The Longest Day

 It's my birthday this week.  I had a dentist appointment recently that got cancelled.  2020 has been the longest day ever.

I say that because it really feels like yesterday that I was turning 36, and I don't mean that in an "Oh, time flies!" kind of way.  It literally feels like it happened yesterday. (Time does fly, though.  I accidentally wrote 26 there instead of my actual age and then felt wistful when I realized I was 10 years wrong).  My cancelled dentist appointment was a yearly follow-up which I recall was followed closely by a root canal, the pain from which had been necessitating that I consume several bottles of ibuprofen every week.  I only just realized that my back bottom right molar has been in its current state of endodontic repair for almost a year and not, as I had previously believed, just a few weeks. I have this terrible feeling that I blinked and I'm a year older.  While most years feel like a whirlwind or a rollercoaster, this time it just felt like warp speed.  Like we started in March 2020 and now it's November somehow.

At the same time, I feel like we've been doing this quarantine thing since forever.  

Am I the only one who feels this way?

Anyway, around my birthday, I try to set some goals.  

This past year I've been working on getting my (figurative) house in order. I've been prioritizing better sleep, meditation, yoga and exercise and I think its made the quarantine more manageable.  

With the hope of a vaccine coming sometime in the next 6 months, I think this is time to consider how I want to fill the time that's been vacant (or, more accurately, filled with extra work) all this time.  Normally, I feel like my life is a whirlwhind or a rollercoaster.  It's thrilling, but I when I get to the end of the year my brain feels pretty jiggled and my hair is in a crazy windswept beehive.  This year moved equally fast, but the pendulum has swung too far in the other direction as far as stimulation goes.  I think what I'm after is some kind of metaphorical rail journey.  There's no slowing the speed of time, but at least this way I get to enjoy the scenery without accidentally swallowing a bug.

I Needed a Win

 It's been a hard week.

The second wave has finally arrived in Niagara and it's raging through one of my long-term homes like a wildfire.  You know what that means.  I'm feverishly refreshing my referral page to get food, fluids and supplements into sick people in the hopes that maybe they make it through their illness.  The guilt that I get to do this from the comfort of my home is palpable. I can feel the cortisol coursing through my body right now.  

Between trying to extinguish a COVID outbreak with jello and supplements and an email from a senior colleague at another job letting me know about some documentation I missed from a client interaction several weeks ago, I haven't felt like a particularly competent dietitian.  

Because I'm fighting those fires I mentioned above, I haven't really had time to do the other things I find rewarding.  Exercise and leisure pursuits have been difficult to get to and difficult to enjoy when I do have time for them because I feel guilty that I'm not doing more for the people I work for.  Even though I objectively know that I can't pour from an empty cup, taking the time to refill feels like time I should be spending pouring.  

Tuesday rolls around and I realize I'm also experiencing the collective anxiety of the unknown that awaits us as millions of people head to the polls just to the south of me.  I recall the morning of the first Wednesday in November 2016, driving to work at the southern tip of the Niagara Peninsula looking at the Buffalo waterfront some 1000 meters across the Niagara River from me and thinking how lucky I was to be living on this side of that water where the Great Pumpkin could never hurt me.  How wrong I was.  Though his governance hasn't had a direct impact on me (in any way that I could quantify here, anyway), I hurt from the divisiveness and hate of which he is a symbol and which he seemed not only to condone but also to incite.  It's been a hard week, but it's been a hard four years.

Point is, I needed a win this week. I got one yesterday.

I'm not foolish enough to think that this solves everything.  I'm almost ready to begin my relaxing bedtime routine so I can be fresh to keep fighting that COVID fire.  That's not going to go away tomorrow because a few states turned blue.  And neither is the divisiveness and hate that's made me and millions of others feel so hopeless.  But watching the results roll in from Tuesday to Saturday at least made me feel like the hearts and minds of a few more people have changed enough for me to hope that there might be a few more wins to come.  Time to fill my glass.

Sick

 Remember when having a cough was something that just happened randomly from the months of October to April?  Your friends might bring you soup if you were really laid up.

