Currently, I am fighting a sinus infection. I am confident I know the culprit. It was my window. It’s been cold for the past few nights and my window has a tiny opening due to the window AC panels. The bottom of the AC panels leave this tiny gap enough to bring a draft into the bedroom. It’s been unusually cold in Los Angeles for the last few nights, some of the residents here think they may have woken up with Colorado overnight. Right now the simplest solution is to cover the entire window with blackout curtains so no more cold air goes in. We are not using the AC until maybe July.
Tonight I was supposed to go to a watch party with a book club I am part of (not my cookbook club), but due to my flaring sinuses, I ended up not going. I was going to watch “Daisy Jones and the Six” since it releases today but I guess I’ll go to the next one…assuming I don’t get sick. I was so bummed out.
My friend is coming down on Sunday from the Bay Area. I am hoping my sinuses clear up before Sunday.
I have seen better weeks and this week did not make the cut.
The Most stressful half-mile drive
On Wednesday afternoon, I was driving from work picking up my kid from daycare. I was almost to the daycare and the right front side of my car got really bumpy. I thought, “I’ll call roadside assistance when I get to the daycare.” At the stoplight with a quarter mile left to go, the people in the cars around me were honking and saying that my tire popped and it was almost at the rims.
My stress escalated.
I told them, I’ll take care of it when I pick up my kid at daycare. The man in one of the cars yelled, “You may not make it!” Gulp. He may be right.
Was it stubbornness? Was it stupidity believing I could get myself to daycare on a damaged tire? Or maybe it was tunnel vision, if it wasn’t daycare, where else would I stop? I guess I could stop and walk to pick up my kid…but then we’d be waiting for the tow in the cold for however long. Also, doesn’t my car have sensors? It should give me a notification in advance that my tire pressure is low–why didn’t it go off this time? There were so many thoughts in my head.
I took a stupid risk and drove that last quarter mile. I parked at the daycare, turned on my hazards, and stayed in the daycare until a tow arrived. We waited for almost an hour. I directed the tow to the closest tire shop and tire shop was really busy. There were two cars ahead of me and later, there were three cars after me. I was so relieved to hear that the rim wasn’t damaged. And mostly importantly, everyone was safe.
As far as I know, I didn’t run over any potholes. But this particular tire was been previously patched a few times over the past year. A few months ago, the technician found a hole in the shoulder and sidewall of the tire. He advised it was a weird place to put a patch but he advised me to keep an eye on it.
What have I been loving lately?
De-influencing – What? Telling people what NOT to buy? Is the influencer job market on the decline? I hope this is a trend that stays. Influencing isn’t new, it’s been around since advertisement has been around. But what makes influencing different is that the advertising seems more ubiquitous because it’s on my phone and I carry it around and I interact with it more any technology. Influencers aren’t movie stars or tv stars endorsing a product, instead, they’re supposed to look like “everyday people” but only way prettier.
I get that influencing is a job (that probably doesn’t pay as well as the life portrayed), but I am on the side of the people who are consuming the influencer content. The consumer is left feeling inadequate and led to believe that in order to have a life a little more like the “influencer-next-door”, they have to buy their product (i.e. a water bottle, shampoo, an expensive crew neck t-shirt). True story: I have a former-coworker-turned-influencer who is trying to shill $2k facials. Uhh…I am doing the math thinking about where in the world can I go with $2k. I know! I could buy two roundtrip flight tickets from LA to Auckland, New Zealand for less than 2k.
Breathing exercises for stress – A much needed exercise I’ve been practicing this week. I am glad to have this in my arsenal of stressful times.
Eat, Play, Live 
Hi Julie.
I’d bet that while your tire’s wheel rim was okay, your tire was likely a total loss.
The way tires are made today, they are designed to fail if you drive on them when pressure is lost. The only way to save both tire and rim are to pull over ASAP and swap to your spare tire. Of course, that’s such a joy-filled job that many don’t want any part of it.
But your description of “influencers” confuses me. I don’t think I’ve heard of anyone doing this as a serious role and are you suggesting that they even get paid for it? This is totally outside of my experience.
Who would own the task of granting one person the role while denying it to another. Would the selling company – who produces the product or service somehow pay the people who refer others to them?
I know Amazon encourages all their customers to write reviews for anything purchased there – but here you only earn a reputation if you write enough good quality and helpful reviews – but no money.
Well, yes. you could push a towel remnant through that hole in your window, but good think blackout curtains work also. Our front door has a complex seal that I’ve not been able to fix so I have a small hand towel lying over the top which fill that gap whenever the door is closed. Without the towel, if the temps drop low, that gap becomes a cold air blaster that prevents anyone near it from staying comfortably warm.
Thanks for the virtual visit. I hope by the time you read this – that you’re feeling much better.
Blessings.
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Hello, Gary, Thank you for stopping by. I’ve been feeling better overall.
Blackout curtains are very useful — especially in the summertime when the sun is so strong.
Honestly, I have a mixed view on influencing. I mean we write on our blogs about things we enjoy and share it with the world. When we endorse something we believe in, it’s some form of influencing right? But I think that’s different from the social media influencing that I’ve been surrounded with through adulthood. I’ve been bombarded with things I needed to buy and live and eat and raise my kid all because I use social media, I just want to keep in touch with my friends and family! And yes, one can get paid for influencing — some have even quit their full-time jobs to pursue it full-time. This Medium article describes how toxic influencer culture has become: https://medium.com/codex/the-toxicity-of-influencer-culture-445a4abde933. The healthiest thing I’ve done for myself in the last few years is ignore/unfellow “authentically inauthentic” influencers on my feed. I just couldn’t take any more gaslighting.
Unfortunately, my car is a little bit on the newer end (2018), it did not come with a spare which is commonly found nowadays.
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Wow – I must not be enough of a user of social media to have learned this. The industry of social media must consist of billions of dollars worth of hardware and software especially if we include the salaries of all those who engineer, buy, and manage it all. That money has to come from somewhere and ads can only return so much. This “influencer” role sounds like yet another way to create product or service demand via us as 3rd party marketeers. The only product that these folks have is their social media audience – so this is where you (and I – if I were to use social media more) become the buyers produced by the influencers. Yuck – because I too just wanted to be able to stay in some amount of touch with friends and family.
I think we’ve created a monster and need to move back towards sitting down to share a real cup of coffee with real live people without a screen between us.
Thanks for opening my eyes.
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I would’ve had a major meltdown if that had been me in the tire situation… 😅 Kudos to you for keeping your cool and so glad you made it safely! De-influencing sounds interesting and actually useful, with so many people and advertisements telling us what to buy and oftentimes those things turn out to not have been worth it, it would be nice for a change to know where not to waste money. 🙂 I hope you have a stress-free week!
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De-influencing is also a form of influencing too but I am okay to be told what NOT to buy. It’s refreshing. The funny thing is that the people who are leading the way is the younger generation. I try really hard to keep my cool or maybe I was stupidly confident I would arrive at my interim destination at the time. Though it wouldn’t have been a far walk to stop and get my kid and walk back to wait for the tow, I think I should have lost my patience waiting for the tow for an hour in the cold. I haven’t had the best luck with short wait times when it comes to tows. Thank you for stopping by, Lina Belle!
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Hi Julie – I’d probably have done the same thing if I had a flat tire – you just want to get somewhere safe and also be able to be there for your child – the tyre and the rim are secondary considerations. I’m glad it all worked out for you and you didn’t have an expensive rim to replace too.
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