Reflections on the 2019-2021 School Year

 Sitting at their kitchen table today after our lovely department retirement breakfast, my mom asked me, "Do you think when you've reached the end of the year that you finally retire that you'll look back on this school year as the hardest one of your career?"  

And I really had to think about that for a bit. 

Because my gut instinct said "No," but I wasn't sure why.  

It has been a hard year.  A really hard year, though perhaps in some ways maybe not quite as hard for me as for others at least in terms of the technological learning curve. And I clearly thrive in isolation for the most part. The aspects that others struggled with didn't get to me as much or as often. (It's also entirely possible that my personal life going to shit just four weeks into the school year made the school part seem less hard because it was all I had to think about...) 

I absolutely do not want this to be misconstrued by anyone thinking that I am speaking on behalf of teachers everywhere to somehow downplay the challenges of the last year.  They've been monumental, and for a lot of teachers, it's been the thing that propelled them out of the classroom. Redesigning all your curriculum for online learning was no small feat; not knowing your kids well enough to know how to help or motivate them when they're a little black screen was intensely frustrating; not always having the technological knowledge to pivot or adapt or problem solve when something goes sideways makes everything orders of magnitude harder.  All of this is true, and this year was spectacularly hard for so, so many reasons. (Then add the complexities of school districts making all kinds of weird and frustrating decisions, plus the grumpy parent community at odds with everyone else ... it's been *a lot*.) 

So I sat there reflecting on why my instinct was to say no. 

And I realized: I am much, much less tired this year than I was at the end of the 2009-2010 school year. 

The year that started with a student death days before school started.  The year we lost Veronica Aguirre in a car accident right before Winter Break. And the year Chelsea King disappeared on a run and was found days later, raped and murdered by a monster. 

We spent that entire school year swimming -- and eventually drowning -- in grief. It started in grief and ended in grief and the fact any of us accomplished anything that year is still an absolute testament to the resilience and persistence of both teenagers and teachers. 

There's no teacher preparation course called "Grief 101" or "Dealing With Campus Trauma." No one knows how to do this; we're not trained in grief counseling -- or any counseling, for that matter -- and when you have three consecutive traumas in a single ten month span, it's a grueling dance without any choreography. I can barely describe what it's like to have a room full of 16 and 17 year olds look at you with terrified, traumatized, grief-filled eyes and wanting -- needing -- you to say The Thing that's going to make it better. That's going to alleviate their fears that what happened to those students could happen to them; that's going to help them make sense of a senseless act of violence; that's going to explain the utterly unexplainable. It's absolutely, astoundingly, absurdly fucking awful. And yet teachers all over America, when these traumas happen, do it. We stand in front of our students, meeting their eyes with ours, and try our best to figure out what to say. Sometimes we say the right thing. Sometimes we say the wrong thing. We don't know. All I know is that my only answer is to tell the truth: "I don't know what to say or how to do this, so be patient with me, but I'm going to do my best to get us all through this." 

And that year, we all had to do that a lot. Too much. All the time. After Chelsea disappeared, we did it straight for weeks. Not days. Weeks. And it took every single atom in my body to keep doing it, to keep showing up for kids, to keep trying to keep myself together so that the kids could fall apart if they needed. We watched stupid movies and I trooped them out to the space in front of the Performing Arts Center just to sit together and process their grief and their fear. We packed the football stadium for her memorial, sobbed through Noah and the Whale and Owl City songs, and tried to love on our kids as much as we possibly could. And graduation was both an exciting and excruciating capstone to the whole year. 

Then I went home and laid on my couch in pajamas for two weeks. And I am not exaggerating for effect here. I wore pajama pants and a hand-me-down flannel shirt and every day moved from being horizontal in my bed to being horizontal on the couch, letting the sound of the television waft over me for two entire weeks before I started to feel even remotely human again. I finally had the time and the space to process my own grief, to try to refill my own cup that was so empty I could barely feed myself. It was exhaustion on a cellular level because of the emotional labor it required to help 150+ students every day keep on going, and to somehow keep learning, too. (Because if we've learned anything these most recent two school years, CollegeBoard stops for nothing...)

And here's the thing I realized as I was explaining this to my parents. At least with the pandemic, everyone in the United States -- hell, everyone in the world -- has experienced this in real time, all together. Sure, different places had different responses, and not everyone's experience has been exactly the same, but there's a commonality across the country that enables educators to nod to each other in solidarity and understand that we all understand. That we're all dealing with new technology and with a lack of connection to each other and our students and with the fear that comes along with a super scary virus that might kill someone's grandparent or parent or teacher or other loved one at any moment.  But we have all, in one way or another, experienced these hallmarks of the pandemic, so there's a common language and a common empathy around it. I hadn't realized until today how much that's actually helped. How much memes on Instagram and Teacher TikTok has made it feel less hard by making it feel more communal. 

