Sorry, it's been a minute

As the little banner in the sidebar points out, this blog is written by a human, not an AI. And this particular human is very, very tired.

What's it like to live in the United States right now? In a word, exhausting. Every day we're jerked around another corner by the madman at the wheel, all of us hoping against hope that he won't plow us all into a brick wall just for funsies. And even as I write this, I recognize that many other people with less social currency than Captain Midnight and I are having it SO much worse under this regime that it seems boorish even to complain about what we've experienced.

Perhaps I'm so tired simply because I know it's all likely to get far worse before it gets better. And I don't know if I'll live long enough to see things improve.

Since November 2024 I have thought, very seriously, about moving to another country. Let's just say there are some logistical issues with the idea. We used money from the sale of my family home to put a down payment on a house in 2022, which means we're tethered here by a mortgage. While Captain Midnight has looked into overseas employment, it's been difficult to find jobs outside the United States where he could command even a small fraction of the salary he was paid last year, and I've been out of the regular workforce long enough that I don't have much by way of useful skills to recommend me as an immigrant. Then too, I'm both a Type 2 diabetic and a bariatric patient, which means I'd have to choose a country where the medications I need to survive are readily available. We're both in our fifties, which means emigration to certain countries is simply barred to us (places like New Zealand, for instance, strongly prefer young families with children). Finally, we stay anchored to the USA because of numerous family members and friends. We're both loath to leave the nation we were raised in, even though it's becoming increasingly difficult to recognize.

I did attend one of the many Hands Off protests that occurred on April 5. That was, actually, quite cheering. The nearby small town I went to had so many protestors in attendance that the main street was completely blocked to vehicular traffic. I know that at least some of the people there voted for our current Dear Leader, so I have hope that the cultlike attitude toward him and his ilk is starting to sour. We'll see.

The deadman switch

HEN I first started writing this blog in 2006, mass social media platforms like Facebook hadn't taken off yet, so it was fairly common for people to read each other's blogs and make comments directly on the site. I had a few regulars who would come by, read the latest post and make a few comments. In turn I would often follow links back to their blogs, read what they were up to and make comments as well. (This was how I got to know Gretel, for instance.) As Facebook and other social media sites took off, however, and as blog-supporting software like RSS no longer received updates, the number of regular commenters on most blogs slowly dropped off. It's now quite rare for me to get a comment on any blog post, old or new.

Social media is now old enough that we're starting to think about the greater consequences of what we say and do online. We think about the future more than we did back when the medium was still a novelty. And one of the things we rarely thought about in the early days was mortality.

Back in the day I had a regular poster on my blog, an artist who lived in middle America, and in return I'd often visit and read her blogs and make comments on her posts. A while back, I realized I hadn't heard from her in ages. So I popped over to her blogs and noticed it had been multiple years since her last update.

Now, it's quite possible that she just fell out of love with blogging. That happens. Or it's possible that she was going through a dry spell. (My last entry on this blog was back in May, for instance.) But I also knew that this particular blogger was past retirement age when we first started exchanging pleasantries online. I'd never met her in person; she lived thousands of miles away from me, albeit in the same country. Blogging was my only connection to her. So it's also quite possible that she stopped posting because she passed away. And other than searching for her name in online obituaries, I have no way of determining what really happened to her.

I'm not much of a musician, but I know how important it is for any musical piece to have a coda. As human beings, we crave definitive endings -- what is sometimes cloyingly called "closure." And I've been thinking about how human mortality fits into online writing. When you know you are sick, for instance, and that your illness is likely to end you, you have the time to think about how to craft an ending and how to say goodbye to anyone who might be reading. But there are many other people for whom death comes swiftly and without warning, as it did for both my parents. Unless you have some real-world connection to such people, there might be no online indication about what happened to them. They just seem to vanish.

So although I have no intention of kicking off any time soon, I now have the literary equivalent of a deadman switch on this blog. It's scheduled to post automatically at a set date many years in the future, assuming Blogspot is still around, to let potential readers know that if they're reading the post, it means I've died. I'll update it every now and then to make sure the particulars are as accurate as I can make them. I'll push the publishing date into the future as necessary. And I'll let CM know it's there so that, assuming he survives me, he can publish it immediately upon my demise if he chooses.

I know this might seem a touch morbid, but the way I see it, it's a good idea to be prepared for eventualities. And whether or not we want to face it, every one of us will die eventually. But this way, no matter what the circumstances of my death may be, my little story online will have the ending I choose for it.

The trail to the tree

When I was a kid, growing up in California and Utah, I quickly learned to hate going on hikes.

And today I took a hike -- and loved it.

Frankly, if you'd told 2015 me that I would eventually choose to hike, of my own volition, without a gun to my back, I would have laughed and told you to up your dosage. But I'm starting to come around for a number of reasons.

Last week I had the pleasure of dogsitting a very good and well-behaved boy named Eddie. When family is away, sticking to a pet's everyday schedule helps foster a feeling of calm and reassurance, so I made sure to take Eddie on his usual twice-daily walks. While there were a few times when it felt like he was dragging me up and down hills at the end of a leash, most of the time I didn't have trouble keeping up with him. And when I took him to off-leash parks, I didn't even have to do that -- he could snuff around in the underbrush looking for squirrels to harass, and I could walk along the trail nearby, keeping an eye on him without having to run to catch up. It didn't feel difficult because I had plenty of chances to stop and rest, and it was genuinely pleasant walking in the woods and along the beaches of Puget Sound. So at the end of the first day, I was shocked to discover that I'd hit my 10,000 daily step goal for the first time since the thoroughly exhausting day we packed up and moved out of our Redmond house. Because of those daily walks, I continued to meet or exceed that goal pretty much effortlessly every day I took care of Eddie. I wasn't even waking up sore the next morning.

Once I returned home, I did a little thinking and realized I didn't have to take Eddie with me to achieve that step goal (or at least get close to it), as long as I was willing to find a local park, beach, or trail and do the walking on my own.

