Tuesday evening things

* I had to ask Siri midafternoon if it was Monday or Tuesday. It being Tuesday, I had to get the bag of weeded stuff down to the curb because supposedly tomorrow is yard waste pick up

* The city has new rules and I tried to abide by them - they only do this once a month now (in the before-times, in the warm months, it was either twice a month, or sometimes if their crew wasn't very busy they'd drive around and just pick up what they saw. Or you could call them). They also want branches and brush (which get mulched) piled separately from the bagged herbaceous stuff (which I am assuming - from the bags - is probably landfilled, but as the city yelled at me once for having a leafpile in my backyard, I'm not going to chance making a compost pile)

* When I look out my front window in the evenings as it's getting dark, I notice the lightning bugs are out. One little link with my childhood, though there are fewer here than there were in Ohio - or in Illinois; I remember a couple damp springs when I was there when there were just tons of them and it was kind of magical to look out at night and see all the flashes.

Also, I see my neighbors on the corner across the street have some kind of little solar-powered rechargable light on their porch - I know you can get garden lights like that - and looking out at it, it's weirdly comforting to see. Even if all their windows are dark because they're not home (I think several people here on the street either stay with family some times, or have jobs that take them out of town). I think, once I get out again a little more, I might consider getting a few solar lights to put in my front garden, just because. Except I wouldn't really see them from my window. It's not even a security thing - I don't go out that much at night (I didn't even in the before-times) and I have a big security light on my garage I turn on if I have to be out after dark, mainly so I don't trip walking up to the house in the dark.

Though I do have my porch light, which is set to go on once it gets dark. Still, I just like the idea of the rechargeable solar lights.

* I finished "Chances Are" today, two of the continuing-ed books I planned on reading down now. This one was maybe a little less directly useful than the first ("Fat Chance") in that it was more a history of the uses of probability and, towards the end, a bit of a philosophical digression on chance and our lives.

I will say it was odd - and maybe a little unsettling, given current events - to see talk of past wars (the Civil War and the Napoleonic Wars, mostly) and also to see Sun Tzu quoted (particularly the line about that if your opponent is of a choleric temper, you should strive to irritate him...I guess I would also make a bad warrior because my tendency, faced with someone who angers easily is to avoid them as possible, placate them if it seems reasonable/not a violation of my own ethics, or kind of go grey-rock otherwise. I don't like being around angry people and particularly people whose anger feels kind of chaotic)

I started on a book called The Triumph of the Fungi, which is mostly about plant pathology, and unfortunately the author takes a purposely breezy tone, and to me it comes off as "Hello, fellow kids! What is up?" and honestly? I know people complain academic writing is "dry" but I find that better than this. I'm still going to finish it though because it has useful information.

I may keep out the books I've read this summer (I've also read, for "enjoyment" "A Provincial Lady in War-Time" and I re-read "The Book of Three" and am working on "The Black Cauldron" and intend to go through the rest of the Prydain cycle)

* Other than that, I'm sad for my country. Sad for the violence exercised on some of my fellow humans, sad for the people who think smash-and-grab and ruining the small businesses or restaurants someone worked hard to build up is the answer to their grievances, sad for "leaders" who don't know what to do and take a path that seems to make things worse. I don't know how we work towards fixing the underlying problems or even if they're too far gone at this point to be fixed.

I will say in the two bigger towns nearest me, the protests reported were fully peaceful - people exercising their right to speak freely, and apparently there was at least some dialog with local police about making sure everyone was understood. And in Ardmore, the protest today wound up as a prayer meeting, which....hopefully that's more productive. Though maybe in smaller cities you have a better chance of the police living in the neighborhoods they work in, and that seems to lead to things being less a problem? I don't know.

As I've been saying: I have no wisdom in this, though at least I guess I realize I have no wisdom, so that's something?

