May 18, 2026

Living in the time of pandemic: COVID-19 (311)

Year 7 of COVID in the Bay Area

Year 7, Day 15: I wanted to try this roasted cauliflower recipe from Smitten Kitchen but we only had florets and no pumpkin seeds, so I accidentally overroasted the cut florets instead. Whoops. SmolAc claimed to love it, though, so we’ll try again tomorrow with a much shorter bake time.

It was a real mental slog today with the layoff-with-no-information still plaguing everyone. We still need the necessary information to make decisions, like say, LAST DAYS, and we’re *shocker* being strung along. Still. I had a medium chat of commiseration with my colleague who feels as despondent as I do today. They responded to my feelings of failure using my own words from last week which, ok, fine, fair play. We did the best that we could with the information that we had. For all that I regret not foreseeing this exact outcome on this timeline, my therapist reminds me that this is very consistent with all the reasons that I hated the new parent company coming into our lives in the first place. They’re callous, inefficient, incompetent, and entirely about money and power. I hated that at the start of my career, I hate it now at the end of this part of my career. I might be done with this industry. I’m good at my job but I’m terrible at the politics and you can’t survive in senior to executive leadership with my attitude towards politics (deep sincere loathing). I’m worse at tolerating incompetence, and it’s quite clear that that is the only way to thrive in this corporation and probably most others.

Year 7, Day 16: I’m less tired than yesterday but then burned some of that precious recovery going to my annual eye exam. I HATE eye exams. I always feel like I’m failing and this time, the results for the only test that I’m “good” at (the peripheral vision) were bad. The doc thinks that it was due to fogging in the visor thingie. We skipped the eye dilation in favor of the horribly blinding bright flash photos to view the optic nerves; that always makes me feel sick. The nausea wasn’t as strong as usual but it did leave me off kilter enough that, on my way home, I misjudged the distance to the curb and bounced off it a little bit. I almost panicked at the impact but managed to get myself into a parking spot safely. The rubber of the tire is a little chipped but I think it’s ok? I hope it is.

My mood isn’t good but the heaviness of yesterday eased up enough for me to do a handful of to-do items and that helps my mood immensely, generally. Submitted a praise nomination for an award for the compassionate nurse from last week. Submitted a change in camp schedule for JB. Submitted a request for a replacement debit card for PiC. Stopped by the bank and deposited cash from PiC’s recent sales.

Year 7, Day 17: I rescheduled one of JB’s camps for August to get around a schedule conflict. I hate how public school doesn’t just give us the whole year of scheduling in one go when most of these things that they give us so little notice for was set in stone for months! That’s going to cost a $25 cancellation fee which feels much less negligible then it used to feel. This reminds me I need to do an estimate of what camps that both kids might attend next summer to estimate what we should contribute to the 2027 FSA – best case scenario planning (assuming PiC still has his job in 2027) to go with my worst case scenario planning. I contain multitudes.

I’ve gone through our election ballot and selected most of our candidates for most position. I’m stewing over the governorship – why do we have SIXTY ONE candidates?? Argh. This is how we end up with a pair of Republicans in the general election! GRR.

Year 7, Day 18: A friend shared this cool site: https://reciprocard.com. You can check to see if you have reciprocal privileges at another library!

I spent 15 minutes looking at high-level job listings and have concluded I hate them all. I want to be independently wealthy, volunteer, and give my time and money to help people and animals.

MakeItSoPicard.gif.

We toured the middle school and the tour was led by sixth and seventh graders which was moderately annoying. We also didn’t get sufficient information on electives selection which I didn’t realize til long after we got home. SmolAc loved it because they snacked their way through the whole thing.

Year 7, Day 19: I’m feeling a lot like Stephen Colbert about my Schrodinger’s layoff: There are more important things in the worlds. I’m mostly concerned for my staff (and my financial future). I have no interest in litigating it at all. My colleagues/staff are all taking it really hard, and my primary job is to support them. Maybe I’m just numb (my instinctive coping mechanism), or being reasonably financially stable in a time of crisis for once (novel!), or because I’ve been through one of these already and they haven’t, or I know there’s simply no point in demanding to know why a corporation bought a perfectly good company only to strip it for parts. This happens all the time. Red Lobster. Party City. A hundred other companies I couldn’t recall off the top of my head. Private equity is of the devil and so is “line go up” corporate business management. It’s all the same: they only care about extracting value and kicking the husk into the corner.

