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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October 8, 2025
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 $82.50 in dividends from the stocks portfolio.
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October 6, 2025
Year 4 of COVID in the Bay Area
Year 6, Day 161: I was looking forward to this day all month. A specific form of stress was scheduled for this month and if I was lucky it was going to be over today. I was determined to be Zen Zen Zen. I probably 70% succeeded? But then layered on top of that, I had one key person on my team out for the first two weeks of the month. When they returned, a second key person on my team was out for a week. All unexpected and unavoidable and exhausting as I covered for all of them. Then I got the news that my friend is in her final days, and then the news that a relative is undergoing a scary surgery soon. Naturally, after making it through the very hard goodbye visit this weekend, walking away from our friend knowing we won’t see her again, SmolAc fell to the latest terrible viral incursion. Their throat was a misery all weekend, complete with fevers and a (thankfully mild) cough. They got no sleep, so I got no sleep. All of which to say: this month has been an absolute ball (draining, long and late nights, a whole lot of fuss, a whole lot of muss). This day that I was looking forward to was a haze of the shakes and flu like symptoms (which happen when I am so exhausted I’m about to slide into PEM). It’s lovely trying to work out whether I feel sick because I’m sick or because I’m so damn tired my body thinks it’s sick. I AM glad that the original form of stress has ended at least. And a few of the other stressors we will be recovering from if I can make it back to near baseline this week. Just. Dang. What a way to open the week. It felt like a week in a day.
Year 6, Day 162: Past me, all the kudos. The kids have turned on the grape acetaminophen flavor and SmolAc’s visible distress every dosing time for that instead of the ibuprofen pushed me over the edge. I planned to run out and buy them name brand Tylenol for the cherry flavor and for them to try the apple flavor. Anything but the now-hated grape. Except when I went on the hunt for some small round bandaids (I still can’t find them), I discovered past me had already anticipated this and loaded up on cherry flavor Tylenol. THANKS, ME.
Also why must my children be opposites in all the most unhelpful ways? JB only ever sustained giant lacerations, 2 inches and bigger. I have loads of giant bandaids and gauze and medical tape. SmolAc? TINIEST injuries requiring the smallest of bandaids. Which I never have because why would we bandage that? Oh, right, because they’ll forget and scratch, rip it open again and come crying to me with the most tragic of faces. I made do with a tiny square of gauze and a square of medical tape. Never let it said I could be defeated in first aid by tiny wounds and scratches.
Year 6, Day 163: My therapist warned me that I’m so burned out that I’m about to break, so I had to set a boundary for someone directly asking me for help that I can’t give. I’m not knowledgeable in that area they need help in and their case is complex. Even knowing that and even recognizing the burnout I didn’t quite recognize how bad it was, and I still felt guilty for not being able to help.
And oh, right, that’s my depression expressed as rage, missed that wee detail. I mean, I’m only sick of everyone and everything all the time, that’s not normal? No, not really. Normal is being light to medium exasperated by everyone and everything. Not so fed up with them that I want to bite off everyone’s heads for existing at me.
I had a really dark suicidal-type thought this morning quickly followed by, well THAT was dark. And then awwww MAN. Therapist was right. I am so tired and burnt out that the “logical” reply to a self-care comment was a suicidal type thought.
Late tonight I realized there was another contributing factor: missing my nightly handful of meds, which include my antidepressant, last night. Welp. Can’t live well without those. Quite literally. Other signs of burnout: I entirely overlooked a payday happened. I haven’t missed checking and recording a payday more than twice in the past 20 years. I love paydays for the money and the endorphins. To be so overwhelmed I miss a major source of endorphins, not great. But I had my meds, I vented with a friend, SmolAc is slowly recovering.
Year 6, Day 164: We’re a month away from being done with Project from Hell #1 (and starting Project from Hell #2 and #3), so that’s kind of a good thing. We are still in the thick of it now but there will be an end in sight.
Total subject change: Five and ten years ago, I was served Apple & Eve Orange tangerine juice after the kids were born and I’ve been wishing to get my mitts on it ever since.
Costco online seemed to have the brand in a large assorted flavors case, but said it wasn’t available at our local stores or online for shipping, so I couldn’t see which flavors it held. That sent me down the rabbitiest of rabbitholes. I gave up after 40 minutes of trying every possible combination of zip codes and locations and settled for buying a variety available at the local store: fruit punch, strawberry watermelon and mixed berry.
