September 21, 2026

Living in the time of pandemic: COVID-19 (329)

Year 7 of COVID in the Bay Area.

Year 7, Day 139: We’ve cobbled together a semblance of a routine. I drop off SmolAc, he drops off JB. I wade through my to do list, chores or desk work, until it’s noon and I’ve forgotten to eat lunch but too late now! It’s time to mosey out the door for SmolAc pick up. When we get back, I feed SmolAc a snack and we fill the time one way or another. We head back out two or three hours later to pick up JB, depending on the time they get out and where they’re meeting us. We have two different pickup locations and three different pickup times.

The one constant is how exhausted I am by 3 or 4 pm. Sometimes by 1 pm. I feel like I should still be taking JB to their after school sport like I always did 2 days a week but PiC has taken that over since school started. It’s not even in me to put up a token protest. I’m so tired that half the time, after we get back from picking up JB, I have to put myself to bed. Sometimes it’ll be because I spent the between pickups time cooking. Sometimes it’ll be because I did so many chores in the post dropoff chunk of time. Some days it’s because I was in so much pain the night before, sleep was impossible.

Today it was getting called in as emergency contact auntie to pick up a friend’s kiddo who was sick and we brought them home to keep them safe, fed, and occupied until their parents got home from work. I’m very grateful we have this ability to help out and I’m also very very tired. But I’m so tired every single day.

Except some days if we can make it to the library. On those days, the kids can craft for a few hours and enjoy the library and sitting up doesn’t feel too hard. But that’s more like good luck than anything else.

I can’t suss the amount of energy I’ll be allowed each day, this is not the first nor the last time I’ll wish I had a health meter bar installed like I’m a video game character, because it sure would help when I’m dropping in my tracks and wondering why. I’m pretty sure I used to last later through the day because my butt was firmly parked for 4-6 hours a day, not just 1-3.

Year 7, Day 140: I’m full of sadness and anticipatory dread today. I started the day a bit sad, just generally. Then getting the kids out the door didn’t feel like the relief it usually does. I had to untangle a lot of tangles at work and am taking big deep breaths over the many ways that the parent company is torpedoing our quality. I knew they would be doing that and had accurately predicted how and where they would cut corners. Having it actually happen shouldn’t be any kind of a surprise and yet it sits badly in my gut. We have several more weeks, and I don’t know how I’m going to stand it.

Chatting to a friend today was really sad. Their kid is going through a severe depression and the parents need more adult support in those gaps when neither parent can be home. That’s where I come in. We’re scheduling days and times where I’ll be picking up and minding their kid when they are at work. What a terrible weight they’re carrying right now, my heart breaks for all of them.

Year 7, Day 141: Are the Google docs and sheets apps cursed now? They keep refusing to open important files and telling me to check my internet connection and permissions. Having created the docs, I do darn well have permission! And I can do everything else that requires an Internet connection so what gives?? /grump

Oh and another thing on an entirely different subject. I think I might be a fool. I might have been PEMSing myself ever since school started. And it took a MONTH for it to even occur to me.

I’m trying to ease the tasks on PiC’s plate while he’s the one with a job that extends past this fall so far as we know and it’s really stressing him out. Both the fact that he’s the primary breadwinner for an unknown span of time and because the stress of the work itself is so much worse than before (several rounds of layoffs later).

We flipped from 90/10 him/me on meal planning and prep to 20/80 him/me. My meal prep is much more labor intensive since I’m cooking from scratch and even occasionally remembering to make veggie sides. I’m doing all the after school pickups and the after kinder care, the trash bins (out and back again) and the gardening. It doesn’t sound like a ton but it’s significantly more than I’d been doing. Then, usually late at night, I make myself do as much of a workout as I can so that I can check off the exercises boxes. I’m paying for a trainer, those assignments need to get done!

It’s been weeks of dragging myself through the day until I literally cannot anymore and have to lay down. Then, more dragging. It’s infuriating.

Almost accidentally, I gave myself the past two days in a row off from working out, which I have not done since July and … errrr. I lasted til dinnertime tonight. I was tired but not catastrophically pass out against my will tired like every single day for the past month. Crap. I think I did this to me.

