Schreiber

Subrealm: A not-altogether cheerful Laetare.

So as I’ve said, the original plan was that I was going to go up to Maine for the tail end of this week, then get back to Boston in time for Mid-Lent Sunday services (and ringing) today.

Obviously, this did not happen.

Instead, I did the closest I could manage, which was doing a Zoom call with Squigamunk and Partner on Friday. (Squig. has been laid off; partner is working from home. They have been keeping themselves amused with re-playing Skyrim and acquiring a dozen baby chickens.) And I drafted this this afternoon while waiting for another Zoom meeting, this time with my relatives (and some wine.)

Life around here has sorta settled into a routine, though one that will probably need to be modified as my roommates start doing more online teaching. Get up (late)(by my standards), have breakfast, pick a work location in the apartment, attempt to keep my nose to the grindstone for 7.5 hours plus lunch break. Possibly take a REALLY long lunch break and go running, then put in an extra half hour in the evening to make up the difference.
If there’s enough going on, that is.

This weekend, we declared Saturday to be Spring Cleaning day (or at least Spring Cleaning pt. 1). I cleaned one of the bathrooms, took a break to make hot cross buns, and then cleaned the rest of the kitchen floor.
Today I got up, said Matins, ran a load of laundry, and then in the afternoon went for a 2-hour walk.*
So overall, it was an pretty okay weekend.
If you have to be in what amounts to (though isn’t yet officially mandated) Shelter-in-Place...

* I was worried for a time that this would have to be cut short, I’m also on-call in case a former colleague needs help. In a metaphor for everything that is wrong with America, she was already teaching while taking care of her elderly mother, who has dementia; and she is STILL trying to do the latter, only while she also has the Coronavirus. Holy shit.

PS Weather this weekend: was chilly (20s at night) but sunny.

...Wow, I've been super bad about posting. Let's see if I can at least fill you in on how my various weekends went.

Aug. 24: 2House2Warm (Housewarming party: evening)

This went fine and was fun, even though we had fewer attendees than we were hoping. But we fed them food, and showed off the apartment, so that was all good...

Aug. 26: super-long super-complicated quarter peal on the bells at Advent. eep.

I eventually ducked out of doing anything more complicated than ringing the tenor behind [i.e., just keeping the measure by ringing last in every change, not trying to remember the actual method.] So we rang quite well for like 40 minutes, got snarled, got unsnarled, had somebody disagree with the conductor about the timing of a call, and probably as a result couldn't get back to rounds, so it didn't count. Bother.

Then...go eat ice cream to celebrate Kat's birthday.
Ice cream! And also talking about canals and pubs in England. Good times.

Sept. 1: Mercifully/boringly free of plans. Maybe I should go to Maine.
I did not go to Maine.
Sept. 2: Danielle's asked me to ring ANOTHER QP.
This one we actually got. First qp for me on Stedman, or indeed affected*!
Sept. 3 (Labor Day) Sadly, nothing much happened. I think I probably tried and failed to unpack stuff.

Sept. 8: Rise for Climate
OK, I had a lot of thinks and feels about this, but it basically boiled down to:
a) This was depressingly poorly-attended,
b) I'm worried that the message got diluted in this particular event, and
c) Who the hell thought that having the rally and the march separated by a three-hour teach-in was a good idea?!?

Sept. 14-16: G. is attending a wedding in Portland. I go attend Peter in Portland.
This went fine.** I drove up to Portland, got to actually see my Dad (and explain how tenoring behind works), and spent a fun afternoon with Peter wandering along the shore of the Eastern Prom. (We even got to see my brother for a hot second.*** G. picked him up a little early the next day; I drove home.

Sept. 22-3: No plans yet. Maybe go apple picking if my roommates aren't dead.
My roommates ate'nt dead, but they also did not feel like going apple-picking, and neither - sadly - did anyone else. I DID, on the other hand, spend a pleasant evening having coffee with teenybuffalo and nineweaving on Saturday. And also there was a lot of cooking.

In other news...
Work has been alternating between periods where I feel like I'm drowning and periods (like this) where I sit around waiting for someone to give me something to do. Possibly because it's the end of the fiscal year? Who knows.
My immediate supervisor is on a cruise in the Adriatic for practically the entire month, which makes life that extra bit weirder.

My apartment is still nice. My roommates are still nice, and still like my cooking. My room is still a total disaster area, although I got a shelving unit for my bathroom*** and partly as a result I am beginning to make some headway against the chaos.

Me: Still not 40 yet.

* i.e. where I *actually* had to remember how calls worked in the method.
** Well, aside from the bit where I postponed my drive up in order to go to a Friday-night event that it turned out wasn't actually happening (and had never been going to outside my own brain, apparently), which meant that I felt like an idiot and had to have dinner VERY late.
*** Dan is mad busy with a play, but made the time, and I finally handed off the box o' books+things from England. Somehow he has a girlfriend now. How do people even meet people?
*** I may or may not have mentioned this in the past, but one of the perks of this place is that my room comes with its own bathroom. Of course, this means I am the only one who's going to clean it, but hey.