But when it's just your campus -- and this is also what I imagine it's like for teachers who have worked at schools with similar nationally newsworthy events on their campuses -- it's isolating as hell, and isolating in a way that's not the same as having to stay home. No one can really ever know what it's like until it happens, and though of course other teachers offer support and sympathy, it doesn't really help. It's nice, but it doesn't undo the damage done, and it doesn't make it any less challenging to walk into the classroom the day after a devastating tragedy has happened to just your campus community. Life goes on around you, in your grocery store, or in your gym, or in Starbucks, where people are happy and laughing and enjoying themselves and a tidal wave of grief and loneliness will wash over you to the point where you want to scream, "Will you all stop being happy? Don't you understand the the world is a terrible place where terrible things happen but I can't let anyone know that's bothering me because I have to stay strong?! Just stop smiling, for the love of god!" At least that's how it felt for me. I'd have to constantly remind myself "They don't know" when I'd be out running an errand or something and it felt like people were being too happy in my immediate vicinity. It sounds silly, I know, but grief is just really, really weird, and it pops up in unexpected ways, at unexpected times, and suddenly you're the person crying in the cereal aisle because someone around you made it clear they have no idea what you're going through. And why would they? (And when do we ever know what strangers are going through?) 

While this year has been grueling in its own way, and I'm really glad that it's finally (almost) over (... teacher check out day on a Monday? ::shakes fist towards the sky::), here at the end, I'm just ready to go back to loving my computer for the video games it allows me to play and to not think about grading for awhile. To sleep without waking up to an alarm at 5:00 am. To read a book or six. To leave the house and get some sunshine. I'm an almost-normal amount of end-of-the-year tired; there's just some extra bonus tired that comes with how weird and unnatural pandemic teaching has been.  

But when I truly sit and reflect on this year, I think I already maybe had the hardest year of my career, and it maybe wasn't this one. 

Impatiently Patient

 Impatience.

That's what it is. 

Impatience. 

That's the sense, the feeling, that crept into my brain tonight after I finally fed myself dinner at 9:00 pm and tried to quiet the mind that was becoming increasingly unquiet as the night stretched towards bedtime. 

There are so many things to be impatient about right now. 

Firstly, there's the Incredibly Obvious Thing: the pandemic. I'm impatient for normalcy, as so, so many of us are, though normalcy as we picture it is still potentially a long, long way off, and it's hard to confront that each day this situation marches forward.  

I'm lucky in the sense that I have a disposition well-suited for quiet and solitude, but I'm also sensitive and empathetic to the struggles of those around me, and they accumulate on my psyche as someone who generally looks for solutions and wants to rush to help. But I know these solutions aren't solutions. Not really. They're only polite suggestions that we all know are meaningless, and do nothing to actually fix the problem. And the real problem of the pandemic is so staggeringly immense in magnitude that it exhausts and enrages me. 

But secondly, there are the less obvious but no less trivial things that make me impatient. 

To be honest, I'm impatient for my life to start over, and not just in the sense of the After Times of Covid. 

I'm impatient as I hope for things I probably have no right and no cause to hope for, impatient for answers to questions I'm too afraid to ask. I think about Prufrock in this moment, and I think of one of the lines that has always resonated so deeply with me, but particularly right now, about his fear of forcing the moment to its crisis. And in short, as Prufrock says, I am afraid. Afraid that in taking a leap, a risk, I find out it's for nothing; find rejection instead. And so, again like Prufrock, I am paralyzed into indecision and introspection. 

Lately, I retreat into the comforts of the secret favorite entertainment that brings me both joy and shame (but shame only in the sense that I truly enjoy some absolute garbage that people would a thousand percent judge me for listening to on repeat several times a day). But I do because, well, I'm alone. A lot. Days and days at a time, I am the only warm three-dimensional human in my orbit, and so I listen to, or watch, the embarrassing things because they provide a genuinely nostalgic sense of happiness. When things were simpler, and when daydreaming didn't seem quite as pathetic. I listen to early 90s slow dance songs and feel that same ache of longing that has characterized so much of my life of not-quite-requited love. I reread snippets of books I've loved for decades because they are familiar and their endings predictable. I watch the movies we favored as teenagers because they were sappy and lovesick, and wonder as I did when I was 15 whether any of that kind of love is real or possible.  

And then of course, I find myself thinking in the dark after a day spent alone, "Maybe?" And then I vaguely imagine scenarios I have no reason to imagine. Stupid, pathetic, love-starved scenarios that, again, I perhaps have no real reason to hope for; surprises and grand gestures and off-the-feet sweeping has never and may never exist in my world, and I've spent the last five months sitting with that, trying to be okay with that. Yet these scenarios, however fleetingly they last on my almost-always-otherwise-occupied brain, buoy a sense of optimism that feels ... real? Somehow improbably real, real in the sense that maybe I'm wrong, or at the very least maybe I am allowed to hope for what I hope for. 

That new possibilities exist and I just have to be... 

patient. 

