Work turned out to be, for now, fine. Even pretty great. The long-term picture is still not great – but with the rise of AI, I can’t really think of any field that seems like a safe haven from big changes. My long-term big work project finally reached its most major milestone late last year. It’s what we’ve been working towards since I came back from maternity leave over 7 years ago! It was very very exciting. It was insanely busy with 12-hour shifts for a few weeks and a many trips away from home. But it was largely successful. The project is in its next phase, and I’m winding down my role to part-time role, and ramping up on a new project. Getting going on a new project is always a bit of struglle, getting over that hump of newness and slogging to become familiar and comfortable with things. But I’m far enough in that I’m getting excited and interested – even if measurable progress is slower than I’d like.

LO completed first grade, had her first “friend” party for her 7th birthday, and continues to be an amazing kid. She’s so smart and funny and kind and creative. She keeps growing up in little ways that slip by quickly, and in big ways that… also seem to slip by quickly. She spent 3 weeks with T’s parents in the Midwest, giving us a huge break in parenting and our first adult-only vacations since she was born. I am always envious of people with family help nearby, but at least we have family. Family that will offer this, and that we fully trust can take good care of her. I really didn’t have a single worry about it, aside from missing her a lot. It has been a time of rest and hanging with T, and much-needed after what feels like months of overstimulation and chaos. It also allowed me to get around to “maybe update the blog?” on my list of things I maybe want to do, someday, when time and energy flow in that direction. She is back now and getting ready for a family vacation and “phase 1” of braces.

We spent 4 weeks in Paris last July at the apartment we were in for T’s sabbatical. LO was at a bilingual day camp for 3 weeks because we had to work remotely for much of the time. This year, we’re looking forward to having more time locally and to visiting family. We have already had some fun: coastal camping with friends, a tidepooling and horseback riding weekend, an adults-only trip to Santa Fe, and then another to Sonoma wine country. Coming up is another coastal weekend (hotel), family camp, and a trip to visit my family at a Minnesota lake. We’re trying to be somewhat intentional about to focus spending money on family trips. Money is comfortable enough that it shouldn’t be the reason we don’t go, especially when the vacation is nothing extravagant.

On dilly-dallying:

LO is going to a variety of day camps the rest of the summer. I’m basically jealous that she gets to spend the summer exploring her interests, hanging out with her friends, and making new ones. Wouldn’t it be nice if adults could do that too?

I’m finding that while I get very excited and interested in my projects at work once I’m into them, I also have little ambition for specific work- or achievement-related goals. The day-to-day work is very interesting and rewarding, and I often find myself thinking about or doing work outside of the typical work day. But at the same time, once I turn the work switch off, I want to spend my time mostly dilly-dallying, then maybe walking/hiking, self-care, and actually getting into strength training

. I’ve gotten a bit into gardening over the past 2 years, with one stainless-steel planter thing and a bunch of little pots. Last year didn’t work out well – abandoning all of July for Paris derailed things, naturally. This spring, I was on top of things enough to get some things growing. I’ve had a few harvests of snap peas, though now powdery mildew is threatening them. My cucumber plants started off strong, but have stalled out for a bit, either due to cold, overwatering, or underfertilizing. I’m taking care of the latter two concerns, and maybe the hot weather will come back to my microclimate to help. I added some green beans that I expect can take over for the peas if it gets hotter, a tiny lettuce bed, and some dill. I have several pots of flowers plus some in the ground, with hopes of decorating my table with cut flowers for several months. There is also Thai basil that we rooted from leftover sprigs, culantro, and Thai chillis. T’s hoping to use them in cooking, though we may not get hot enough weather for the peppers. I added some everbearing strawberries and harvested a few. Is it a rule that you have to get into gardening in your 40s? Or is it because my kid is getting too old to fuss over in that caretaking way? I don’t know, but it has been fun!

