Reopening & Other Progress

My library will be opening by appointment starting next Tuesday. We have approval from all sorts of boards to allow one family/household at a time come in to browse, use computers etc for 30 minutes at a time. Our local numbers are very low and flat so everyone feels like this is a good move but as we are heading into a season when this virus is likely to surge again, I am nervous. We will be starting with only Tuesday hours and I don’t work Tuesday so, who knows, maybe we will be reevaluating this move before it even changes anything for me specifically.

I’ll be off next week until Friday so I can celebrate the holiday and other things. I welcome the time off to cook and clean for our feast. All the laptops are finally gone now so I can get moving ahead again! We also have 2 slightly raised bed gardens installed at this point and one in progress for what will be our berry patch. We have tentative plans for a live willow fence along the front yard as well. I am looking forward to finally, hopefully, growing a decent portion of our veggies and berries. Even our yard is becoming more organized.

Our new raised beds and future berry patch

Our Thanksgiving feast is pretty much planned and our Yule feast is mostly finalized. I have the main course narrowed down to 2 options and I’ll just order both and see which I get. I’m looking forward to our once a year, amazing turkey next Thursday, and our Yule/Xmas feast next month.

Yesterday I finished 2 projects for Xmas, one was a small, simple project I made 6 of and one was a longer term, lots of work project for a dear friend we are adopting into our clan. (Assuming she doesn’t run screaming into the hills when she realizes we’re all mad here.) I still have a bunch of projects I haven’t even started including a set of Hogwarts cloth napkins I want to make for our table. I’m not into matchy-matching everything except for special occasions. For our big feasts and celebrations I like to go all in and give us a real sense of occasion. I need to keep reminding myself that I am very much on track right now and that it is all under control. I am doing less this year and that’s why I have room for the long-delayed napkin sewing etc.

Got the first two napkins pinned and ready to sew. Only six more to go!

Thankful

I’m sitting here with my tea, planning my day, watching my husband doggedly keep trying to secure a PS5 for Christmas, and I feel deeply grateful that if he lucks out and bags one of those things we can afford it. We are both somehow still employed during a nightmare scenario for this country. We still have food, shelter, warmth, (thank you wood stove)and the plausibility of a new gaming platform. A whole lot had to go right for us to get here.

23 years ago we were living in subsidised housing, with food stamps, WIC, and assistance with heating. We worked hard to get out of poverty, no doubt, I thrifted like a master, he educated himself one certificate at a time to make the move from retail to tech. Yes, we worked hard, but our biggest help was connections, no question about it, connections to people in a position to help us were 100% critical. The first big jump was helped along by a dear friend who highly recommended him as an addition to an IT department for a little nonprofit she worked at. He had a fistful of certificates and some natural talent with computers and he walked into a department in chaos from long neglect. It wasn’t long before he was in charge. Another friend fiercely fought for him to get into the organization he’s in now. Again, he ended up in charge of that department in fairly short order because he worked hard and kept learning but he wouldn’t have gotten either of these breaks without the help of friends.

We’ve also received monetary help at times in the form of loans and gifts. We’ve had relatives buy us major furniture, pitch in on home repairs, buy clothes for our kids, lend us cars when our car was in the shop, hook us up with a friends and family discount on a new car! These are all important things, substantial things, that helped us get here. Our many connections, along with our advantages, made a pretty strong ladder for us to climb up out of poverty on and I am thankful that we could take advantage of all of it. People without well placed, decently well off friends and relatives, who didn’t go through well funded, well maintained schools, who lived in food deserts, have to work much harder than we did to make a fraction of our progress, or even just to avoid winding up on the streets. I don’t think we should rest until we, as a country, fix this unequal, broken system so that all folks can live with dignity and have their biggest holiday worry be that they won’t get the new gaming platform and their kids will be marginally disappointed. That’s the dream.

Banner credit: “Traditional Cornucopia — Leanne and David Kesler, Floral Design Institute, Inc., in Portland, Ore.” by Flower Factor is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0

A Very Covid Thanksgiving

I haven’t been posting because I had an allergic reaction that lasted for days and then suffered a tick bite that required a doctor visit and antibiotics. Gods, I hate ticks so much. They are the worst.

