Friday afternoon things

 * Both my graduate students had medical issues (well, one is getting her second COVID vaccine dose), so no class this week, which is a relief. I am waiting to hear if the oral exam for the graduate student is still on or not; I have not received the Zoom invitation and if I have not by 3 pm (the scheduled start time), I am going to assume something went wrong and just go home. (Update: the person in charge is just very last minute about it, it will come shortly before the exam. Sigh. I am not used to only knowing things 15 minutes in advance)

* I did finish the binding on the newest quilt last night: 

Those are supposed to be lanterns though I know they kind of look like spools. This is not the greatest photo but it was after 8 pm last night when I finished it, so no outdoor shot.

I have another quilt to handsew the binding on, and a third one I need to PUT a binding on (make the binding and do the initial, machine-sewing step. And I have two more in at the quilter. I guess my quilt productivity is still pretty good, though in truth, most of these are the backlog of tops I made during the several years when I had no access to a long arm quilter. 

(I still want someday to get my own longarm machine and learn to use it, though I suspect I don't really have room in my house for one. I WISH there were studios where you could rent time on one, and such a studio was nearby, but for now I will take paying someone else to do it for me). 

* I also crocheted a bit on the endless ripple afghan last night; maybe I make a bit more of a dent in this before considering starting a new blanket. 

* A card from my mom (with a check in it for her share of our joint birthday gift to my brother) has gone missing. I reported it from the Informed Delivery page but I don't know what more I can do. My brother also told me his card arrived torn open - fortunately the gift was something delivered as an electronic gift certificate but this is unsettling. Some years back someone was arrested from our local PO for mail tampering - many, many cards I sent out never made their destination, and I received ones that had been slit open and re-taped. So I don't know - I guess next time I go down there I report it? I told my mom to wait a few days, and then, if she wants to spend the money, cancel the check - I know it's an expensive thing, and that should not be so, but it does seem as if someone unsavory got my check, seeing as it showed up in Informed Delivery for Monday and then just....never arrived. 

I hate this. I hate not being able to TRUST.

 

I called the PO. "Cheerful but useless" would be my most charitable description. I have no faith the check is going to show up and I heartily hope my mom isn't going to have to deal with identity theft. 

at least they know that at least one postal customer is losing mail, just in case they suspect another thief in the PO like they had before.

* And another thought about the low-stress news story of the week: I Like that the Big Boat is Stuck, by Sarah Gailey. They point out that it's not a debatable story; no one is conspiracy-theorizing that the boat is actually fake, or it's a mocked-up photo. No one has died or even been hurt. Yes, it is bad for commerce, and we may see an impact in short order in terms of higher prices or things being unavailable. But for now....it's a story a five-year-old can understand, and for some of us, with pandemic-brain, it's kind of nice to have a story that is simple and easily grasped: it's a big boat. Something bad happened and it got stuck. They are going to have to figure out how to unstick it.

And the other thing Gailey comments in their essay: "Unsticking the boat will require making the boat not be stuck. It won't take a year or more of isolation, or new heights of handwashing, or phone calls to legislators. It won't require the courage to face down militarized police forces or the gumption to get a shot that I know will make me feel a little bad before it makes me a lot safe. Nobody can tell me that if I just work a little harder or stop spending money on avocados or get a side hustle, the boat will get unstuck. If I did all of those things, perfectly right, right now, on tiptoes, there would still be a big stuck boat!"

 And yes, I feel that hard. It's not me being told "well, here's how you use a belt to hold a classroom door shut when there's an active shooter." or "Well, you need to wear a mask when you go out in public, and wash or sanitize your hands every time you've been outside your house, and only shop for groceries every 2 weeks if you can go that long." or "If you just worked a little harder, if you just applied yourself, you could write a whole BUNCH of manuscripts and submit them and if you were just a little tougher the eventual rejections of them would not hurt you, get over it!"

It's not something I have to take responsibility for.

 For me, that's the most freeing thing about it: there is literally nothing I can do to make the boat less stuck. And there is no way I can screw up that will make it more stuck. Its stuck-ness has nothing to do with anything I do. And to me....I can't explain it if you've never been an anxious perfectionist with maybe a tiny touch of compulsiveness, but....after a year of scurrying into the washroom after every lecture to wash my hands yet again, and after coming down with food poisoning, thinking it was COVID, and then blaming myself (until I got a negative test result) for having had the audacity to shop at a fabric store during a pandemic....it's a giant relief. 

 I can just watch, and laugh at the memes, and wait for the inevitable cheering when it IS unstuck.