So why is this a big deal?

Well, today I realized that I still do hate hikes, but -- and this is the big breakthrough -- only specific KINDS of hikes. I hated the double-digit-miles, strenuous group hikes that were part of my childhood in both the Camp Fire Girls and the church-sponsored camping trips for young women. Such hikes were usually conducted during the hottest part of the day, so we'd have to carry metal canteens with us, which were heavy, unwieldy, clanked against our hip bones and often leaked all over our clothes. The fastest hikers in the group were usually allowed to set the pace, which meant that the slowest of us (it meeee) never got a breather. The folks in front were told to stop every now and then to rest and let the slower hikers catch up, but as soon as the last person caught up with the group, everyone would immediately start off again. (And the unspoken idea among the adult leaders, I think, was that the slower hikers could stand to lose some weight anyway, so why should they get a break?) The parts of California and Utah where I grew up were arid, with little shade along the average hike, meaning that it was a deeply uncomfortable experience for anyone who was slow, fat, and sweated heavily. These hikes sucked all the fun out of the experience for me, and the minute I could avoid them, I stopped going.

This was a shame, because there were many things about nature hikes that I loved. I loved coming across small creatures in their own habitats. I loved seeing all the different plants growing and the spicy smell of the red earth and the graceful shape and movement of the trees. And, frankly, I often made no effort to catch up with the group because I liked taking things at my own pace and enjoyed feeling like I was alone in nature.

Today it occurred to me that if I hiked by myself, I wouldn't have to worry about keeping up with the group because there wouldn't be one.

I wouldn't have to worry about getting sweaty and muggy because this is the Pacific Northwest and even in the heat of the day, there's plentiful shade from large trees on most hiking trails. I wouldn't even have to carry water with me on the short trails; I could tackle them without getting dehydrated. And although I'm still obese, I weigh about 100 pounds less than I did a decade ago, so moving my body isn't as difficult or painful as it was back then.

Further, because every trail and park and beach and green space on this peninsula is new to me, it feels like an adventure to be exploring each one for the first time.

It feels like I could be going anywhere. And that's the thing I enjoyed most about hiking when I was a child: that sense of adventure, of stepping into unknown territory, what I would later call liminal space, where anything could happen.

I had the trail all to myself today. Literally, I didn't see another human being on the entire hike.

In fact, the trail was infrequently traversed enough that I kept having to hold my hand up in front of me so I didn't accidentally walk face-first into a spiderweb crisscrossing the space.

At one point a little garter snake crossed my path. He slipped away as quickly as he could, so I didn't take his picture, but he was a beautiful deep brown with lengthwise yellow bands.

Seeing a lot of these plants put me in mind of Stephan Seable. When I was growing up in California, he taught us kids about which local plants were safe and good to eat. I recognized a few of these, things like fiddleheads and so forth, but for the most part everything was new to me.

Oh hey, wild bleeding hearts!

As I continued down the trail I began to hear the sound of running water, which always makes my heart happy.

But the original trail bridge over the creek (as seen here) was permanently closed.

So instead I took this one! Built like (and possibly by) a truck!

I made like a Billy Goat Gruff and trip-trapped over this thing in no time.

Made it to the big tree after which the trail is named (in this case, it's a Douglas fir), and it is indeed big.

While I have seen larger trees in Big Trees State Park and in Sequoia National Park in California, the difference is that this tree is notably larger than all the other trees around it.

It is singular.

Sat for a while on the flip-top bench near the big tree and just listened to the creek running by. There were a few birds piping in the trees, the sound of what was probably a diurnal owl, squirrels chittering at each other, and probably if I waited there long enough another snake (or the same snake) would show up.

A single white butterfly floated around the ferns and bracken. It occurred to me that it's been a long time since I've seen a butterfly in the wild. 50-odd years ago when I was little, you could find monarch caterpillars and butterflies everywhere there was open space and milkweed growing. But now a lot of those open spaces have been plowed over and turned into houses and condominiums, and no one grows milkweed. So a lot of the places where the monarchs used to grow up are gone. These days if you choose to plant milkweed in your yard there's a good chance you will become part of the monarchs' migration path every year, because there is so little wild space left for them to exist in.

This forest was exactly the kind I would have adored when I was a child. Frankly, I still do. It felt like the kind of spot a fairy tale would take place in.

You could easily imagine a slightly anthropomorphic wolf stepping from behind a tree to convince a little girl to pick trilliums by the side of the path.

Or a hollow tree where six princes in exile are living, until such time as it is safe for them to return to their kingdom.

Or maybe some kind of forest wizard.

Perhaps a nixy might rise up out of the water and offer a challenge or request a favor.

Or, you know, you could even find Piglet's house.

That's what liminal spaces are -- places where the unlikely or the unusual are much more willing to happen. A liminal space is a place that humans have not yet pegged down, squared off, and gentrified in some way.

Or it's a place that refuses to be tamed. It's where the human notions of cause and effect, of what they expect to happen, do not apply.

I realize that going on a hike by oneself is potentially dangerous. (At the time I write this, actor Julian Sands is missing and presumed dead after having gone on a hike alone in midwinter.) But the advantage to hiking solo in a relatively safe place is that you can walk at the best pace for you.

If you're heading up along a steep switchback and you feel tired, you can stop and rest until you're ready to continue, and no one will be tapping a foot or looking meaningfully at a watch.

If you want to take a closer look at a tree, a flower, a bush, a spiderweb, a squirrel, a snake, or even a cougar from a safe distance, you can stop and take all the time you need. (It's probably worth noting that even though this is cougar territory, I'm not particularly afraid of meeting one out here. Cougars are not highly aggressive toward humans; they tend to be far more scared of us than we are of them.)

At the top of the trailhead there were several human-made artworks, most attempting to bring some whimsy or magical quality to the area.