I’ve always been at least a little fatalistic about the world and corporations specifically, so really, after I absorbed how quickly this went down, I also have no desire to prolong the pain by worrying over how and why they can be so terrible. Because they have continued to be awful, of course. My laser focus is on getting my staff taken care of and making sure they pay me every penny that they owe me before I get the hell out.

I give myself a little job hunting time every day, and a little do whatever the heck I want on my chore/to do list every day. I’ll start to volunteer at the local rescue soon because they have remote volunteering options!, to give myself a little joy in my life, to try to offset the weirdness of being unemployed when that final day comes. I also need to think of what to send each of my staff to personally thank them for their time and efforts since they started, for the last day. My old bosses sucked – they couldn’t even be bothered to take a minute to say goodbye to me when I left my last job to come work again for my Good Boss, I won’t have that last day go unremarked for my people no matter how this ship went down.

May 11, 2026

Living in the time of pandemic: COVID-19 (310)

Year 7 of COVID in the Bay Area

Year 7, Day 8: We’ve finally gotten some information on the layoff. I’ll have months to wrap up work, though there’s not much of it (any?) that I care about. Now that they’ve treated everyone so badly, my obligations are to draw a paycheck and dump information wherever they want it and ride it out til the last day. I’d almost prefer that last day to be sooner so I can get on with healing and resting but it makes no sense to give up extra income while the workload is lighter than it’s ever been, ever.

When all’s said and done the package could take me through the end of February. Then… I don’t know! I threw an application into the world for a job that closes in a week. Told them I wanted only remote work and a start date in 2027. It’ll be unlikely they even bother to look at it but I redid my resume from top to bottom and went for it anyway to shake off the rust. I’ve not had to apply for jobs in 15 years, it’s been a really good run of avoiding the whole process. But it does mean I’m out of practice and need to brush up while I’m still unwilling to commit to anything.

I’ll have to actually do some math to figure out how much money we need for me not to have to go back to work, or for us to live on one income, but none of the calculators I’ve run to date seem to come up with less than 3 years from the best case lowest spend scenario.

Year 7, Day 9: Actually, having finally edited the budget spreadsheet, I think I will have paychecks through mid-February. That should feel comforting but instead the panic is eating my brain today.

Maybe a small part of it is fueled by my secret competition where I’ve been trying to catch up to PiC’s salary. He’s older than me and started out with a higher salary when he entered the workforce but this past year I finally caught up to his salary to within $200. I was so proud of that! And I knew I wasn’t going to have this job and this salary long, failure felt inevitable because of what corporate was doing. I was so proud of finally making the highest salary I’d ever made and really enjoying wrapping myself in the temporary feeling of security. Before I could get used to it, it’s gone. And that’s sad.

But now I’m contemplating making choices that make less money for my health and happiness and my subconscious has begun to absolutely freak out.

A friend reminded me that my past trauma is rearing its head: did someone else make really crappy decisions that are impacting my life negatively and creating enormous piles of work that I have to clear up? WHY YES, that DID happen. Repeatedly. I can make all the good things to do lists I want, I can’t leapfrog the grief process.

I’m sad that 1/3 of my life’s work ended in such a shitty way. I knew I would have to walk away at some point but leaving a smoking crater that someone else caused behind was not in my list of imagined possibilities. I’m so mad that they have treated everyone so badly through this process. I hate that my carefully recruited and constructed and trained team are being torn apart.

Year 7, Day 10: I’ve reworked my 2026 spreadsheet and then set up 2027 to game out the rest of my severance period, get a sense of our cashflow, and see how long we’ll last on PiC’s income after my income runs out. I had to add in a lot of recurring expenses that I don’t normally spell out to have a better sense of cashflow, remembered that at the end. If I stopped saving entirely when my income stops, then we would cash land at the end of 2027 with very little cash. If there’s no spike in spending, we could make it through the year before we start tapping the savings. What I wonder is, longer term, how long could we go before my being unemployed becomes a problem? I’m entirely unnerved by the necessity of stopping our regular savings, so that’s not great. But it is good to know that’s one lever to turn. The other lever, of course, is reducing spending but would you believe I’m so out of practice with constricting spending like this (versus just telling myself I can’t have wants) that it feels like it’s kind of complicated to manage? The simplest things to start cutting are my healthcare: therapy and my trainer. But those are the ways that I manage my health, should they be first on the chopping block?

