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.

Dispatch From Under my Bed

Nope. Nope, nope. Not going to talk about the state of the world or all the craziness going on right now. I’ve focused on the crazy already, elsewhere, and I’m going to let this blog be a place of refuge from turmoil, strife and fear.

I found no blackberries in our yard this morning, and was only able to find a few golden raspberries, but there are bushes out in the neighborhood that are producing and I’ll probably hit some of them later. Our bushes are still heavy with not-yet-ripe berries, and we are getting a bit more rain lately, so maybe we’ll have more blackberries soon. Our staghorn sumac is finally producing! I was able to harvest 7 berry clusters this morning and they are now soaking in cold water for a day so I can make my family some pink “lemonade.” I can’t drink it because I am allergic. Sad story, I am allergic to lemons but in a Wild Foods class I took I learned that staghorn sumac tea was the original pink lemonade. It tastes just like it! I got to drink it 2 maybe 3 times before I became allergic to it. I was so excited to have lemonade again… a major letdown, but my family can still enjoy it so I make it.

Got through book 3 of the Demon series: Secrets of the Demon; by Diana Rowland. Really loved it as I have all of them so far. A little iffy on the ending but I am willing to see where the author takes it in the next book: Sins of the Demon. I love her books for many reasons, but the best thing for me is that I haven’t unraveled her endings before I got to them, not in any of books 1, 2, or 3, and that is a rare and happy event for me. I mean, sure, there’s something ego-boosting about figuring out whodunit all the time, but it’s also kind of tedious too depending on how early I’m sure I’ve figured it out. I don’t know why but I’m good at figuring these things out and it makes me appreciate writers who can surprize me, especially when I can look back over the story and actually see the hints that were so skillfully obscured. Suddenly seeing the red herrings for what they were is wonderful. Her white Trash Zombie series is wonderful too, I should get back on that, I think I’m on book 4 or 5 of that one.

Here at the homestead we are focusing on our many games. We’ve started to split off from each other a bit, which is weird. The girls are in games with friends, my eldest even dropped out of the family game, our boy dropped out of the circus game too which means my husband and I are in/running 2 games with none of the kids involved. It’s probably a good thing. Someday things will be more normal and we’ll leave the house for jobs and school and social stuff and it’s good the kids are taking steps and branching out before we get to that. We should encourage our boy to join a game with friends online too.

The reopening of the library continues. It looks like the trustees have approved opening for August 1st. We will start allowing a maximum of ten patrons at a time in to use our computers. Supposedly there will be no browsing allowed, not sure how that’s going to go over. Hopefully it will go well. There are still some layers of approval to get through, the Board of Health and the Select Board must approve the plan before we go forward with it, so it might not happen the way it’s written right now. It seems fairly reasonable to me, if the plexiglass is in place and I am not expected to leave the staff area to interact with patrons, I think I can handle it.

For all my worries about the virus, I am also stressed with the tons of extra work I’m now expected to do. Patrons can’t come in and browse and many of them can’t figure out how to properly reserve things online, so they call us with lists. That’s fine when it’s a few patrons a day but right now it’s many more than a few, and it’s overwhelming. I’m enunciating through my mask into the phone, trying to type or write with one hand, the computer is slow, the patrons are often incorrect that their searches have verified we have the item in our collection, and I have to apologize constantly, explain constantly, etc. After all that, I have to enter everything into the new curbside pick-up spreadsheet we’re supposed to keep. Pus the near endless procedures of quarantining and disinfecting every item coming into the library, all the doors, and everything we touch during our shifts. It’s a lot. I get it, I know it’s all for the best, but we are not working a single extra minute on this stuff. We have the same shifts we used to have only now we’re supposed to add in all this extra stuff and that is just going to get worse for a while as we slowly open up.

After each patron’s computer appointment we are going to have to sanitize the computer, mouse, desk, and chair. We are going to have to field all the phone requests by patrons who haven’t had access to a computer in months, collecting information like name, age-range, phone number, whether they will need to use the printer, etc. We will be enforcing 30 minute limits for the first time since I’ve been working there and requiring patrons to leave the building when they are done. They can’t pick out a book or movie while they are there, at least I think that’s how we’re planning on doing things at first, so we have to enforce that as well.

Lingering, nagging doubts about reopening are with me constantly. The emphasis from my boss is; “if you don’t feel safe with the way we are planning on opening, tell me what concrete steps I can take that will make you feel safe with reopening.” But the only thing that would make me feel safe would be not opening. At this point we are looking at pretty flat numbers in the state, which is lovely, but a lot of people were really stupid only about a week ago, around the 4th, and we won’t see if we will get a spike in cases from that for at least 1-2 more weeks. Add another week onto that to see how bit that potential spike will be. The crazy thing is we’ve been loosening restrictions across the state without pausing long enough to see how that loosening is affecting the infection rate. I’m afraid by the time we see the spike, and even later when officials finally admit that it’s a problem, and even later when they Hopefully lock things down again… it’ll be too late. It’ll be a disaster we can’t hope to contain. We’ll be utterly fucked.