This year Thanksgiving is going to be a little different. Usually this is a day to gather with family, and/or friends, to feast and celebrate but this year we would all be wise if we did any gathering via Zoom or Skype or some such. Our day will be spent, as all days since sometime in March, with only those who live in our household. That’s somewhat typical for us, we often have one or two loved ones from outside our home attend,but we’re not into huge gatherings. My mother is very into the big gatherings, the bigger the better. She used to host, and we would sometimes go (or go to my husband’s motherer’s) but the last few years she’s gone to her brother’s. Now, his state has just straight up said if folks go there they need to quarantine for 2 weeks. I predict she will go anyway and just blatantly skip the whole quarantine. That’s my guess.

I saw her the other day and she started crying and said she can’t take the pandemic anymore, she just really can’t. I sympathized and did not point out that she is exactly the reason why we are still in this shit. She travelled to neighboring states 3 times this summer to vacation. I saw the pictures of her on the beach with a group of people and jammed together for a photo not a mask in sight. I know she has gone to friend’s houses and had her friends over. She has had the woman who works for them in the house 5 days a week, she has continued to have a house cleaner in twice a week. Etc etc, etc. She also refused to wear a mask when she was out walking in her town. And now, 8 months since the start of the pandemic, we are still refusing to get together with her for a meal. Damn right we are! Christmas isn’t looking good either because the number of cases is climbing like I cannot even believe right now.

Christmas will be weird. My mother usually comes for that and even helps cook but this year I think it will just be my little family and some zoom calls. Our scaled back presents and Maximum Effort feast and holiday decor will have to carry the day. We’ll probably watch movies and play board games since getting a PS5 seems impossible at this point. Ooof. I know they were all hoping big for that console and some new games but profiteers bought up all the consoles and, last we checked, were selling them for FOUR TIMES the retail price. Jerks.

In Good News: I finally got a turkey! It took a month and this is the third time I ordered one and they were always out of stock by the time our pick-up appointment came around. Today we got one. The one I ordered was out of stock but the young woman who got our order substituted from some other brand. It’s about 14lbs so pretty perfect for us. Plenty for dinner and plenty for leftovers and there will be soup, oh yes.

The Itchening

I accidentally ate a bit of tomato yesterday so now I am both terribly itchy and zonked out on Benadryl. I’m through day one so only 2 or 3 to go like this. It sucks but at least my allergies have not been life-threatening. My mouth hurts so I am eating very cautiously, soft stuff, drinks, I’m finding tea soothing. I’m spacing out, staring at the TV a lot, using most of my willpower not to scratch my skin raw or claw at my eyes. It could be worse, I am ok, it could be a lot worse. I have my nurse by my side.

There are so many things I need to do, I wish I could do them, I just have no focus. I think I could fold laundry and get something out to thaw for dinner. Not sure what else I could do in this state. I’ll try to read and do a bit of work from home if I can. I’ll see you when the itching subsides.

Relief and a Soapbox

This must be what hope feels like. Not that hope was entirely absent, just that four years of unbridled greed, corruption and hate had somewhat smothered it. This is what hope with a decent basis for it feels like.

I’m not saying things are going to be all beer and skittles from here on out, just that now we can start the very hard work of trying to fix things. I have some small hope that enough people on the Republican side of things may have had their eyes opened a little bit by the current administration’s utter failure to control the spread of the virus and the complete disregard its members have shown for those infected or killed by it. I can understand dissatisfaction with politicians and thinking that someone outside of politics might do better for people but unfortunately the GOP chose very, very poorly and we are now in a FUBAR situation because of it.

We need to remember that all of us actually do have much in common. We all want a safe and peaceful world for our kids, that is the ideal. We want our kids to be healthy, we want to have a chance to have a satisfying life, surrounded by good neighbors, we want community, we want economic security, decent schools, good jobs, and so on. Some people have been mislead to believe that in order for one to succeed, others must fail, if one prospers, others must do poorly. But that isn’t how things have to work, there are other ways to do things. When I, as a person who values human rights and equality, say that I want people of color to have opportunities for education, jobs, safe neighborhoods etc, I am not saying I want white people to lose those things, I am not saying that even a little. There is no reason we cannot all have decent working conditions, a living wage, proper healthcare, safe neighborhoods and satisfying lives.