But honestly, they didn't hold a candle to the real thing.

I'll be looking for more trails around here very soon.

Fun and games at the Elfhame Wash & Dash

Laundry day! And since our washer is on the fritz again, I am off to a new-to-me local laundromat (the Elfhame Wash & Dash) to justify my epithet of  "Laundry Faerie." We'll see how it goes.

3:51 p.m.
Just chillin' and sudsin' at the laundromat. As you do.

4:18 p.m.
The handsome fae attendant has twice had to forbid a young vampire from playing in the extra-large-capacity dryers. "One more time and I uninvite you from the premises," he warns. A couple of elderly banshee customers nod and tut in agreement.

The vampire is now sulking punkishly in the darkest corner of the place. He's spotted a rolling laundry cart and it doesn't take an Einstein to figure out what he's planning to do next.

4:19 p.m.
Young punk vampire has now grabbed the cart and is merrily rolling up and down the aisles yelling "I'm Batman!" This won't end well.

4:22 p.m.
Well, Count Suckpunk just ran over several tomtar, who are now yelling at him and cursing rather violently in Swedish. The attendant, looking weary despite his immortal beauty, wades into the fray. Meanwhile I'm loading a dryer and minding my bidness.

4:25 p.m.
The attendant is making the vampire apologize to the tomtar. "I wasn't trying to hurt anyone, I was just bored," he mumbles.

The eldest tomten isn't having it. "I don't care if yer undead, yer cruisin' for a bruisin'!" he says in a carrying voice.

The attendant sighs. He seems to be rethinking his career choices.

4:29 p.m.
Oh hey, one of Santa's elves just showed up. With one of the biggest red loads I've ever seen.

4:35 p.m.
The elf was listening in on the vampire-tomtar brouhaha as he loaded an extra-high-capacity washer.

He is now making a list. And checking it twice.

4:41 p.m.
Wup, the attendant just dropped a roll of quarters. They scattered everywhere and now the young vampire is searching for and counting every single one.

The elf looks over, pulls out his list and makes a few amendments.

4:42 p.m.
"Forty! Forty quarters! Ah ah ah ah" *BOOOOOM*

5:11 p.m.
Welp, my load is dry and I think I'm going to fold this at home, just in case things get any crazier and someone calls the chupacopras. Thanks for coming with me!

Staycations and epiphanies

"Time for a staycation!" said the bearded shopper behind me.

I turned. "Sorry?"

"We were planning to go off somewhere this weekend, but now we're just going to have a little staycation instead," he said convivially, looking over the beef jerky. "Getting all kinds of goodies for the family." He surveyed his cart. "Actually, there's almost no junk food in here," he added. "They're gonna be disappointed."

After we exchanged a few pleasantries about needing to have flexible plans these days, I wished him a happy staycation and continued looking for salad fixings. (Tonight I'm making ham and beans and a big green salad with goodies in it.) And as I was looking through the canned beans, a sudden memory swept over me.

The word "staycation" has been around longer than I thought -- Merriam-Webster says it was first coined in 1944 -- but it really took hold in American popular culture during the early days of the pandemic. But the concept of staying in while doing something different certainly isn't new. And the memory I had was an amalgam of several different memories, something my mom would do occasionally when I was growing up, especially my years in middle school.

"Tonight, let's see what it was like to live in colonial times," she'd say. And for that evening, we'd turn off all the lights, unplug the appliances and clocks (except the battery-powered ones), and turn off the ringer on the phone. Instead of cooking on the stove, Mom would fire up the kerosene heater in front of the fireplace and cook a bubbling stew on its flat, trapezoidal top. We'd light kerosene lanterns at the kitchen table and put candles above the fireplace, and we'd do our homework by lantern light while Mom, who had been a history teacher before she married and had six children, would tell us about the era before video games and electrical power and refrigerators and lightbulbs: how people in those days lit their homes and kept their food safe to eat, how they'd cook over the kitchen hearth and bake in earthen ovens, how they'd entertain themselves in the long, cold winters. Sometimes during these colonial-times evenings, we'd get our sleeping bags and all sleep together in the front room, cozy and safe in the residual warmth of the kerosene heater.

"Lantern" by Chuck Grimmett. Public domain image.

I was smiling a little at the thought of it -- and then, for the first time, it really hit me.

"Oh," I said aloud, right in the canned-food aisle. "She didn't have enough money to pay PG&E."

We lived well below the poverty line even before my dad died, and while I think we kids all knew there wasn't much money, my mother tended to focus on things that were freely available to us -- the library, the public parks, city museums, walks and hikes in local green spaces, imaginative play -- rather than things we couldn't afford. There must have been times when she had very little money to pay the gas and electric bill, but she'd done such a skillful job of making "colonial times" into a purposeful adventure that up to that moment, it had never occurred to me that she was doing it out of financial necessity.

"She made necessity into an adventure." If I had to sum up my mom's parenting style in six words, I think that would be it.

AAAAAH WHYYYYYYY

OME of you might know that I save correspondence -- the snailmail letters and postcards that I receive from family and friends. (Not ALL of them, mind you, but the ones I hold dear for one reason or another.) And several years back I got the brilliant idea to organize all that correspondence into a few binders -- one for letters and cards, one for postcards, one for the Wish I Were Here project. And it was a great idea and worked beautifully and everything was nice and neat.

For a while, anyway.

But, as with so many of the projects I begin with the best of intentions, I neglected it. And the correspondence went into a pile -- because I'd sort it out eventually, right? -- and the pile grew, and grew, and grew, and GREW as I continued to ignore it because I just knew it would be a Task of Eternity and I didn't want to devote loads of time to doing it.

Well, today I finally decided to take the bull by the horns and sort through the mighty pile. We're preparing to move and I knew I couldn't afford to wait many more days before it had to be done. I blocked off the entire day to accomplish this task, hoisted the pile onto the table, found the binders and started sorting.