Year 6, Day 165: Here’s me ruing the speaking too soon. The Project from Hell #1 is really doing a number on me today. By that I mean the incompetent fools who were responsible for key parts of this did a terrible job of setting it up and the most basic parts of it still don’t work. I’ve got something like 50 hours of work needed for it and 2-4 hours to do it in since I also don’t get to weasel out of all my other responsibilities.
A deep sigh.
And today’s fraught for deeply heavy reasons. My friend @isobelcarr has passed. 💔 It’s hard to grasp that I won’t share dog pictures or stories or political rants with her anymore. It all happened so fast. I exchanged messages with her just two months ago asking whether I could bring her anything for her then-current round of treatment. She’d been fighting cancer so hard for so long and I hoped this latest was just a blip. That we’d have her another 50 years. But we lost her this week and so many who loved her are bereft.
October 3, 2025
1. You can always tell it’s been a hard week when I couldn’t think of a good thing. But getting to do my exercises for the first time this week was really nice!
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October 1, 2025
Life with JB
We now have a fifth grader and our first “please don’t hug or kiss me in public” request which is weird after a summer of cling.
I’m second guessing myself a little tiny bit but mostly not. JB had a friend in their sport who turned out to be a real jerk of a kid but they’re also manipulative so they’re nice to JB’s face and an asshole behind their back to mutual friends. I’m proud of mutual friend for shutting that shit down outright and I’m proud of JB for learning to use the little white lie when JerkFace approached them and wanted to know what they were doing. I’ve been teaching them to be honest with people you’re close to, but people who aren’t trustworthy don’t deserve all of the truth. Especially the little twerps who use that honesty to hurt you. I’d given them my phone to use for a quick phone game so they could have an excuse not to talk to JerkFace, JerkFace wanted to know what they were doing and JB blandly replied, “Oh, just texting a friend.”
“Mutual friend?”
“No, you don’t know them.”
Now, encouraging my kid to lie isn’t maybe the strongest parenting move but honestly I’d rather they had that protecting them from having to be honest and therefore vulnerable to the random jerk kids they encounter regularly.
Life with Smol Acrobat
SmolAc has this funny thing where they are very declarative, and I can’t tell if it’s for emphasis or a cadence thing. It makes them sound a bit like a kids storybook:
I wasn’t coughing, I was not.
I do not want those fruits, no, I do not!
Did you know I jumped the fence? Not the other fence, no. Not that one.
But I can’t help wif anything? I cannot?
They thought it was an awien (alien) but it was not an awien, it was not.
Pupdate
The problems blocking dog adoption that I can solve are: rebuilding our cash reserve, much depleted after the house work, to a minimum of $12K and identifying reliable sitters in case we need to travel where we can’t bring our furry family. I hate leaving them but there are some places that aren’t suitable for them and they’d be happier staying with a good sitter. There’s a hospice dog that I’ve got my eye on. We’d been going through Rover with Seamus and Sera but it was a slog every time the casual sitters would move on or stop sitting or whatnot. I think a full time sitter and a dog boarding facility that isn’t depressing will be the key combination for our needs.
But the thing I can’t solve, only time can, is moving into a slightly different (less?) hectic period of our lives. Caring for dogs is all-consuming at times and right now it’s hard to tell when makes more sense to bring home a fur companion. I surmised that maybe next fall could work, that’s also when our daycare payments finally stop which would be a huge cash back to our budgets. That’s good! Dog money!
Buuuuuut that’s also hard to figure out what we’re going to do with SmolAc being in school only half the day. Unfortunately SmolAc could not fill that time by, say, helping me care for a dog. They need age appropriate activities so that time period will be ??? I will still have a full time job so uh. That might NOT be the best time. I don’t know – there’s not going to be a quiet time in our lives for another twelve plus years, so it’s not like waiting til that happens will work. I’ll quietly tip off the edge of reasoning if I have to be dogless that long. But if we can get in our
Precious Moments
SmolAc: Ozzy came to my school and we did a breakdance. We runned, FWIP! Like dat.
SmolAc: *sudden cackling* Coach Paul today, he said (tapping on my head with each exclamation) “boing-oing-oing-oing, oops! Ribbit! Wet’s twy dat again! Ribbit! Ribbit! Ribbit! Boing-oing-oing-oing! Ba-doop! Ba-doop! Ribbit!”