We're back to patience, a virtue wearing thin on me in the solitude of a Saturday night. Oddly, I spent the vast majority of my day today plugged into the hustle and chatter of a 12 hour Zoom call and yet after a day spent (virtually) surrounded by people, I feel a keen sense of loneliness tonight, a loneliness that crept in only after I stepped away from my computer and my office and fed myself and took a deep breath and looked around my living room. 

And that's when the sense of impatience overwhelmed me, but realizing that I could point to the feeling and name it felt good; it felt powerful to accurately label the disquiet I feel tonight. 

So perhaps you, too, dear Reader, have been wrestling with an unnameable, abstract emotion, not as strong as fear or anger, but not as uplifting as hope or happiness. I don't feel mad, or sad, but in this moment, I also don't feel happy or optimistic. 

Tonight, it's simply impatience.

A Brief Interruption from Quarantine Life to Talk About... Games!

It's been funny to see how many former students have reached out to tell me they think it's funny/awesome/weird/rad/awkward that I play video games. I've been playing video games since my dad brought home an original NES when I was maybe five. Of course, I think Kyle played a LOT more than I did, but I can certainly hold my own at MOST games. Unless it's a first person shooter a la Goldeneye. These I suck at.  But give me a car racing game or a puzzle game (TETRISSSS) and I'm golden.

Once upon a time, in Lillehammer, Norway, we home stayed with a lovely Norwegian family who had a young son, maybe 12 at the time, and they had an NES.  At one point, four of us girls were installed in their downstairs family room to hang out and we were offered their NES to play with. At some point, I had made it to World 8 of Super Mario Bros. and the son was watching me play. He was shy and was kind of scared of us (mostly because his mom kept pushing him to practice his English with us, and I understood why he didn't want to) but it was clear he wanted to say something. Eventually, he was able to tell me that he'd never beaten the game because he couldn't get past a certain part of the next level.  I said "Oh! I can teach you!" and I showed him. He was SO excited and it was the most animated and excited he was the entire time there were weird American girls in his house.

Granted, I grew up having to play Luigi to Kyle's Mario, and Kyle is a vastly more gifted gamer than I am. Though beating the main quest line in Breath of the Wild before him is among one of my greatest personal accomplishments of my entire life. And Mario Kart is probably the only game where he and I are approximately evenly matched. Read: this is the only game I think I've ever beaten him at. When we lived together, I spent more time just watching him play Twilight Princess on the Wii and attempting to hold my own with him in Guitar Hero. But that jackass is good at every video game you hand him, so, I've come to terms with being not as good.

But I do love them, and I love all kinds of them. And here are some of my favorites:

Paperboy
I don't know why, but the simplicity of this game tickles me. It's surprisingly harder than it looks on the screen, and I think I've made it all the way through the week only a handful of times.

Tetris
This is a Forever Favorite of mine, and it makes me sad that in no iterations of the new NES models (the virtual one on the Switch, the NES mini we have) have the original Tetris that we played for hours and hours as kids. Jack has an emulator version that's reasonably decent, and I have the Tetris 99 game on the Switch, but it's not the same. (And that damn Switch game is stressful af!)

Frogger
I LOVE Frogger. It looks so simple, but that is a deceptive little game. It requires patience and a steady hand. In February, when we were in Vegas and spent the day at the Pinball Museum (... side note: February feels like a hundred years ago now...), I spent a TON of time on the Frogger machine. The first time we were there (... yes, there were multiple visits...), I ended up setting all five of the high scores on the machine. I enjoy the sound effects and the little musical ditty at the beginning of the game -- it's so nostalgic to me because Frogger is one of the games we have for the Atari and I've been playing it as long as I can remember -- even longer than the NES, because that Atari was first (but when I was a kid, it belonged to my Uncle Terry, who would set it up on the tv in my grandma's bedroom for the grandkids to play).

The Sims. All of them except Sims 3, I guess?
I was an INSTANT Sims fan. Instant. From the first moment I installed the bootlegged copy of it onto my first Dell computer my freshman year of college, I was hooked. HOOKED.  There was a period of time that semester where Jess and I would be playing on our computers simultaneously and yelling at them to stop peeing on the carpet and just go to work already! On my currently laptop, I have Sims 2 and Sims 4, and I love them both for a lot of different reasons. Sims 2 is a nice evolution from the original, and though it took me a long time to truly appreciate (and understand how to play...) Sims 4, I'm a total convert to that one now, too. I guess I skipped Sims 3. I think it was too much of a leap for me at the time, and I remember it being dark -- like graphics-wise, just dark.

Puzzle Pirates
This one is a bit niche, because not a lot of people have heard of it, and I'm not even sure how I learned about it, but I've been playing it since maybe my junior or senior year of college. It was an online game that eventually got packaged into a downloadable version. I don't really engage in every possible element of the game that's available, but their puzzle games -- and they have an impressively wide array of them -- are super fun.