It took an hour.

The task that has been hanging over my head for nearly a decade. Took. One. HOUR.

This is a prime example of ADD's tendency to play tricks with mental time estimates. I often assume that some "quick" task will take five minutes when it's really going to be more like half an hour, and I tend to avoid other tasks for long stretches because they seem like they'll be arduous and take all day, when in reality ONE FREAKING HOUR.

Welp.

On to the next task. Cleaning the bathroom. Shouldn't take more than 10 minutes tops, right?

The house on Oakmont Lane

Our family moved into a rental house in Provo, Utah in the last hot days of August, 1983. I can remember that specifically because one day after we finished unloading the moving van into our new temporary home, I started the school year as a freshman at Provo High. I literally didn't know a single soul there, and my mother said that when she dropped me off at the front of the school campus on the first day, I was shaking like a leaf. But despite my fears, the kids at Provo High turned out to be kinder and significantly more welcoming to a shy, awkward teenage nerd-girl than the kids in the middle school I'd left behind in Northern California. I found my feet relatively quickly.

The rental house was a prefab home with an unfinished basement and a back yard full of boulders and little else. But it was at the lower elevations of Y Mountain, in an area known as the East Bench of the Oak Hills neighborhood, and the west-facing windows offered a gorgeous view of the city and BYU nestled into the valley, Utah Lake out beyond that, and the Oquirrh Mountains framing the sunsets. Even on days where "inversions" made the air khaki-colored and gritty and the Geneva Steel Mill did its best to give everyone in the valley lung cancer, the view was still striking.

And then there was the allure of the house right next door.

Looking up from the cul-de-sac, 2021

It was an imposing-looking place, two stories of red brick and an unfinished partial daylight basement, built in 1979 (so only four years old when we moved into the neighborhood). There was a minor tragedy about the place; the original owners had built it from the ground up, sparing no expense to create their dream home. It turned out that "sparing no expense" was their downfall, as they ran out of money and lost the house to a bank repossession. Hoping to get it back some day, they had placed a lien on the property that made it difficult for prospective buyers to purchase it. It was a gorgeous home, but we assumed we'd never have the finances to buy it, let alone the ability to navigate the legal thicket associated with the lien.

As circumstances would have it, the original owners still lived in the area when we moved in, and they attended the same church congregation we did. We'd been living in Provo for about a year when they discovered Mom was interested in buying their house, and by that point they had largely given up on ever getting it back. They liked Mom, and they liked our family, so they decided to remove one of the roadblocks to purchase by taking the lien off the property. Further, because it was bank-owned and had some plumbing issues from having stood vacant for a few years, it was offered at a very good price. In the summer of 1984, Mom bought the house on Oakmont Lane and we made what was probably the simplest move ever -- we just picked everything up and trotted it next door.

The house, like all houses, had its quirks. The huge room over the garage was originally meant to be an open-air deck, the solar panels on the side of the house didn't work properly, the roof leaked, the plumbing needed several repairs, and there was one particular section of the water pipes that tended to freeze solid in the Utah winters. But it didn't matter. We owned a home again, and it was ours.

When we first moved in, the house had three bedrooms, all on the top floor. With six kids in the family, we really wanted one more bedroom. See that little window at the bottom of the house, in the daylight part of the basement? That was the area where one of our neighbors, a contractor, framed in and finished a bedroom for my sister Julie and me. We shared that room from the time we moved in until I began a series of moving-aways -- first to a college dorm, then to a shared apartment, then to a year spent working in California with extended family, and then finally when I got married and moved out "for good" in 1993 (Captain Midnight and I did return to live in the basement for a couple of years in the early 2000s).

This place has been our family home for 37 years.

We sold it today.

None of us could afford to keep the place, and in any case Mom specified in her will that we should sell it and divide the proceeds between the six of us. We all knew it would happen eventually. Personally, I haven't lived there since late 2004; there are other places I've called home since. And in all honesty, it was only home because Mom made it that way. Since she died, the sense of "home" has slowly leaked out of the house, diminishing by degrees as the little treasures and furnishings and keepsakes were taken away. Now it's just a place.

But. It was a place where I practiced the piano over and over again, where Dan practiced his trombone, where Julie tried her hand at playing the drums and Tim worked on his practice chanter for bagpipes. It was a place where we sang together, where we told each other dumb jokes and family stories and laughed uproariously at them. It was a place where fights and family tragedies unfolded, too. It was a place where I'd often sneak our long-haired kitty Chamomile, who was supposed to be an outdoor-only cat, into the basement room for a warm, comfortable snooze. It was also the place where I returned with Chamomile's body in a cardboard box after her final visit to the vet, to bury her in the side yard. It was a place where Mom cooked homemade doughnuts at Halloween and oliebollen at New Year's, a place where the whole family (and many friends) congregated for Christmas julbords every year. It was a place where I went out onto the front balcony one winter night, looked down into the cul-de-sac and caught sight of one of my neighbors, a teenage boy, delightedly dancing in the falling snow. It was the place where I graduated from high school, where I spent most of my years in college. It was the place where I first got into dialing up BBSes, became a co-sysop and started meeting users, including a guy who called himself Captain Midnight. It was the place we held the murder mystery dinner party, when Mom first noticed CM and strongly encouraged me to date him. It was the place I first announced to my family that CM and I were engaged. It was the place where Miss V was born and where she spent most of the first decade of her life being, as my mom called it, "grandma's little sidekick." It was the place we came back to when CM lost his job and we needed somewhere to regroup. It was the place where my siblings and I helped Mom recuperate from the many, many surgeries and other medical procedures she went through during the last twenty years of her life. And it was the place where Mom had the catastrophic fall that ended up taking her away forever.

I know it isn't what it was. But it was home once, the shell of the place that used to contain our family. In many ways, it was the last vestige of Mom's presence on earth.