I’ve been reading a lot again, something I struggled hard with for the first ~5 years of LO’s life. So many good books. Years too late, I read Super Sad True Love Story, and man, that book was prescient. I gave 5 stars to some other older ones: Little Fires Everywhere and A Gentleman in Moscow. Newer ones I loved include My Friends and The Correspondent. Mostly, it is just nice enjoying books again.

Then there are the little half-finished crafty things I have, just waiting for my mind to be able to pick them up again. Learning to knit. Finishing the raccoon crochet kit with step-by-step basic instructions that LO gave me after discovering it was too hard. It stalled out when I couldn’t figure out the “front” and “back”. Figuring out the rest of this art thing I want to make for LO’s room with this iridescent acrylic already cut into small squares and drilled with holes. Wheel pottery – the sensory experience is so pleasing! Maybe some baking or cooking projects (not just cooking so we don’t starve). Then bigger, less attainable things, like figuring out a better decoration or system for our entryway, some sort of backyard project, redoing the fireplace…

Anyway, I don’t think I’m going to have any trouble with keeping entertained and busy during an early retirement. A life of little projects sounds nice. Then maybe save the world from facism for the hard part.

On FIRE and Money:

Financially, we obviously aren’t there. I accidentally mentioned something about being retired in ~10 years to some “normal” family friends of ours, and the reaction was… interesting to me. First, one assumed I’d made a mistake: “2036, in your early 50s?”, and I played it off as a maybe idea, but also said something about saving money. Which it is. I have no specific plan to retire on any specific date, other than I want to be financially ready to do so as soon as is reasonable.

I haven’t been able to keep up on our spreadsheets or calculate a savings rate or spending or anything. Most of our money is going into savings and housing bills. Now braces are on the list, though a lot of that can at least be from our FSA pre-tax. I think they quoted us ~$4200 for 18 months of braces/expander/etc treatment, with $1500 lifetime benefit for orthodontia from our insurance. We still spend a fair amount on child care – after care during the school year is about $700/mo, and summer camps during the summer are anywhere from $250 to $700/wk, depending on what you sign up for. It’s nothing like having a young kid in full-time daycare, but it is still significant. Food spending is higher due to a combination of convenience food and rising prices. I’ve been getting Thistle deliveries for a few weeks to help get into the habit of nutritious salad meals for lunch. I could/should make these myself, but I’ve been so burned out that I’m more worried about my health and mental load than about the money right now. It’s a luxury to be able to make that choice, though. And travel, even in a “light” year like. We splurged on our adult-only vacations, but are driving for our family trips. We bought tickets to “granny camp” and tickets to see my family later in the summer, and then flying home for the holidays will be $2,300 for the 3 of us. Ouch, but also, important. I want to quantify this all, but it sounds like a lot of effort. I want to dump it all into AI and have AI do it for me in a quicker way than my old manual process – but I don’t actually want to give all that info to AI either. That’s why I’ve used homegrown spreadsheets for so long – I want to control the data. But I no longer feel compelled to spend time on it.

T has become interested in at least tracking our account balances, so we have that. I don’t have a specific target number. I’d imagine we’d want to get LO through university, or at least have a clear line of sight for that. Health care is always the major question. But also, we are prioritizing some of hte “now” parts of life, at least when it comes to things like seeing family and making our own family memories. I finally feel comfortable enough to do that. I’ve convinced my self that we’ll be ok, or things will have gone so badly in the world that any choices we make now wouldn’t have much impact on our level of “ok”.

I finally truly cut Amazon out of my life, except in very rare cases. The main issue was figuring out a new grocery system, since I used Amazon Fresh for easy and cheap basics. We’re going to our local stores more, though still also to Safeway when we need to. I’m sure our grocery bill is up, but we can handle it. T gotten quite into cooking since this fall. He’s a great chef, and it took a big chunk of meal planning mental burden away from me. We rejoined Costco for household basics, and we are mostly covered. I finally set up a Blue Sky account so I can follow a few accounts after abandonning Twitter a long time ago. I don’t have the bandwidth to be a Blue Sky poster or even a daily reader, but at least it is there if I want it. I deleted the facebook and instagram and amazon apps from my phone and rarely look at them. I went to the April 5th protest and held up my sign. I’m doing 5 calls, though not every day. I convinced my red state parents to do it to. Yet, it is still all so bad and I don’t see how we can come back from this. I won’t give up.

