Tuesday evening things

 * I got the stitches picked up and the stripe of green done on the chicken. Now it's ten rows of orange, and then I start the shortrows to shape the body

I am ready to be done with this. I want to work on one of MY projects, or start something new

* Like the National Park hat (Cuyahoga Valley version) that I bought a kit for from Yarns and You when i went there. I thought of it again today when I got their newsletter in my mailbox. The good: apparently they are going to Rhinebeck*

the not so great for me personally: that weekend they will be closed while they're out of town, and that was my mid-fall break day, and I HAD considered going back down there. Oh well. Maybe I find something else. I HAVE to do something fun. (I don't know what, now. If the weather's OK I could go to Chickasaw but often it's rainy here in October)

(*A friend said they weren't on the list. But A Chick that Knitz is, and she's one of their dyers - so maybe they're buddying up with her for their stall. And I'm glad to see A Chick that Knitz having a broader reach; I remember ordering from her on Etsy shortly after she opened in 2019.)

* Even though Math for Knitters will be considerably delayed, I (perhaps foolhardily) decided to try ordering a book from the UK - Folio Society is republishing a replica (I guess) of the original Paddington Bear book, with the Peggy Fortnum illustrations, and I wanted one. The order went through, I hope a place as large and generally-respected as Folio has figured it out, but we'll see.

I'm tired of the chaos, and I admit I'm also worried about being able to get things like yarn (almost entirely made overseas; even the stuff dyers here dye is mostly spun in Peru or Turkey or elsewhere, and there's not a LOT of stateside spinning capacity; I think Brown Sheep may be the largest remaining yarn producer that spins here)

* I got a call from the textbook rep for the company that does our intro class book (that's the one that the students have the greatest involvement with - there are online exercises they get access too in addition to the textbook and she wanted to be sure they weren't having any trouble in accessing it) and in the course of the discussion we got onto other classes and when I mentioned I taught environmental policy, she asked if I also covered environmental impact statements as a class (I don't; we used to offer it but the guy who did it retired) and I admitted regretfully I didn't have the background for it. And as we continued to talk, I mentioned I had taught myself what I needed for policy and law, one summer, by reading a lot of books and also going through the various government and policy-wonk group websites. And then I sighed and said "That was back before the pandemic. I'm not sure I have the capacity now to do that kind of thing again" and she laughed kind of ruefully and said that a lot of people (including her) have found doing new things that require a lot of attention and learning much harder after the pandemic. 

And I felt very "heard" and in a way I rarely seem to be. Everywhere it seems that the expectation is we're back to "normal," and if we didn't have a severe case of covid or long covid (I don't think I ever even had it at all - never tested positive, never had clear symptoms, got vaccinated yearly once the vaccines were out, and am fundamentally a hermit), we're expected to be exactly back as we were before, with no lingering trauma or psychological stuff.

 

But. I notice it in me. I walk into a store and the shelves seem a bit bare, and my mind blips back to the weeks in 2020 where you could only find one kind of milk (Usually whole, which was too rich for me, and a couple times I went with - ugh - oat milk as a replacement) or there were no eggs to be had, and it makes me nervous again. And all the chaos now - this time, entirely human-imposed, entirely imposed by a small group of humans even - it exhausts me and does remind me of 2020. And I admit I worry about things getting worse, and for some reason or other it becoming unsafe to go out much.....and we're back in July 2020 again, when I sat in my house and wondered if there'd be anything much to come out to once the pandemic was over. (And yes, I do feel like a lot of things I saw as Good Things are disappearing now, maybe never to return - we've already lost JoAnn's and some small businesses, what if we lose more small businesses and places like Books a Million, literally the only large shop selling new books within an easy drive of me - well, how do I go on?

And I admit, in all the talk of "social media is a cancer," that some are saying now, rightly or wrongly, I hear a tiny undercurrent of "you losers who don't have a nuclear family or a ton of close friends, and do a lot of socializing online, we want to shut that off, and you can just suffer and be alone because you're weird and wrong."

But also: the fear that if going out much becomes inadvisable again, like it was in much of 2020, how do we make it without people to talk to online? And finding local people......that's hard and scary and I've found some people here really don't understand me and seem not to want to try. 

(So much of my young life was me being told I was weird and wrong by my peers, I have internalized it and kind of believe I AM)

SO anyway - I DO want to go out to places like yarn shops and bookstores *while I still can*

And I know I need to figure out "replacements' if all that goes, and I'm not sure I have the energy to.