Maybe that's why it hurts more than I thought it would to let it go.

I just hope the new family that moves in will love the house on Oakmont Lane as much as we did. I hope they'll enjoy the million-dollar view of the valley, and I hope they'll learn how to accelerate into the cul-de-sac in winter so they can make it up into the garage without their car slipping down the icy driveway. I hope they'll enjoy taking a bath in the walk-in bathtub downstairs, and that they'll always have enough hot water. I hope they'll relish eating the apples and grapes that grow in the back yard, and that they'll become good friends with the neighbors (who are some of the most awesome people ever). I hope it will be cozy for them around the fireplace on the main floor, especially on January nights. Maybe they'll even choose to keep Mom's "Mexican restaurant yellow" color scheme in the dining room, because they'll find it as joyful and sunny a color as she did.

I hope it'll become home for them the way it was home for us.

And I hope they'll fill their home with memories to replace the ones we took away with us.

Pandemic: ugh

How's this past week been for the Laundry Faerie, you ask?

Public domain Cyclone image by Mark Houtzager

Well, to sum up: it's been a roller-coaster. First elated. Then nervous. Then terrified that this nation will experience a full-on coup d'état, with the tacit approval of about a third of the population. Plus, this last week -- due either to nerves or some kind of brand-new food allergy -- I've been continually breaking out in hives. 2020, you truly are the gift that keeps on giving. I had a televisit with the doctor, who prescribed an anti-steroid medication, loratadine and an antacid, but the thing that's kept me out of continual scratchy hell is Benadryl. Trouble is, Benadryl completely knocks me out. So I can either be awake and blazingly itchy from the back of my scalp all the way down to my knees, or I can have some temporary relief and stay zonked out in bed all day long.

Let's just say this week hasn't been very productive.

Fortunately, Captain Midnight came to my aid on days when I couldn't leave the house, picking up aforementioned Benadryl and emergency groceries (gotta have Mountain Dew, he says), and other stellar behaviors. He's a keeper.

Miss V has been busy working at a local business, walking a lot, getting trim and making some big life choices. But since they're her life choices, not mine, I'll let her discuss them elsewhere at her discretion.

Charlie-cat is being a furry little mendicant, as usual. It's a good thing he's so cute, or we'd have turned him into gumbo by now. He's also discovered that if anyone leaves the pantry doors open, he can sneak inside and hide out in the kitty-cat clubhouse area behind the food. We have accidentally shut him in there on more than one occasion, and only found his super-secret hiding place when he started knocking stuff over in the pantry and we looked at each other and said, "PA! DID YOU HEAR THAT SUSPICIOUS THUUUD?"

At the moment our biggest challenge as a family is staying 'rona-free until we can get vaccinated... which, realistically, won't happen until spring 2021, but it's a lifeline all the same. I've been trying to avoid risk whenever I can, but I realize we've just been lucky up to this point -- it's very easy to catch, and it's extremely difficult to tell who has it. I've got five siblings, and at this writing three out of the six of us have caught a case of the stuff. Soooooooooooooo that's fun.

I miss my mom. But I guess that goes without saying. I try to focus on the memories of her love for me; she and Dad always made sure we knew we were loved, and I'll need that knowledge to sustain me for the rest of my life.

Hey, guess what?

Remember the Wish I Were Here blog?

Well, I can't fault you if you don't. I run the place and I barely remembered it.

BUT! I've been cleaning off my computer desk (a heroic struggle, but worthy of the effort IMO) and came across a whole stack of postcards from imaginary places -- ones that I'd never posted to the blog.

I think it's well past time they got their day in the sun, don't you?

Here's the first one. More to come shortly.

Pandemic: ephemera

OME minor odd things I've noticed regarding pandemic conditions, which may or may not be forgotten by history unless someone (say, me) writes them down:

• Decluttering is tough right now. There's plenty of time to do it, but thanks to widespread states of depression or dysthymia there may not be much internal motivation to do it. And then there's the problem of disposing of all those unwanted but still-useful items. Due to fears of COVID-19 contamination, Goodwill and other secondhand stores aren't accepting donations right now. Unless you want to break out the bazillion Amazon boxes in the garage and start trying to sell items one by one on eBay, you're kinda hosed.
• So. Much. Flour. With lots of free time on their hands and a strong yen for comfort food, many Americans have rediscovered baking -- which means that flour, yeast and other ingredients for baked goods have vanished from stores almost as quickly as face masks and toilet paper. (Fortunately for me, the chocolate supply is still holding up!) I'm no stranger to this activity; a few weeks ago I picked up some instant yeast online, and since then this household has feasted on homemade bread, cookies, calzones made from homemade pizza dough, and Swedish apple cake. (You know I can cook.)
• I get tired of cooking all the time, and sometimes other family members spell me off, but every now and then nobody wants to take the responsibility and everyone's hungry. That's when we yell TO THE TACO TRUCK! and light out for Westside Park. Someone in our neighborhood cut a deal with several area food trucks, so nearly every weekday around lunchtime there's a truck parked at Westside, slingin' hash and takin' names. We've seen some familiar faces from the neighborhood while waiting in line for lunch (maintaining good social distance, of course).
• I've noticed you can now tell where other grocery shoppers are getting their news. Most people around here wear masks. Above the face coverings, their eyes are concerned, resolute, occasionally friendly. They keep a respectful 6 feet of distance from other shoppers and apologize when they get too close. Conservative media fans, on the other hand, tend not to wear masks in public (though this will change in the coming week, as King County is making it a requirement). Their expressions range from confusion to frank disdain of their fellow shoppers with masks. They don't maintain reasonable social distance, they never apologize for coming too close, and they tend to get angry when people ask them to move away.
• Last week I had a run-in with one of these clowns, an older man with no mask, at the grocery store. I was boxed into the produce section (another shopper was blocking the exit behind me) and I couldn't get past him safely, so I waited for him to back away and let me out. But Grampa Boomer wanted something next to me and wasn't willing to wait for it, so he got really close and started passive-aggressively coughing in my direction. I had to push past him to get away (with a single-word opinion on the status of his parentage, I'll admit), but if I had a do-over I would've gotten a closeup photo of his face. DUDE. Deliberately coughing at someone else during a pandemic is a form of assault. You are old and have lived your life, and if you want to play tiddlywinks with COVID-19 that's your call, but I have a family to take care of. How dare you put me and them in danger because you want your broccoli 5 seconds faster?
• In the same vein, I'm continually amazed at the people who are out protesting life-saving quarantine measures for reasons I can only describe as frivolous. I'm not talking about protests due to concerns most people would recognize as valid (resuming needed medical treatments, financial assistance to get through lockdown, fear of increased domestic abuse, etc.). I'm talking about people losing it because they "need" a haircut, a manicure, a massage; they are demanding the return of summer camp and the reopening of Disney properties not because it's safe, but because they're already sick of their kids. *sigh* ... really? I know, I know, these conditions have never before happened in your lifetime. They've never happened in mine either, and I can think of hundreds of things from "normal life" that I'm missing right now and would dearly love to have back, but not at the expense of other people's lives. I don't think Patrick Henry would've been on board with milling around in front of the capitol building, yelling GIVE ME PEDICURES OR GIVE ME DEATH through a bullhorn.
• Quarantine has been fantastic for Charlie-cat. I honestly think he's going to have some kind of feline nervous breakdown the first time all three of us humans leave the house at once. He's adored all the extra company, attention, toys and treats he's been getting for the last two months. (As I typed this, he hopped onto the computer desk, curled up next to me, leaned his head on my left arm and is now purring contentedly. D'aww, fuzzy beast.)