We’ve been working on local community building. T has been better at it than I have on the neighborhood social front. I’ve been more engaged in school-related stuff. It is exhausting, though. Not just community buidling, just everything.

My personal and family life is going well, on the other head, even though it is busy. We juuggled a patchwork of frustrating and expensive after school care options through mid-Februaury, where one of us had to pick her up at ~3 every day and move her to another location, then go back to work. It was really really disruptive, but we literally could not find another option for any amount of money, short of hiring our own private babysitter. We were not the only parent in LO’s class doing this. Finally, we got into the on-site aftercare, and the stress has lessened. LO has adjusted really well to her kindergarten, and is the best. She loves learning all sorts of things and activities. She’s great at art. She’s funny and kind to all. Our biggest struggle is getting her to focus on her morning/evening routines without distraction or arguing. But all possible parenting issues considered, this one is managable. It is so much fun watching her learn to read.

Money stuff is perfectly fine right now. In the long run, money stuff will be less good. Federal research grants generally fund T’s summer salary, and who knows what that landscape will be like going forward? It is extremely likely the adminstration will go after his university just as they have come for Columbia and Harvard. We no longer count on his summer salary for anything, but it provides a huge influx for savings and other discretionary stuff. The silver lining is that summer salary going away would provide T a lot more freedom in the summer, and I’m all for ways of trading money for quality of life at this stage. But the actions that are being taken could be devastating for research in general in this country, and especially tough on graduate students and young researchers.

Then there is my job, which is 100% funded by federal research contracts. The adminstration has already stated they intend to slash funding for what I do. There is a long road between what the president says and what happens in the end, but there is no way it is “business as usual”, even in the best cases. This is one reason we’ve always saved so much, so bumps like this don’t make us panic. I’ve never recovered from the fear when I started my career just as the great recession hit. In all but the worst cases, we will be fine. But there are so many other people in this economy who didn’t have the priviledge to prepare for the worst. Even if I can have some comfort that we are not financially in any immediate risk, none of this is fine.

The weather has generally shifted warmer, and the poppies (and other things) in our yard are blooming like crazy, and they make me really happy. It is our 15 year anniversary soon. Things are bad, but not everything.

I loved the billingual school that LO went to. She thrived socially and emotionally. I didn’t get a great sense for what she was learning academically, but she learned enough. I got even less of a direct sense of her French skills, since she of course only spoke English to us. But she definitely learned and understood quite a bit by the end. She did rely on her more fluent friends to help her out, which surely slowed learning over an immersion environment. Still, that made her life easier and made the transition easy. The class she was in was the local equivalent of kindergarten due to different school age cutoffs, but it was much less academic than the kindergarten she’s enrolled in this Fall.

Working remotely was fine, until it wasn’t. From September through about March, I was able to do most of my job by working on indepenedent tasks while LO was at school, then running/attending meetings during my evening during US business hours. In the spring, the project moved to a phase where being remote was harder. We worked around it, but it was harder. A couple colleagues had to cover travel that I otherwise would have covered. I did travel back for ~2 weeks to support some hands-on testing, and was willing to cover another 2 weeks until schedule changes made it collide with family visitors. I also got burnt out from having meetings nearly every weekday evening, sometimes for 3+ hours. It was a trade off obviously worth making for the chance – but it would be difficult to sustain indefinitely.

I didn’t quite meet my B1 French language goal before we got home, but I’ve continued learning and am early B1 level now, at least for reading and listening. I have stage fright with speaking. I probably can construct A1/A2 sentences slowly and with bad pronunciation. This is self-taught, aside from a 2-week “conversation practice class” I took in early January. The class was good, too time-consuming to balance with my job. My self-teaching combined Pimsleur and Anki grammar flashcards, Duolingo and consuming French media. It’s a scattershot approach, and a tutor or more conversation classes will be a good next step if I’m ready to invest more time & money.

