Fool

Life with a pandemic is weird. There is a wild discrepancy in how seriously people are taking this and that is likely to cause big problems. My husband’s workplace is taking it very seriously, has closed the campus and is preparing for the students to learn remotely and for faculty to teach from home, some staff will work from home, like my hubby who is in IT. My son’s school is closed and preparing for distance learning. My boss has excused us from work if we or anyone in our households are sick ‘in any way, shape, or form.” It is likely my workplace will be shut down soon as it is a public place open to all. Meanwhile, the churches near us are still having services, people are still flocking to the restaurants across the street from us, and people we know are laughing at us for isolating ourselves. My husband may already have covid19… do they want to get it?

Look, I know it isn’t very serious for most people, some people literally have no symptoms, THAT is part of the danger. Symptomless people spreading it to vulnerable ones is very very very likely. This bug is contagious in a way few things are and to the elderly and those with underlying conditions, like my dear husband, it is very serious and the fatality rate is yet to be determined. A fatality rate between 2 and 6% is high, is dangerous. If my extremely asthmatic hubby gets this his chance of dying isn’t going to be in the single digits, I have to deal with that worry. What I don’t have to do is allow him to potentially be exposed to this thing, hoping BIG that’s not what he has already, I can keep us all away from people until this thing is under control, until there is a vaccine or something.

View at Medium.com

this article is about social distancing and flattening the curve.

So, for now, we get to deal with everyone thinking we are overreacting. We’ll see if I feel foolish later. I’d rather feel foolish, look foolish, and be a fool than lose my husband.

Battening Down the Hatches

Well, it seems we’ve made the call. My son’s school has closed and is gearing up for online learning, my husband is/has been working from home while ill, we’ve stopped taking my middle-est daughter to school and are hoping they will let her learn online so she can graduate in the spring, my eldest tried to get time off from the pharmacy she works at but they said she could come in as usual or lose her job so she lost the job, and I am hoping like crazy that my boss keeps being supportive of my NOT going in to work. At this point, with no way to know what my husband is ill with we are either protecting others from getting Covid19 or we are protecting my very vulnerable husband from it. I did not imagine having to make a call like this until very recently. Life has gotten weird.

We’re as stocked up as I could get us. I built up our supplies of TP, pasta, rice beans, tea and other staples, froze a bunch of chicken and beef, a little bacon, got ahead on toothpaste, soap etc. we have board games, video games, rpgs, and tons of books and art supplies. I also made sure to have cat food and litter to last a while and plenty of dog food. I think we can lay low for a month or two without going crazy or suffering privation. We’ll see how it goes I guess. schools are closing, sporting events are cancelled, library programs are being cancelled, companies are telling people to work from home, hand washing instructions and videos are popping up all over and social distancing is being encouraged widely.

i don’t think we’re overreacting, we are calm and making the best calls we can on all of this. When my daughter quit her job we had doubts, we felt awful, but then we saw a video where a Doctor with 30 years experience talked about why this disease in particular has him worried. There was a situation he was involved with where 13 people were exposed to this virus and all 13 contracted it, something he has never seen before, all 13 got it and 3 ended up in the ICU, 2 are still there. If my husband doesn’t happen to already have this thing there is no way in hell I am letting him risk getting it. He has terrible asthma, just shockingly bad. We’re already doing everything we can for him outside of a hospital setting and his doctor wants us to hold the course. The doc calls daily, sometimes more than once, to check on him. We’re in limbo here and we’re making the best calls we can day by day.

Explanation…

By way of explanation. My husband has been asked by his doctor to self-quarantine because he works at a school with students from all over the world, is ill with a very bad cough, and it’s possible he might have been exposed to the latest corona virus because parents of some students came to campus to pick up their kids.

My husband also has very, very bad asthma. He’s been ill for over a week and isn’t getting better. The doc just started him on updraft treatments 3xs/day which seems to be helping. They said to keep the kids in school and the eldest and I were allowed to work… which seems crazy and wrong and a great way to spread whatever Hubby has. (though I do not think he has the corona virus, his symptoms just don’t add up to that. Thank the gods.) I am letting my boss decide when she wants me to come in. So far she’s opted to have my shifts covered.

