New Things

 It's a long time between blog entries these days because day-to-day pandemic life has a kind of bland sameness that doesn't inspire me to document it. Yes, we are still social distancing, wearing our masks, staying home. I follow many doctors and nurses online, on twitter, many of whom are working on Covid units. They describe the rage they feel when they come off 12 to 16 hour shifts taking care of Covid patients--intubating them, holding up iPads while families say their goodbyes, holding their hands while they die--and then walk into grocery stores where people aren't wearing masks.

It's heartbreaking--and it makes me glad that I left the hospital when I did, that I *could* leave the hospital and live off savings for the moment. 

My second shot is next week, thank god. But who knows how long the vaccine will hold against the new variants of Covid, the rapid-spreading variants, that are already here and taking advantage of all the people who refuse to wear masks or who take them off ("It was only for a few minutes!" "It was around a friend, who I know is being careful!") or wear them under their noses or chins.

It's frustrating. I sit at home and think of how goddamned frustrated I was at work, at the hospital, with people who should have known better and who should have been doing better, but who weren't. The attitude by the time I left was: "Well, we're all going to get it eventually anyway, so I'm not going to worry about it."

So I stay home. I cook and eat and clean and sew and read and journal and watch things online. 

I'm sick of cooking, but aside from a pizza now and then (less often now that Dave has been making pizza dough and other baked goods) and some Korean-fusion food a few weeks ago, we have not been eating takeout. We get a grocery order at least once a week which is either delivered from Whole Foods or done with curbside pickup from Smiths. 

I've had to start eating lower carb and getting more daily exercise on our stationary bike, though, as my blood sugars were creeping up in the morning after too many bread and pasta-based meals in the evening. (Thank god our scale is broken!) We do eat well--too well sometimes. In the past few weeks, we have made pizza (Dave has started to experiment with a kimchi pizza, which is ridiculously good, but we mostly have stuck to our old reliable vegetarian sausage, feta, onion, and green chile combo) and japchae (a kind of Korean noodle dish made with sweet potato starch noodles, vegetables, and tofu). I always look at those as "production meals," as in, meals that make a production out of things. We've also resorted to super easy dinners that consist of microwaved Quorn "chik'n nuggets" and baked potatoes. Some nights it's been oatmeal with berries and maple syrup.

We started a backwards decluttering exercise, getting rid of extraneous things. We're packed in pretty tight right now, what with both of us living at home, Dave working from home, Dave's instrument collection, all our books and computers, Dave's baking stuff, my ridiculous sewing habit. I also, in a bit of personal decluttering, cut off almost 20 inches of hair (first about 14 inches, then another 6), bringing my waist-length hair back up to just below my shoulders.

While one hand gets rid of things, the other hand orders things online. In the past couple of weeks, packages have come in from Target (toilet paper, paper towels, forks, large spoons), Walmart (a new broom, six boxes of Dave's beloved cereal), Amazon (a book,  an iPad holder), and a company called WAWAK, which sells sewing supplies (tailor's chalk, one-inch elastic, suspender clips, thread, beading needles, glass-headed pins, quilting gloves, and a pin cushion shaped like a tomato with the accompanying strawberry attached just like the one my grandmother always had with her sewing things and which has been sorely needed among my own sewing things, clearly).

And yet, I am not sewing anything of consequence. I have only sewn a handful of things since Christmas--a handful of masks, some mini-quilts, a couple of curtains, crumb blocks, a seatbelt pillow, an insulated handle for Dave's cast-iron pan. I've done some big stitch quilting on two mini-quilts. I've organized my sewing area and gotten rid of some things, projects that I would never, ever finish (a run of equilateral triangles sewn into short rows, for example) and some bits of fabric that I ended up not liking very much and which persisted in tiny bits despite all my efforts to use them up completely.

As far as reading, I'm slowly making my way through a book about PTSD, one that has been sitting on my shelf for years, called The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk. It's about how our brains and body are rewired by trauma. It's a very unsettling book, but explains a lot. 

I've been watching a lot of stuff online: Last week, I finished up Martin Scorsese's multi-part documentary about Fran Leibowitz called Pretend It's A City. (I love Fran Leibowitz.) Then I watched Self Made, the Netflix miniseries about Madam C.J. Walker. I watched documentaries about the artists Andrew Wyeth and Jean-Michel Basquiat. I watched a documentary about Sophie Tucker. I re-watched Lost in Translation, the Tokyo-based Sofia Coppola film with Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson. (I miss Tokyo. There's a very clear shot, in the very last scene, of the building I worked in in downtown Tokyo. That city is so magical.) I have queued up a documentary about Banksy and the history of graffiti art. Looks interesting. 

Sometimes in the early evenings, we go for a drive around town. Our usual jaunt is up and down the long road that wends through the valley where we live to look at the geese and cranes that are migrating through, but lately we've gone further afield, cruising around the zoo and the country club area or through Old Town. My eyes are hungry for new things these days.