Pandemic: random thoughts

A handful of things you think about if you're me (which I am) and you're up late at night/early in the morning to get some much-needed solitude while in quarantine.

Pandemics create so many rapid societal changes that it's tough to keep track of everything that's happened, or to predict what may happen with any accuracy. I am trying to keep track of the things that are happening for several reasons (one of them admittedly self-serving; I have a story on the back burner about an engineered virus that rips through the world, altering people's ability to communicate with each other, and I imagine some of the things we're seeing with SARS-CoV-2 would happen in that fictional world as well... so I'm taking notes).

I think most people living through this realize they're witnessing a major historical event unfolding in real time. We understand that some day, people will study this pandemic. So if future generations ever read this rambling first-person narrative as history, here's something I want you to understand: we don't know how this is going to end. You have the benefit of hindsight, of knowing how long quarantine and self-isolation and social distancing and other viral stop-gaps had to continue, of understanding what we did to keep the millions of people suddenly out of work from being kicked out on the street to die, of being aware what antiviral treatment or series of treatments finally put the 'Rona to rest or at least in abeyance, of seeing what leadership measures needed to be taken and were not, what kind of political fallout came from all of this, how it changed society. We don't know any of those things. The future is completely opaque to us, and that's what makes this time especially wearing on the soul. We don't know how many months or years we'll have to keep our distance from fragile friends and loved ones so they won't get sick, how long we'll have to wait before it's safe to hug someone again. We don't know how the many businesses and social organizations that will inevitably fail during this pandemic will end up altering our society. We don't know which, if any, of the many experimental treatments now in the pipeline will work. We don't know who will make it out of this alive, and which people -- like my friend and KIN colleague Sarah Johnson, who died of COVID-19 on Saturday -- won't. We don't even know what insane things are slated for next month (Yellowstone eruption? coronal mass ejection? alien invasion? AAAAIIIEEE GOJIRA!?). We can't know these things any more than you can know what'll happen to you next week -- maybe less so, because I want to assume your lives are stable enough that you can plan and dream more than a week in advance. We don't have the luxury of dreaming right now; we just have to focus on not getting dead. History only seems inevitable when it's happened, not while it's happening.

In the same vein... I just want the luxury of being able to talk about ideas again, about books and movies and art and even video games. I don't want to discuss who died today, whether I need to suit up and venture out for supplies, or what I'm going to make for dinner.

OLLYWOOD plans ahead, but it occurs to me that in a few years, there's going to be a COVID-19-shaped hole in the movie release pipeline. I suppose anyone foolhardy enough to make a halfway decent film during the pandemic stands to make some bank. Assuming the 'Rona doesn't decimate anyone who tries, of course.

The safest bet for a pandemic project like this would probably be an animated film. Voice actors could record their parts from home studios, coached remotely by a director; individual animators could probably work safely from quarantine.

Less safe but still possible: a small, artsy film made by a team of people who were already in quarantine together -- say a husband-and-wife team or a family of actors. It would probably be best to create a quality adaptation from Shakespeare, or to adapt a novella where all the action takes place in a single location, or to create a documentary about the pandemic itself.

The most dangerous and foolhardy project, and (alas) probably the most likely to happen, is a big group of film students Blair-Witching it on an ultra-low budget. YEAH DON'T DO THIS. It isn't worth the danger. As several people way smarter than me have pointed out, wealth can be rebuilt, but death is permanent.

Pandemic: just checking in

ONJOUR, mes amis! I've been hesitating to check in and say things like "we're all well here," because I realize how quickly our circumstances could take a turn for the worse (whenever I leave the house to get groceries or prescriptions, or Miss V leaves the house for dog-walking or errand-running, or CM leaves the house to get work-related hardware, we're potentially putting ourselves and the entire household at risk to catch a case of COVID-19. Charlie-cat, who never leaves the house -- though not really for lack of trying -- is our social distancing champion). For the nonce, we're all healthy and hoping to stay that way as long as we can, or until there's a viable antiviral or other treatment available.