Now we're in this weird place where every sniffle is an alarm bell that we might be ground zero for a super spread.  My husband developed a cough on Thanksgiving weekend; we had felt safe visiting with our relatives that we had included in our bubble throughout the pandemic because we generally have been maintaining a pretty consistent bubble, social distancing, and masking.  Nonetheless, my husband started with this croak-y cough on Saturday evening.  I was mortified.  If I think about the real, non-COVID world, this seems like a really trivial thing to be mortified about.  How many times had I gotten the flu over the Christmas holidays when I was a university student?  But now, it's not.  It could be life and death.  Luckily, my husband was able to get a same-day COVID test as soon as we got back and the next-day results were negative  We had only passed on a minor virus to my mother and her husband to battle in the following week.

This week, it was my turn.  I started Monday with a sore throat.  It was my only symptom, one which is a classic sign of a week-long sinus infection for me, and the pre-screen for work told me I should still attend, although I did get a call from infection control on the way to tell me I had to get a COVID test ASAP.  I already had one pre-booked for another job.  It took longer for my result to come back. It was negative, as I suspected it would be.

But the wait period in-between onset of symptoms and when I finally got my test results back was odd.  Messaging people with whom I had pre-planned meetings and appointments to discuss my symptoms and the likelihood I would have my test results back by meeting time seemed like the right thing to do, but also seemed like a strange conversation to have in the context of a non-COVID world.  I wonder if it's something we'll continue to do when this whole weird world eventually resolves.  

What I have learned: wearing a mask with a head cold is harder than wearing a mask without a head cold, sneezes have smells and they're not great, and most people are appreciative of a pre-meeting symptom discussion.

No News

 I've added writing to my to-do list lately.  I'm finding it somewhat challenging to do this regularly because life has been so stand-still-ish so it doesn't feel like there's anything much to write about.

Way back when I was trying to be hot person, I would sometimes look at situations and think to myself, "Will this make a good blog post?"  Often, it meant subjecting myself to some small (or large) degree of embarrassment in the name of entertainment.  I never really became a hot person.

I was visiting some friends in pre-COVID times, and despite not having seen them in over a year, neither of us had much to report.  Then we talked about some friends whose marriage had fallen apart after a failed attempt at opening it up.  And we all agreed that we've come to the point in our lives when no news can be good news.

So life is pretty ok.  I work.  I go to the gym. I meet with friends for outdoor/socially distanced activities.  I go on baking and cooking adventures on the weekend.  I read books. I ride my bike.  I knit and sew things.  I play the piano.  I teach myself the guitar with limited success.  My husband and I play boardgames once or twice a week.  Life is ok.  And that's nothing to write home about.

Moving On

Anyone else feel like they're on a hamster wheel right now?  Like you're working really hard to get somewhere but the scenery hasn't changed a bit? 

I remember talking to a friend via messenger back in March or April and talking about three months from that point and thinking this would all be over.  It's been almost 2 months since that future we were dreaming of came and went and there's no real end in sight without a vaccine that may or may not be available within the year, and even if it is available, to whom?  How safe?  How effective?  

In the meantime, we're all trying to fit ourselves into a new normal without really knowing what the new normal is yet.  Though we've all had our moments over the past several months, I think our nerves are fraying and the walls are wearing thin.  Despite the separation and isolation, we're really starting to see some people for who they really are.  We just aren't as polite as we should be because it's just really hard to deal with constantly trying strike a balance when the scales keep moving.

I think we'd all like to be able to move on with our lives, but it's difficult to know how to do that without knowing what the new normal is really going to look like.  Many of us had set the ball rolling on major life plans that had to be put on hold when the world shut down and it's still not clear if we can pick up where we left off or if we have to abandon that ship and start building a new one out of what materials we can find lying around.  

I'm being deliberately vague, but that's because every story is different and also because energy is scarce to lay it all out.  But we're all waiting and seeing.  For the border to open.  For a vaccine. For a bigger bubble.  To go back to work.  

