Minda Goes West

There are a few pieces of good news, for which I am grateful. The Inspector Gamache novel revived my interest in reading, although I'm definitely happiest staying on the lighter side of my usual reading range. Mystery novels, witches and vampires, and fairy-tale-esque fantasy novels? Yes, please. Novels about suffering in the real world? Rain check, please. I spent the first week or so of quarantine bingeing TV shows, and reading feels much better. While we're on the topic of reading, thank heavens for Kindles and the ability to borrow ebooks from the library. We noticed hearts, peace symbols, and greetings on the windows of the buildings facing us half a block away, so Youngest Kid and I used pink sticky notes to post "HI" in the window facing them. Hopefully it brought a smile to someone's face. (Photo of the view through a window, showing sticky notes forming I and H.)  Due to my manager urging me to take Friday off, and church streaming the ser

What a week. It felt like at least three. I know I'm not alone in this, and yet it seems odd. After all, we are all healthy. We have a comfortable place in which to shelter, with expansive views and some outdoor space. WriterMan and I can both work from home easily, and although our investments have taken a serious hit, we are not in any immediate financial difficulty. Our older kids are safe and secure where they are, as are our parents, siblings, and other family members, and we have many ways to connect with them. On the surface, our week was normal, or possibly more relaxed than usual. After all, there was no commute, no Boy Scouts, no errands. (We were already living like this, and the city of San Francisco joined us, by order of the Mayor who declared "shelter in place" effective 12:01 AM on Tuesday. On Thursday, that extended to all of California.) And yet, I'm exhausted, and have been pretty much all week, despite getting plenty of sleep on paper. So

Fortunately, Friday was emotionally smoother than Thursday, although I still struggled to focus at work. Note to self: In the future, try to avoid putting a work trip with a fair bit of post-trip effort, a significant change in responsibilities (hello, learning curve!, hello, new team members!), and a global pandemic in the same two weeks. Thursday, the cascade of cancellations marked a clear Before and After. Like the fall of the Berlin Wall, or 9/11. Or, I wonder, the London Blitz? Except instead of coming together as a community, we have to stay 6 feet away from each other. Friday, things had settled down a bit, perhaps because, with school officially cancelled, WriterMan home, and me working from home until further notice, I was not obsessively checking the news every 5 minutes. We are slowly figuring out the rules of this new life. For example, Youngest Kid needs to be up and dressed by 8:30 each weekday morning. An hour of reading a day is mandatory. And as long as the

Hi. It's me. Yes, I'm still here, although I haven't blogged in so long that I literally forgot how to create a new post and bumbled around for an embarrassingly long time before I figured it out. It's been a little over a month since the coronavirus started appearing in the news here. WriterMan was quick to understand that this could be a Big Thing and placed our first apocalypse order with Amazon the first week of February, when I was away on a work trip. Over the past month, we have slowly built up about a month's worth of food and basic supplies. Since we don't have a car and I have to transport all the groceries back in my little shopping cart, we were not at Costco, piling carts high. But I did buy a little more at the grocery store each visit, and there was a definite uptick in the Amazon deliveries. We've watched the cruise liner in quarantine in Japan, and the outbreak in Washington, and the first cases around Sacramento. We've seen the su

Youngest Kid and I spent this weekend at a church retreat at Bishop's Ranch, a couple of hours north of San Francisco. It was nourishing in many ways. First, it was nice just to get out of the city. We chose city life very deliberately, and I love living in San Francisco, but I am discovering that getting out into nature every month or two is a key part of happy, healthy city living. This really hit home for me in October, when I stayed with a coworker one night to save myself three hours of commuting between Day 1 and Day 2 of a workshop at another office. The coworker and her wife live out in the country, and as I listened to the crickets chirping through the open window as I drifted off to sleep, my soul relaxed a piece of me I didn't realize had been tense. The ranch is far from being in the wilderness. It's adjacent to a Clover Dairy farm--our noses were well aware of that at times--and the nearby hills are covered in vineyards. But there is no city noise, growin

Today I called Progressive to cancel our car insurance, because we no longer have a car to insure. My husband sold both our vehicles back in Vermont before flying out to join me here in San Francisco. Even though I've been living carless for two months, and even though I know we can choose to buy a car if being without ends up not working for us, it is strangely unnerving not to have a car. Or car insurance. And I find the fact that I am unnerved unnerving.

Tomorrow, if all goes well, our moving pods will be dropped off in front of the house next door in the morning, and the teenager we've hired to help us unload them will show up at one. We'll unload the pods and assemble at least the beds before WriterMan leaves for Vermont early Wednesday morning. But so many things could go wrong. For example: The SUV with Oregon plates currently parked in front of one of our temporary No Parking signs (posted by the city over the weekend) could still be there when the pods arrive. The pods could not arrive. The teenager could not show up. The teenager could show up but not be strong enough for the three of us (he, WriterMan, and I) to haul the heavy furniture up the two flights of stairs to the front door. Beautiful mango-wood table, I am looking at you. One or more of us could injure ourselves hauling said furniture up said stairs. Given WriterMan's history of sprained ankles and my history of breaking my foot on stairs, this i