Uncertain Spring

[pameladean]

Yesterday and today I made myself go out for a walk. Yesterday, though sunnier, was much brisker than today, with a searching breeze that made me glad I'd put a fleece jacket over my hoodie, though I was too warm by the time I got within a few blocks of home.

People are being very good, very locally, about distancing. I've seen a slight increase in the number of people wearing masks. I don't have one yet and simply stay well away from everybody.

The scilla is in full bloom, both in our yard and in the neighborhood generally. I used to covet those sheets of pure blue in other people's yards, and now I have one. It began with about three volunteers from the yard next door and a bag of 25 bulbs that I planted mostly in the shadiest part of the back yard, leaving a handful to carefully put in a chicken-wire cage with a handful of winter aconite and plant in the front instead. Both front and back yards are now dotted with individual plants pushing their territory outwards. All the purple crocuses are up and blooming. The yellow and white ones haven't put in an appearance yet.

Unlike most of my neighbors, I have not raked any leaves out of the lawn or flowerbeds. The Xerces Society, champion of pollinators, asks that one wait until the soil temperature is reliably fifty degrees at all times before raking up the shelter of many overwintering beneficial pollinators. But Minnesotans are out there way too early, raking away, as if bare ground were lovelier than a patchwork of leaves, as if a brown lawn were nicer than that patchwork as well. It looks tidy, I guess, but lovely it is not.

I do admit to having lifted by hand about six maple leaves that were preventing the opening of crocus buds, but that is all.

Quite aside from the question of pollinators, I am now vindicated because there will be a winter storm tomorrow, followed by several quite cold days and nights below freezing.

Yesterday had bright sun and cloud shadows dappling the new daffodils along my route and picking out the red shoots of peony and hosta. Today there was a kind of ghost sun, showing me a faint outline of my shadow, sometimes a human figure, sometimes a walking tree or pillar, sometimes vanished.

I'm having trouble reading fiction, even books I've read before. Basic hygiene, cooking dinner, and walking have been my accomplishments, along with a call to the Member Services Line of my health insurance company to inquire why my medication list had disappeared from their new website. (It hadn't, they'd just put it under a weird tab. Next time I'll just go through all tabs no matter how apparently irrelevant.)

We are all well here so far. I will get to wave to my local brother from a safe distance on Monday when he comes to collect groceries from our porch -- there were no delivery dates available in the suburb he and my mom live in, but Minneapolis still had a few. It has none now, though pickup dates are still copious.
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Saffron is having some issues with her food. She is prone to gum inflammation. For some time this has been kept in check by a prescription food called TD, which comes in large unwieldy chunks and must be crunched up rather than just bolted by the feline consumer. But she stalled out on eating a portion a few days ago and then refused to even try the next one. There's nothing wrong with her appetite; she agitated ceaselessly for actual food until I opened a can of wet food, which she ate with abandon. We tried her on the TD again after, we hoped, giving any minor soreness of jaw a chance to heal, and she did eat most of a serving but left several pieces, and left more the next time. So we are trying the soft food again, and hoping we aren't actually training her or allowing her to train us to just give her the damn wet food already.

After the first few indignities at the veterinarian's office, she has refused to let the vet look insider her mouth at all; and he said that if we ever did need to see what was going on in there, she'd have to be sedated. I hope it doesn't come to that.

How are you all?

Pamela

Comments

[julian]

I got to luxuriate in the carpet of Scylla at my parents' house today, the one I grew up with and which is just The Best. (My grandmother planted it, more than 40 years ago, and it has done its colonizing thing.) Also, said hello to my parents from the requisite distance, and gave them milk. (This was weird and bad, but better than not.)

People distance OK in MA. But they should be better at it. Harump.

OTHERwise, I'm fine. Mostly. (I can do fiction in brief spurts, but sometimes I dry up again for awhile.)

[pameladean]

Ohhh, having access to one's grandmother's scilla is the best, indeed.

"Weird and bad, but better than not" sums up so much of this whole situation.