Oh, was he playing duck duck goose?
SmolAc: “No!” *Cackles, then farts 12 times, cackles some more*
*****
SmolAc: what are these?
Me: Stretch marks from when you and JB were in my body.
SmolAc: you eated me???
Me: No!
September 29, 2025
Year 4 of COVID in the Bay Area
Year 6, Day 154: I felt that! 3 am quake in the Bay Area. I woke up to the rumble as it started up and counted the seconds waiting for it to either escalate or stop. As it wound down I guessed: 4 near us, or a 6 far away. I waited another 15-20 minutes to see if it would be followed up by a bigger one but thankfully that was it. 4s don’t concern me. 6 does. But more than that, I feel like the fact we’re well overdue for another Big One is unsettling. I keep whispering to the fault under us: do as many 4s as you need to relieve your stresses, don’t let it all build up til you liquidate the whole Peninsula!
There’s a life lesson in there somewhere.
I’m trying to get through this week’s PEM, brought on by doing a social thing on Sunday morning. I knew, when I was leaving the house, that I wasn’t actually up to the task but not going wasn’t fair to the kids who had been really looking forward to it. So I pushed through and, of course, crashed. Thankfully laying down until the evening was possible and repaired just enough of the damage for me to function minimally again. Really bad crashes make me pass out entirely so this was something like a 7 on the PEMs Richter scale.
Year 6, Day 155: I’m feeling the complexity of being in a relatively good financial position after so many years of fighting to find and build stability. It’s still not good enough to just do what we want, but tis good enough to help other people. I think about how people struggle with understanding when they have “enough” and how much that’s going to be me. Comparatively, we’ve made it. We can pay our bills, we can weather a lean year without income. We can’t live off our investments now. They would take us through a rough micro patch: illness, layoff, big bills. They would not cover us in a macro-level rough patch: fascism takes down the stock markets, major stock market crash for other reasons, a second Great Depression brought on by high unemployment and high prices due to tariffs. I won’t feel comfortable walking away from employment until we’re so well off that it’d take a severe series of events to make us go back but what that number is, well…! It keeps going up with everything going on here. These ruminations come more often as I see more and more need online, and as I have harder days at the job where I wish myself well out of the rat race. Who knew I’d be such a reformed workaholic that retirement savings simply cannot build up fast enough?
A complaint I wasn’t expecting to hear today from SmolAc: I ran out of green beans! (To eat, even).
Year 6, Day 156: I would very much like to know what’s wrong with dream me. I keep having dreams where I’m running to do errands or go somewhere whether on foot or driving and halfway there I find that I’m barefoot. Then inevitably I have to go into a public restroom which is absolutely filthy and gross. Why can I never remember to put on a pair of shoes in my dreams??
I am more disturbed by this dream than the non-zero number of times I’ve almost left the house without pants on. Says something about my priorities, possibly.
Year 6, Day 157: Work life has advanced to a new level of intense this week. We’re testing some new systems and the designers of those systems are giant arrogant blowhards, so my exasperation levels are at an all time high. That’s saying something considering the past 2.5 years which have sucked. I’ve worked with many a dev in the past, and even got on quite well with the ones who notoriously shunned everyone else around them and refused to commit to any deadlines, except for me. I don’t think I’ve ever met a software developer as arrogant as this fool who declares that the systems will absolutely work perfectly as intended by the go-live date. That’s not how this works.
There is always always something that goes wrong or some edge case or some damned bit of code that worked fine in production that zigzags in live and hocks up hairballs. It’s absolutely the nature of the business so you plan to mitigate those issues. I’m super grateful to my co-leads who have taken the hits in taking most of these meetings with these unmitigated jackasses because I’ll be honest. No amount of professionalism would have survived an encounter where I had to sit through hearing some of that bullshit first hand. Just hearing it secondhand had me wanting to Force choke him. (Anecdotally, it’s always a him.) I idly wonder if my new bosses already know me well enough to keep away the worst of the jackasses until I absolutely must cross paths with them because my patience is now rather famously limited and my co-leads are happy to shine up my reputation as being a hardass. Whatever the reason, I’m taking many many deep breaths to get through this and next week. If we can get through the end of November, when I’ll move on to my next massive migration project, maybe I won’t be on the verge of exploding like a volcano when an incompetent turkey gobbles aloud.
