Sara sent me this postcard to mark that she has almost finished watching the series Lovesick (the one with Johnny Flynn, Antonia Thomas, and Daniel Ings).
Like me, she found the series a good distraction from ALL THE THINGS!
May 2022. This is a post from the beginning of the pandemic. It’s been sitting in my draft folder for more than two years now. I am publishing it without revising, so please excuse its first-draft form.
I’m down to just two more things to do for the full time gig. I’m looking forward to leaving that behind.
When the writer’s strike happened back in aught seven, it wasn’t good for some things. The show Pushing Daisies, for instance. Never really got traction, despite being a fabulous show. But the things the writers wrote on the side when they were out of work? So much fun! And we had good enough internet that we could see some of them. Without the Writer’s strike, we wouldn’t have gotten Dr. Horrible. Because why not make a short musical when you’ve got nothing else to do.
The corona virus version of this is the late night shows filming from home. They can put together the graphics, and the writers can write, but there’s no studio audience, no studio, and hosts having to do their own makeup.
And still, it manages to be funny.
And laughing is good right now.
Look what arrived in my mailbox today!
Things I enjoy about this postcard:
May 2022. This is a post from the beginning of the pandemic. It’s been sitting in my draft folder for more than two years now. I am publishing it without revising, so please excuse its first-draft form.
One thing I learned last week is that our internet plan is not nearly speedy enough to navigate through two people working from home. It’s slow enough that Matt doesn’t even try to stream anything on the TV during the day. He’s been watching DVDs of Firefly.
When I’m doing the work I have to do before my job is over, I click on a link and then wait. And then wait some more. Sure, it’s a great reminder to breathe, but six hours later, it’s just exhausting.
We’re scheduled for an upgrade tomorrow. Ideally it will happen early so things can go back to zipping along. But they could be working as late as 3:45.
In other news, Sentinel had his growth removed and has a row of stitches up his neck. Here’s hoping we can keep the incision clean until it’s time to take the stitches out.
May 2022. This is a post from the beginning of the pandemic. It’s been sitting in my draft folder for more than two years now. I am publishing it without revising, so please excuse its first-draft form.
I’ve just finished with a Zoom meeting with the Librarians of Librarian Book Group. This is my second Zoom meeting in two days as we successfully had Writer’s Group yesterday. Plus, tonight I helped Matt and his family play an online bar-trivia type game.
Being an introvert, I’m not yet feeling the feeling of missing interacting with people, but I’m sure it will come. And it’s fun to get to see people, even if the screens are kind of at weird angle sometimes, or the picture freezes.
It reminds me of Before Midnight, with the younger couple who met and have a long-distance relationship and video chat a lot. You can see what Jessie and Celeste lost by not having that connection.
I’m still feeling thankful that we have so many electronic resources. And hopefully the internet upgrade we have scheduled for Wednesday will improve things even more on this front.
In cat news, I’ve decided to have the rapidly growing lump on Sentinel’s neck removed. It was thumbnail sized in October, and has more than doubled. I’ve got one more paycheck coming and I guess it’s better to spend a chunk of change now rather than having to take action in June when there is no money coming it. He has surgery tomorrow. Poor thing. He’s going to hate it, plus I’m not sure how the cone will work as the cone would be on his neck.
Sentinel has had a growing lump on the side of his neck since last fall. I had it biopsied a few months ago when it wasn’t nearly this size and it came back as not cancerous, so I left it, hoping it would stay small.
But it got a lot bigger. It also, much to the vet’s interest, was a two parter, with one dark black part and another lighter part.
I’ve got one more paycheck coming from my soon-to-be-over job and a big chunk of it is going toward taking this sucker off of the cat. I think it will be money well spent.
I had to get a special dispensation because of the quarantine. The vet’s office was only doing essential surgeries.
Update from the future. The lump was removed, biopsied to find again it was not cancerous, and has not (seven months later) made a reappearance. It was money well spent.
We’ve decided our date ritual during this pandemic will be that we buy a frozen pizza at Fred Meyer on Saturday nights. While we were there, I also picked up some lime for the garden.
I picked it up and then Matt carried it home!
You’ll notice the pandemic hair is waving at you.
May 2022. This is a post from the beginning of the pandemic. It’s been sitting in my draft folder for more than two years now. I am publishing it without revising, so please excuse its first-draft form.
Grocery store hours continue to thwart me. I checked online and in the newspaper and WinCo’s hours were listed as opening at 7am. I drove out there, arrived just before 7, only to find a note on the door that they opened at 8.