Stardew Valley
I discovered Stardew Valley by watching an ASMR video where the creator was playing a day in Stardew and explaining about the game and how it worked. I was intrigued, so I downloaded it and was also hooked instantly.  It took a lot of game mechanics from other popular games (like Animal Crossing and Harvest Moon) but took it to a pretty cool new level. It has everything I loved about FarmVille mixed with a Sims-like attention to interpersonal relationships to advance the story, mixed with a little monster combat. I deeply enjoy it. And it figures into one of my favorite classroom moments in the last few years: I have it listed in my syllabus About Me page as a video game I love, and a student, thinking he was being cheeky, asked me how far along I was in the game. I said "Oh, I think year three or four? I have a couple million gold..." and he kinda just stared at me, and a kid next to him was like "... do you know what that means? What does that mean?" and the kid says "It means she's a beast and should be respected." Hilarious.

Breath of the Wild
Hands down, this is my favorite game ever. I want every game to be like this one, even though then that would make it not so special. It is by far the most visually stunning video game I've ever played, and I love that even a skabillion hours in (like over 300 I think), there's still things to do. I still have some side quests I haven't done, and I just got the DLC in December and have a bunch of clothes to go find (LOL). I love it. And I didn't really intend on completing the main quest line when I did -- I was looking for a shrine that was close to the edge of the castle, and suddenly, there was a cut scene and I was in the castle and, whelp, I ended up face to face with Calamity Ganon and I ended up finishing that whole battle. WITHOUT DYING, TOO! I was so proud. But this game, man. It's just brilliant. I can still spend an hour just wandering around the world, and now that I have the DLC, I also have the Hero's Path so I go and explore places I haven't been, even in all that time.  Somehow, though, all those places I haven't been are full of Lynels or Hinoxes and it was getting irritating to keep heading into uncharted territory only to come immediately upon a Lynel ready to kill me just by looking at me.

But I could do without the Korok seeds....

Skyrim
When I finished the main quest line in Skyrim, it was also almost by accident? I had spent almost an entire summer working through it and getting better at the open world game thing. When I first starting playing it, Skyrim was so overwhelming because it was the first huge open world game I'd ever played, and I've never been great at the whole first-person combat thing. It was a long road in the  beginning, trying to not die every two seconds. I remember it taking like two or three days for me to creep past an abominable snowman creature. It was frustrating, but I kept at it. And I think I've barely plumbed the depths of what Skyrim has to offer. I did buy a house, and tricked it out with whatever was available, but there are a lot of skills I could go back and work on. The magic stuff still baffles me, and there are a ton of side quests I never did.  I'm glad I played so much Skyrim, though, because it definitely prepared me to actually enjoy Breath of the Wild -- I might have given up on BotW early if I hadn't had the experience with the open world, non-linear nature of Skyrim.

Honorable Mentions go to: 
Diner Dash (online; laptop)
Super Mario Bros 3 (NES)
You Don't Know Jack (laptop)
Super Mario Land 2: Six Golden Coins (GameBoy/DS)
Mario Kart (64, Wii, DS, Switch)
Smooth Moves (hahaha) (Wii)
Guitar Hero and Rock Band (Wii)
RC Pro Am (NES)

Games I Miss and Can't Find Online Anymore: 
Noah's Ark
Insaniquarium (granted: I found this on Steam but it's only for PC :( )

Living Through History, Part V

I was thinking tonight about food.  Mainly because this happened: 

Me: Hey mom. Can you send me the recipe for that marinade for flank steak so I can put it on chicken tomorrow? 

Mom: Sure! That's fancy -- we're having that meal tomorrow, too. 

Me: Oh, that's weird. 

::a few minutes into the conversation later:: 

Mom: We just finished dinner. I made turkey burgers

Me: ... we had turkey burgers for dinner to.  Are we... are we menu planning on the same wavelength tonight? 

Mom: We must be. 

And I had been thinking for a few days about cataloging the food things I've learned or obsevered since being on lockdown for a month. 

1. I actually don't hate leftovers if they're homemade.  

I'm a little notorious in our house for not eating leftovers. It drives Jack a little bit crazy but ultimately he wins because he gets all leftovers.  But I think what I don't like are restaurant/take out left overs except pizza.  I will sometimes tolerate Chinese leftovers, and we rarely have Thai leftovers (sadly), but that's about it.  But Jack will eat anything. 

However, I've made every single dinner since March 13th except ONE, when we ordered pizza. Everything else I've made.  And either I make exactly enough for our single meal, or I make enough for the meal and a few days' worth of lunches. I'm actually enjoying this. Last night, I made fajitas, and that means today for lunch I got to have a quesadilla with fajita chicken inside my 'dilla. Jack loves some leftover spaghetti, and our Instant Pot recipe makes PLENTY.  I ate lots of leftover tortilla soup. All of these are things that reheat well -- almost better, sometimes. 