There's nothing for it but to keep moving on, but it's hard when we don't know where.

Coming Up for Air

I quit my job last month.

One of them, anyway.  And started a new one.

The overwhelming atmosphere of the coronavirus pandemic for me, thus far, has been that I have to keep working.  I have to work just a little bit more.  Because if I don't work enough, people that are under my care will die.  At least that's what I think I was feeling when I look back.  When I was in it, I didn't really feel anything.

This job I quit has always been a little more than I bargained for.  I was never able to fully get on top of things, and always spent more time there than I had budgeted.  Then they had a COVID-19 outbreak and it felt like every minute that I wasn't working was time I wasn't spending getting calories and fluid into people who were too sick and weak to do it themselves. The worst (but maybe best) thing was that I wasn't able to actually be there because of provincial public health rules, so I felt like I was just guessing a lot of the time. I lost touch with a lot of things and people during those months.

Then this windfall job fell in my lap.  I had applied for it months ago and not heard anything so I wrote it off.  Even after I was interviewed over the phone, I had no inkling as to whether I had got the job or not.  Anyway, it's mine now, and I left my time-suck position with some degree of relief and a significant amount of guilty feelings.  But then, I had to train my replacement, orientate at the new job full time on weekdays, and somehow complete my other contract obligatons on evenings and weekends (which, thankfully, the privelege of working remotely allowed me to do).  It was like running a marathon only to realize at the finish line that there's a pack of wolves behind you and safety is another 3 miles away.

The new job: it is not a dream job.  No guaranteed hours and a pretty big cut to my hourly wage.  But it has potential to grow into more.  And right now it comes with something I've felt like I haven't had in months...maybe even years.  Time.  

For the first time in I-don't-know-how-long I don't feel like every day is a race to cram in as many things as possible and hope I don't miss anything or have to delay anything important because there were too many important things.  It feels like I've been holding my breath for a year and I'm finally breathing again.

It'll Be a Good Story...

This past weekend, my husband and I drove to our family cottage for an unwind weekend.  The fan motor on our central air had a factory defect and our house is HOT, so we headed north for some cooler air and some time without fewer screens. 

On our first morning, my husband woke up early to digestive distress.  He was upset because the sun was out and the air was nice and warm without being too sweltery and he was stuck inside running to the bathroom every half hour. 

His upset resolved around 10:30 and we decided it was safe to go for a bike ride.  We chose a familiar route and wheeled away.  It wasn't until we reached our turnaround destination, some 15 km from home base, that we saw the dark black-green clouds surrounding us...leaving only a small patch of blue above our heads.  We had one errand to run and I thought to myself, "We're going to be racing this home."

COVID times and courtesy dictate that only one member of your party enter the store, so my husband went in to make his purchase and left me to watch our bicycles.  No sooner had the door swung shut behind him than the rain began to fall on me and our bicycles.  It started with a light sprinkle but swiftly transformed into sheets and sheets of torrential downpour.  I sought shelter under a cedar tree lining someone's property on the roadside.  My husband ran out from the store.  We stood under the cedar tree hugging each other for warmth as Mother Nature hurled bucket after bucket of cold rain on top of us.  I counselled my husband to keep his bike helmet on lest it turn to hail.  Which it did.

When I heard the thunder, I recalled my girl guide training and thought we should seek shelter in the store we had just patronized rather than remaining under the tree's natural lightning rod.  The proprietor allowed us in, asked us not to drip on anything, and requested we sanitize our hands...COVID times again. We stood in his entryway, slowly saturating the carpet beneath us, waiting for clear skies or rescue.

We were rescued by my cousin in the neighbouring cottage who happened to be coming into town for groceries.  We drove back with our bikes strapped to the rack, marvelling at the number of downed trees and how quickly some chainsaw-wielding do-gooder had removed them from the roadway. The cardboard box holding the cord we had purchased, as well as the emergency toilet paper in our saddle bags had turned to mush.

It was a terrible morning, but it'll be a good story.

I'm hopeful this is a metaphor for our times.