Kris's Covid Pandemic Blog

This is a long story and I'm not sure how much into the weeds I wanna get so I will try to keep it short. An old friend and fellow co-worker of mine started a project a couple of years ago...2017, I think, maybe earlier, for sure before Max was born...promoting women's participation in baseball. I said I was happy to help and we had a podcast going for awhile which was taken down because I forgot to pay the hosting on it, so that's on me, I have not always held up my end of the partnership. So these days it's more of a social media presence. I haven't really paid attention to it in...a long time, but I got a notification something that had been posted was blocked by facebook, yadda yadda, so I went in and looked and it was...all very political. Like incredibly left wing political and not baseball related at all. Which, okay, it's not my project, but there were tons of messages from people saying what happened and why didn't you cover this major women in base...

 Let's see now, where were we? Oh, yeah, Christmas is exhausting. It was a lovely holiday all told. We were able to go to outdoor Christmas Eve services with my dad and then take a bunch of bad pictures by the tree because we were trying to take them quickly and get masks back on. Christmas Day we did the morning thing, James slept until 6:40 and made it all the way to 7:45 before he woke everyone up, so that was amazing. I had breakfast in bed for him and we watched White Christmas while we waited. We had Zoom chats with family during the day and the kids got properly spoiled and we haven't been able to get the living room properly cleaned up since although God knows we've tried. And Josh made us delicious food. So that was good. What I want to remember...James wanted a music box so Santa found a Star Wars music box...unlicensed Etsy merch FTW. And I think that was his highlight. I wrapped up gloves for both of them to unwrap Christmas Eve morning (so they wouldn't fre...

 Yeah, I've been a little AWOL. Truth is, I'm really really tired. Saturday night was the neighborhood cookie swap, an event deemed "Corona Christmas Cookie Convention" by its organizers. Bake cookies, bag them up, set up a distribution center in front of your house. Super adorable. Much work.  Saturday night I went to bed early but Josh woke me up accidentally by walking around on the deck outside the bedroom window. My brain naturally assumed he was an intruder come to kidnap James. Nighttime brains are like this.  Today the kids were WIRED. First official day of winter break, POURING. We went to the beach and ran around in the rain. After writing Christmas cards. Not sending many, just to the people on James's list.  Now it's snowing and James is WIRED. Tomorrow will also be a long day. Plus today I did all the holiday grocery shopping and those sorts of errands. It's been said before but it's worth saying again: Christmas is really tiring for moms....

 I feel like if this blog is doing its job as a record of the pandemic (which it probably isn't,) then I should note for the record that the first vaccines were given in the U.S. today, including at 2 hospitals in Seattle. The first round of vaccines is going entirely to frontline health care workers. I'm not a healthcare worker myself so I don't have much more to say than that, except that I really hope that as distribution goes forward whoever is making the decisions about how they are prioritized (that has to be a really truly awful job) remembers there are a lot of minimum wage essential workers out there (see grocery baggers, fast food workers, etc.) who don't have a lot of political clout or big unions advocating for them but should FOR SURE be high on that list. Myself I'm not expecting to become a priority for several more months and that's okay. I hope the distribution goes well and the vaccine gets to people who need it as soon as it can and I'm ce...

 I wasn't always this voracious of a reader. It's true. There's been ebb and flow.  In college (and fresh out,) I didn't read a lot that wasn't assigned. I didn't have a library card my first year out of college. I reread a lot of old favorite books. Not that that's a bad thing. I started working in libraries in 2003 and had so many books going in and out of my hands so much that I went back to an old habit of reading. A lot. And all the time. In my early years in libraries I ALWAYS had so much more checked out than I could ever read. It took a long time to learn that I didn't have to take EVERYTHING home, that it was okay to leave some things in the library until I was ready for them. It's a lesson I still forget sometimes. As a children's and school librarian, outside reading was part of the job. I was regularly expected to promote books to kids in organized "book talks," plus I had to have suggestions in my head and things I knew abo...

 Whew. I guess NaNoWriMo ended and I quit writing there for a bit, eh? Quick wrapup on that: I finished with 40,000 words, which, while not technically a "win" by NaNoWriMo standards I was proud of. I ended with a draft of my "short" story at about 10,000 words, a draft of my holiday picture book, and completed a poetry prompt every day. I've started a new writing prompt book called "642 Things to Write About," which will probably take me around 6 years to complete. We are now full-on into the festive season and I'm EXHAUSTED. So...I am not the most organized person in the world when it comes to holidays. I generally buy Josh's gift sometime around December 22nd. I'm always the person on the 20th in the post office complaining about the prices of priority shipping.  This year is forcing me to prep early. I'm trying to minimize my shopping in person and do online shopping (oh, my God how I hate online gift shopping,) and I know anything ...