Year 6, Day 158: My hip pain was at an 8 today, which is: grinding my teeth involuntarily, and nauseous with the pain. I resorted to taking every pain medication I had – one of every variety, not all of the meds in total – in a giant handful and it feels almost miraculous that it did take the edge off. Sometimes not even that helps.
At daycare pickup I ran into a frazzled mom desperately trying to load her very angry 2 year old into their car. The kiddo was going full “stiff as a board can’t shove me into the car or a car seat” mode and she looked EXHAUSTED. I took a chance and made eye contact and said really sympathetically, gosh it is SO HARD to get into the car at the end of the day, isn’t it? It’s Friday, what are we thinking, asking this of you? And the kid was bewildered enough by this strange lady using her dog voice at them that they slid right down to the ground and stopped fighting. The mom and I chatted for a while, further confusing the kid who decided to just lean on her legs, and at some point she asked if I was PiC’s wife? Then the bewilderment was mine, have …we…met?? Go figure I was going to be mortified to be talking to someone I thought was a stranger only to find out I knew them. Thankfully no, she just recognized Smol Acrobat in the car behind me. We gassed up the littlest one a little and asked if they could show us how they got in their car? In that way of 2 year olds, tantrum forgotten, they happily scaled the SUV to their car seat. We cheered and clapped and waved goodbye. The mom mouthed THANK YOU!!! as she shut the door, finally.
It was really nice to help a mom who could have been me ten years ago, just beaten down and asking WHAT IS HAPPENING as the life of a toddler unfolds around me.
September 26, 2025
1. TIL that chocolate is fermented. WHAT.
2. I’ve learned more about football from Chris Kluwe on Bsky than anyone else. I really like that he’s politically active, and vocally fighting back against fascism in his local community of Huntington Beach, CA. Now, he’s running for Assembly and we can support him!
Helping folks: This GFM for an old friend of jewelry artist Wings needs some traction.
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September 24, 2025
Sometimes this exercise feels a little like grasping at straws to feel like I’m in control of something, since I’m in control of so little, but mostly it’s to help myself remember all the moving pieces.
Pros:
With my vastly increased responsibilities at work, my salary went up a bit (not at all proportional to the amount of work it increased by, of course). As usual, I won’t count on the bonuses. Even though they include that as part of my total compensation, a) not guaranteed because that’s entirely dependent on the larger company’s performance. I can only do my best and they could still fail to meet whatever pie in the sky targets they set. Not my circus, not my monkeys. Well, a little bit my monkeys, but not the kind I get to control. b) this year’s bonus isn’t paid til well into next year so next year’s bonus (if any) wouldn’t be paid into 2027 etc. As far as my financial planning is concerned, that’s all pretend money until (and if) it lands.
The SALT tax cap lift (effective in 2025) to $40K does help us, because our state and local taxes are so damn high. It’d be great if the taxes were lower to begin with so we weren’t paying $40k+ in taxes but here we are. Literally here, being in CA has a lot to do with why we’re taxed so much. My Alaskan friends aren’t paying anything like our property and state taxes and the SALT tax increase doesn’t even register on their radar.
Cons:
Open enrollment in October will bring some kind of healthcare premium increase. The only question is how much. I already pay around $10k/year out of pocket for our various expenses, that doesn’t include our premiums. I should go calculate how much those premiums cost. I tend to forget it once open enrollment is over.
We’ve always itemized deductions because of all our expenses which includes a fair lot of charitable giving. In 2026, we’re going to lose the charitable giving deduction as it exists now. Taking the standard deduction allows you to also deduct $1000/2000 for charitable giving but itemizers have a new threshold to exclude:
Beginning next tax year, a different provision sets a threshold for itemized charitable contributions, equating to 0.5% of a taxpayer’s adjusted gross income. For example, an itemizer earning $500,000 would need to exclude the first $2,500 of their donations before receiving any tax benefit.
I’ve got to do the actual math on that because I did it wrong before. ($500,000 to use their example, x 0.05% vs $500,000 x 0.05 which is what I did first. Oops. Very different results.) See? Good thing I’m writing this and double checking my work.
I’m really not motivated to read through the whole damn thing budget bill to find out what else is going to impact us but it feels like I need more than just the highlights from Kiplingers and co.