Another Not So Good Day

It was another long day of fighting to stay awake and being too brain-fogged to really function. I was also thrown off by the 10yo not doing his classes this morning. He was excused because of his tech and anxiety issues, but it threw my whole day off as I got used to working on writing stuff for two hours. I spent all morning in a state of nervous energy, waiting for the time his classes would be over and they would post assignments for afternoon independent study. And that's right around the time I started to get really drowsy.

I can't win. I'm starting to lose hope again that it won't get any better than this. I'm going to spend the rest of my life being half-awake and unable to really do anything.

I even drank a pot and a half of coffee over the course of the day and had two cups of iced tea. Nothing helped. I did managed to not take a nap, but it was a struggle to focus on anything, especially making my son do his homework.

Then made him sit through a small group zoom meeting thing his teacher had scheduled. I thought maybe if there were less people in the meeting, he wouldn't get as much lag, but if anything, the lag was worse today than when I listened in on his full class yesterday. I started poking around his iPad and found out it needed in iOS update. Problem is there's no more room in the memory to download the update.

This is a school-issued iPad so it's full of security programs and school apps. I have no idea which apps he still needs (he's collected a lot over the years as they keep the same iPad they get in kindergarten). I tried to email his teacher to see if she knew which ones we could safely delete, but she hasn't gotten back to me. I'm wondering if his lag problems isn't a network issue, but just the fact that his iPad is out of memory to buffer the videos.

So tomorrow, if he doesn't throw a fit, I'm going to have him do his morning zoom meetings using my phone. If there's significantly less (or no) lag then the problem is his iPad. I'll have to contact the school tech support to figure out what to do after that. I'm really hoping that's it because there's no way he can do the zoom meetings with the amount of lag he has. The small group meeting had like 8 people in it and the video was skipping every other word because of the lag. Sometimes we missed whole sentences. It was impossible to know what was going on. We were both just confused and frustrated.

Anyway, after school stuff was done, I made burgers because the 14yo wanted one. She offered to just come down (with a mask on) to get her own food but my grandson was due to come home any minute which would mean his mother would be downstairs and would freak out if the 14yo was also down there. As it was, when the baby came home, she refused to let my husband touch him because she thinks he's contaminated and won't sanitize to her satisfaction. It was heartbreaking because all the baby wanted was to go to Pop-pop. He even said "pop-pop" which was the first time I've heard him say that. We've barely seen him in weeks, even when he was in the house because of my daughter's germaphobia.

After I cooked the burgers, I was sitting in my room and noticed this streak of white across the sky. At first, I thought it was clouds, but then realized it was smoke from fires in Oregon. I decided to hike two blocks up the hill to the park to take a look. The 10yo and 14yo (with a mask) came with. I got some pictures of the smoke stretching across the horizon.

Then we walked around the neighborhood a little to see damage from the wind storm that swept in Monday. It wasn't as windy today but we saw some tree branches down here and there and lots of debris blown around. It was over 90F so we didn't stay out long.

Later, I watched from my bedroom window as the smoke quickly expanded out from just the streak to covering the entire sky and blotting out the sun.

This is looking down our street from our porch as the smoke rolled in from the south. It was eerie. By the time the sun set, the sky was dark with smoke.

That's not as bad as a friend who lives on the Oregon coast and was forced to evacuate but was blocked from leaving because of the fires. Last I heard, she finally managed to find a way out and was heading to her mother's house. So I guess I shouldn't complain about a little smokey air. It could be so much worse.