I have talked to my mom on the phone but not yet seen her from a requisite distance. I don't think we'd handle it well.

P.

on a tangent

[julian]

OK, since you're generally right on phenological matters, I finally looked it up, and yep. Scilla. It's not named after the mythological Scylla, which is what I was stuck on, but it is Greek. (Comes from the Greek name skilla for sea-squill.) So! I have learned a thing, and thank you.

Anyway. I decided I'd handle not seeing her at all worse than seeing her but not being able to hug her, and I coped, but this situation is, to again understate, not the best.

[kore]

I do admit to having lifted by hand about six maple leaves that were preventing the opening of crocus buds, but that is all.

Your posts are so charming.

I melted down totally yesterday, and recovered somewhat today by having grilled cheese and a decadant chocolate bar (this one https://www.chocolatebar.com/products/dark-chocolate-with-caramel-sea-salt/) /o\ (The chocolate has gooey caramel with salt crystals INSIDE IT. It is like crack.) Carbs, fat, salt and chocolate, yeah!

[pameladean]

Aww, thank you, that is a really nice compliment.

I have not utterly melted down yet, but I get Very Exercised if Very Simple Things Go Wrong. Drop a tortilla on the floor? Five minutes of dithering between Wasting Food and Risking Food Poisoning, since there is just no way you can adequately wash cat hair and whatever comes with it off a flour tortilla. I know this but I could not toss it until I had Agonized. Rargh.

I commend your choice of recovery foods. Especially the chocolate. I MEAN.

P.

[kore]

IT'S SUCH AMAZING CHOCOLATE. And no evil oils! It doesn't make me sick!

....omfg, our floors are so bad (we have lived in this apartment something like nearly 20 years) any food dropped on the floor is a lost cause. The cat barf stains are like if Lovecraft designed carpet patterns, no matter how much we scrub at them with Nature's Miracle (did they change the formula or something?).

[graydon]

Tangentially, https://chocosoltraders.com/ seem to be having a sale.

I absolutely should not consume any chocolate, even this stuff which the food intolerances find permissible, and it's way off into the foodstuff! end of the foodstuff! confection! argument, but it is as that entirely excellent.

[kore]

Distancing not going so well here, in spite of Seattle getting plaudits:

https://www.seattletimes.com/business/local-business/seattle-qfc-store-managers-bulletin-to-workers-says-social-distancing-will-not-always-work-amid-coronavirus/

JUST IMAGINE, after the reporters blabbed in the local paper, all of a sudden the standalone self-checkouts now have every other one turned off! Like Rachel Maddow says, a lot of this stuff is in the local papers, not the national media (which remains entranced by Trump's minirallies from the pressroom, and is constantly picking on Biden for, IDEFK, not shaking hands or something).

[pameladean]

We too have our sucky businesses that have to be bullied and coerced into doing what is really obviously the right thing, all the while sending out pious emails to their customers. Blargh.

I would like to send ferrets after the national press. What in the world is wrong with them?

P.

[graydon]

I got out today, to pick up supplies for bathroom repairs I can perfectly well do and it avoids having anyone else into the house. (Since the house is now slated to be a tear down, as and when, the landlord is not risking all that much, and I really want the shower enclosure to stop it with this interminable leaking.)

Lovely sun, but a searching wind here too. Excellent process at the hardware store; you order ahead by phone, you pay over the phone, you hike down there after a set interval, they bring it out, it goes into a standing trough thingy, you wait decorously for whoever brought it out to retreat, and then you pick it up and proceed on your merry way.

Food shopping was deferred because there was a substantial line; I can head round Tuesday, since no critical shortages and Sunday is bathroom repairs and Monday is forecast not fit for man nor beast. (Other food source does delivery; there's a couple days of queue depth so far, but that's not especially concerning. (Especially as I'm carefully avoiding eating the victuals for an actual emergency, the which my brain refuses to regard as presently applying. This is but an inconvenience, as supply is still to be had. Should even be getting my second set of updated glasses, by and by.))