2. I eat fried eggs now. 

Not ever in my life have I enjoyed fried eggs. I am a scrambled only girl. Well, in breakfast contexts. I enjoy a hard boiled egg and a deviled egg. But for breakfast, I am scrambled only.  About a year ago, though, I tried putting a fried egg on top of Smitten Kitchen's bacon corn hash (as she recommends) and ... I didn't hate it.  It took awhile before I was willing to try a fried egg all on its own, but during this quarantine time, I've learned to enjoy them with some sausage and toast. I will say, though, that I'm still learning to make them. This is one of the few things Jack is actually better at making than I am. It might be the only thing. I'm getting there, though. 

3. I'm coming around on 2% milk and I don't even know who I am any more. 

Jack and I have wildly different milk tastes -- I'm sure he'd mainline whole milk if he thought he could get away with it, but he sticks to 2% Lactaid, though we've had to forego the Lactaid for regular in these trying times. I, on the other hand, for years and years and years, have been a skim milk girl. And not even necessarily because of the lack of fat, but I just ... like it thinner. And I think it gets colder. I don't know. But a few months ago, I wanted a small milk to take to work with me for tea and cereal and the store was out of the small cartons of skim and I got 1% and ... I didn't hate it, especially in the cereal. And since we've entered this new world of grocery shopping thunder dome, it's been easier just to buy one milk. He uses way more of it than I do and he's much pickier about it than I am (as recently as February we were trying to find a compromise to buy just ONE milk for our hotel room in Vegas) and so I've been buying 2% and ... it's much tastier in my tea and helping in baked goods. 

4. Produce is exciting now. 

I mean, I like fruits and vegetables, but I never thought I'd be so excited to see lettuce appear in my Sprouts order this morning. Like nearly in tears at the sight of BOTH a head of iceberg lettuce AND a batch of romaine. AND STRAWBERRIES. So it's the little things, I guess. 

5. I'm getting better at timing out my meal making

One of the things that always astounds me about my mom is how perfectly she can time out a meal. Everything is ready all at the same time, and this has always felt like a huge feat to me. No matter how much I try to logic it out, I almost always have  one part of the meal not ready when I need it or want it. Cooking so much now, though, I'm getting markedly better at timing out the prep of all the parts. I feel so fancy and accomplished. 

All of this being said, I'm not cooking anything super de duper fancy because I'm using what I have stashed or what I can get from online grocery ordering. Our standard go-to meals are... 

• turkey burgers
• meatballs, sauce, and ravioli 
• Instant pot spaghetti
• Pulled chicken sandwiches
• chicken fingers
• spicy chicken stir fry
• tortilla soup (when I can get cilantro)
• corn dogs
• tacos or fajitas 
• DiGiorno pizzas (h/t to Erica for introducing us to these like a year ago)
• sandwiches
• breakfast
• bacon corn hash
• grilled chicken, mac n cheese, and broccoli

I guess that's a wider range of meals than I thought. I'm hoping that tomorrow we can add a new meal to our repertoire, and I have others but I can't quite get ingredients for them. (Meatloaf, for example). I also eventually want to make like a baked chicken/mashed potato/corn meal, one of my favorites. but I just haven't gotten around to it yet. 

Oh, and y'all, my new pancake hack, of subbing in half the flour with pastry flour? It's the best. I'm never NOT making them this way, unless of course I can't quite get by hands on more pastry flour for the foreseeable future. Honestly, though. Watching my mom eat two pancake tacos the other morning was a triumph in my cooking life. 

Living Through History, Part IV

Okay, so I disappeared. The clouds parted and the darkness lifted and ... well, I got back to semi-regular life and the semi-regular things I used to do and didn't *need* to blog anymore for my well-being.

However. It doesn't do us much good to document history if we don't ... document it? ... then, does it? So, here we are. A few weeks later. An update.

My nails look like they did in the 8th grade.  Sad, jagged, and poorly polished by yours truly.  But honestly, I don't really care that much about what they look like, contrary to what I'm sure people assume, given that I have had acrylics permanently for the last 12-ish years.  It's actually not for the looks at all. In fact, sometimes I think they're prissy and annoying, and they impede on life quite a bit. But I have them because of my terrible skin -- the thickness of the acrylic nails keeps me from scratching tears and holes in my sad eczema skin.  I'm honestly a little nervous, now that I've taken them all off, what the state of my skin is going to be in a couple of weeks. The painting of them today was also not even about aesthetics; it was about making them more sturdy.  Post nail-removal real nails are super thin, and if you've never experienced the odd and almost-painful sensation of a nail folding backwards when doing something as simple as scratching  your arm, then ... well, you're not missing out AT ALL.  But I hate that sensation, so I'm hoping that keeping my nails polished with a few coats with thicken them up a little bit and stop that from happening. *fingers crossed.*

Also, I had forgotten how stinky drug store nail polish is, and how hard it is to paint your dominant hand with your non-dominant hand. Why do we do this?