Year 7, Day 142: Testing my theory again yesterday, I did only 1 set per exercise instead of pushing myself to do all 2 or 3 or 4 sets. My PEMs was distinctly lower today. Argh! I have to roll back the exercise. I’ve emailed my trainer.

I was browsing Costco.com and noticed their P&G offer good until Sept 20. We can get a $25 Costco Shop Card for things we bought last week. Score! For a second $100 of spending, we’d get another $35 card. I’m checking other receipts to see if there’s anything that fills that second hundred.

Update: I submitted the first receipt with $130 of P&G items only for them to say there weren’t $100 worth of qualified items. 🙄 I’m going to have to highlight these things for them, aren’t I?

Year 7, Day 143: Welp a decade later, we find ourselves back in the casting room at the local hospital. Back then, it was their nursemaid’s elbow. Today, JB took a bad step and their foot is in a cast for a month. The sports medicine floor is really poorly designed for kids who have these kinds of injuries. I saw at least four of them in similar situations just walking in, but they made us traverse the whole floor about 4 times. Insurance coverage is something to be thankful for. Our visit, three X-rays and a cast would have cost:

We paid $35.

The middle school secretaries have this down pat, so within minutes of our arrival with the doctor’s note they’d already arranged for JB to have extra time to hobble from one class to the next and all the other things they had to arrange for their late arrival, for pickup and drop-off and other bits and bobs for the next month.

September 14, 2026

Living in the time of pandemic: COVID-19 (328)

Year 7 of COVID in the Bay Area.

Year 7, Day 132: My tiny victory with the oven was followed up by a power outage. I told the oven VERY STERNLY that it had better come back from the power outage fine because we don’t need to be going through taking it apart again! (It did.)

The power outage was useful in that it was pretty short, it was resolved about 6 hours later, so we had the chance to put ourselves through our paces of “what do we do when lights don’t work” without a giant load of stress. It did make me realize that we’re reasonably set for power outages but boy howdy do I not want to have to also go through a power outage, and broken water lines, and broken gas lines and whatever else a bad quake would bring us.

Year 7, Day 133: I am wrestling with my feelings over a job listing. I have some hard lines (that I share with a number of other people) which has made job hunting taste more like despair than usual. No genAI, no travel, do some social good, prioritize good work over profit margins.

I found one that checks a lot of boxes except the travel bit. They emphasize that the travel bit is important. And they want a lot of it.

It checks all the other important to me boxes and that’s unusual. Every other listing so far is all about implementing AI or driving up revenue or some other thing that’s simply not important to me. So this one is unusual. Still, I find myself grumbling “I don’t want it” while crafting my cover letter and resume.

Update: I went through four rounds of editing and called it good. I submitted and put it out of my mind. If they bother to read it or my LinkedIn recs and are interested, we’ll talk. I have a whole lot of other stuff to keep me busy in the meantime.

Year 7, Day 134: Yesterday I woke up to my hands being REALLY weird. The swelling had gone down to nearly normal levels. It hasn’t been down to this point for months. I reveled in it but didn’t want to say anything because I didn’t want to jinx it. Naturally today we’re back to LEGO person hands so that was short-lived.

This is frustrating. I made myself work out the night before, had a good dream for once, and woke up with my hands in decent shape. I gave myself last night off working out, had horrifically stressful dreams, and woke up with my hands and wrists in awful shape.

Year 7, Day 135: Argh. Middle school Picture Day was last week and I completely forgot that we have to order pictures before the actual day for them to be delivered to the school with no shipping costs. Now I have to figure out how to rectify this miss.

Garden update: the first green bean plant to survive is starting to put out buds. We harvested our first snap peas. I’ve been picking off the tendrils for a while to encourage it to focus on the peas. The acid amendment for the blueberries and blackberries seems to be helping both bushes a bit! The blueberries are putting out a second round of (a few) flowers for the year, the blackberries might be putting out a first set of buds?

I’ve transplanted the second small green bean seedling and the darn roly polies are already at those leaves. I’m also babying another itty bitty seedling, here’s hoping that one will get nice and strong soon.

Our two day heatwave doesn’t seem to have affected the garden badly except the next green bean seedling I was trying to germinate. It seems to have given up.