Overall, I have to say we simply loved our time in Paris, to the point where we are non-seriously daydreaming about a permanent move. We are slightly more seriously exploring buying an apartment there in a few years, very seriously wishing to spend a month each summer there, and almost certainly going to go visit again this coming summer

Life here felt like it picked up where it left off, in some ways as if we’d never left. LO is adjusting pretty well to school. T & I have been frantically juggling trying to piece together aftercare since there are not enough available slots at the on-site aftercare. We’re begging to get off the waitlist, while piecing together other options for the time being. The way public school schedules are structured in the US seems like a failure of society. No wonder the surgeon general has noted that parental stress is a significant public health issue! I did not appreciate the NYT framing it as intensive parenting, as if it is lifestyle choice I’m making. We are litterally just trying to have two full time jobs with a one kid in public school. How do poeple with harder lives manage?

I started organizing our finances again, tracking spending and making projects. Everything looks fine, but we are trying to work out what are near and long term goals are with our savings.

We made it to our destination, and have figured out a bunch of settling-in logistics, and survived the first 2 weeks without any childcare. Our apartment is exactly what we need, and I love it. LO has started her bilingual pre-K and seems to be doing OK so far. She had an amazing experience at her last preschool and she misses it a lot – but she is making friends and having fun. She’s also getting used to city life, which is a big change from our quiet neighborhood at home.

Financially, things are going fine. I’d say our finances are in “chaos”, which isn’t really true. But I haven’t really had any time to balance the books and look at spending. I don’t understand how that will possibly change in the near future, and I’m trying to be OK with that, but also still have that itch to dig in and sort them all out. It just can’t be a priority right now. With my raise, T’s steady raises, and the drop in childcare costs, I know we are saving quite a bit. We are also spending a bit more than usual, but it is not without intention.

Work has been good – the best news is that I’m still working remotely with the agreement of leadership. The title change for my promotion was finally made official (the raise happened ages ago), and we also got the yearly merit raises. Our major partner continues to be a challenge in some ways and great in others. I spent about 1.5 months completely sucked into a side project working on a new proposal. I like working on proposals if the team is good, but the timeline was terrible. Aside from starting extremely late, it was right on top of when we were moving. To add to the stress, I stacked a 5-day international work trip just before the move. We held it together as a family, but it was pretty stressful. I’m happily working remotely and finally getting caught up now that LO is in her pre-K. I’m lucky that the visa type we got allows me to work here – I’m not sure if all countries would have given me that right and we barely considered that when we first started planning.

Sabbatical for me? T’s the one on sabbatical. For him / his department, this means he does the research part of his job and still advises his students (remotely). However, he doesn’t have to do any teaching or service. It is also an opportunity to collaborate with others and try some new research directions. That is pretty standard for academic sabbaticals. Corporate paid sabbaticals tend to be more “do whatever” but are much shorter. My job doesn’t have a concept of a sabbatical, working remotely is still pretty amazing. I’m trying to carve out more space and time for myself during this period, and am targeting a 30-hour work week, using vacation leave to cover the rest. (I have lots of vacation banked from my lack of travel when I had an infant, then COVID). My goals are mostly personal: learn language to level B1, start running (or something else) again, then do some one-off sightseeing or maybe cooking classes or other fun things. I think it will be hard to fit that in with a full-time job and a child who allows only bursts of sightseeing on the weekends. I honestly want the rest of my career to be a 30-hour/week job and think that should be the new normal for any worker who wants it.

We had an exciting decision point this month at work. I don’t know how to talk about it vaguely in a way that would make any sense at all. I hope it means a quick trip to Florida later this month, but it may turn out to be some other location. It also will close a bunch of open technical items, and hopefully encourage our major partner to really put all of their cards on the table. (They are driving me nuts lately, and being a bit secretive about issues they are having.)