Of course, not everything is sunshine and roses. I'm still incredibly fearful and anxious about the idea of going outside/in public again until it's deemed scientifically safe.  This is a disease I do. not. want. to contract and the idea of even going back to school this school year has me anxious and filled with dread. I'm thankful for grocery delivery and I've been tipping HUGELY because I'm so grateful for the people willing to do it, and I've even been writing them thank you cards and leaving them on my porch. That's making it possible for me to stay home and keep my vector -- and Jack's -- from going anywhere.

Second on the list of nighttime and weeds, our water heater busted and leaked pretty much all 40 gallons of itself into the floor of my garage. Thankfully, not too much was in the path of the water as it ran down to the driveway, but now I'm a little concerned that some of the carpeting that's out there (we have some patches of cheap 'frat carpet' as I call it under where we do laundry and under dad's workbench) will get stinky and gross before it has a chance to fully dry out. But I think we got most of the things on the floor of the garage out of harm's way.  And in order to make way for the repair people to get to the water heater spot through the garage and limiting their entry into the house, we had to move a significant amount of crap into our living room.  Granted, we haven't spent any time in our living room during almost the entirety of the lockdown: Jack works in the office and then we have dinner in the kitchen and then we retreat to our bedroom. I spend the day at my desk that's in my bedroom now, or sitting up in my bed (because it's Very Fancy and inclines like a hospital bed so it's like having a couch). But even if we wanted to now, we couldn't, because it's full of junk.  (Anyone need set of golf clubs that haven't been used in the amount of time that Miss Kaylee has been alive?) I guess my project in the next couple of days will be to move all that stuff back and really think about how to put it back, now that I have a chance to do some rearranging.

Oh, and the other drag of the water heater debacle is that our stupid not-cute-old-just-sad-old house (built in 1983) is woefully run-down and showing its age, and the water heater set up was no exception. When the first set of repair dudes appeared bright and early on Saturday morning to install a shiny new tank water heater, they had barely cleared the threshold of the garage before they were basically like, "Oh, yeah, no, there's no way we can do this installation. This whole situation is horribly out of code compliance" and after some discussions with dad via speaker phone, no new water heater was installed.  Basically, the spot where the water heater goes is too small for the modern water heaters, and whoever installed the last one vented it completely wrong (apparently) and it was dangerous and impossible to put a new tank there. (Though for the record: the only thing they were impressed with was the length of time our good ol' newly-dead water heater lasted: it was installed in 1998 and we got like 12 extra years out of it...)

But anyway... we were left with a handful of options, each kinda more ridiculous and/or more expensive than the other: a) hire a handyman who could just install a new tank purchased at Home Depot or whatever and maintain the janky illegal set up, no questions asked (... not ideal ...) b) potentially hire like a proper contractor and have that entire corner of the garage reconfigured to accommodate a modern water heater (for the record, this option was never actually discussed out loud, but it was something that occurred to me...) or c) go with the tankless water heater option, which is twice the money up front. Ultimately, we went with Option C. They're meant to last almost twice as long as a standard tank heater, but they're twice as much upfront. But again, between mom and dad and me and Jack, pooling our money together, it was really the only viable option, all things considered. Now, we have a SUPER FANCY water warming robot hanging on the wall in the garage, in the exact location of the old one, and the water temps are almost exactly the same as the old one (my shower knob position remained EXACTLY the same, which I'm very VERY happy about). And potentially we'll save a tiny bit of money on our SDG&E bill, but that might be slightly negligible because our water heater is on the gas line and that's usually a pretty small portion of our bill anyway.

I guess that's really it on the doom and gloom stuff.  The Big Picture fear stuff, and then the more specific inconvenience of having no hot water for five nights. Which, to be honest, wasn't that big of a deal precisely because we can't leave the house. Jack and I talked about this at lunch today. He had been thinking that this was The Worst Time Ever to have the hot water go out, and I said that while I get that from a global perspective of everything being terrible and this just added to it, on the other hand, at least we actually didn't have to go anywhere and interact with humans or the nature or anything else that would have introduced dirt or germs or whatnot on our bodies, and having to deal with either cold showers or lugging hot water upstairs to clean ourselves. We basically just ... sat around ... for five days, and so we weren't really that stinky or gross. Jack hadn't shaved so he was scruffy, and my hair was pretty greasy, but now my clean hair feels AMAZING because it got a break, and Jack's skin is all smooth because it got to rest awhile between shaves.

I'm all about finding the silver linings, and considering how our lives are going to change for good after this.  And I don't mean the consequences of the pandemic; that's a given, and something that makes me a little freaked out to think about (especially in the context of my job...) but I'm more thinking about what Jack and I are learning during our time at home, rattling around in our house 24 hours a day and trying to keep up fed. Here are the main things I feel like we've learned and behaviors that I think might be permanent:

1. Better food management and portion control. Pre-pandemic, I made and served us pretty big portions. I'm usually pretty hungry when I get home from work, and we eat too much for dinner and I use a lot of materials for those meals.  Now, I'm looking more critically at how much I need for each meal because I'm trying to conserve what I can, if it's a recipe that doesn't require a specific amount of things.  For example, tonight I made fajitas, and I use a bottled sauce I really like. Typically, I would use about half the bottle for a single fajita meal. But I don't think I have another bottle in the pantry (and of course, once I'm out, I'm just going to look up a recipe for the spices online; I probably have everything I need). So, tonight, I used the bottle that was in the fridge, but just used a LOT less of it. And honestly, it was the same as if I had used half the bottle. Now that I know this, this is how I'm going to proceed.  Plus, we're just generally eating less for meals but also I'm eating better lunches because I'm home and I can.

