups. When we run out of whole fruit, we still have something for the kids. It helps us bridge gaps and reduces my stressing over that element of their diets when we’re juggling so much.
On that subject, feeding Smol has been a real challenge. They’re so opinionated about what and when they eat that they can spend an entire dinner yelling at me and waving their arms in negatory gestures. The fruit cups help smooth the way to their eating a balanced meal.
Speaking of dinner, I managed to make a lentil salad and salmon dinner tonight! It’s the first night in weeks that I was able to take up my dinner duties again and I’m so relieved to be capable of cooking again.
Year 2, Day 311: I had to gain consciousness at 4 am in part 3 of Smol’s jaunt down FUBAR Sleep Lane. First it was a diaper change. PiC took care of that and then passed out. 20 minutes later, Smol was hollering because they were hungry. PiC speculated (hours later) that we’re hitting another growth period where they’re hungrier faster than usual, but also they were a right pain about eating yesterday so I’m sure they simply failed to get enough calories during the day. I cuddled them in our bed while they drank a bottle (still trying to wean them) and then plopped them back into bed. I couldn’t get back to sleep until just after 5, expecting that I’d really regret going back to sleep later. I did. It was HARD waking up again to take JB to school and get to work!
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I had what should have been my last ortho appt today. PiC said that was fast! I said that felt like an eternity! He said, well that’s because you were holding your breath for 20 minutes!
It’s true.
My ortho is incredibly brisk and to the point which I VERY much appreciated in a time when I wanted to get in and out as fast as I can. It turns out I’m not done yet, alas. They still need a bit more work so while he’s removed the little bits that hold the aligners on, he’s also ordering another set of treatment trays.
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I made dinner two nights in a row! I’m happy that my thrown together chicken in enchilada sauce turned into taco salad night with blue corn taco shells, romaine lettuce and tomatoes, Mexican rice we’d had frozen in the pantry, and guacamole! We both grew up almost exclusively on our respective Asian cuisines but in a pinch, what I can throw together is an approximation of Mexican food for dinner with pantry foods. We’re kinda weird.
Year 2, Day 312: Up at 5 am with Smol, both PiC and I were. Ugh. Why. What have we done to be punished so??
We did our best to keep on chugging today, but it was quite a slog to keep the body and brain in motion.
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My annual collection of tax forms dance has begun! I’ve got a W2, a 1099, just twenty more forms to go! I’ll have to wait up until the end of February to get my Vanguard forms. Booooo. I always look forward to being done with filing so of course I’m on tenterhooks the whole of January and February trying to gather all the forms.
I don’t know why I enjoy this but I do.
Year 2, Day 313: Smol slept well all night!!!! We didn’t have to get up at 4 or 5 am!!!
So that was exciting. AND we’re speculating maybe all the wake ups this week was for a developmental purpose because today, instead of screeching all throughout their meal(s), Smol suddenly started pointing with a purpose which clearly communicated what they wanted at breakfast, lunch, and dinner. It was amazing. It was so much better than the dramatic hollering at random that was impossible to figure out.
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JB celebrated their 100th day of school today. (We all did, because as I pointed out, this was not a solo endeavor.) They had a crown, and wrote 100 words as fast as they could, and brought in 100 small items to share. We had cheesecake for dessert with pretend candles to top it off.
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I’ve gone without a massage for several months and underestimated how severely I’d be in pain after my first one back. After much deliberation and anxiety, I’d taken up an appointment today and it felt good at the time. But the physical feedback afterward had me curled up on the floor in pain by the evening. Seamus and I used to share my heavy duty pain meds to manage his arthritis. Now I’m using his leftover heavy duty pain meds. Turn and turn about.
I couldn’t sleep until 5 am because that’s the tradeoff for being in slightly less than excruciating pain: having a brain that simply cannot fall asleep for the entire night. I wonder if pain meds actually reduce anyone’s pain because my experience with it has always been, at best, a temporary and mild reduction in pain with horrible side effects.
Maybe there’s a different med I can try in the future.
January 21, 2022
1. Last month, we had stocked up on rapid test kits at a huge markup for our travel ($300 worth 😱) but for various reasons didn’t use them all up as I had expected. I felt a bit foolish for miscalculating so when someone I know peripherally on Twitter mentioned an inability to get any tests at all, I was glad we could offer a few of ours. This shouldn’t be an issue but of course this country in this pandemic….SMH. This was just before the announcement that we could order free kits in the mail but that’s a whole 4 kits per address if you can even get them (as of Tuesday, people in multi-household buildings like apartments could not).
2. I organized our coupons and menu drawer and PiC’s t-shirt drawer. One drawer/section at a time!
Challenges this week: We had to make the call to push childcare again. It feels a LOT less bad than going in the middle of a surge with no vaccines but it still feels … rough.
