Hitting a wall

 the painters are *almost* done but there's a tiny bit of trim up high on the back of the house they'll have to do tomorrow. (Also they didn't take down a lot of the masking. Some of it I could but I feel like for what I'm paying, that's their job). 

Also no sign of Martin to do the indoor stuff; I'm really hoping he comes tomorrow. If he doesn't, maybe midday I text the big-boss to remind him I have meetings the end of next week and I really want this done.

Because I do. I've been living with most everything out of the kitchen and having to crawl over stuff and root around in boxes when I want some kind of canned good gets really old really fast. 

I'm prepared to pay the rest but I want to wait until the work's one. I told the big-boss that I would have most of the money the middle of next week.

Anyway: probably no Chickasaw trip for me this summer, boo. And Saturdays it's too crowded until it starts to cool down enough that swimming is not appealing, so I can't take a Saturday and go. 

I'm also just hitting a wall with the heat and the dryness and the near-isolation of having to be home all day, every day in case the painters need to plug something in or have a question. Also already dealing with some borderline-demanding work e-mails and I'm sort of tired already and also thinking with apprehension of four classes AND having to try to prep the class somehow for next spring - I have no ideas and no inspiration still as to how to do it. 

I tell myself I'll feel better when the house is done, but at this point....I wonder if the house will get done, or if I'll have lived for a week with a disrupted kitchen and stuff all moved around in the sewing room and just have to keep waiting. (At what point do I move stuff back into the kitchen so it's easier to cook?)

Also looking at the COVID numbers here with apprehension and figuring I have to mask again this fall to be careful, even though I will probably be the only one. And also today I was thinking of how I used to go to scientific conferences, and how fun the North American Prairie Conferences could be....and I may never do that again (Well, I don't think they do the NAPC any more anyway). But I regularly see reports on Twitter of "If you were at xyz conference/convention, test yourself for covid! several people there came down with it" and yeah. I have a couple more post-tenure reviews to go through before retirement but if I can teach myself to tolerate getting "imperfect" ratings, I just avoid the whole conference thing and try just to publish instead. 

I've read articles where researchers are saying it'll be 2024 before we hit "endemicity" with covid, which just means it's not circulating at such a high rate, and it's more like the flu, and I just don't know. I mean, we heard before it was nearly over - and I'm now thinking about how stupidly optimistic I was when the vaccines came out, I thought we'd actually get a happily ever after on this where we'd all get vaccinated, and it would stop circulating, and in a year we would be able to do everything we did before again and wow, was I wrong. So I just expect the worst now, which is why I'm worrying about monkeypox now....

And yes, yes, I get it: this is what people who are disabled dealt with all the time. And yes, yes: keep the virtual option at conferences, and hire more professors at colleges to run online classes for people who need them (but DO NOT load it onto the regular profs, some of whom (me) are teaching 4/4 where all four classes each semester are DIFFERENT so there's no economy of scale). But what I have seen in the past year is a lot of the virtual events have just gone - like some of the talks, some of the "this group you belong to where you can never go to the meetings because they're a long drive away but now you can because' they're over zoom" have stopped doing that and I GET it, I hate zoom to and I'm sick of it for work but for social things? it wasn't so bad. But now that's gone and so most nights I sit at home watching re-runs of stuff, but not really watching, because it can't hold my attention any more but I do need friendly background noise, the sounds of people.

But it all makes me sad. So much has changed in my life in the past couple years, and I can't think of any good things to replace the good things I have lost - I am just more isolated, and have fewer fun things I feel comfortable doing, and it feels like my life has closed off in certain ways even if those were ways I didn't take advantage of (I very rarely went to movies in a theater, for example). But it's the not-having-it-as-a-choice if you're being careful that rankles. (And yes, I could go in a mask. But sitting for an hour and a half in a warm theater in a mask is unpleasant, and it's also, yes, unpleasant for me to be the only masked person, because it reminds me of being that weird pre-teen that everyone avoided because she didn't dress like the "normal" kids at school.)

And monkeypox - I don't even know. Teaching on a college campus means there may be more people around who've been exposed (given the close living quarters and, uh, "experimentation" that college students experience) so I suppose sooner or later I'll need to get vaccinated if there's ever enough for non-high-risk people. (And if I do get it? I'm finding a DOCTOR to give it to me who will watch me for a half-hour after, and who I can call if I feel lousy the next day, given my reaction to the covid booster; I'm just now worried that my immune system is going to freak out at every future vaccination of any kind). 

But yeah. It's just been a hard summer: hot, I did very little that was fun or even all that useful, and I'm worried about getting these renovations one on time. 

Maybe some day I'll be able to get out and do things? But I fully expect more bad waves, or some new horrible disease, or whatever, and just to spend another 2020 summer at home (This summer was a lot more like 2020 than summer 2021 was, ironically).