Limiting my exposure to the news isn’t helping. I can be adequately informed as to what’s going on or I can be calm, I cannot have both. I very badly need both somehow. It doesn’t help that my husband feels a need to stay up to date with the news, or that his brother calls and fills him in on any horror he’s happened to miss. It doesn’t help that ignoring all the horror doesn’t make it go away and i know that. I need a break. I need 2020 to give us all a break, to give us something good, something really, really good, something helpful, something hopeful, something less stampede-toward-total-dystopia-ish.

So here I am. Here we are. Tonight will be the last cool night for quite a while. So I think I need to sleep in the fort tonight. In an ideal world, I would arrive home tonight to find a note from my hubby saying “meet me in the fort.” and I would get out there to find a nice dinner, lit candles, jazz playing, and wine. I know, that’s the date I put together for him a while back, it’s the date I need tonight, but I have to go to work. Maybe I can pull it off somehow? I’m having trouble seeing how.

Isolation Interlude

How crazy is the world right now? It’s almost a sincere question because I am trying to keep my head down and not look at the news because I’m trying to preserve my sanity. Some stuff still gets through and a lot of it is depressing and enraging and horrifying in the extreme. I don’t hide from the news all the time, just when I need a break.

I’ve been reading a book called Mark of the Demon; by Diana Rowland and I’m really enjoying it. I ordered the next couple of paperbacks in the series because I had a Barnes & Noble gift card. I’m reading tons of other stuff, The Color of Law; by Richard Rothstein, The Witch must Die; by Sheldon Cashdan, plus many more and I’m still waiting for my copy of So You Want to Talk About Race; by Ijeoma Oluo. But Mark of the Demon is my escape read at the moment so it’s getting gobbled up in a hurry.

The other ways I’m distracting myself from reality are working on a project that may or may not be anything at all, work and the Summer reading preparation that is swallowing me whole, replacing instacart shopping because gods, does instacart SUCK. We had good luck with them for a few months but when they fail they fail BIG. Wasted my entire day dealing with it and I’m DONE. We did the curbside pick-up at Hannaford’s for the first time today, it went well so I’m hopeful. It was also way cheaper! We grabbed the farmshare on the way home so the fridge is full to bursting and I will be committing acts of vegetable preparation and loads of cooking in the next few days.

My roses have gone ballistic! I harvested at least 150 blossoms this morning. At this rate I will have enough for tea all year long. I just need another couple of harvests like that. Since we finally have rain, the mint should start going crazy too. Yay! I need a lot of mint to keep me in tea through the winter. I still possess exactly zero apple trees though and that is sad. I bet they take forever to get established and get going too. I’ll have to look into it. I am not good at growing plants for food. I do okay with house plants but I’ve been frustrated for decades at my inability to get even the hardiest herbs to grow. But I DO have mint now. It’s a ray of hope that I am determined to capitalize on. The golden raspberries look like they will do well this year, as do the wild blackberries. What can I say? Little dreams keep me going through the dark times.

Everything else is continuing on as normal. We’ve got 4 or 5 RPGs going at the moment so that keeps us busy. The kids are all staggering along doing their best to keep occupied and sane too. I look forward to a day when we can do regular stuff like run out and get yummy soft-serve ice cream, or stop by a store to pick up that one thing we forgot, or maybe get haircuts or something. It’s so weird right now and it seems even weirder with people rushing to get back to normal. I hope things will start truly improving soon but I don’t know. I keep dreaming of tornadoes.

Day 48

We’ve got a real pattern going here. We eat pretty well right after we get groceries, there’s fruit and lettuce, milk, cheese oj, we got little cupcakes from the bakery this time. I was missing those darn things so bad! We’ve been home long enough I had to buy conditioner, guess I forgot to have enough of that on hand. So, we got some groceries delivered yesterday so we had fresh bread and salad with dinner the past 2 nights and I got to make the weird mac & cheese I wanted to make. We got apples and oj for the next couple of days at least. I’m trying to space out the good things the little cupcakes will be gone tonight and I will likely wait a day to make the brownies from the mix I ordered. I try to keep a few of the fresh veggies for a few days to liven up an extra meal or two. We’ll be back to pasta, rice, and tuna again before long. Not to complain, it’s good to be able to eat, it’s just less stressful when we have a more normal range of food.

If you need distraction as much as I do: There’s a really cool game for the PS4. It’s called “Journey” and it’s lovely. My friend told me about it and I went to go buy it and it’s FREE on the PS4 in downloads! It took me maybe 2 1/2 hours to play and it was diverting and charming and … just cool. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mU3nNT4rcFg I intend to play it several more times. It only took 15 minutes to download too.

I got 3 submissions to my contest! Feels like a victory to me. There are 3 kids claiming they will log in for the Pathfinder game tomorrow too. I will be on top of the world if that happens. Seriously, that is a huge leap in participation in my virtual programs and I will take it. I’ll be announcing the winner of the contest on Monday and sending out the little prize. ^_^

I’m not feeling well, haven’t been sleeping enough, nausea, headache, just under the weather. Crazy because I have had no exposure to anyone or anything in ages. Could it be allergies? Meh. I hope you are well, I hope you are coping. Stay safe everyone!