Easter was a pleasant, if subdued, affair. I planned in advance (novel change of pace, ne?) and ordered a big box of See's candy by mail weeks ago, so we had plenty of chocolaty goodness for our Easter baskets. We had a short church service at home, then CM made a delicious pork tenderloin with cherry peppers and potatoes (recommended) and we watched a slew of movies: Father Goose, Meet the Robinsons, The Good Dinosaur and Coco (the English version and part of the Spanish version, just for comparison's sake). I'd never seen The Good Dinosaur before, and while it's far from Pixar's finest story work, it has its moments. It's best described as a dino-Western; it even has Sam Elliott doing voice work. It also has a scene where our dino hero and his pet feral child get stoned on rotten fruit, which I'd characterize as mild nightmare fuel, so if you intend to see it, be warned.

V has been making fabric face masks for family and friends, so she was busy cutting and sewing most of the afternoon. CM, as mentioned, has been cooking and making Minecraft videos for fun and (minor) profit. I've just been trying to keep on top of the dishes and laundry and making notes on whatever's running low around the house, so that when I do go out I can make my errands as effective as possible. I also do handwork -- basic knitting and crocheting, stuff that requires little to no brain power so I can do something productive while watching movies.

Speaking of movies, we also saw Onward the first day it was available on Disney+. It's very much worth watching and rewatching. We would have caught it in local theaters if they hadn't all closed down for social distancing purposes the weekend after it released. I got a kick out of the comment (I think it was on Twitter) that it could have been named The Brotherhood of the Traveling Pants.

Oh, yeah, also: want a random postcard? I'll send one to anybody who sends me a mailing address. I'm not a huge fan of the USPS, but it's in danger of going under thanks to a combination of pandemic conditions and no bailout from the U.S. government, and it needs all the help it can get, so I'mma send POSTCARDS GALORE. Sling an email here if you want one.

Take care this week, find creative things to do inside, stay healthy, read, try a new recipe, etc. If you're on Facebook, I recommend following the hashtag #coronavenger for some commonsense advice on how to get through pandemic conditions. And if you have advice about how to handle various kinds of stress and strain associated with social distancing, please share. I'd be delighted to get your thoughts.

For now, though, I'm going to bed. Later skaters!

Pandemic: Life on Pause

month has gone by fairly rapidly, with many changes, and I haven't taken the time to write about many of them. And it occurs to me that I should be writing these things down, because though I've felt relatively calm and self-possessed about the changes that have occurred within the last 30 days, I also realize that I'm living through an experience that doesn't happen every decade, nor even every generation, but perhaps only once every few centuries. I take strength and comfort from the thought that the people who lived through the last major worldwide pandemic -- the Spanish flu epidemic of 1918-1919 -- had their lives upended in ways much more severe than ours, and that eventually society shook it off, righted itself and got back to normal (or at least a reasonable facsimile thereof). So although things are chaotic at the moment, I try to think of this experience not as the end of life as we know it, but merely of life with the Pause button on for a while.

So at the end of February I was finishing up the most recent travel experience with Miss V, visiting a couple of potential graduate schools in North Carolina and Pennsylvania. We'd heard about the nasty viral outbreak in China and how someone in the U.S. -- actually, someone in our state -- had come back with a case of it, but we didn't yet know it was in the full community transmission phase. But when the news about Life Care Center of Kirkland broke, I knew things were about to get nasty.

The rash of cancellations and closures started in early March. An interfaith network meeting I usually attend, a St. Patrick's Day celebration at Seattle Center, a live podcast recording V was planning to see, Emerald City Comic-Con all got nixed. Church was canceled at first for just one week, then until further notice; we've started holding church services at home. School districts shut down one by one, switching to distance learning, and college students were told to leave their on-campus apartments and go home; some had as little as 48 hours' notice to vacate the premises. Missionaries were sent home, given temporary new assignments, or confined to their apartments. First the Seattle temple was closed, then every temple around the world was closed. There were public recommendations: practice social distancing of at least 6 feet from others in public, limit public gatherings to 50 people, then to 10 people. And always, always, "wash your hands for at least 20 seconds and don't touch your face." Commencements were canceled. Weddings were canceled. Funerals were canceled. Restaurants, especially Asian restaurants, became ghost towns even before the governor restricted all restaurants to delivery and carry-out services only. Non-essential businesses at first tried to stay open by limiting the number of customers who could be in the store at once. Eventually they had to close completely.

Panic-buying and stockpiling set in early. Certain items became difficult (and, in the case of face masks and hand sanitizer, virtually impossible) to find at groceries and pharmacies. I've been exceptionally fortunate throughout most of this, because although we've never hoarded or stockpiled anything, I've managed to keep the family in enough toilet paper for our needs.

At first I continued picking up groceries via Epic Late-Night Grocery Run, since nearly nobody was in the store late at night and it felt safer to pick things up when I didn't have to risk getting (or giving) a case of the 'Rona. Alas, I cannot do an Epic Late-Night Grocery Run now, because no grocery store in this area is open later than 11 p.m. and the governor has advised Washington residents to shelter in place, only running errands for groceries or prescriptions. To make sure my errands out are as productive as possible, I've been keeping track of household items we need on a Post-It-style phone app. Once the list gets full or something critical runs out, I venture forth for a massive coordinated errand run where I try to get everything done in one pass.

Captain Midnight has been working from home since the beginning of the month. He set up a workstation at the far end of the kitchen table, and the area is slowly being taken over by the equipment he's testing. CM is getting used to Charlie-cat hopping up on the kitchen table and sitting on his laptop keyboard for attention, disrupting online team meetings. Charlie should be a minor celebrity at CM's work by the time all this is over.

Miss V had an internship in Seattle this month, which abruptly came to an end. She's been working on some sewing projects and picking up a few paid gigs here and there. I know this isn't the way she imagined Spring 2020 would go, and she's had some anxiety and a number of disappointments over canceled events, but overall she's done her best to maintain a positive attitude.

