Tag Archives: isolation

grey damp days.

It’s felt like a week of Groundhog Days. Every day dawns grey, damp, and unseasonably sticky-warm. Brandon’s been home, bored and very tired, so we have coffee together and then if I’m not going for an early run, I shower, dress, and log on in my home office (which is also currently my bedroom during Brandon’s Covid isolation period). I’m spending a lot of time in that little back bedroom.

A couple of mornings I’ve run before work which helps break things up.

We have lunch and the afternoons are back in the home office while he naps. Around 530 I start dinner, we watch a scary movie for 21 Days of Horror (more on that later this month) and then tea and bed.

To get up the next day and do it all over again.

It would be nice to see the sun or have some things to do outside the house. Maybe next week. Brandon is feeling a bit better every day and I’m still healthy and displaying no symptoms. We’ll both get tested at some point this weekend and hopefully two negatives will mean a return to some semblance of normalcy around here.

breakthrough

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Last week was a week. Can I just tell you? We were all sick with what we originally thought was a seasonal cold or flu, probably brought home from school. Our immune systems are untested and fragile after a year and a half in a masked bubble, and the illness cut a swathe. I ended up on the couch and unable to work (or do much of anything else) for two days, my kiddo ended up in Urgent Care and on antibiotics for a sinus / ear infection, and my partner in Urgent Care with…breakthrough Covid.

Luckily, he is vaxxed and the doc says that has helped his case be quite mild. His major symptoms are fatigue and a mild loss of smell. He’s on the mend, isolating for the requisite 10 days, quite lonely and bored already as we’ve divided up the house (and kept Miss L at her dad’s house) but it is what it is. I have tested negative, and have no new symptoms. We are very grateful that a year and a half into the pandemic, this is our first household experience with Covid and that all in all it is mild. We are so lucky to have had the vaccine and access to quick, reliable healthcare.

I’m on the upswing health wise and am trying to keep the routine in the house, the refrigerator and oven full of good, nutritious, and comforting foods, and catch up on work missed from my own two days down and out.

All in all things could be much worse!

(Of course this viewpoint has only emerged AFTER my initial storm of panic, anxiety, alarm and guilt – now I can be philosophical and sound like I am rolling with it and have it under control, which, I can assure you, I very much DON’T! But I’m also a proponent of ‘fake it til you make it’ and maybe also a bit of ‘if you build it, they will come’ with a dash of ‘you must imagine your life and then it happens’.)

Keep calm and carry on. I hope you are all in good health and spirits. xo

currently

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Sorry folks but all I have to share is cat pics and memes this week – bear with me as the content is a bit light due to quarantine.

Along with the rest of the world, I’m not entirely sure what day it is (or month). I’ve been working from home and observing the guidelines of social isolation / distancing for about 3 weeks now (I think?). Work is crazy but more interesting than usual, I have to say – being in a Legal Department during a pandemic has meant different things every day and also trying to organize our annual board meeting with this going on has been extra trying. But I’m glad to still be working, getting paid, and be home while I’m doing it – it also gives a sense of structure and stability to my days that I personally need for my mental health.

Michigan is burning. Detroit is a hotspot with 3,550 cases of the 12, 744 statewide and my county has about 2,500. I feel so grateful that my parent’s county is so far being spared, but that will change once the summer people from downstate begin flocking north. Governor Whitmer (also known as “that woman from Michigan” per “that man in the White House” and of course now they’re selling t-shirts with that slogan – I think she wore one under her blazer for a recent spot on the Daily Show) issued an order this week that closed schools for the remainder of the school year. So Miss L is switching over to an entirely online curriculum. She’s done a great job with this. We set up our home office / classroom at our dining room table, draw up her weekly schedule in bullet-journal form, decorated with stickers, washi tape and boxes to color in as she finishes tasks, and she usually does about 3-4 hours of work a day. Don’t ask me what we’re going to do once my office reopens (IF it reopens anytime soon) – I’ll figure that out when I get there.

I finally frogged my Pink Memories sweater and will be restarting it from scratch. This is now the third attempt on my first sweater – I’m nothing if not tenacious. But I still can’t bring myself to knit anything in the evenings except repetitive garter stitch. It’s all I seem to have bandwidth for.

Anyway, I hope you are all well and safe, staying home and keeping your loved ones emotionally close if not physically so.

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week two of the new normal

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Alrite.

How’s it going.

(To quote Karl Pilkington, for any of my readers who are fans!)

Our second week of isolation is going well. I’m back into a good groove with my home office and Miss L has set up with me to do her online classwork. (Huge props to our school district for a quick move to online learning- they’re doing super cool things with Google Classroom assignments and keeping kids connected via Hangouts and video conferencing a couple times a week!) She has also been keeping us well supplied with baked goods from a cookbook for kids that my folks got her for Christmas- she’s made brownies from scratch and chocolate chip cookies this week.

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Emmett has been our faithful home office companion and we call him out unpaid intern for as much time as he spends hanging out with us at our work table.

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Although our governor has issued an official stay-home order, Brandon was deemed an essential employee by the company he is doing work for, so has to go into his workplace every day. He’s been a trooper about it but I know it causes him a lot of personal and ethical conflict and concern. We’re trying to take extra good care of him.

The weather has been nice (for Michigan) the last couple of days, with mild temperatures and sun. Brandon got Miss L’s bike out yesterday and we went for a walk while she rode. It was amazing how many people were out – hanging out in their driveways, on porches, doing some early yardwork, walking their dogs. Everyone maintained wide berth from each other but it was very reassuring to have some contact, waving and calling hello, sharing gratitude about the sunshine.

I only want to knit in simple, mindless, meditational garter stitch so I’ve pulled out the log cabin blanket I started a couple of years ago.

I hope you are all well and experiencing similar moments of goodwill and gratitude wherever you are, amidst all the worry and strain. xo

working from home

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I’ve been putting off this post all week, making the excuse that I’m getting used to “the new normal”, being at home, trying to set up a new routine, be productive, be upbeat, be calm, be responsive. The truth is I just don’t know what I have to offer at this point that’s any different than what all of us are experiencing. We’re all scared, mad, anxious, confused, worried, and I’m no different. I’m scared of the empty shelves at the grocery store and worried about my family and my friends and myself. I’m worried who will take care of my daughter and my pets if I get sick. I’m worried about my company’s ability to weather this. I worry about my girl, her physical and mental health during this scary time, and my parents and Brandon who is still out there every day doing his normal job.

I’m mad that some days it feels like I’m carrying that burden all by myself.

I don’t have a “but then I realize…” triumphant recovery paragraph to come after that.

The only thing I really know is that I am not alone. I hear the same cracking tone in my colleagues voices over our teleconferences, admitting that they can’t watch the news, admitting that their kids are freaking out with cabin fever, and they’re not the best at homeschooling and trying to get the reports out on time.

All I can do is keep checking in on the people I love and who love me, try to be prepared but not panicked, be willing to share and offer support and whatever supplies I might have to spare. Keep showing up to my little home office with my unpaid feline interns. And be full of gratitude for my extreme privilege, which so far has kept these things as worrisome spectors and not tragic realities.

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I do believe that people have the ability to be their best in a crisis and there’s no one in history I admire more than the Londoners during the Blitz huddling underground at night during bombing raids and then getting up to carry on with their days and their families and their jobs. If this is my London Blitz then I want to be like I imagine they were.

Anyway, that’s all I have for now. Next time I will come back with a stiff upper lip and some knitting, some running, and another report. Be well and take care of yourselves and others and keep in touch. xo

Six Ten

of this be sure: you do not find a happy life, you make it.