Year 7, Day 136: One of the One Spirit coordinators contacted me saying that hunger on the reservation is really bad now with no help to be had. I depleted most of our funds supplying one of the families from the Okini list but I’m thinking about how best to help. I asked her if she could locate a single community organizer who would be willing to help share out food supplies across multiple families so we could try to help more folks in one go. She’s working on that while I’m working on gathering funds and compiling a grocery order. I put out the word on Bluesky but my reach and mutuals there is so vastly diminished from our days on Twitter that I don’t expect much from that.

Update: friend shared on Mastodon to go with Bluesky posts and after a few days, it seems to have gotten some traction. I’m working out the details of what they need with the local who is taking on the responsibility of sharing the food with the community.

September 7, 2026

Living in the time of pandemic: COVID-19 (327)

Year 7 of COVID in the Bay Area.

Year 7, Day 125: We’re still figuring out the rhythms of drop off and pick up. When PiC has an 8 am meeting, he can’t do drop off. Since we have an excessively narrow window for dropping off SmolAc, this gets extra complicated. We managed it this time by having SmolAc go early and get school breakfast. Their grade is escorted to class by teachers when it’s time. It’s not a great solution because SmolAc feels pressured by the very short block of eating time and don’t like it, but they also aren’t allowed to go to breakfast and NOT eat. I understand why but it’s a dilemma when we have multiple kids to get to different campuses. The next morning we have like this, we’ll ask the neighbors to drop JB with their kid. They leave much earlier but that’ll give JB time to hang out with their friend.

Year 7, Day 126: I’m so tickled about our creative reuse store visit.

We found all the notebooks ($2 new on sale) and poly folders ($23 new) for the kids for school. We found the big envelopes (~$12) and page protectors (~$20) I need for mailing things and saving their art. We found useful odds and ends in the free section and wrapping paper and a puzzle in the tubs. We walked out of there for $5! I only have to buy a calculator for JB new on sale now. They had used calculators for $1 but they didn’t meet PiC’s standards.

My body is far less tickled by the outing. Entirely too much walking and socializing for this bag o’ bones. The pain has been quite high this week even if the swelling has stayed under control. I’m hoping that we’re past the hump of this flare.

Year 7, Day 127: I’ve been craving brownies for ages. A slightly fudgy but also kind of cakey (but not too much because that’s dry) brownie chock full of walnuts. After a friend mentioned their kid loves the Ghirardelli brownie mix, it stuck in the card catalog of my cravings section of the brain and I finally grabbed a box recently. Mixing it up was incredibly fast, melting the butter is what took ages, and then it went into the toaster oven for an hour while I took myself off to bed. It was a really good treat for being in the middleish of a multi-day pain and fatigue flareup.

Year 7, Day 128: Alright after N months of NOT looking or finding a repair person, I texted a friend to confess my cowardice over the possibility of delving in and making things worse. We decided that I probably wouldn’t break it more and well, if it does, I needed a repairperson anyway. I took apart the oven, cleaned it because we’re already in here why not, replaced the battery and put it all back together minus that one screw that’s been put into timeout because there’s absolutely no way to put it back in flush and it’s not critical. I’m still not telling PiC where the screw should be though, the perfectionist.

Voila, I fixed it! I have saved myself at least a $100 callout fee and embarrassment over wasting that time on a callout for something so simple.

Year 7, Day 129: PiC is looking into aftercare programs since the most desirable one waitlisted us, again. I’m betting we never get off their waitlist. We never got off their preschool waitlist and had to pay for THAT privilege, too, blech. But he asked for some recs and checked out one of them. He came home bearing printouts and brochure type information and would you believe that for a 5 day program with pickup, they’re charging basically $10k and change per year? Probably that price lands differently when you have two full incomes, we certainly were paying twice that for daycare (for full days with 3 meals though), but with mine soon to end, that doesn’t sit comfortably. I need a happy medium between SmolAc being bored at home with me and paying through the nose for a few hours of care a day.

This school year feels like a more benign version of 2020 where it’s a whole lot harder and people are home a lot more. It’s a lot. It’s also temporary. Kindergarten can’t/won’t last forever. But I don’t love how tired I am every single day.