2. Eating at the kitchen table.  This might sound like a no-brainer, but for almost the entirety of our relationship, Jack and I have eaten meals -- breakfast on weekends and all dinners -- on the couch in front of the coffee table, watching TV.  But as I said before, we haven't spent any time in the living room because we've been eating at the kitchen table.  Previously, the kitchen table was often an extra storage location, but when I needed a workspace (before the great desk migration two weeks ago) we cleared it off and discovered it was great for having our shared lunches together, and it is actually a LOT easier to prep and cook and serve dinner when it only has to go to the kitchen table. Who knew?!

3. Having lunch together.  Well, we're not going to have much control over this one, actually, once one or both of us have to actually go back to work physically, but having lunch every day with each other is rad. We get to have a little mid-day check in with each other: he gets to decompress a little from work, I get to have some company and also decompress if necessary (I'm currently on Spring Break so it's different this week) and it's just a nice little time with just the two of us.

4. Keeping basics stocked.  I thought I was reasonably good at stocking basics like chicken broth and refried beans and tuna and all that shelf-stable canned stuff that lasts awhile, but it turns out I guess I'm not? So someday, when we go back to normal, and grocery stores have achieved some semblance of normal and people aren't panicking and buying everything on a shelf because they can, I want to properly stock a pantry with stuff that will last awhile, should it be necessary again. We're certainly getting by, and we've been eating pretty well, but it would be nice to have some of those staples more handy than they've been.

5. Jack is good in a crisis.  I kinda already knew this one,  but it always stuns me how calm he is. I get a little freaked and screechy, and though I can usually *eventually* flip into problem solving mode, it can take my brain a minute to readjust out of the panic mode.  Jack, on the other hand, very calmly takes stock of the situation (he'll move quickly if the situation necessitates it, like the time our freezer leaked all over the kitchen) but he assesses and mostly keeps ME calm while we manage the crisis. When I mentioned this to him tonight after dinner, he said mostly when it's an "us" crisis, he's able to stay calm because he knows between me, him, and my parents, we're financially able to fix just about anything.  We are super-de-duper lucky that this is the case, of course, and we know that, and the water heater situation proved that, in more ways than one.

6. My parents are the best.  Wait. I already knew this. But every new situation proves it. (Though I did plan on leveraging my cousin Christopher the home inspector if the handy man/continued lankiness option was the one being seriously considered. I was just gonna FaceTime him and show him the situation and have him inspector-shame Uncle Steve into a different choice. (And Jack and I were already financially prepared for the tankless option...) But that ended up not being necessary.

I think I'll end there, given that I have nothing but time and could ramble forever. I'll choose not to do that.  All in all, this is a weird time, but I'm trying to focus on the positives as much as I can and not get too tangled up in fear.

And I rediscovered my super old rubber stamps and the results are rad and some people are going to be very pleased in 2-3 days' time. ;)

Living Through History, Part III

Today was much better. Much, much better.

I still feel a little fragile around the edges, of course. Things are just making me sad, even though I know this isn't forever. It's going to be a LONG time, but it won't be forever.

I spent the afternoon at my parents' house. It makes me uneasy, a little, to think that I could still be a silent carrier, but they told me last night, after I assume my daddy read this blog and a few of my FB comments, that if I didn't come there, they were coming here. They were -- rightly -- worried about my state of mind, and so was I. My mom and I played games and worked part of a puzzle, and watched King Ralph, and went for a walk around their neighborhood, and ate my mom's homemade rocky road ice cream. Dad just watched shitty TV... (love you daddy!) (How did that weird Mel Gibson movie end?)

And our new dishwasher was installed this morning! It's been almost a YEAR since our other one crapped out completely on us, and though Jack is amazing and washes pretty much 90% of the dishes, it also doesn't get done daily and though it doesn't bother me to have dishes in the sink (I know, I'm a heathen, whatever... I blame cohabitating in college with someone who used a new bowl for every bowl of cereal, even if eaten in succession, so after a night up studying for prelims, the sink would have like eight bowls in it. I learned to ignore it.) (I'm also just a slob. I can claim it). Anyway. But Jack takes F O R E V E R to wash dishes (he's just slow and distractible) and though I'm pretty fast at it, it's hard on my eczema even with gloves, and now with my back situation, it's kind of a weird angle and I inevitably get a weird back cramp. A new dishwasher is going to be heaven. HEAVEN.  We splurged a bit and got a pretty nice LG one, with a third rack and a steam option (not sure what that's about yet but HEY) and I'm super stoked that this finally happened.