Year 7, Day 11: A neighbor’s tree hasn’t been maintained properly and now the power lines are entangled in the branches. I used PG&E’s report it function to send pictures of the problem and rather promptly got a status update stating they agree with us that it’s both a safety concern and a violation of a safety regulation. I just checked the status of the problem today and the Remedial Action Date is 04/28/2027. EXCUSE me? The last time I popped in, it was 5-7 business days, now you’re going to take almost a year to get around to it??

Another PGE mystery: I’ve paid every bill in full. But they currently say that $1.50 from my last bill is now overdue. With a $0 balance. What??

Year 7, Day 12: I wish I could do something remote and part time and make enough money from that alone to coast but I have a lurking worry that relying on just one breadwinner is setting ourselves up for failure. In a more charmed existence, that wouldn’t be the case and we’d be fine on his income for several years. Many of my pre 30s years were very hard grinding traumatic years. Have I passed out of that or am I cycling back into that? Who knows!I’m not sure where we exist on that spectrum of luck and whatever else.

Headlines and updates on the economy aren’t helping me sleep at night. From Money Talk News, Expert warns: The 2030 economic cliff is coming for your retirement. A major economic shift is predicted to peak by 2030, driven by historic cycles and rapid AI adoption. Are you prepared for the “forced loans” that could target your digital assets? (I know something is happening because of the AI being forced down our throats but is that going to continue for the next four years or will pushback finally work?)

From Moneywise: “Goldman Sachs says the S&P 500’s run past 7,100 is ‘froth’ — Wall Street said the same just before the 2008 stock market crash”  (Ok but how many other times have they said this and did they pan out or no?)

This is getting under my skin. I’d set aside cash for this year’s upcoming large expenses and the cash left over was sent to our Vanguard brokerage to be invested. But the market keeps going up (irrationally IMO but I have thought that for the past 10 years) and I keep not committing to the transaction for the lump sum. I kept repeating to myself in the shower: Time in the market is more important than timing the market. But even being an old hand at this investing unemotionally thing can mean nothing in the face of unsettlement like the imminent end of income for an unknown period. I keep thinking “but what if we need that cash?” I think the answer is that we already have cash on hand for this specific purpose so invest it already and if we blow through our liquid savings, THEN we pull it back out of the brokerage. I suppose it just feels like tempting fate? But rationally speaking, we shouldn’t need it before 2028 and if we do then we do and out it comes. It’s not a fail to have to pull money back out, there’s no penalty other than paying capital gains since it’s a brokerage account, it’s not a retirement account with age limits.

May 4, 2026

Living in the time of pandemic: COVID-19 (309)

Year 7 of COVID in the Bay Area

Year 7, Day 1: We have finally gotten the garage door fixed! It cost a bundle ($$$$) but we got a good price from the guy we used with more services for less than the Big Corporate company that sent through a quote for $200 more and half the services. Whew. That’s a huge relief.

The other mostly petty frustrations remain – my blog spam filter is utterly hopelessly broken (I’m now on my third one, hoping this will work), the WordPress app is also not functioning so I can’t blog quick thoughts, and I’ve got to get someone to do a thing about the oven. I would like my oven working again please.

Also how is it I’m working every bit as hard – or more – since being told my job doesn’t exist anymore (except we have no information to move forward from here!)?? I’ve been taking calls nonstop from morning to evening every day. It’s deeply too much. I need to be able to take a break for my own sanity from all this.  Sigh. I’m trying to carve out an hour where I am not making or taking calls, each day. Today’s task is to pull job listings that give me some useful language for my laughably outdated resume. Yesterday I spent a few hours fixing up my LinkedIn profile as a test run and that did help shake loose a few cobwebs. Weirdly being faced with the Word doc of my resume feels impossible to tackle but I’ll hack away at this slowly.