There is enough for all of us. The reason things are so messed up is that the hyper-rich are literally hoarding almost all the money and resources and they don’t think they should have to pay their fair share. We need to fix that. We can fund everything we need to fun if the hyper rich pay the taxes they actually ought to. We can have well funded police, fire fighters, and military as well a schools, well maintained roads etc. And don’t worry, the rich will still be really, really rich! The poor however will not be so poor anymore, they will be able to live decently and with dignity, they will no longer be a few missed paychecks from disaster. There is no need to exploitation or hatred.

just forget the world…

I’ve done all I can and I need a break from stress and worry so I’m here to talk about things that are bringing me joy in some way, things that take me out of myself and distract me, all that sort of stuff. So, onto that! First things first: Books. They are my sanctuary, my education, my consolation, and my many, many other lives.

Current/Recent Reads:

The Ballad of Black Tom; by Victor LaValle (fantastic mythos-related story)
Adventures in Opting Out; by Cait Flanders
Disfigured; On Fairy Tales, Disability, and Making Space; by Amanda LeDuc
The Library of the Unwritten; by A.J. Hackwith
The Only Good Indians; by Stephen Graham Jones
Dirt to Soil; by Gabe Brown
A Deadly Education; by Naomi Novik (The latest Fantastic Stangelings Bookclub read)
Beowulf; by Maria Dahvana Headley
A Long Way to a Small Angry Planet; by Becky Chambers

There are other books, of course, but these are all the ones seriously in the flow at the moment. Other wonderful things I like to fill up my senses with: Shows!

Community. (Hulu & Netflix) My current comfort watch. Brilliant show with a ton of laughs and lots of heart.
The Haunting of Bly Manor. (Netflix) Pure gold so far. Atmospheric, subtle horror, perfect storytelling. I think I’m on episode #5 and I am having such fun. As always, my brain is whirring on ahead of the story making guesses and trying to expose the whole picture. I spotted a few things before they were revealed but, wow, there is so much here to unpack and it is glorious.
Liziqi. (YouTube) My ultimate escape from my own reality mixed with my ultimate life goals. Somehow relaxing and inspiring at the same time.
Good Omens. (Amazon Prime) We’re on our own side. Perfect.
Vienna Blood. (Dvd from the library) Very cool, entertaining, a bit like a Sherlock Holmes homage. Victorian Vienna. Hitting a bit close to reality with the superior race nonsense but a good crime procedural with interesting characters. Some absolutely stunning voices among the cast; loads of deep gravel in varying flavors. Particularly the lead detective and his rival. (I’m a sucker for a really good voice)
Shetland. (Dvds from library) Love, love, love this. I love the way this show is paced, the slow unraveling of the clues, the deep sense of Place. The landscape as another ever-present character. I have sadly finished all the available seasons of this and…
Vera. (Dvds) The same author wrote the books this series and the series Shetland are based on. Brilliant TV, just brilliant.
Videos of babies laughing hysterically, goofy pets, etc.

There are many more shows I could list that are excellent distractions but these are the ones I’m currently living inside. I’m also playing RPGs, of course. I am currently playing in; Hell’s Rebels (Pathfinder) on most Tuesdays, Azartia (a friend’s homebrew D&D) on Thursdays, and Age of Ashes, (Pathfinder) on Sundays. I am also running; Extinction Curse, (Pathfinder) on Saturdays and The Slithering, (Pathfinder) randomly, and my hubby is running the teens from the library through Age of Ashes as well. I’m playing 2 Human Druids and one Gnome Bard multi-classing into Druid and experiencing whiplash between characters. My bard is level… 12? 14? Something, and in Pathfinder which is designed for characters to be heroic. She is a blast to play, and absolutely good time. My Pathfinder Druid is low level, fun but kind of a letdown after playing the high level bard. The D&D Druid is… fine. She has a few pretty great spells that are fun/effective but… D&D 5e is just, well, it’s awful. Simple to play? Try; Over simplified, broken, frustrating. Cat, my druid, is level 9 with a 15 AC… The champion in our party has only a 20 AC. We get hit constantly, just absolutely constantly. The game is just not on a heroic scale at all. It’s dumbed down to the point of, why am I playing this? But yeah, it’s a distraction for a a few hours a week and time spent with friends. There are a lot of laughs as we play. Many laughs come from failed saving throws.

