Kris's Covid Pandemic Blog

 I don't know what it is about a Thanksgiving where you neither go anywhere nor see anyone that made it so exhausting, but when Dad told me this morning that he was dying to get out of his house and so was going to come to us instead of us dropping food off with him, I wasn't all that disappointed. Not having to drive an hour each way to see him was nice. The trouble with social distancing at my house rather than his is we don't really have a covered space outdoors so in chancy weather we get wet. And with things as they are, we were not going to hang with him inside. But Mother Nature cooperated with fiftyish degree weather and we sat outside and ate chicken sandwiches and sent him home with a full Thanksgiving feast to heat and eat. My dad has been honest with the struggles he's had this year. He lives alone and it's lonely. His grandkids are growing up and he doesn't see the older ones like he once did. A lot of how he used to see them was driving around to w

 We are feeding 5 people for Thanksgiving this year. The four of us, and then Lord willing and the creek don't rise we will bring some food to my dad. That's 5. I made three pies yesterday. Do 5 people need 3 pies? In fact, they do not, but how do you decide which pie to cut? I mean...eliminate? Let's examine the options. 1) Apple pie. Josh's favorite. Josh is doing the rest of the cooking, Josh gets the pie he wants. Apple pie stays. 2) Peanut butter pie. Ridiculously easy to make, freezes well, has chocolate. Peanut butter pie stays. 3) Pumpkin pie. Which no one here really likes but me. But honestly...is it really Thanksgiving without pumpkin pie? Plus we are going to try to meet my BFF for a socially distanced picnic/hike/whatever later in the weekend and she is the only one in her family who likes pumpkin pie. Pumpkin pie stays. I also made dinner rolls. I don't always make dinner rolls but when I did the shopping I made sure I had yeast just in case. I'm s

 I feel like I for sure fall into the trap of making things sound rosier and more positive than they are sometimes, so when I have a bad day I need to own it. Maybe it will make Future Kris feel better about life or maybe if there really is someone out there reading it will make them feel better, I don't know. Today was just rotten. It started rotten. It started with me being mad at James for being James, for destroying things and not really caring much about it, like usual. It didn't get better. The teacher sent all the morning work back because we didn't follow directions...one I knew about, one is difficult to correct and getting any independent work done after about 1 p.m. (aka during or after naptime) is really hard The highlight of my day is Josh more or less threw us out and sent us to a park to go run around which we did and it was lovely. James is now BFF with an older lady walking her dog there, so adorable. James is like ridiculously good at making friends. But o

 I am 42 today. And it's kind of nice. It's a different sort of birthday to be sure but if birthdays are meant to remind you that you are loved, success. We did most of our celebrating yesterday, which was a weekend day. My girlfriends did a birthday Zoom for me and sent me some cupcakes via Uber Eats. My husband made me one of my favorite meals, breakfast for dinner, with his cinnamon French toast and bacon and eggs. My kids gave me fun new kitchen tools and lots of hugs and snuggles. And James and I did what we've been saying we would do, which is take out the Christmas books. I have absolutely no idea how I got started collecting Christmas books. Holiday books, I guess, there's some multiholiday and a few Hanukkah ones in there. I inherited my mother's Christmas books that she would put out, but she had maybe a dozen or so? I have 129 holiday books. Yes, I do have them inventoried. On Goodreads. They take up two standard size packing boxes. There are kids' bo

 I turn 42 on Monday. It's not a "big" birthday (still feeling for my dad who had his 80th birthday party indefinitely postponed in March) but I've been feeling emotional about it for...well, lots of reasons, because it's 2020 is probably saying enough. So I really want to have a nice birthday weekend. As I think I've said, it's been a WEEK, so today was meant to my my day of recovery, and then Max woke up in the wee small hours in pain. Poor kid wasn't even crying, just rolling over and over and whining "ow, ow" whenever he moved. I got him to point to his diaper area as what hurt and eventually we got the diaper open and found just horrific diaper rash. I don't know where it came from. So the morning was all about soaks in a warm bath and having James hold his hands and talk gently to him while I had to wipe his little bottom and he sobbed. James has been just wonderful to him. It's better now...still there for a few days I'm su