Year 7, Day 2: Here’s something I didn’t expect with this layoff: I actually have people who respect and like me well enough to write me glowing recommendations. Back in 2008, I was still early enough in my career, and isolated enough, that I had to stretch to get as many as three references. My bosses at the time were horrible toxic creatures so they were to be avoided at all costs and they didn’t give two hoots about what would happen to us.

In today’s world, I’ve already lined up a minimum of three senior leaders to serve as references for all of my people so they don’t even have to ask and contacted half a dozen folks to ask them to be references for me across multiple departments. My instincts had reacted like I’d be as much up a creek with this layoff as the last one – perhaps job hunt wise I will be, because it’s bleak out there, everything is AI everything – this bit of things surprised me. I guess logging 15 years with the same boss also gave enough me time to build strong connections I hadn’t expected to be able to lean on. This probably doesn’t have any relationship to outcomes, but…one can hope?

Of course with not a single rec mentioning how scary (complimentary) I am, which is the first thing these people usually say when they’re describing me, it feels a little weird. I’m being oversold here!  In response to that, my friend commented that many companies posting job descriptions are also overselling how great they are too so it all balances out. There’s a certain amount of merit to that idea and it helps with my anxiety.

Year 7, Day 3:  I’m not feeling sorry for myself because I’m too busy being mad and worried for my teams; we are in a much better position than last time so I am grateful for what stability I’ve built over the years; and stopping working for the terrible people is a net good. A random glance at an October post, and my memory of 2024, reminds me I have been miserable for a long time.

I am anxious, though. I will probably know next week roughly what we’re working with and that will be good information and start a loud ticking clock in my psyche. It’s going to whisper a countdown and I don’t want a countdown in my head. My best case scenario is that someone will have a job that’s a good fit out there and I’ll connect with them sort of earlier than I want to be working again and we can agree on a start date that gives me actual time to rest and recuperate. Universe, y’hear me?

In realityland, I’ve put together one application for a totally stretch position that might be me getting in way over my head. That was true of one of the jobs I applied for back in the day but months later, I ended up with a role with the same company that was much more realistic and while that was admittedly miserable too, it gave me a huge springboard into the next stages of my career with some pretty great people and I can’t hate that so I think it can’t hurt to toss my hat in the ring and see what happens when I ask for what I want.

Year 7, Day 4:  Mental ping-pong 1: Panic, will we run out of cash before I find another job? // Calm, we have a decent amount of savings before we have to tap the brokerage.

Mental ping-pong 2: Fuck this industry that’s going very rapidly downhill. I want to do something that I actually care about now – animal care or something like that. Not that I didn’t care about the quality of my work in this job/industry, of course I did. But that was on principle, not because I loved the work itself. I don’t want to be miserable anymore. // We need a high salary, I need to suck it up and try to land something lateral or higher than my last job.

Mental ping-pong 3: I really really need a break. I don’t want to get out of bed for a week. // I have so many things I should/want to do. There isn’t enough time to do it if I get a job in any reasonable amount of time (3-6 months would be good, I wouldn’t want to start after only 3 months off but I do want something in hand at that point for the future).

None of these include my specific need to have a job that I can do from bed if necessary. I don’t know how I’m going to manage to swing that despite successfully running this company for many years that way.

Year 7, Day 5: I had a whole battery of pokes and prods and general discomfort: bloodwork, cervical cancer screen, the HPV vaccine because it occurred to me last year that it came out when I didn’t have good insurance so I didn’t get the series back in the day. I’m just under the age cut off so I went ahead and got the first dose. My nurse was really terribly kind, she warned me it would feel bad going in (it did, it burned), made sure I had an ice pack and observation for 15 minutes to make sure I didn’t have any adverse reactions and sent me home with an extra ice pack. This is the first vaccine where I completely forgot I’d gotten it at all within hours and not because I was very still for too long. 98% of the pain was gone by the evening with only a dull almost bruise like pain if I really thought about it.

I’ve been worried that I take too much magnesium, putting my liver or kidneys at risk, but either the magnesium I take contains MUCH less Mg than advertised or I have some kind of deficiency because my Mg levels are well within the normal range. I don’t know what to make of that and kind of want a chemistry kit to test the Mg tablets I take for content.