One Cobble at a Time

My head is full of things today and I’m supposed to be focusing on preparing a presentation for WXR at SIWC, the online conference that is going to occupy so much of my time for the next 10 days. I’m really excited for it, and if you want to join at the last minute, you have until noon Pacific on October 17 to sign up. Events for the conference start that same evening. Tomorrow.

This morning I had conversation with a long time blog reader who had no idea I have a Patreon. I do. You can sign up to support me here. I also have a newsletter that I send out once per month with a thought-filled letter, similar to one of my more extended blog posts. Also project updates. You can sign up for that here.

I’ve put a lot of energy in the past few weeks into setting up an October sale in our online store. I’m thinking about how messed up package shipping got for awhile in spring and early summer, and how clogged up the mail gets during a regular holiday shipping season. The mess is going to be epic this year and it is going to start in mid November. Add to that the fact that I think mid November is when the increase of Covid cases will force municipalities to start enforcing lockdowns. People will be stress buying online and at grocery stores. I expect to see shortages. Nothing dire, just increased inconvenience for various items. Mid November is also when I expect people to start realizing that maybe they don’t get to have all of the holiday traditions they’re accustomed to. You probably don’t get to travel home to see parents or grandparents this year. Or at least you shouldn’t. We’re having to evaluate whether to gather with a single pair of married kids who don’t live in our house. We’ve already ruled out all of the extended family and my parents. Those hard emotions of grief and anger are going to spike right along with cases and restrictions. Not looking forward to all of that. So we’re encouraging people to please shop early. Things are going to shift this holiday season, no one knows how yet. So maybe plan ahead?

Also driving sales is vital revenue for us because we can’t feel good about running another Kickstarter until we’ve fulfilled on this one. And while we’re continually making progress, Howard’s breathing issues have come back a bit and we’re waaaaay behind schedule. We’re okay for short term, but my job is to pay attention to medium and long term as well. With that in mind, I just sunk some money into a Schlock themed holiday ornament. I hope to have it in hand and make it available in early November. A new shiny thing in the store helps to drive sales.

Sometimes I sit in a quiet, peaceful place in my house or garden and think about how lovely it would be to be able to just make interesting and beautiful things without having to worry about promotion, sales or bills. That is not the world I live in.

Howard is breathing reasonably well today, but he needed supplementary oxygen a couple of days ago. We can’t prove that is ailments are post-Covid syndrome. He was sick in January, supposedly before the illness was local. When we finally got an antibody test, it was too late. Any antibodies he had were already gone. Yet his ongoing symptoms match those described by Covid long-haulers. So on top of the “what is going on medically and how do we fix it” we have to wonder if what we’re dealing with is post-Covid at all. It is so much better than it was last spring, but there are still regular impacts on our life and capabilities.

This week I had a lovely volunteer to help me test my intake system for consulting. I’m tooling up to hang out my shingle as a consultant for creator-owned small businesses. With her help I’ve already learned a lot, I expect to have to learn more. The best news is that I really enjoyed the hour I spent doing the actual consulting. That is promising that this source of potential revenue is a good one. Work I can get paid for, where I feel like I’m helping others, and where I come away feeling energized.

Had a tweet thread about helping an ADHD and depressed adult build a system to take their daily meds. It got a lot of positive response and I had a dozen tiny conversations as a result. I really liked making the thread and feeling like I’d put something helpful/happy out onto twitter. I want to post a follow up later, because the system I created has built in problems for long-term use. We haven’t even begun to address the challenge inherent in my kid learning to manage medication refills. I also have a set of thoughts around having my adult kids living at home, which is always pitched as a massive failure in media. “Living with mom” is failure at adulting. I want to write something to challenge that concept and to talk about building healthy interdependence with housemates where one person’s strength can help answer another’s need without anyone being taken advantage of. And without anyone being co-dependent.