 I'm not gonna lie, this week has really sucked. The weather has been lousy, we've tried to get outside but no one is getting enough fresh air or exercise. The kids are climbing the walls, the patience of the parents is very low. The COVID situation is awful, the upcoming holidays seem pretty depressing. It's not been a grand amount of fun. Positives are important. We are healthy and safe. Josh remains employed and James is doing well in school. So the bads are more whiny and annoying bads than serious and awful bads. But it has not beeen a grand amount of fun, I cannot lie.  We are working on refinancing the house which in the long run will be good. Saving money is good. But in the short term that means a lot of logging on to different places and finding and signing the right kind of paperwork which isn't fun. I spent more time than I wanted to doing that today which gives me a lot of sympathy for families where two parents are trying to work from home and wrangle smal

 I somehow feel like I can make it through the next round of restrictions because the libraries are staying open for curbside. Other than Thanksgiving, there's not really an impact in my life. I'm seeing the new restrictions in place. There was a staff member at the door of the grocery store today with a counter counting the number of people entering and leaving so the store can stay at the 25% of max capacity they are required to. I went in the middle of the day on a weekday, which I've been trying to do, so I had no issue. Apparently there were shortages of staples over the weekend but my store was well stocked today. And so far, there's been no move to close the library. I was a library kid. I'm sure I've mentioned this before. I think I was seven when I got my first library card. Back then you had to sign your own name to get a card. Now we issue them to infants if the family wants one. I had James get one plus his own library bag for his 5th birthday becaus

 My dad has this theory that there are certain tasks which have been created to test your marriage. Paying taxes. Packing for a camping trip. That sort of thing. Hanging Christmas lights was on that list. Not that I ever saw my parents hang Christmas lights together. Lights were my dad's job. Begrudingly. It wouldn't be fair to call my dad a grinch. He likes a good Christmas carol in December (he loves to sing.) He's very generous with presents and he enjoys making people happy. But he's never been a huge fan of what he calls the lala season. When I was a kid, he had certain tasks at Christmas time. Getting out the boxes the decorations were kept in. Buying the tree. (He worked at a high school and the junior class always sold them in a fundraiser so that's where we got our trees for years.) Putting the tree in the tree stand. The other pieces...putting ornaments on the tree, putting out other decorations, those things we always did with my mom. Once the tree was st

 I found my book group early in the pandemic...it was before the library reopened so I think it may have been late May or early June. I have been spending a lot of time on #bookstagram during the pandemic, #bookstagram being the bookish side of Instagram. I'd been active on #bookstagram for awhile but during this time where facebook became seriously intolerable, #bookstagram has been a very nice walled garden for me, social media wise. It's not exempt from the conversations of this world, after all reading is a political act, but to frame 2020 in books has been really nice for my general frame of mind. Anyway, one of the people I started interacting with on #bookstagram was Ramona. She was reading a book called Felon: poems, which I had heard of and sounded awesome and I saw her mention that she was reading it for her book group. I said, well, I FOR SURE want to be part of a book group that is reading this book, and I even got the ebook copy from the library, that's how muc

 Fall is not my fave.  I think people who really adore fall are people who live in the crisp, dry days part of the world. Here in the great PNW, fall can be quite...soggy. We do have a fair amount of deciduous trees and the foliage can be quite lovely...I've always wanted to travel to a place that had the real deciduous forests and get the full blast of the fall foliage, but for us it's some lovely pops of color backdropped by green, which is kind of nice because when the leaves do fall it doesn't all go...dead. But it can be wet. My husband, a transplanted Midwesterner, always says our rain is really annoying because it isn't "real" rain. It's just this misty dampness. That doesn't end. There's this joke that Seattleites never carry an umbrella...well, I'll tell you as someone who commuted by bus for four years and had to walk through downtown to transfer buses, a lot of us find an umbrella handy for those tough days. But with most of our rain

Max had a rough bedtime last night. He's actually been doing really well at bedtime for awhile now...and this is the kid who his entire life has struggled with sleeping alone. But lately, as long as an adult snuggles him and gets him all sleepy and cozy and tucked in, said adult is allowed to leave the room while he's still awake, if and only if said adult promises that the other parent will come check on him soon. I think his little brain was somehow thrown off by Daddy being gone for a few days, because last night he was not having it. Daddy got him all snuggled and down and ready and within a minute of Daddy leaving he was standing by the door yelling, "No leave! Mama come! Mama come now!" It's cute when he gets by his door and waits for people, if somewhat sad. Sometimes he sticks his little fingers under the door, and sometimes he smooshes his whole face against the crack and tries to see (you can totally see it although it doesn't photograph well. Last n

