And more blocks

 I think I'm more than half done now. (I have 24 blocks and I need 42, so yeah - just over half done). 

It takes longer than you think because you have to press each intermediate seam or else the blocks come out lumpy. But I did get ten done, and also realized I was one strip short, so I grabbed a piece out of the stacks and pressed it off and cut another piece. (That will be a later block, though - not in these). 

But I got them done this evening

I also got more stuff put away; most of my yarn will now live in the flip-top boxes I have in the guest room closet. I also found some stuff I forgot I had but want to knit up some time now. 

I also got most of the leg of a plain sock knit during Zoom knit meeting. 

***

Other than that - kind of a hard weekend. Had a headache much of Saturday; I don't know if it was an immune response to the flu shot or because it's been *extremely* dry and dusty here. I also read a Twitter post that Nat Guest wrote about the ongoing grief and frustration with the pandemic. She lives in the UK and so had the harder lockdown than we did (though people like me who are cautious? Are still not doing a lot of the things we once did): "It's the sort of grief where you're absolutely capable with getting on with life 99% of the time, but when that 1% hits you? You start crying, and you keep crying, and you're not sure where the end of the crying is or ever reasonably could be."

And yeah. Evenings are bad. I get to thinking about things - that my life is more than half-over, I don't know WHAT I would want to do even if I COULD.  And the fact that I've met very few people the past two years, and I've also lost a lot of people to various reasons. 

And I got to thinking about Friday night, when I went to a local place to pick up a pizza (they don't deliver and I don't feel like messing with the Door Dash interface, even though they're supposedly in my town) and I waited. And waited, and waited. And I was the ONLY solo person in the place - there were couples walking in, some in date-night clothes, and there were families, and there was a group that came in because it was a wedding rehearsal dinner. If I hadn't already paid I'd probably just have walked out and gone home  and eaten oatmeal instead.

Finally, someone said "Oh, we didn't see you, are you waiting on a carry out order" and yeah, yeah I was: pathetic single woman all alone on a Friday night just trying to get her darn pizza and scram so she can eat it in front of the TV. 

Normally in the past being the only solo in a place didn't bother me, but now? After having been alone so much? It does. And I think one way I've emotionally regressed is I've gone back to that teenaged stage where I feel like I simultaneously stick out like a sore thumb (because I'm alone, and someone alone is weird) and yet am also invisible ("oh, we didn't see you")

I know, it was a fluke (the place normally has good service but it was Friday night and they were slammed and yeah, I get it, someone picking up a pizza is less profit than a family coming to get a full dinner at a table, or a wedding-rehearsal group (which probably also bought drinks from the bar). 

But it did get to me. And it does get to me that somehow Denison - a half-hour away - now feels like it's the other side of the world after a couple years of not going there very often. (I probably need to get out next weekend; maybe I will be happier after going, even masked, to do a little "fun" shopping).  

But yeah. Maybe not 99% of the time, but 90% of the time, I'm doing okay and managing. But some times - usually late in the evening, usually when I'm otherwise tired or not feeling great, it all hits me, everything we all collectively lived through, and the realization that my life will never be the same as it was, and it's worse in a lot of small ways than it was before, and I didn't even realize it would get worse in those ways, and....it's just hard. I cry more now than I did before. I guess that's okay? I don't know. 

I just wish I felt more optimistic about the future, but I honestly don't now. I've heard rumors of a coming winter wave that's going to be bad, and I just do not want. I need to get the bivalent booster but also really wanted to wait until I was at my mom's in case I had a strong reaction and felt really unwell, but I don't even know now, I might not be able to wait that long if it's a bad variant with a lot of immune escape?