I have been out to the grocery store with full hand sanitizing and staying away from people and they are starting to run out of certain things. I was able to get sanitizing wipes and bleach but they are 100% out of rubbing alcohol, hydrogen peroxide, witch hazel, hand sanitizer, and so on. I got some of the last wipes. They are low on a lot of things but food can be had aplenty in our area still. I’ve been hearing that Costcos nearby are out of near everything, I’ve heard of people not able to get inside them to shop, schools are talking about, and in some cases preparing to, go into online learning mode. My kid’s schools are discussing these things though there are no known cases in our county yet.

We’re ok, I hope you and yours are too!

self-quarantined

My husband is ill and has been asked to self-quarantine by the doctor because he works at an international school. There are no test kits so the doc doesn’t want to see him. My work doesn’t want me to come in until things are resolved…. so we are hanging in there as best we can. We’re ok so far, really.

getting over the flu

haven’t been knitting or doing much of anything. mostly sneezing today.. as fun as it sounds. ;/

knitting by the book update 2/13

snowy weather and illness means i’ve had more time to knit lately! i’ve finished 3 of the horcrux washcloths and started a 4th.

completed: cup, diadem, and nagini. started: ring.

so, i finally ventured out to the greatest yarn store to get supplies for upcoming projects. i’ve got yarn to finish all the horcrux washcloths, for the house colors mug cozies, the nagini lariat, the beaubatons capelet, and i jumped the line and bought a bag of yarn for the order of the phoenix throw blanket because it was such a good deal. at the moment i am slightly bored with the washcloths and keep reconsidering my plan to knit all of them, but i’m about halfway there anyway so i am going to try to stick with it. my plan is still to make items for each house when a project calls for it… at least through the scarves. when i get to more advanced projects, like the house cardigan and all the socks and such, i may pick one house and move on. i would go back and make the other houses later because of course i want to make all of them.

i’ve also finally packed away almost all the harry potter xmas decorations. i still have the house banners up because the dining room always looks so sad once i take them down. everything else is back in boxes in the closet waiting for next winter.

first project finished

i’ve finished the first horcrux washcloth and am working on the second. i finished the hufflepuff cup and have started the ravenclaw diadem. we ventured out today to get yarn and needles for upcoming projects and failed pretty hard. i was able to get approximate colors for all the washcloths and some to make an upcoming nagini project but that was it for yarn. i’ll have to head down to webs to get expensive yarn i guess. oh well, it will be much nicer yarn too so it’ll work.

more later, i’m beat and need to make dinner. cheers all! and happy knitting.

knitting by the book

it seems i got a late xmas present from my sweet husband. he bought me harry potter knitting magic and it just came out. i’m psyched that it seems to have projects of every level. i’m not an expert knitter by any stretch of the imagination so I’m starting with one of the beginner level projects.

i’ve been pretty much a beginner for decades so i think i’m going to try to use my love of all things harry potter to force myself to make real progress. i’m going to try to knit through the book, make all the projects starting with the simplest all the way through the most complex. i don’t know if i’ll be able to make everything, i have so much to learn, but i am going to try.

i’m on row 40-something of the “cup” horcrux washcloth. there are 7 of them and i will probably make them all and then pick the next project to attempt.

oh, and my computer is having issues, the shift key doesn’t work very often so hardly any capital letters. Its’s a pain.

Games and Goals @ the Library

I spent yesterday at the library with my husband. He runs a Pathfinder RPG for the tweens and teens once a month, usually while I’m working, I fetch snacks and print things for them because I’m almost always on the clock. Yesterday we reset the game to level one in the new Pathfinder 2.0 and started the new one shot module designed to teach players the new rules. It’s the same module we ran at home and the kids at the library jumped right in and did a better job sorting it out than the we did. ^_^