Today's NaNoWriMo goal was to write words in all four of the projects I am working on this month. That means write poem for my poetry prompt, write a page of my picture book, write a section of my short story, and write a blog post. This writing is the last of the night, project 4 of 4 and if it goes well it will probably put me back on par to make 50,000 by the end of the month which is kind of insane.  So today was a big writing day, also an I fell asleep with Max on piles of unfolded laundry day, also somehow we got all the schoolwork done but I'm not sure how day, and on top of all of that last night I started reading my book for Saturday's book group and so I tried to read a big chunk of that today. It is...not fun. It is a memoir called The Chronology of Water and it is kind of a stream of conciousness written out of order but in discrete vignettes kind of situation. I think I would call it trauma porn. I totally understand wanting to write about a traumatic past, and

 I love listening to the West Wing Weekly podcast...it's incredibly nerdy, but I've listened all the way through it a couple of times now (although way fewer times than I've actually watched the whole West Wing.) One of the things that is always fun is when Aaron Sorkin pops in. Something he said once really struck me...he was talking about how he kind of lives in a perpetual state of writer's block. Immediately after turning in an episode of TV, he says he always thinks he's written every single word he knows in every possible order and will never again be able to write another word. Well, as a creative person, it's nice to say that you can relate to Aaron Sorkin. It is Day 9 of NaNoWriMo. I went in with low expectations, because, well, 1) pandemic, 2) distance learning, 3) 2 children, 4) husband out of town for five days, and 5) have barely written anything all year. So my goals were: 1) write every day, 2) work on several things and count all the words from a

So to continue on my story from last night, you will note that I did not in fact become an English major....although, funny story, my LAST quarter of my undergrad career I took a random English class to get the 4 more credits...in something...that I needed to graduate and with four weeks to go in the class the professor said I had a real ear for literature and should become an English major. I think I said, um, that's super nice of you but I'm graduating in a month. So I have never in my life taken a college level course in poetry. In fact, I have never in my life taken a class of any kind in poetry. I know we read Shakespeare in high school and I took a Native American Literature class in college (this may have been during my "take a class in everything, major in something" quarter and we read some poetry as well as short stories and essays. But what I knew about poetry as a random college graduate was...well, about what most people know about poetry. Except then I b

This isn't going to be an Election Day blog. I have been trying very hard to stay away from election news coverage tonight...it's only 6:30...the night is young...but I am NOT expecting there to be complete results tonight (that's not a bad thing, that's just a thing that happens,) and I can't imagine that it would be good for my mental health to sit there and watch pundits talk and talk about everybody's predictions. Like they haven't been doing that for over a year.  So this isn't that post. This is a post about me...about how I came to get a Bachelor's Degree in Political Science and how I turned from that person into a person who is doing her level best to avoid anything resembling election news coverage on Election Night 2020. I did not go to college with a plan. In fact, I feel like I can say this with some confidence now, 20+ years later, my college years were something of a bust. I don't think I was willing to admit that at the time, give

Tomorrow is election day and that's all I intend to say about that here. I do have a lot of possible topics for today...I went to the doctor (I'm fine,) so I can talk about adventures in pandemic medical care. James and I are co-writing a picture book, so I can talk about that, or I can expand on yesterday's conversation about poetry and talk about how I came to be a poetry nerd. It's interesting...I ran yesterday's blog post through the free wordcounter I use because I am counting words written here towards my NaNoWriMo total and the software lists your top used words and their frequency, etc. Usually it's pretty boring, like my top words are things like "the" and "but," but last night's was interesting. I don't know if they've just changed the algorithm to filter those out or what but I felt very literary...the top used words were things like "poetry" and "laureate." Maybe writing about writing will up my lit

 Be aware: all blog posts during the month of November are being added to my NaNoWriMo word count because, well, all words are good words. I don't think it will change the content of the blog all that much...as I have mentioned in the past I'm not "doing" NaNoWriMo in the traditional way (I have in the past, although I've never created a novel that got past a second draft...yet...) but I am trying to focus more on writing and being a writer. Also, be aware that today's post is probably fodder for a future Instagram post...you know, it's one of those things where you have to reuse content as much as humanly possible.  So this story goes, as I've said we were in Port Townsend last weekend to visit Fort Wordon and generally Not Be at Home for awhile and one of the things we did was pop into an antique store up there that Josh really likes (having yet to have met an antique store that Josh does NOT like.) Shockingly, the only person in the family who bough