Work remains as it ever was; we all worked from home anyway. No travel by the principles is improving our productivity, if anything. It only feels surreal sometimes. Writing is a bit stuck but it was already a bit stuck as I flail about looking for structure.

A collection of emergency vehicles circled the hospital across the road last evening, lights flashing and sirens winding; I presume this was some sort of morale exercise. My immediate presumption on seeing the size and diversity of the convoy had been that someone got entirely lost to decorum and picked the middle of a pandemic to threaten to detonate the dirty bomb they had just spent months, months I tell you, carefully hand-coating with pneumonic rabies spores. But apparently, no, just a glad noise.

There are a bunch of affronted bulb-based flowers along the fence in the front yard; we had snow a couple days ago, and it sublimated off all right but it's been well below freezing the last couple of nights, so I presume they have been offended and will bloom later. (Possibly in a week or so, when the nights start getting lastingly over freezing; the next week is a chilly one in the forecast.)

[pameladean]

May the bathroom repairs go smoothly! And I'm sorry you'll have to move again at some point. Landlords. Rargh.

I would be quite alarmed if emergency services used their usual noisemakers to make a glad noise! I'm glad it was glad.

I think "affronted" is going to be a very apt term for a lot of emerging bulbs by tomorrow evening. Our next week is also chilly in the forecast. I am sometimes amazed by how large some weather systems are.

P.

[minnehaha]

We have a fire station down the 4 blocks and occasionally have a rig go flying up our street. Now there is one a day, the last three days. So that is bothering me.

K.

[jjhunter]

I vacillate between joy in the sheer surging sproing! of spring about me and anger at the malicious mismanagement happening at the federal level and a slightly manic drive to take great care of everyone but myself.

I have to keep pausing and stepping back and making myself attend to the basics of self-care, even though allowing myself to be cognizant of this damn headcold that's been on and off for the last three weeks makes me feel anxious as hell. It's that which tells me I do have an ocean down there of pain and fear and grief and uncertainty that weighs on me even though I've had this great gift of small joys helping buoy me through.

Today I put a care package in the mail for a work friend half the country away doing covid-19 testing shifts as well as running her own clinical testing lab. I hope she likes it; it worried me that she was so very tired (and making so many typos) in our text thread yesterday.

I worry that I've been spending too much money; I worry that I'm not spending enough, or more generally not doing enough personally to help those around me. I'm grateful to have a job I can do as WFH that's important; I'm frustrated that my team is understaffed and there's a subtle pressure on me to put in more than my 40 hours a week to help make up that deficient. I'm proud and guilty both to be (mostly) defending my boundaries on that since letting it get pushed really won't make me more productive (quite the opposite, actually).

I got invited last minute to join in a play reading this evening of the second half of one of my favorite Shakespeare plays, and Feste was still up for grabs so I went whole hog and then some. It was such a delight!

I am so very grateful people are still making art and taking care of each other and doing their bit and a bit more. Do the next right thing. Do the next right thing after that. I have to believe it will eventually help the arc bend back towards justice.

[pameladean]

Oh, I hear you; so much that would be good for me is fraught now.I hear you about the money dance, too. I keep getting extra non-perishable groceries, some a bit fancy ("What if we end up with only rice and condiments?") and what I really want to do is contribute to everybody's Kickstarter or Patreon, and yet I'm somewhat reliant on my own Patreon and the monetary future is uncertain in the extreme. I don't sew so I can't make masks, and I'm in a high-risk group so I shouldn't get groceries for people, etc. etc. etc. I also don't write fast so I can't put up free comforting fiction, which is getting to me.

I hope your friend will be okay, and I love that you got to play Festel; that is such a great character.

I think you are right and doing the next right thing will help. It's just so slow. And if larger entities than individual people would stop getting in the way, that would help.

P.

[queenbookwench]

An unrelated hello from Sebastian!

[carbonel]

I finally managed to appease my yearning for sushi by ordering takeout from Bagu. They're doing curbside delivery, but that's cash only (I guess because otherwise there's the dance of signing the credit card receipt). So I paid by credit card ahead of time, and there was minimal contact. I got 2.5 meals out of it: two real meals eaten, plus a small serving of tom yum soup remaining.