So tonight, I'm going to bed in better spirits than last night, but also just ... the rate at which everything shifts is almost incomprehensible to me. Oh, and the best news of the day is that Jack is pretty sure tomorrow will be the last day he's required to physically be at work and he can start being home to work and my anxiety will be cut in HALF if that happens. Evidently, there are people working in his office that don't even think this shit is real and I just ... it makes me fearful every day that he's going to track it into our house.  One more day. Just one more day and he'll be working from home.  And thank the Universe that he's properly employed and not still counting on Uber for his livelihood because holy shit what a scary thing to think about.

Living Through History, Part II

I'm not even going to sugarcoat it.

Today was spectacularly hard for me.

I didn't sleep well last night -- maybe just under three hours of sleep total, and we went to bed reasonably early? I think? But there I was just... staring at the TV, "aggressively awake" as I told Jack at about 3:00 am once I had given up entirely and was researching what I was feeling.  Because I was feeling strange.

I've had a bit of a ... journey ... since Halloween (that's not important other than I know it was the day that kicked all of this off because it was the day I almost lost consciousness during first period APEL) to sort out what's going haywire in my body.  There have been three or four office visits (only one with my new primary care) and a CT scan of my head on Thanksgiving, and so on and so forth.  So far, I have no answers, and with the state of medicine being what it is, my problems are obviously small potatoes in comparison.  But my hormones, and then by extension my blood sugar, have gone a bit haywire -- due likely to stress and my underlying PCOS becoming more of an issue as I get older and my hormones just naturally change -- and I think I felt a lot of that today.

Today was probably the single biggest shift I've ever felt in my hormones all at once, ever.  Perhaps I don't typically notice it because I'm at school during the week when it would, cycle-wise, happen, or because typically civilization isn't collapsing around us when I'm entering this delicate monthly lady phase.  But man oh man, today has been emotionally really hard.  There has been lots of crying. Lots. And lots. Just in waves.  I tried a lot of my go-tos for distraction, but I felt SO distracted and antsy that I couldn't really do some of my go-tos, like cross stitching or reading or video game playing.  I tried watching When Harry Met Sally (mostly to see if I could nap) and then I put on Anne of Green Gables (another go-to movie when I'm blue) but those didn't really suck me out of it.  And the lingering weirdness of my body has haunted me all day.  Maybe I should just give it a name, like I did my dizziness friend. Her name is Patty. Patricia when I'm REALLY dizzy.  That came back all at once on the couch last night, and I have mostly already linked that to hormones. So it wouldn't be surprising that this new weird thing -- these weird tingly/shivery phases -- is, too.  (And I learned today that the period flu is a thing.  Who knew?) (Bodies are weird.) (And dumb.)

So that was my day: being distracted and freaked out about the new way my body has found to engage in treachery; being exhausted from lack of quality sleep; and continuing to be generally unhinged when I let my brain go too slack and start to think about the hows and ifs and whens of all of this.

But I vowed before I opened my laptop to write this -- which I didn't want to do because I was finally emotionally a little settled -- that I would end with some positives. Let's see if I can make it to ten.

One: we're having a new dishwasher installed tomorrow!  It might not be the absolute most responsible thing we could do in this moment, having work people in our house, but our logic is that we paid a pretty penny for it, and it needs to get installed, and if one of us does get really, really sick, it's going to be a pretty important piece of the sanitization battle.  My plan is to make sure everything is clean when they get here, let them in and run away, and then wipe every thing down again in the kitchen when they leave.

Two: I took a candlelit hot shower just now and it definitely improved my mood. I cried a bit in the shower again, but overall, it was a net gain in emotional boost.

Three: I'm enjoying the daily prompt posting and I am loving how many different people from all different aspects of my life are connecting.

Four: Bless Jack.  Poor thing came home to me as an absolute wreck, but he snuggled into bed with me and just held me.  And then we feasted on leftovers.

Five: I'm reading Jane Eyre one chapter at a time aloud and posting it to my APEL classroom. I have no idea if anyone cares, but it's helping me have some structure to my day.

Six: Buying a Switch for myself for Christmas definitely felt a bit selfish at the time, but I'm thankful I did it because it is providing a pretty solid distraction when I need it.

Seven: Thankful that I invested in a weighted blanket. Spent a LOT of time under it today.

Eight: Thankful for streaming services that make it so that I never have to actually get up to watch a movie of my choice. Heh.

Nine: Thankful for all of my friends -- Summer, Bonnie, Erica, Sarah, Kaitie, Kim, Satin -- who provide a constant stream of conversation and distraction.  Especially Summer, who keeps me sane by keeping it real and helping me talk through everything.

Ten: My little neighborhood that enables me to safely and easily get a mile or so in each day simply by walking in circles. I managed to get a walk in between bouts of rain and while I don't think it did as much good as I hoped it would do in the moment, I'm hoping tonight it'll help me sleep a bit. We'll see.