Other:

Knitting: one big project for a present, over half done now. ^_^
Work: 2-3 shifts a week, busy, on my feet, frustrating with Covid restrictions but, hey, I love it anyway and I’m lucky to have a job at all.
Baking/cooking: my daily chore and sometimes creative outlet.
Macrame’. I just got supplies to start doing this. I’ve been wanting to try it for ages, since like the 70s. Just getting around to it!
Holiday planning: well underway, constantly on my mind, so much to do!
De-cluttering. On the back burner but always on my mind. I want to get the excess out of here and have a semi-orderly, uncrowded, welcoming home.
Writing. Blogging here, jotting down ideas that keep coming to me, writing for work, which is fun and cool that I get to write for work at all. It’s mostly instructions for craft kits I make up or promotional writing for said craft kits, but still.

Sigh, and now the world is calling, I’m afraid, and I must answer. Stay well, be safe, see you soon.

Banner photo credit: “Contemplation – Dartmoor, Devon” by Faborsky Photography is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

Remember, Remember…

So, to catch me up to today: democracy still hangs in the balance, we topped 100,000 infections yesterday, wow, and my hometown voted over 90% for the side of sanity, human rights, and compassion. A mixed bag. I don’t know how many died of Covid19 yesterday but it’s usually around 1,000. One thousand, it’s just a number, so abstract to hear it like that: 1,000 died yesterday. That is 1,000 people, 1,000 human lives cut short in a horrific way. 1,000 people dying pretty much alone, isolated, every single day from just this one disease. I say all that to remind myself of the 10s of thousands of broken hearts happening because of those deaths. I need to be patient, be safe, keep everyone safe by continuing to wear a mask, keeping a nice 6 ft distance from others, staying the course.

Still no word on whether democracy will be renewed for any further seasons. I’m trying not to think about it. I’m trying not to think about the awful people out there threatening the poll workers with guns to try to get them to stop counting votes because they don’t care about democracy or freedom only the continuation of their orange faced baboon in chief’s reign of idiocy and destruction. So, good job me, there I go thinking about it!

Breathe in, breathe out, breathe in, breathe out. Think about art, think about gardening, think about books and reading. It’s all good. It’s all good. Everything will be ok, sanity will prevail, it will. When it does there will be a fuckton of work to do to get things back to anything approaching normal or good, again. And there will be even more work to do to bring about universal healthcare, racial justice, and human rights for all. Things are bad, and the flames have been fanned by a madman for nearly 4 years now, so it’s going to suck, and be a huge amount of work to fix it, but we can fix it. Ok, here’s me not thinking about it again.

I’ll be stress-eating if anyone needs me.

The 4th of November

Laying low today with a horrid knot in my back, watching Liziqi and trying not to know anything about politics today. Final word will not be for a few days yet as all votes are counted so… I just can’t take the ups and downs right now, my stress is pretty well maxed out.

So I lie on this heating pad and I watch Liziqi and the world falls away. Here is a short video of hers to brighten your day, just in case you need it as bad as I do. https://youtu.be/d1MLIw6mP2k This woman inspires me and her videos calm me when my nerves are jangling.

Life continues, I am now working on getting ready for Thanksgiving. There is so much to do and I’ve already tried to get a turkey once and found none in stock. I guess I’ll just try each week until I get one. I’m hoping I’ll be able to get everything we need, so many traditional dishes to make.

My boss will be working from home after a possible exposure to Covid19 so that will be a bit of a strain on the library. She really keeps things on track and level around there and I know being short staffed is going to mean we can’t do as much as we usually do. Hopefully she is fine and will test negative. She’s an awesome boss and a truly good person.

Ok, that’s it, that’s all I’ve got today. Be well all of you.

Was I too Calm and un-stressed?

