* Had a little arm soreness from the shot, and what could have been a headache caused by immune response (or that could be that it's been very cold and dry here; I got out and cleaned the warm-mist humidifier this morning and set it up. The bonus is it will make my living room seem warmer)
* My house is not well insulated. Or at least the living room is not - it's big (probably 20' by 16') and it faces out toward the street with no vegetation to insulate it from the cold. My bedroom faces north and east but it seems to be warmer. Though I suppose that could be there are three heat vents open in my bedroom and only one in the living room (I have closed the one nearest the piano on the recommendation of the tuner).
It's supposed to be colder here this weekend than it has been in many, many years (like: since before I moved here, and I've been here 20 years). On the one hand I worry about things like pipes (the intake pipes for the house are quite shallow - I am running the tap in my kitchen (north side of the house). I don't worry about the bathroom because the pipes there run right next to the heating ducts; the water from the cold tap is transiently warm because it's been sitting in those pipes getting warmed up.
I've also heard the semiferal neighborhood cats (a couple do belong to people, a couple of the others I am not sure about) fighting under the house (pretty sure it's fighting and not mating; the female cats I see never seem to be pregnant so I presume they are fixed; there is at least one intact tom around but it seems like most of the roaming cats have been neutered). I presume it's jockeying for space where it's warmer. (I wish people would just take their outdoor pets inside in this. Shoot, I just wish people in my town with cats kept them inside; I always cringe when I see them crossing the street as I have seen dogs and cats get hit by cars. And I mean "get hit" in the sense of "I see the car smack into them" and both times I saw it, the animal died)
* Started a new project but I can't talk about it. A friend (who reads here some times) and I do an annual swap and it's coming time for that (though I think maybe we should wait a bit seeing as the USPS seems to be snarled up yet again) but I needed to get on this project. The funny thing is I purpose-bought the yarn for it, and then tucked it away, and COMPLETELY FORGOT about this until I was reorganizing things and found the yarn. My "object persistence" has gotten really bad again. Hopefully it comes back when life gets a bit more normal.
* And yeah, it does feel much more to me like I'll eventually get something like "normal" back. Oh, it will take a while and even after I am fully vaccinated I will still need to mask in public places (because it's not 100% clear that you cannot *transmit* the virus even if you might be *immune* to becoming seriously ill from it). But I'm REALLY hoping that maybe, maybe by fall we can drop some of that? I would love to be able to teach to unmasked classes and NOT do the half-Zoom half-in-person thing (EVERYONE who showed up to class yesterday - granted, less than half the class in one case - was over Zoom).
But: I think masked and distanced, it will be safe for me to go shopping on my birthday (provided the weather is OK). I think maybe in May it might be safe for me to take Amtrak to visit my mom.
I suspect what getting out of this will look like will not be like throwing a switch, where all of a sudden one day everyone can ditch the masks and we can go back to clustering in groups. I think what will happen is first, they'll be less strict about masking in more dispersed situations (like: small college classes or low-density shopping), and we'll slowly see case counts decline (and we should all hold our breath then, as there COULD be another wave, especially if not a lot of people have been vaccinated). I think we'll see it more gradually peter out and it won't be consistent across the entire country - some places will improve faster than other, and perhaps it will be related to both vaccination rates and population density and also maybe how people behave. (I think places where "personal space" was bigger in the past - like, parts of the Upper Midwest, where people do tend to be a little standoffish - will see improvements faster than more densely populated/touchy-feely areas)
I think we'll be able to unmask before we can gather in tight groups. I think in-person school will be safe earlier than high-density dining/bargoing will be. It will be a long time before I eat IN a restaurant again - I do get carry out (in fact, I picked up a pizza last night - I had a little celebration with pizza and the leftover bottle of sparkling cider I bought at New Year's) or do drive through (I have a vague idea that if I am out over the lunch hour on my birthday, I'll just find a place that does decent drive through food and get food from there and eat in my car)
I do think the knock-on effects, we won't see them for a while. Like, a lot of businesses will sadly fail, and some groups may dissolve (some church congregations, some civic groups) because people have been isolated too long and may be slow to come back. I think we won't realize the psychological toll it will have taken until years later - even though I tend to say "kids are resilient" (at least kids with good and loving parents who can provide sufficient support), I think the people in the 6-16 age group right now will be pretty much affected by having fundamentally two years of their young life disrupted.
Personally, I think it will take me a long time to be comfortable in groups of people or with people close to me. I think that first time walking into a grocery without a mask is going to be stressful at first - I know when I walk out to my car almost every morning, I have a feeling of "oh no, I forgot something!" and what it is, is I'm not wearing a mask, because I'm alone and outside.
I DO think once shopping in-person becomes safe again, I am going to be doing more of that as possible. I miss going out to places, and as I'm not a bar-goer and don't care to go to movies in the theater, my main "get out and be anonymously around other people" was shopping.
* The mail does seem to be slowing down again. I have a package of sheet music (Samuel Coleridge-Taylor's "Negro Songs" - mostly old spirituals he arranged) that is stuck in Los Angeles (after despatching from Arizona). They haven't moved in a week. I'm holding off of complaining to the seller for a bit more, it looks like a USPS problem and not a "they never shipped it" problem (which I think HAS happened in a couple cases with third party sellers) but it's disappointing to have paid for something and never have it arrive.
I ordered myself a few items off of Etsy, and while they wouldn't have shipped yet (the makers have to make them), now I'm wondering when I will see them. I may have to rely on "you can go out and go to JoAnn's and Ulta" as my big birthday treat instead. (Which is another reason for in-person shopping: if the mail just keeps getting more expensive and slower, at some point it will be pointless to mail order stuff, especially if you have no guarantee of it arriving.
(I wish my town had more shops I *liked* - and right now the quilt shop is not open weekends, so it's hard for me to get there. But that's one of the issues of living in a smaller area that has a lower cost of living: a larger proportion of the population doesn't have the money for the fripperies I enjoy, so they are not on offer here. And I'm sure it will only be worse after the pandemic.)
* I suppose also I could start myself something new, some kind of a stuffed critter, and maybe have it done in time for my birthday. I got out the makings for the "giant squid" (not so giant but pretty big) but never started it; I do have the needles set aside and the yarn and the pattern. (I am just short of row counters, and given my level of distraction these days, and the fact that days can pass when I don't have time to knit at all, I need to keep track, so I guess if I start it I get out paper and pencil)
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