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.