New Normal

 I told myself that I would start blogging daily or nearly daily and, look, only six days have gone by since I last posted. What have I been doing? I don't know. I'm in that state where the days slip by without my grabbing much at them or getting much out of them.

In the past six days:

I had some troubling results from a lab test that I'm hoping were just false results. (The re-test was fine, so of course I'm just going to believe the retest.) 

We had a Zoom coffee meeting with our friends Glen and Kathleen. As our coffee meeting treat, Dave made eggless brownies from a recipe that I found on the internet and made several times.

I had Zoom therapy.

We woke up to snow on the ground on two different days.

I watched nine complete seasons of Project Runway. If I'm not sewing, I may as well watch other people sew.

I ordered some new clothes, a pink button down shirt, two long-sleeved t-shirts (one lime green, one pale blue--neither of which are my colors but they were on sale and I'm thinking they might need to be dyed with an ombre effect), underwear and bras. I also ordered two pairs of jeans and a pair of white overalls (again, a sale item bought with the intention of dying them).

We ate takeout burgers and fries for dinner one night. Otherwise we've been leaning heavily on simple tacos and nachos type meals. I don't know what we used to eat. Vegetables, maybe? Dave made pizza tonight and we had it with some roasted cauliflower dressed in lemon juice and Calabrian chile. 

I say I'm not sewing, but I sewed two small zippered pouches using scraps of fabric laying around on my sewing table. And I began putting together a paper pattern (for Tina Givens's Daniella Pant) that I bought about four years ago and printed out and then put away. I have several yards of a pale green linen-cotton blend that I bought at the same time to use to make the pants. I washed it and dried it and folded it up and put it away. And there it has been sitting for four years.  I'm going to actually use cheap muslin to make the pattern first to see how it goes before I cut into my good stuff. (The pattern is very simple, only slightly more challenging than pajama pants as far as I can see from the directions, but I am not a garment maker and following pattern directions is very confusing for me.)

There has been wildlife. We're seeing a lot of cranes these days, heading north. I saw two raptors hanging out in the trees in our neighborhood. We watched a very fat, very colorful pheasant cross the road while we were out for a drive one afternoon. Our old Halloween pumpkins (that I convinced Dave to leave outside in hopes that their seeds would sprout and grow) are being eaten by bunnies. We also saw two young coyotes out in the early evening, heading toward the irrigation ditch that runs along the main road. A tired wasp turned up in my shower one morning, probably looking for water. Dave rescued her and put her outside in a protected spot. 

I'm not working in my art journal, but I am working in a kind of garbage journal where I'm drawing simple things and using the colored pencils that I don't really like very much and writing stream of consciousness type things, not focusing at all on coherence. I'm just trying to keep depression from swallowing me whole.

I'm not sleeping well. I've been staying up all night, not going to bed until five or six in the morning (and waking up at eight to take my meds). Some days I'm trying to survive on three hours of sleep. Exhaustion is my new normal.

I suspect that exhaustion is the new normal for many people. I don't know. Maybe I'm just seeing the world through bloodshot eyes.