Kris's Covid Pandemic Blog

When I started this I called it Kris's Pandemic 2020 Blog. It NEVER occurred to me that I would still be writing a pandemic blog in October of 2021. Today I finally bit the bullet and renamed it. It no longer has years in it. I need to both keep my optimism about 2022 (optimism is a rare quality, I hoard as much as possible) and stay sane and in this reality. So this is officially my blog of...this Covid period...whatever that might mean. The baseball went predictably. The Mariners were really never in their last game and the teams they were up against both won so it ended up not mattering anyway. For the record, in the end the Yankees and the Red Sox ended in a tie and both qualified as wild card teams. The Blue Jays finished a game behind that and the Mariners finished a game behind the Blue Jays. All of those teams won 90+ games, a good record by any standard. The Red Sox eliminated the Yankees two days later in a playoff game (don't get me started on how dumb Major League B...

 This blogging on Thursdays thing is going super well for me given that it's Saturday. I don't think I have time to go into my relationship with the Mariners, but I'll try to give it to you in a nutshell. 1977 the Mariners start as a professional baseball team in Seattle 1978 I was born Until 1988 the Mariners field a solidly mediocre at times abysmal expansion team in the concrete crypt that was the Kingdome. I have sense memories of walking those endless ramps in and out of there. My dad once gave us a choice of 3 games in the $5 seats or 5 games in the $3 seats and was proud of our fan cred and math skills. 1989 19-year-old Ken Griffey, Jr. debuts with the Mariners and my walls quickly fill with Griffey posters early 1990s were the Age of Griffey, with the father son duo and all star MVP and the locking down of my status as a Mariners fan (prior to Griffey I tended to root for the A's who had an AAA franchise in nearby Tacoma and whose stars I therefore knew well. Th...

 "The autumn is a time that makes one think there is no time like the present, and the present is very pleasant." --from The Journal of Beatrix Potter, October 1894 Guess who is starting her blog post after 10:30 because she wanted to squeeze in just a little more reading time? This girl. I have been using reading as avoidance so much...I may need to scale back just a bit. I'm not sure if I agree with Beatrix in that quote or not but I like the quote and I like the idea of the quote. I don't know if I'd feel that way in an ordinary fall, which of course this is not. So Kelly Yang, who is the author of the Front Desk books which I adore, now follows me on Instagram and I feel low key famous. I mean, I have a TINY Instagram following of like 500, it is very much a hobby of mine, but she saw a booktalk I did there on her YA debut from last year which I think I may have written about last week who knows, but it is called Parachutes and it is EXCELLENT.  So she follows...

 I woke up the first two days of this week early in the morning FREEZING. I haven't really figured out what blanket/jammies combo works best for this weather so I'm not either hot or cold. Working on it. I'm not, as it turns out, good at blogging on Thursdays so last week I missed entirely and this week I'm a day early. I'm a work in progress. Fall is in the air for sure. The peaches and pears are both gone. We checked today. It's been bordering on sweatshirt weather although I still get plenty sweaty on the walk to and from school. It's middling season and I'm not sure my body is handling it super well. School has been a smash success so far. He loves it and it is already helping him in more ways than I can describe, both academically and otherwise. We've been doing a pretty good job of coming home and having a nice afternoon routine...coloring, snacking, reading Harry Potter, trying not to do all screens all the time. Max is...demanding when his br...

So I'm reading the Journals of Beatrix Potter right now...it's super interesting...and at almost 500 pages I'm going to be reading it for awhile so you will likely hear more about it. But the thing about diaries if you've never read one is so much of them is the mundane day to day of whatever world the writer is living in. So there's lots of little asides and anecdotes about politics and famous people and just this 1880s world she exists in. And it occurs to me...most of us are NOT qualified to talk about the politics of the time we live in. We aren't subject experts and there's a lot to keep up on. But we do it anyway because we are simply trying to deal with the world in front of us as we see it right now. So here's what was happening in my world and in the big world (Betsy Ray in the Betsy-Tacy books calls it the Great World which is fabulous) this week. First of all, it was back to school yesterday. I don't know what to say about that that hasn...

I said I was going to blog Thursdays and I didn't even make it one week. But James and Max have been invited to go watch a movie and eat pizza with the neighbors (which feels BIZARRE...I am not used to people going anywhere, but they play together through the fence all the time anyway so it makes sense) and now I finally have the time.  Turns out there is one living being that loved the heat wave we had in June and that was our peach tree. Peaches aren't supposed to grow in this part of the world but we apparently have a nice little microclimate. In a typical year we'd get a couple of dozen maybe. Last year we had lovely blooms but no peaches at all. This year...this year we have picked two boxes plus dozens to just eat outside and given bags to two neighbors and a visiting friend...and I STILL have a box of peaches on the porch waiting for me to deal with them before they attract every fruit fly on the planet. They don't get particularly large...it is the wrong climate...

 I'm gonna quit apologizing for updating this since I literally only did it for myself. If you're reading, hi, you're awesome, I hope you get something from this, if not talking to myself is 100% my speciality. It's been summer. During the course of the summer the trend of the pandemic and everyone's general mood has shifted dramatically. In June we were all embracing full vaccination and return to school and we were going out and doing things...in small numbers and slowly. Now the Delta variation is all over the place, too many people are still unvaccinated and it feels like January again except this time with the need to reopen. So....yeah. I'm going with caution but moving forward. James will start school five days a week in two weeks with masks and they just announced a vaccine mandate for school personnel. I kind of hate the idea of a mandate...I'm much more libertarian with stuff like that than most of the friends I hang out with...but I do understand ...