Me, I spend too much time online. (Yes, even more than I already did.) I knit from my overflowing stash of yarn, read a library book that's now on extended checkout through the end of April because the county library system is closed down, and work on putting together a Discord channel where people can gather to tell each other stories during the pandemic. There are days when I go geocaching to feel a bit more normal, focusing on caches close to home. And there are days when I only go outside to pick up the mail. Most days I sleep until noon because I've been staying up until 3 or 4 a.m. just to recharge. There's a lot of love in my family, but we're also all introverts and we need our space, even from each other. There are days when I'm fine with doing the typical household chores (laundry, dishes, pickup, garbage, etc.) and days when I just don't wanna do squat. On Thursday Miss V, who usually avoids cooking, stepped up to the plate and made Indian food for dinner. I don't know what I appreciated more: the taste of the food or the satisfaction of not having to cook for an evening.

When I do go out, the streets are abnormally still, like what one might expect on a Sunday morning at 5 a.m. Even during rush hour, traffic is nearly nonexistent, and it feels like drivers are routinely speeding to keep from staying out any longer than they have to. It's allergy season as well (because of course it is), and high pollen counts make me clear my throat frequently as I try hard not to cough in public. I sanitize frequently during errands and wash my hands thoroughly as soon as I return, but in the end I'll probably be the one who brings back a case of COVID-19. I mean, I hope that won't happen, but I see the exponential growth of this thing and the continued lack of widespread testing and realize that, especially in the next few weeks, the virus will be essentially everywhere I go. The best I can hope for is that we'll get mild cases that clear up without need for medical intervention, and that we'll stay sufficiently isolated so no one else will get it from us.

I have... thoughts about this administration and how it's handled the pandemic. I'm sure you do too. I also have some fairly strong feelings about people who break quarantine to play on the beach in large numbers, but I can't express those feelings without resorting to profanity, so... moving on.

For the time being, Captain Midnight has a job. I realize how fortunate he's been to keep his employment when so many others are out of work, and I'm grateful for it. Other things I'm grateful for: the ability to cook from scratch (thanks Mom), the ability to self-entertain most of the time, the smartphone I swore I'd never get which has helped me stay organized through this (thanks Julie), my bullet journal (thanks Ryder Carroll), getting officially diagnosed with ADHD before all this went down, home delivery of nearly everything, chocolate as a self-medication for stress, getting my (actual) medications filled early (thanks Bartell Drugs), my family and Charlie-cat, and -- overwhelmingly -- the healthcare workers, pharmacists, grocery clerks, delivery drivers, restaurant cooks, and all the other folks who keep the most necessary parts of our society functioning. I know it's not safe to do it right now, but once the pandemic is over and life switches from Pause to Play again, I'm giving all y'all hugs. And it will be both super awkward and awesome at the same time.

Adventures in Pennsylvania: Angels, Bellefonte, knitting and laundry

On Monday night we watched Penn State's production of Angels in America Part 1: Millennium Approaches (well, the dress rehearsal). It was a remarkably ambitious production for a college to put on. While I obviously have some opinions on the depiction and accuracy of characters described as Mormons in this play, I think I'd be hard-pressed to write a play with, for example, Muslim characters without doing a whole lot of research and frequent fact-checking with people who are actually practicing Muslims. In any case, the play doesn't concern itself with specific religious beliefs as much as it is a meditation on human integrity and hypocrisy. (If you have any kind of belief or set of beliefs, you're probably going to act at least once against them. That's human nature. From there it's a question of whether you'll persist in selectively applying your beliefs, return to doing what you believe is right, or pick a new set of beliefs altogether.)

Tuesday was laundry day. If I'm going to be on a trip for more than three days, I'll do laundry so I don't have to carry dirty clothes home in my suitcase. (Besides, I have a moniker to uphold!) I picked up a tiny bottle of Gain at the Dollar Tree, took about an hour and a half chillin' & sudsin' at a local laundromat and spent most of the rest of the day decompressing, as you do. Especially when you're out of your typical comfort zone.

Nittany Lion image by Eric Firestine, Penn State Daily Collegian

On a tangentially-related note, it seems like everything in State College is named after the Nittany Lion, the Penn State mascot. If I opened a yarn store here I'd be legally obliged to name it Knittany.

On Wednesday, I took the advice of one of the Penn State theater professors and visited Bellefonte, a little Victorian town about 10 miles away from State College. It's wonderfully picturesque: built on a steep hill with a river winding through the bottom of the town, an old brick match factory, a historic railroad that offers fall foliage rides, lots of Victorian "painted lady" houses and storefronts, a county courthouse with a copper dome, maybe a dozen old churches, some gorgeous bed-and-breakfast houses -- and at the very top of the hill, behind the courthouse, there's an old Union cemetery overlooking the town and surrounding hills. It really looks like something out of a movie.

Bellefonte train station image courtesy of Bellefonte Cultural and Historical Association

I also stopped by Giant, and serendipitously witnessed Marty, their loss-prevention robot, at work. The googly eyes on this guy turned what could easily have been a tall, somewhat intimidating robot with an Evil Empire vibe into something a little bit more whimsical.

Today (Thursday) brought with it snow flurries, wind and general weather cruddiness. This meant that even if we'd wanted to engage in some outside adventures, the elements were not with us. As a result, we mostly just packed up, ran last-minute errands, drove around for a while, and eventually got bored and headed for the airport.

The State College Airport is teensy. We're talking Fisher-Price Airport size. They have, I think, a total of 3 gates and a single restaurant/souvenir shop, plus bathrooms and a car rental area. When there aren't any flights scheduled to depart for a while, they just shut down the entire TSA security checkpoint and take a coffee break. We took a teeny airplane from State College to Chicago O'Hare -- which is sort of the opposite experience, a humongous international airport with multiple terminals -- and managed to catch our next flight back to Seattle just in time.

And now we're home again, home again, jiggity-jog. I'm going to sleep like a piece of lead.