January 18, 2022
JB had a reasonable wish list this year. They wrote seven small items in their notebook and I took a picture in case anyone asked for it. A few loved ones did and they each got a truncated portion of the list to reduce possible overlap. Some family have set gifts every year so they didn’t need to ask. I like that because it’s predictable and practical, right up my alley.
This didn’t work out the way I expected. A lot of people went off book this past Christmas and some overwhelmingly so.
We have a one gift per person policy: a consumable for adults; a book, outfit, or money for kids. Everyone else took it to a whole other level: five gifts per kid on average. It made me feel slightly uncomfortable about the inequity and even made JB feel like their special handmade gift for everyone was not as good. They were fooled by the adults putting the kids’ names as the gifters. They really believed that their young (under age 10) cousins bought them fancy gifts. I had to explain that was a polite fiction and that their personal effort in designing, making, and remembering to pack their own gifts was every bit as meaningful.
I was torn between being grateful that JB and Smol are cared about and showered with tangible gifts, a thing I didn’t really have after age 7 or so, and being completely claustrophobic surrounded by so much STUFF. As a kid, I’d get a cheap watch and then my adult cousins would show up with one more to unwrap, or they’d take us to the matinee. That was pretty amazing but I suspect Kid Me would have also chosen the too many gifts scenario if that was on offer. Is adult me past that because I deal with the consequences of all the stuff, or because I deny that Kid Me deserved that feeling of abundance and love?
JB is gratifyingly super vocally enthusiastic about all the gifts, so their gifters enjoy the experience as must as they do, so there’s that. They used to get overwhelmed and overstimulated after the tenth gift, so we’d exercise portion control on opening a couple things each day, but now they could go on for days.
I’ve spent three days decluttering and organizing. It’s still not enough. JB was assigned the task of picking older things they’re prepared to let go of as well. They managed to pick about three things. The one-in one-out rule is being gently enforced because this year they’re old enough to get it. We refuse to live among mess and clutter, daily breaking a path through the toys and books and clothes. There must be some kind of order here, darnit!
I understand the pull and delight of new things, we struggle with it on several levels, but we have to find balance on this together as a family. We talked about how we should be able to live in our home with actual clear surfaces to sit on and work at, how we should be able to walk through the house without tripping over things and kicking or knocking things over. We also talked about how we don’t want to spend ALL our time cleaning things because we have too many things. Here’s hoping that some of this sinks in.
January 17, 2022
Year 2 of COVID in the Bay Area.Year 2, Day 302: After a too active weekend, I started this day in a bad place. Bad mood, drained of energy, short of breath, mostly zombie.
I think everyone started around the same place because our morning was no good.
The rest of the day boded ill as well with Smol waking up early from their afternoon nap, but it got better once we adults flipped our mental commitments from work to family. Though too early, we stopped trying to squeeze in work and went for a walk in preparation for an earlyish dinner.
That was better. Then having a fun Zoom call with family helped revive my spirits a lot. Some days feel like weeks, this was one of them.
Year 2, Day 303: Have you ever had dreams about your adult teeth falling out? I used to have a recurring dream where I wiggle a tooth so much it falls out and then I realize it was an adult tooth and I needed that!!
Those all came back today when JB asked me to wiggle their loose tooth, and then to pull it out. *Shiver* I’d like to pull it out but it’s not ready yet. UGH.
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Taking my fun where I can find it: tickling the breath out of Smol when they’re up for it. They also like plonking their face on my head and smushing their face into my face. Then they rub their face onto my face like a cat, and start chuckling. They’ve also discovered bouncing today. Happy bounce, angry bounce, shrieky bounce, giggly bounce. They tuck their legs underneath them and bounce! bounce! bounce!
I also quizzed, wait, no, interrogated PiC on his retirement desires and goals.
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January 14, 2022
1. Tami at Disabled Girl on Fire started her Patreon for helping her to help people in her community. A darn good cause. If you can, it’d be great to support her!
2. I’m getting myself in order for the 2021 tax year thing. I always feel very anticipatory about this even though it’s possible we’ll owe money. Suppose that’s the anticipation talking: I want to see if my projections last year worked out as intended.
3. Delightful: We got a case of a variety of formulas from Enfamil for … I don’t know what reason that we couldn’t use. I couldn’t donate it anywhere here but was loathe to just throw them out. That’s perfectly good formula! I shipped them to Penny and she was able to distribute them in a day!
4. We took Smol Acrobat out to greet JB coming home from school one day and the squeals from the happy elder sibling were really something. We’d stopped halfway up the street, Smol had given up walking, and was leaning on my legs but was so happy to see their JB that they practically ran home with the renewed vigor. It’s very nice to see them adoring each other right now.
5. Our friend sent us an absolutely hilarious gift.
Challenges this week: I’m still exhausted every week. It’s frustrating that my health did improve with therapy and still only moved my baseline from untenable to moderately to severe misery depending on the day. I hope this isn’t the best time I have left.
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