I have election anxiety. I’ve had it for months. But now there is a filled out ballot sitting on my table waiting for me to take it to the drop box. The ballot represents the tiny amount of control I have over the outcome. I’m working to make plans to manage no matter who is declared president. However I suspect that if we get four more years of Donald Trump at least three close family members are going to crash hard into fear and despair. I am not looking forward to helping people navigate that, especially not with the other emotional load I’m expecting to hit in mid November. Theoretically we’ll know in just a few more weeks. I’m trying not to hyper focus on it.

Local races are also weighing heavily on my mind, particularly since I’m not impressed with the ways that the overwhelmingly republican local governments have been reluctant to impose restrictions. They’re waiting and hoping for people to exercise personal responsibility. I, too, believe that people are mostly good and want to do the right thing. However we are all social animals who use context and checking on our neighbors to figure out what is appropriate/good for us to do. We’re all reluctant to be the one to rock the boat or make others upset. This means that if there is a social plan that is a bad idea in a pandemic (say a pancake breakfast at a restaurant for fifty people) and 60% of invitees think it is a bad idea, the thing might still happen because no one speaks up. If there is a top down statement from the governor saying “No social events with more than 10 people” then those people who are concerned can point at the governor and say “Maybe we shouldn’t do this.” And the event organizer when calling it off can make the governor the bad guy instead of having to be the bad guy. Clear leadership and regulation is important to change social norms and to fight our innate desire to gather. The Utah spike has become less spike-y and more surge-y, but in both cases people end up in the hospital, or with post-Covid syndrome, or dead.

My fall projects are winding down to a close. The patio is finished and I even did the plantings in the patches of dirt so I can have pretty greenery going forward. I’ve made significant progress on pulling wisteria vine out of the pine tree. There is more to do and probably a blog post to write about it. I have a plan to use reclaimed hardwood flooring to create a table top to go over the firepit that I repaired using sheet metal. That should probably get a blog post too. Kitchen remodel is currently paused because the next step is to start dismantling the old pantry. It is a “making a mess” step, but right now I’m enjoying having our new pantry wall done and the kitchen being nicer. Also I want to finish up some other projects before launching into another one. I need to finish removing nails from hardwood flooring so it can be donated or reused. Then the jumbled pile of hazardous wood-with-nails can be turned into a neat stack in the garage. There are other clean up things that need to be done in the garage as well. The space needs to be cleared out and organized so that I can manage the next stages of project. Clearing the garage is also a bit time sensitive because it gets cold out there in the winter and winter is coming. I’ve finished all of my fall harvest tasks. We have grape juice, grape compote, grape jelly, and raisins from our vines. I’ve frozen pumpkin to make pies next month. We’ve also got pear jelly and pear butter. I carefully marked the grape vines according to which kind of grapes they grew. This means next spring when I’m cutting back the vines I can offer cuttings to friends and tell them which kind of grapes they are getting. There is also a plan for an arbor and increased height supports along the run of vines. I’m actually planning to use some of the lumber from the dismantled pantry for that. One project always leads to the next. Oh, and I have a plan for spare lumber to be turned into a compost bin as well.

I haven’t been writing fiction as much as I want to be. I’m hoping to correct that by winding down some of the house projects and not picking up as many new projects. However I’m not good at preventing myself from thinking up new projects. So.

… That might be all of my top-of-my-head thoughts for right now. Maybe now my head can be quiet enough to focus on presentation prep. My head is really noisy some days.

It occurred to me today that I’m almost halfway done with October. I’m not entirely sure how that happened. Somehow I moved from “all the days are three days long” to “Many days still feel very long, but somehow weeks slip away from me.” I made this realization while wearing long sleeves and a sweater, laying in my hammock and wishing it were in the direct sunlight instead of the shade. Shade was just a hair too chilly, but sunshine had just the right amount of radiant warmth. It wasn’t that long ago that I’d have to retreat indoors because it was took hot even in the shade. I lay there and tried to savor the near perfect weather and the smell of leaves which were just starting to accumulate on the ground. Catch it now because moments like this will be subsumed by cold and I’ll soon need to stow the hammock for the winter.

My thoughts meander today.