So, I’m avoiding social media for obvious reasons. Today and the next few days are pretty much a giant stress-factory for many, many, many people. I’m just trying to keep my stress to a minimum. I was doing pretty good this morning, I have to say, I started a fire in the wood stove, fed the cats, had some tea, finished the book I was reading and got an email from my boss….

My boss, along with the thousands of other things she does, helps out with voting. The library is the voting place for the town and she pitches in alongside whoever else is volunteering to keep things running. She emailed to cancel tomorrow’s staff meeting because a couple of our patrons, who recently tested positive for Covid19, came in to vote. So that is a potential exposure for my boss and currently is not a potential exposure for me or my coworkers. The problem is we are a small staff and if any of us, say me, is not comfortable working with someone who might have been exposed it throws a wrench into everything. We are on the verge of opening for limited browsing along with our continued computer appointments and even with the doors locked we are required to have two people working at all times. Our boss works full time and overlaps with everyone else, which obviously makes a great deal of sense, but if she needs to stay away… oof.

Yeah, so, I am stressing out anyway, even without whatever ups, downs, and mayhem are happening today in politics etc.

November is Here!

It’s windy and spitting snow this morning on the edge of Cold Swamp. Welcome, November! Halloween/Samhain didn’t really happen here. We wore no costumes, didn’t honor our beloved dead, didn’t hand out candy. We watched a couple of scary movies and ate spider donuts, that is about it. Ah well. We’re all stressed and trying hard to just maintain these days.

I harvested the last of the mint yesterday and made fresh mint tea to go with our sausage, meaball, and potato dinner. It was a ridiculously hearty meal. Tonight’s plan is lentil soup to make up for it. I’ll be at work when my little clan eats it but I’ll either bring some to work or eat when I get home. I love Fall and Winter, love the cold, love coming in from the cold to find the warmth of our fire and drink hot drinks, love the dark that makes our home a little island of light and comfortable coziness. I love wearing the cozy layers of soft clothes, I love being able to stand wearing them without dying of heatstroke, and I love the long, long season of baking and making soup. I love the contrast of the cold and raw outside with the heat indoors. And I love the long, dark nights, the hush of falling snow, and the scent of woodsmoke in the air. I will be making my usual lentil soup, squash soup, and hopefully leek and potato soup, as well as searching for new soups to add to the line-up.

And baking! Oh the bread, the cookies, the homemade cakes! I’m all geared up and ready to shop for feast food here. Got my lists ready to go and might do a few practice runs of some of the trickier items. Muahahaha. Yum. I might try to flip lemon bread and make it with lime since I can’t have lemon anymore. I may have to learn to make pies… I’m not great at it, I can do it, but everyone else’s are better, it is known.

Fun fact: The house banners from last Xmas/Yule are still up. Yeah, I know, but it’s true. I like to leave them up till sometime in February but this past Feb we were looking at the progress of Covid19 and I thought how the banners coming down each year made me all wistful and I thought I’d leave them up a while longer, you know? until the crisis was past? Yeah, at this point I just don’t know what to tell you. Will it ever be past? I hope so. I really hope so.

Our 18th wedding anniversary is coming up. My husband asked me yesterday what I want to do for it. He is not in a good headspace at all and this was clear as anything when he asked that question. So I asked him what he wants to do and he said something like: “Our options are nil.” It’s sort of true in that we don’t have the option to go out to dinner, or to a movie, or even to go out and browse a bookstore together. (all traditional anniversary activities for us) But I mean we do have options. We could make a nice dinner and eat by candlelight, we could read aloud to each other, we could borrow a movie from the library or watch one of our favorites we already have kicking around. We could even go freeze to death in the shed to get away from the kids for a bit. Insulation and a tiny woodstove have to be the next things for the shed. Yep. How cool would that be?

As much as I love my shed it seems the garden is the priority. I have a very cool lady coming next week to start preparing the first of our gardens. The idea is that it will be sitting there ready for next Spring when it’s time to plant. She’s also going to work on expanding and diversifying our berry patch. I have such endless dreams for this project/series of projects, endless. So many things I want to grow. I can’t wait to be growing and harvesting FOOD.

Tune in next time for who knows what rambling! I should have garden progress updates sometime next week,