I kind of worry that my mood seems to be calm all the time. Too calm. This is better than depressed, but I worry a bit that it actually might be a high-functioning form of depression.

I started watching For All Mankind on Apple TV. Normally you need a subscription, but Apple has kindly made a bunch of its shows available for free. It's set in an alternate history in which the Russians made it to the moon two weeks before the Apollo 11 launch, and the space race keeps being much more of a race. (There's a brief mention of Ted Kennedy canceling his house party at Chappaquiddick; I assume that means no Mary Jo Kopechne scandal, which could also be a major divergence point.) I think the reviews are positive but not exceptional, but the premise intrigued me sufficiently to try it.

[asakiyume]

as if bare ground were lovelier than a patchwork of leaves --I agree; it's a strange notion! Maybe it's partly just the wish to be out there encouraging spring along (though speaking for myself, I'm like you and let the leaves lie).

Scylla are lovely flowers--I'm glad you've got lots now.

[minoanmiss]

*waves*

The icon is for Saffron, and for you, and for the vet.

[pameladean]

Awww. That is lovely and I have shown it to her. She uttered an ambiguous trill and knocked my pen on the floor. Qualified approval, I think.

P.

[sovay]

I don't have one yet and simply stay well away from everybody.

Would you like to be sent a sterile mask in the mail? My father is making them.

*hugs for you and Saffron*

[pameladean]

That is a very kind offer and after reflexively beginning a No, no, I'll be fine response, I would be happy to accept it. I'll PM you my address.

Saffron does not appear to be feeling at all unwell. She spent quite some time soccering a discarded and crumpled up Post-It note around the hallway until I became concerned that she was committing destruction on much larger objects.

*hugs back for you and the small black cats*

P.

[davidgoldfarb]

Been working from home, and staying home mostly otherwise, except once in a while when I go out for some restaurant takeout. Today I cut up a t-shirt into four no-sew masks. (The instructions I saw seem to assume that one t-shirt will yield one mask. Evidently their t-shirts are sized for smaller people than me.)

I made a big pot of chili a couple of days ago, as something that would last two people for a while and reduce our temptations to go out for food. It turned out pretty well. Even though I live in Texas, my go-to chili recipe includes allspice and dark chocolate: my excuse is that I have relatives who live in Cincinnati. Last time I made chili I put in two habaneros and it came out too spicy, so this time I used only one.

My local bridge club has moved online to the biggest online bridge server, but I find that face-to-face is more interesting. I like online occasionally also, but never being able to play FTF is annoying. Still, there are a bunch of reasons why bridge especially should shut down right now.

I just finished reading Alif the Unseen, by G. Willow Wilson, whose comics work I'd liked. Seeking thematic continuity, I've moved on to the Rushdie book Two Years, Eight Months, and Twenty-Eight Nights.

[pameladean]

How big a pot of chili was it? Though I am sure your tolerance for heat is higher than mine. I once put a quarter of a seeded habanero in a curry where the recipe called for two or three, and it was way too much.

Ooof, yes, I gather that a lot of keen bridge players are somewhat elderly, and the way all the cards are handled by everybody, really, sadly, no. You need self-disinfecting cards.

I'd like to get my reading mojo back, and at least I did read several chapters in my mystery novel.

P.

[lydamorehouse]

I feel dumb. I know about the pollinators and relentlessly leave the leaves on our hillside and backyard, but I raked the boulevard on Saturday, just in time for the snow to hit the very next day.

[pameladean]

Aw, I didn't mean to make anybody feel bad. And honestly, the boulevard is probably not the very most salubrious place for pollinators, being full of salt, probably. A lot of people keep some parts of their yard tidy and save others for wildlife. I am resolutely anti-lawn and anti-tidy without ever quite doing a good job of providing a good alternative, so I don't have much room to be judgemental.

I do find the raked aesthetic weird, but I don't think that's a majority position at all.

P.