I drove 11 miles back home and shopped at Fred Meyer. It was more expensive, but at least I got to shop. The shelves were stocked, with large gaps where things were missing. Three pound bags of onions were not to be found, but individual onions were plentiful. Baker potatoes? Completely gone. No individual potatoes, no bag of potatoes of any size. Yellow and red potatoes were available and abundent.
It was hard for me to stick to my list. I wanted to buy everything I was going to need. But I’m trusting that supply chains will remain more or less intact and that I will be able to access food in grocery stores.
People were nice, and patient and that was good, but I worry how long that will last. We’re not even really one full week in.
I’m still wrapping up work things, so I spent most of the non-grocery shopping part of the day on that. I’d like to have a good sit down session about what I want for this period of unemployment.
My insomnia has come back in full force. I’m not feeling a lot of feelings right now because I am very tired. This is rather handy, but I’d take waves of sadness and anxiety washing over my well-rested body than this vibration of alertness that won’t let me go.
Tomorrow is Saturday and Matt and I have decided to make our Saturday ritual be to purchase a frozen pizza and something dessert-y to begin our evening date. I’m guessing our dates will involve playing board games, watching movies, and reading aloud from our read-aloud books. But the pizza will be a nice break from our home being a shared co-working space.
The overlap of the Venn Diagram of Michael Gracey’s The Greatest Showman and the actual facts of P.T. Barnum’s life is probably a slim sliver, but that does not take away from the fact that this is a very good movie musical.* Casting the living greatest showman (Hugh Jackman) helps, but so do the dance numbers** and the songs, many of which have a meter that is designed to pep the most lugubrious of people. The visual styling*** is also great and everyone turns in excellent performances.****
Cost: free from the Multnomah County Library (one of two DVDs I checked out before the library closed for pandemic purposes*****)
Where watched: at home.
*Particularly when quarantined due to a pandemic. The hopeful and stalwart songs are just right for our times.
**”Rewrite the stars” has catapulted to my top-ten list of musical numbers.
***My copy had a making-of feature which explained why there were paintings of the film shown during the credits. This was a feature that made me like the film even more. The story behind the story is also inspiring.
****If I were an actor, I would aspire to Michele Williams interesting and varied career, and I also am interested in the turns Zac Efron takes. Long after I’ve forgotten the details of the film, Keala Settle will remain the thing I love about this movie.
*****I stayed away from this due to tepid reviews, and I’m kind of glad. It was the movie I needed right now.
According to Hugh Jackman, the film’s nine-year development process from conception to completion was, in part, due to studios’ unwillingness to take a risk on an original musical. What finally sold the deal at 20th Century Fox was the future Oscar-nominated song “This is Me”, which had literally been written by Benj Pasek and Justin Paul during the two-hour flight to the studio meeting where the film was greenlit.
May 2022. This is a post from the beginning of the pandemic. It’s been sitting in my draft folder for more than two years now. I am publishing it without revising, so please excuse its rough draft form.
On Tuesday, I was laid off. It’s not a thing that has happened to me before. Quit in a fit of anger? Sure more than once. Give my notice because I just couldn’t face going to the job for longer than the two weeks? That’s happened too.
But until Tuesday, I’d not sat in on a conference call (because we’re all working from home due to the pandemic) and heard the CEO of my company do her best to not cry as she told us that we all were done.
I’m not going to lie, I felt a sinking feeling, and then what shot through me and stayed with me the rest of the day was elation. I’d been wanting to leave for a long time now, but wasn’t able to give my notice with nothing on the horizon and have worked too hard to be a responsible adult to flounce out in anger.
Since then, I’ve cycled through worry and panic, but where I always settled back to is the freedom of not having to go to that job any more. Or at least not having to go to that job anymore after March 31, which is our last day.
Today Matt and I visited the accountant and we found out that we were both getting a tax return. That’s money I can squirrel away. I got to ask her about unemployment and accounting things. It seemed great timing, being laid off right before our already scheduled visit.
I’ve got a list a mile long. Several lists a mile long. Things I’m excited to do at home, things that I need to do to get things in order to start looking for work. Things to do to grow the side businesses. I haven’t gotten to write down most of these lists because I’m wrapping things up at work.
But I’m excited to make the lists, to squirrel things away, to hunker down, to be frugal. It feels like an adventure. A scary one amidst a global pandemic and social distancing and my very real worry that the economy is going to tank, but an adventure nonetheless.
