This, at least:

 Got an e-mail from the journal today:

"I am glad to inform you that your manuscript has been accepted for inclusion in the 2021 issue .... Proofs will be sent to you in November."

So at least there's THAT. I'm glad to mark it done, at least for now. (Hoping the proofs don't come over Thanksgiving week, yikes).

I mean, yes: I expected it, because this is the one I revised and incorporated nearly every reviewer suggestion, but you DO NOT KNOW until you have the e-mail in-hand that it's for real accepted. 

***

 I now have five students isolating: four from the one class where Patient Zero was (that student, plus the three sitting around them). The other student said he's a secondary contact of someone who tested positive (I think he was exposed at work) and he was responsible and left campus as soon as he got the notification. 

So boo, I have to do Zoom in three of my classes (the newest person is in two of my classes). 

Do not like and do not want. Though again, could be worse: I could have had to isolate and right now I feel perfectly fine (though by my calculations, if I get anything symptomatic, it will show up on Saturday). I am continuing to mask strictly around people and MIGHT skip church Sunday if I seem even slightly symptomatic. 

 Hopefully none of the secondary contacts will test positive, hopefully they'll be tested on Monday and be able to come back to class. I want to find out what the testing would mean for me - if I am asymptomatic but positive will I have to isolate for 10 days and retest, or is the "well you're positive but have no symptoms" just a "FYI" thing? If it's just an FYI thing I might just as soon forgo the swab up the nose and continue to act like I could transmit it, short of isolating at home.

Chances are I'd get a negative result given all the vanishingly small probabilities of a virus penetrating the layers of defence (student's mask, 10' of distance, my mask, my being vaccinated) multiplying up to a much, much smaller one, but I will go by what I'm told.

 I hate this all so much, it makes my inner Chidi Anagonye scream at me. Or maybe just scream in general; it seems Chidi didn't scream so much at people as he screamed in existential horror.

 But this is more people than last semester, and it's earlier. This variant is nothing to screw around with and I will not be at all surprised if we wind up having to go virtual. If that happens I hope they let faculty continue to be on campus because trying to teach Biostats from home with NO smartboard and no whiteboard other than the cruddy virtual Zoom one, will not work. 

Trying not to think about that possibility :( 

One of the isolating students (not Patient Zero) did send me a nice e-mail thanking me for how fast I sent out the Zoom class code to them. I had noted "if you need more assistance e-mail me and I'll explain it more" but I am assuming MOST students with either one year of college or who is a recent HS graduate has probably had to cope with Zoom.

 ***

Raining here, which is a good (and rare) thing for August, and it is mercifully cooler. (Though I still could not go hiking tomorrow or Friday; too wet). I would not mind a cooler wetter autumn for once. 

***

 I desperately need to think of something simple and fun. Not for this weekend as I may be having to isolate (and also have Zoom knitting) but maybe next weekend? I wish there were somewhere I could think of I felt comfortable going - if the weather is remotely nice Chickasaw would probably be too crowded, driving into Texas is currently a drag with the horrific construction. This feels very much a time to be merely endured rather than lived, and maybe that's just the key - endure it for a few more months (I hope it's only a few more months) and maybe in October I can go up some Saturday and hike in Chickasaw when it's too chilly for people to be swimming, maybe in November the construction will be completed enough and Delta will have passed and I can go and shop at Quixotic Fibers in person.

 I admit at this point I am almost afraid to hope after thinking about how I felt in June vs. how I feel now. Like having hope is somehow wrong and I will be punished by having it dashed. I know that's very much a "your counselor needs to know" and "this is something to work on" thing but this past year has just been disappointment on steroids so much that....it's hard to want to plan more than an hour or two in advance seeing as your plans might be upset.

***

I also wish there were simple baked-goods recipes that make little mess and dirty as few bowls as possible. I recently re-discovered pikelets or drop scones (that is QEII's recipe, though I am not sure she baked herself very often) and those are a good "I want something bread-like, but do not want to wait for yeast to rise nor do I want to heat up the oven" (because you fry them in a griddle). I was out of cream of tartar so had to substitute baking powder for the cream of tartar/baking soda combo (which seems to be an older way of doing leavening, and I think when I made similar goods from a different recipe, I used the cream of tartar and baking soda and it was better? At any rate, I ordered some cream of tartar when I placed a Penzey's order recently because it struck me that pikelets are a good autumnal food to eat with soup and the like)

 But I would love to have simple (NON MICROWAVE MUG CAKES, those never turn out for me) recipes for something chocolatey, or something like a yellow cake I could eat with fruit....I still don't have a dishwasher (I know, I know, but I think I need to get a floorboard repaired under where it would go first, and too many things in my life are a House That Jack Built of tasks upon tasks to the point where I lose the motivation, and also I've heard "nonessential" appliances like dishwashers are currently harder to come by, and I have a couple very specific "wants" for one) so any dishes I use must be hand washed and I forgot how arduous that is.

Pudding might be a thing; I used to make baked custard a lot, too - but that also takes the sort of advance planning I am at times short on these days. 