I think about the visit I had with two friends earlier in the day. I set out chairs on my patio, carefully spaced. In the middle I set a small table that had a bin of water bottles and pre-packaged snack foods. This is what gracious entertaining looks like in pandemic times. I was grateful to have the lovely weather and the patio I worked all summer to create. I was grateful to have friends willing to come and sit with me for two hours. I was pleased to have thought of loading a bin with snacks. I figure I’ll be able to entertain this way for another month before it gets too cold even when I light a fire in the fire pit. Or perhaps Utah will have a mild winter. That has happened before and would be great for keeping the pandemic manageable. Of course it would be terrible for the extreme drought conditions. We need a winter full of snow.

I had a book with me in the hammock as I watched a few leaves drift from the tree to where my friends and I sat only a few hours before. But I wasn’t reading the book. Instead I watched a lone quail bobbing his way across my patio to pick at fallen walnuts. I wondered where his companion was. Quail almost always travel in pairs. There were doves, finches, sparrows, and blue jays to keep him company. All of them flittered to and from the feeders I’ve stocked at the edge of the patio. I thought about going to fetch a notebook so that I could work on the presentations I need to give next week at an online conference. I’m excited to try out some of the ideas I have for using zoom backgrounds as part of my presentation. The green screen arrived today and I just have to go and see if the frames I have at my warehouse are the right sized for hanging behind me on camera. I’ve given the presentations before, but I always like to refresh my thoughts and presenting in an online format is new to me. However if I can make it work, that opens possibilities for me to teach classes on my own schedule without being attached to a conference. I like that idea quite a lot. I don’t actually go get the notebook though. I don’t want to scare off the birds.

On the side of the patio near the house there are potted plants sitting in the dirt. They’re waiting for me to put them into the ground. I meant to do it on Saturday, but emotional distress from one of my people prevented them from assisting me with it. I thought about doing it today, but I was focused on setting up for my visitors and then on birds and hammocks and presentation thoughts. The fact that I’m short on sleep does not make the planting more likely. I want to tap one of my in-house assistants to help me, but I’m not sure if they’re in a good emotional space to do assisting. This is one of the disadvantages of being the primary emotional support for my assistant. I have a hard time asking them to step up and do the work that I need done. I always have to provide the motivating force to get a project moving instead of being able to join someone else’s project momentum. Over all hiring my kids as my assistants is being beneficial to everyone, but it is both more complicated and much simpler than hiring someone I’m not related to.

I close my eyes for a moment and just feel the sway of the hammock. In the distance in my mind, out beyond the peace of the moment, I can feel the presence of all the tasks I should be doing. They are the things I must do in order to financially support my ability to have this moment in the hammock under my trees with birds near my patio. If I want hammock moments, I also need to have focused business moments. Fortunately I can enjoy those moments too, just in a very different way. I sometimes forget that I enjoy the business tasks, which is why I need moments of peace to help me regain perspective.

Eventually I do get up from my hammock and wander myself back inside. Dinner hour is close and I should make some decisions about food. As I enter I see my new pantry wall. It is the promise of the kitchen I’m going to get to have. There are a few more clean up and preparation steps for me to take before I can launch into the next project phase. I’m not rushing to get through them. I’ve had a period of pushing on house projects. They can lay idle for a week or two while I focus on business and career tasks. November is soon enough to tackle the house again, but I have at least two weeks of October remaining before I get there.

Our lives are governed by seasons. Even in modern living where we have grocery stores stocked with every item almost all year round, there is still a seasonality to our lives. Marketers capitalize on this natural inclination using seasonal shift to send demand toward different items. Though there is a simple life logic to purchasing certain items in the spring (swimsuits, sandals, patio furniture) and other items in the fall (fuzzy blankets, flower bulbs, pumpkin everything.) Even during the years when my life was so internally focused that the seasons changed unnoticed around me, I was still affected by things such as holidays and the onset or cessation of school. We don’t have any household members in school anymore, so it would make sense for me to be less aware of seasonal change. Instead the opposite is true.