* I also increasingly feel sort of bleak about humanity, like "why do I even want to go back out if we ever get a vaccine against COVID?" I mean, I didn't go out all that much in the before-times - it was mostly to do things like shop, which I've largely replaced with online - and for the occasional lunch at a restaurant. But it was....out. But the more I see of my fellow humans (granted: filtered through the occasional news I watch and social media), the less I want to engage in the future.

It's a hellish paradox: I miss people and yet I realize on some level I can't stand a lot of people. Or maybe "can't stand" is too strong; it's that people frustrate me and yes, sometimes people scare me - once or twice I've bugged out of a store, abandoning my planned purchases unbought, because someone started screaming at a family member or one of the workers in the store and all my internal senses went "danger!" and while (from the absence of anything on the news later) I was mostly wrong, I prefer not to be around volatile people.

* Where I am it is stupid safe but I still find myself startling and cringing every time I hear a siren. Chances are here, it's either someone having a heart attack and needing transport to the hospital, or someone having a grease-fire on the stove...but still, I know in some parts of the country it is not that. My mom reports that things "got a little out of hand" in part of her town the other night. She's okay - this was a commercial and not a residential area it happened - but still.

* Really, I just want it to be safe (there to be a vaccine or an effective treatment/preventative) for COVID so I can go visit my mom, and so I can go to church and hug people there, and I can go see my friend Laura. I feel like.....I feel like that's asking for not that much.

I also wonder what teaching in the fall will be like based on the "Safe Return to Work" training I did yesterday, and the fact that some campuses will require monthly testing (using the invasive swab test, which scares me a little - I have a deviated septum and jacked-up sinuses, and I'm afraid someone moving too fast to do it could damage something in there). I also feel like....like I sheltered at home for all these months for nothing now.

* For me I really do have to take it one day at a time, if I contemplate the endless stretch of days leading ahead of me where literally everything of how I live my life will be different, I just want to give up. I still want to give up some times, even with the "one day at a time" so I wind up doing it "one hour at a time" or even "ten minutes at a time."

* And I try to find escapes. By golly, I am probably going to watch through every episode of Murder, She Wrote. I watched another one tonight. No, in some ways it's not aged well - I forgot how ridiculous the stories and some of the characters were - but it's soothing, and the "one sane woman" trope in Jessica Fletcher is nice. And also, nostalgically - the clothes and the hairstyles and even the way people decorated their houses - that was my youth; I was in high school when it first came out. I remember those styles. I don't know why nearly forty-year-old images of interiors and the semi-preppy clothing she wore and the way women wore their hair grab my interest so much, but they do.

* Mostly it's the sameness of the days that gets to me. I find myself finding little to write about here because.....all I do is read for possible future teaching, or knit a little, or cook, or work in the yard, and once a week run out and pick up groceries and it does feel very small and narrow even though in a way it's more than what a lot of my ancestors did - my mom's maternal grandparents lived on a farm and probably went to town once a month and depended on the mail for a lot of things (as I do now) and of course even further back, there would have been people who couldn't even read.

And yet. Yet, they had families with them. It's the being alone that's hard.....I think the last I actually talked to a person (other than my mom on the phone) was the person at the barbecue restaurant on Thursday or Friday when I picked up my dinner.

I'm going to forget how to talk - I think of the stories you read about people stranded on islands or the like, and how their voices are either all creaky or they can't talk at all after they're rescued and I wonder how I will manage to sustain HOURS of talking if I teach this fall....especially if it's in a mask and behind a plexiglas, both ideas that have been floated.

* I know the way forward is to embrace the "new normal" (a phrase I hate a very great deal) but I'm not there yet. I am still mourning my "old normal" too much and it will be a while yet. And also having lost a lot of the little things I used to do makes it hard - it's to the point now when it's a bad mail day (like today: a charity-beg from a place I don't give money, and one of those dumb advertising things made out of glossy paper, like the coupon sections in the old Sunday papers), it can be a considerable disappointment.

I lack things to look forward to, and that makes it hard.