Progress is going slowing on all fronts around here. I’m not tending to my goals very well, except my reading goal which I’m still ahead in, I haven’t had time or money yet to get it together to work on things like soap or lotion making and it’s not exactly gardening season here in the North East. I’m also spending more time working on the upcoming Summer Reading Program than I’d have thought I would at this point in the year. The Cultural Council grants came through and it looks like I will get to offer both the stained glass and teen paint night workshops I wanted to. Yay! I thought I hadn’t gotten the painting grant but it was just late because of a typo or something in the council’s answer. For those 2 things I’ve just dashed off some emails to the instructors. What I’ve really been working on are my plans for other activities. I plan to run a Fairy Tale Writing Contest, plant some sort of fairy garden, offer a workshop on Wee Folk house-making, and hopefully a few other things as well. Last summer’s Book Cover Contest was a complete and utter bust and I am going to do my best to make sure the writing contest is a success. I definitely made some mistakes! (it was my first time running an SRP and my first time running a contest so it was inevitable I would mess it up pretty big time) How I will improve this year’s contest:

RULES: I will NOT leave things wide-open. It turns out that saying “do whatever you want!” is not the best way to inspire creativity. I will make sure there are clear guidelines for what I want submitted.
Examples: I will absolutely make sure I have at least 2-3 examples of what submitted tales could be like. Last year I had no examples whatsoever because I was swamped and kept putting off working on it.
Publicize the contest outside the library with flyers in the local middle schools and high schools, with a press release and with a very nice flyer I have been working on for ages already.
Prizes: I will tailor the prizes to the contest and not offer the generic one-size-fits-all prize I attached to last year’s book cover contest.

Sometimes it’s a little overwhelming learning this job as I go but I think I’m really starting to get the hang of it after a whole year. The collection is coming along. I’m starting to find areas of nonfiction to focus on that I think will interest local teens and be of help to them, I’m still working on getting more clear direction from them on what sorts of fiction they want in the collection. I put out surveys and got a far number of responses that were pretty diverse so I can only make sure I try to order a wide selection of books across all the genres at this point. The budget is such that I can’t really order more than 1 or 2 of any genre each month but I am able to supplement that with donated books sometimes. People who love books are so generous to the library, I often get books that have just come out within a few months in perfect condition, it really helps. I’m making progress in the programming I offer too. After each one I sit down and sort out what worked and what didn’t and why. I think about what I could change to make it more successful or about why it failed.

I love this job and I want to make sure my boss feels like I am worth the chance she took hiring me. In my job description it states that I am to run at least 2 programs per month, one being the Teen Advisory Board and one other of my own devising, and that attendance should ideally be 3, 4 or more teens (we are a small, rural library, larger libraries probably get a lot more participants). Starting this month, with the new year and all, I am offering every month:

Teen Advisory Board: pizza, small projects, and talking about what interests those who show up. I usually get 4-8 teens for this.
Pathfinder Role Playing game: 4 hour session, snacks provided, usually attended by 3-4 players.
Monthly Movie: tied to the summer reading theme, this year fairy tales, with free popcorn. My first and only screening so far had 7 attendees.
Book Boot Camp: a book club where we each read whatever we want within a certain genre and discuss them over cocoa and baked goods. (I’ll switch that up if I’m still running it once it gets warm out) This month will be Mystery and it happens next weekend. I believe I have 5 sign ups but we’ll see if anyone shows up.

Last year at this time I was running TAB and attempting to continue the Young Writer’s group started by my predecessor. Unfortunately the writing group fell apart in short order and it took me a few months to begin to offer my own programs. So, progress! I am definitely doing better than I was a year ago and I’m still working on it so I have to be happy with that.

very small update

Things are going fairly well in my little world right now. I am scrupulously avoiding thinking about those things that would break the dam and focusing on the good, the improving, and personal growth. Currently my job is going well and I have things planned out for more than 3 months plus the Pathfinder game, TAB, monthly movies, and Book Boot Camp planned right through December. I am getting things together for Summer Reading and am very pleased that I can offer a stained glass workshop for the teens due to a grant from the Cultural Council. !!! I didn’t get the grant for the painting workshop but I think I’m going to look into a cheaper option for that one.

I haven’t been getting to much crafting but I have been reading right along, writing is spotty too and I feel like I may have stretched myself a little thin. Ah well, perhaps I will adjust my goals a little. I’m cooking more, again, keeping us from resorting to eating out much. I still need to plan a bit better, might have a handle on that for this week. Time will tell.