Kris's Covid Pandemic Blog

 So really what's going on is I need a new spot for my reading chair. But problems have their advantages. My grandpa, who was a furniture upholsterer, made a chair for me not long before he died. And I love this chair. I've had this chair in every home I've lived in. When we moved into this house, we put the chair in James's room and sat for years with him and read stories to him in the chair. When we moved James into his big boy bed, the chair went into what became in short order Max's room and that's where it is. Max and I still sit and read in the chair a lot, but the transition is coming again except this time I don't know where it will go. But for right now I spend a lot of my time sitting in Max's room reading because that's where my favorite chair is. Both kids got dollhouses of a sort for Christmas. James's is more of a traditional doll house and Max's is a fire house. Today I was sitting in his room and watching him play and it's...

I don't really know what to say about Dr. King's birthday except that if people are happy learning what we learned in school when they realize the whole truth of what's out there they must really like being lied to. I appreciate teachers who taught us more thorough history as we got older and also that I was never limited in what I read. James and I had a mom/James date today. Yesterday we as a family went to the park and as James invented a game Max completely fell apart and started melting down so I told James I would take him back today and we could play and have big kid time without having to worry about the melting down. It had been a long time since I had one on one time with James and Josh actually got today off which he doesn't that often. James is...a lot. His energy and creativity are a lot to handle and right now he's physically clingy which adds to it because he's not a little kid anymore. But I do love spending time with the kid. We ran around the p...

 Woke up this morning to find out that my first camp director and friend for almost 30 years passed away from a stroke. She was 54. Her daughter is a very similar age that I was when I lost my mom. If you've never worked at a summer camp I don't really have words to explain it. It's a family...a dysfunctional and loud one and one that has people who get estranged and drop away and generations that don't speak each other's language, but family all the same. Family that I've been on the phone and text with all day today.  I really want to hug them. In normal times, there would be a funeral and we would go to it and probably go get lunch after or end up in someone's house. And we'd reconnect and talk and hug. And it would still be awful because why is it the best people on the planet who die of strokes at 54 and leave behind teenage children and devastated communities of students and friends and Girl Scouts who wish they could hug you and laugh with you and...

I will not apologize for being away because sometimes life is like that, I'm just going to pick up from here and move forward. So a lot has happened but I'm trying to think of just what I need to say to explain what has happened for you People of the Future reading this. We have a new variant. Probably when I spoke to you last we were still in the thick of life with the delta variant, deadly but controlled well by vaccines. Well, in the weeks leading up to Christmas (this thing likes to mess with the leadup to holidays, wtf is that about???) we all met the omicron variant. VERY contagious but the good news is the disease itself seems more mild, especially in vaccinated people. However, MANY MANY people are out sick or quarantined right now which makes the already short staffed country feel...very overwhelmed. Being able to catch a flight the week after Christmas was, for example, EXTREMELY difficult because of staffing shortages. I can talk about Christmas in a bit, but first l...