My promotion and raise is still stalled somewhere. I’m not yet infuriated about it, because it hasn’t been long since I last complained about it. After my written-out complaint, I got an acknowledgment and apology from both my current and former manager about how terrible the processes has been for me, and that really was enough to satisfy me for the moment, since I know the pay will be retroactive.

Mental health

I started an SNRI in the fall after some mediocre CBT-based virtual therapy was not helping much. The meds seemed to be helping a lot, and I feel like a functioning person again. As part of the therapy, we discussed a possibility of ADHD being a contributor to some of my struggles. I was on the fence about this – the picture I had in my head of ADHD is nothing like me. I am rarely late. I’m not loud and disruptive or hyper talkative – if anything the opposite. I do not forget to pay bills or have trouble organizing my life in a general sense. My house is often relatively tidy since clutter is very distracting to me. I have lost a lot of important items throughout my life…. but I don’t lose things very much anymore because I have systems to militate (e.g. a cross-body purse is a must for me). However, I’ve always struggled with details, making careless mistakes. I am impatient and interrupt people if I’m not careful. I have trouble with routine (boring) tasks. I like setting up new systems, but following through? Not so much. On the other hand, I used to set up marathon training plans and mostly execute them with no issues. I was a straight A student, even in engineering undergrad and grad school. I got my M.S. while working full time. To me, that did not seem like someone with any executive function disorder. Why I would pursue a diagnosis, given I’ve made it this far in my life with relative success?

I also pondered why my ability to focus seems significantly worse in the past 5 years. Some of this started when I was pregnant, but I expected that I’d be “normal” by now. Looking back at my 20s, it was always one challenge after the next. Got my degree, got my job, started the MS while working, moved to California, completed the MS, started marathon training and distance running, moved to Northern California, got a new job, got an active dog to keep us busy, then had a kid. It was always “what next?!” Parenthood combined with the loss of the structure of office work during the pandemic made me feel like I was drowning.

I’ve also realized that while having a kid is a joy and a challenge, a young kid involves a lot of monotony. Instead of traveling or even just hiking to give my brain that happy boost of novelty, my little hits of dopamine were sought out through… reddit/internet browsing? That was a mistake, surely, but it was all I could manage. Sometimes it is still all I can manage. It is something I can do while “supervising” my child. Not while connecting with her in a truly beneficial to both of us way, though. But sometimes I just don’t want to be Anna while she plays Elsa….

After a lot of mental back & forth I ultimately decided to do a pre-screen. I really struggled when they asked about symptoms in my childhood. Who remembers their childhood at that level of detail? And when I was able to name an example, the follow up was whether this was primarily ages 6-12, or less than age 6? Well, I have no idea what happened less than age 6! I have a follow up screening later this year. It’s been a long process. Even if I’m not diagnosed, taking the time to reflect on this has been helpful in understanding some of why I do what I do, and how to ensure the most critical balls aren’t dropped.

Sabbatical

We have found an apartment! We have found a school for LO. We have even booked plane tickets (!), because me and LO booked ours with credit card miles, and there is a huge advantage to booking those as early as possible to get saver fares. (You can also change/cancel with no impact, so there is really no reason to wait.)

We are still waiting on formal approval from T’s department, on visa progression, on figuring out how my job will play in, and on figuring out renting out our own home. Then there are the more minor but still important things to sort out: banking, taxes, medical care, and how all of that will work. And the more fun things, like what kind of trips and things we want to prioritize doing in our spare time. But some of the biggest pieces are complete, so that is a huge relief.

The other thing we’ve been focusing on is decluttering and getting rid of things in preparation for renting it out. We have a small-ish 1950s house with limited storage, so even being judicious in what we buy, closets tend to fill up over time. My local Buy Nothing group has been great. A lot of it is baby / kid stuff, but also some stuff that we just no longer need or use. It can be a bit addicting!

Money

Our windows are FINALLY in, and the money for them is out. We’ve had a lot of various expenses in the past few months, so will be working on rebuilding some cash positions over the next few months.