Cookies are too much effort, sitting there dropping out each one, unless there's some magical small batch that would only make one pan's worth. I do make brownies from time to time but....I get tired of brownies and would like something a bit less heavy?

(What I would really like? A nice real bakery in this town where I could walk in and buy a loaf of cinnamon bread or a few muffins, and they be things baked on site from real recipes instead of artificially mix stuff, which is what most grocery stores here sell. While I'm dreaming I'd also like a proper meat market where I could go in and buy ONE pork chop, instead of a family pack where I have to freeze seventeen of them and if it turns out they're tough and bad - common with the pork we get here - I'm stuck with blah food for a long time) 

 

part of it is the action of making stuff - of cooking/baking, because I feel taken-care-of in a way that opening a box of stuff doesn't do, part of it is that it's fresher, part of it is that I can have just what I want. What I want is small-batch stuff; I don't want to have to freeze stuff (I forget about stuff in the freezer) and I don't want it hanging around for weeks afterward. 

***

I was also thinking of the old "Knit Lit" books and similar the other day. In the early 2000s, there was a trend of books of essays/semi-autobiography about knitting - the KnitLit series, and several others, and I think Clara Parkes' books were actually towards the end of this trend, like around 2012 or so? But I was thinking specifically of Knit Lit, because I was thinking about the 20th anniversary of Sept. 11 coming up* and how several of the essays referenced that - one included a knitter who was killed in one of the planes; another was (IIRC) someone escaping into a yarn shop as they ran away from the Towers.

And while I don't love being reminded of that time....I also think back to the early days of the current knitting revival. I picked it back up in 1997 or thereabouts after learning to knit as a child and not doing much with it. And back then, it was a different world. There were no big slick knitting sites. There was Woolworks, there was Knitting-and, there were a few shop owners who hosted patterns on their webpages and did a very low-volume sales over them (I think I ordered from a couple places where I actually had to phone in my order, can you imagine?)

And there was, I think, in some ways more a celebration of the homeliness (in the good British sense, not the "it's ugly" American sense) of knitting - of taking up your knitting and sitting in a rocking chair** and your child or your cat or your partner comes and sits with you, and things are good and right and cozy because you are home, and you have your knitting (more often than not a good old wool like the Germantown I referenced the other day). And, I wonder, has some of that sense of quiet appreciation been lost in the swirl of Instagramming and slickness and online sales and the newest-coolest-latest? I think of it as being kind of like how rock music changed from possibly-slightly-odd-looking-guys playing music they loved, to people (by and large, and Meat Loaf notwithstanding) who were prettied up for mass consumption, and maybe something was lost, something became more homogeneous? (I am not even going to touch the whole question of Diversity In Knitting, I am not qualified, but I will note that age and attractiveness are also diversity things)

And also the idea of "innovating" - that if you just knit from patterns, you're a Blind Follower. I never liked that idea. It made me sad, because to me it seemed to diminish the craft and the skill. We as humans are far too good at reducing what other humans do, of knocking it down and making it seem small.

(I am thinking now of my sadness - and my mother's rage, when she found out - of how an individual who probably Should Have Known Better - referred to my Master's thesis, after it was completed, defended, and bound, as a "nice LITTLE project," emphasis very much on the "LITTLE." It made me simply sad; my mother, when she heard - she is a Ph.D. in botany herself - was angry, and declared that "your Master's thesis was more work than my whole Ph.D., and no one ever talked about it like that!" and anyway, in the long run? Joke's on that dude, the 1996 paper that emerged from that thesis is my most-cited paper ever, and people are still reading it - I found out that someone cited it in a 2020 publication they wrote)

But yeah. I want to recapture that mindset of All Knitting Good (even though in this world of concerns and caveats, perhaps not, and certainly All Knitters are not Good People, as a famous knitter of the past once claimed; though then again, I would argue, as someone whose faith practice holds a few faint echos of the Calvinist mindset that No People Are Really Good People though I would also argue that people are Redeemable)

But I don't know where I'm going with this exactly other than that I miss that style of writing, and maybe I try to find where I've stashed my copies of the various books like that (they are literally scattered all over my house; I know one of the Knit Lit volumes is on the shelves in the living room, and I think one of the essay collections that was more recent is on my bedroom shelves, and the rest are probably in my sewing room). I would like to read them again, I would like the comfort of thinking of other knitters with other lives and different life experiences; the people whose six year old child comes and asks to be taught when she sits down to knit; the person who is knitting in a solo Soho loft; the couple who live in a yurt and spin yarn, all of it, warts and all. Actually, especially the warts, as a countermeasure to the slickness that's been gained at perhaps the loss of some degree of accessibility and comfort.

 

(*And yeah, I am going to assiduously ignore it; I don't need more disaster porn in my life. I was already inadvertently exposed again to a photo of "the jumper" on someone else's essay and you know? when 600,000 of my countrypeople have died of a disease, I don't need to be reminded of old horrible deaths. I'm kind of at the point of "there should be a statute of limitations where we let go of the collective sadness and instead work on trying to prevent similar things from happening in the future")