This year there is a hum in the back of my head spurring me to prepare for the winter. It is going to get cold, some tasks are harder in the cold, so get them done now. Fix that cracked window. Spray wash the garbage can. Deep clean the kitty litter. Cut back that over grown vine. Preserve food and acquire food so that it can be available out of season. I’ve done far more canning this year than I have in quite a while. I know that some of this food prep is driven by the pandemic and economic uncertainty. I have this urge to acquire resources now against potential coming hardship. I’ve been streamlining and organizing food stores, not just accumulating, but starting to understand exactly how many sticks of butter we go through in a week so that I can calculate what is a reasonable amount to store. If I store too much food, it will go bad before we can eat it, which is a waste. If I don’t store enough, then if my family is hit with a mandated quarantine period or some other financial hardship, we could run out.

Several months ago, at the beginning of the pandemic, my neighbor and I were talking about the empty grocery store shelves. She pointed out that the food-hoarding behaviors were often driven by food insecurity. Anyone who has experienced food insecurity is more likely to grab extra food just in case. At around the same time I read some posts from an online friend who grew up in the Caribbean. At the beginning of the pandemic he suddenly found himself selling off an extra car, buying an extra freezer, re configuring his house for working and schooling at home. He was ahead of the curve on all of those things because he was raised in hurricane territory and some deep-instinctual part of himself was thrumming with “there is a storm coming.”

I’ve never lived in hurricane country and I’ve never been food insecure, however I grew up in a culture that valued emergency preparedness, we spent two years with massive financial insecurity, followed by nearly two decades of highly variable income which continued to feel financially insecure. Like my online friend, I feel a storm is coming and I’m storing up the things I might need to get through it. It is one small lever of control when so much is far larger than me.

This weekend I’m listening to General Conference, which is my church’s twice-per-year opportunity to hear the Apostles of our church speak to the entire membership. They speak at other times during the year, but usually to smaller audiences. There will be five sessions of two hours each, so a total of ten hours of listening. I usually turn on the stream and let it play while I work on cleaning or gardening. Sometimes I just sit with a notebook or a craft. It is a lot of information all at once, but everything is recorded and I can re-listen whenever I want, so I don’t try to catch and remember every detail. I let it flow past me and trust that the things I most need to hear will jump out at me as inspiration grabs my attention and tells me what is most relevant to me.

I’ll admit that I approach conference with more caution than I used to, because I believe there are ways my church needs to change and hasn’t yet. Culture and tradition are powerful and often slow to shift. This time I was pleased to notice that several speakers in the first session addressed the political polarization in society and issues of racism. It was interesting to me how the words that were spoken could be either comforting or upsetting depending on what the audience brought with them to the words. One speaker said that the gray area was going away, that we would all have to choose whether to be on the Lord’s side or not. One interpretation of the statement could lead to additional polarization where people are convinced of their rightness and double down on things they see as sinful behavior. Another interpretation is that people at church need to stop being comfortable that they are right simply because they are going to church. A different speaker mentioned that in seeking to be part of the gospel of Christ, we might have to give up aspects of the culture we come from. That statement could be exceedingly worrisome to people who have experienced a history of white christian churches systematically erasing portions of their people’s identity and history. However I think the statement is very true, just not aimed the way that worry fears. I think that white suburban people need to give up the part of their culture that makes them oppose having low income housing or other outreach programs in their neighborhood. They need to learn how to love their neighbors when they don’t get to carefully filter who qualifies to be their neighbor. And when I say “they” I mean me. Because I need to be better, and I’m listening as part of figuring out how.

These talks are like scripture in that the messages they give are so much more than the words. I combine those words with my life and experiences, the lens through which I see church and the world. There is also inspiration from God that comes to me as I listen, because sometimes the words spark a thought in my mind that wasn’t previously in my head and wasn’t in the words either. So I am listening. I am taking notes both for my benefit, and because I may be able to use these words to help broaden the perspectives of my fellow church members. In the wise words of a man who was not in my church: Be the change you want to see. I’m trying, and it starts by listening. Listening to these talks. Listening to resources on racism. Listening to resources on protecting the vulnerable, the elderly, the disabled, the marginalized. Listening and thinking and praying. Slowly learning how to be better and how to help others to do the same.

I remember learning about Thoreau’s On Walden Pond. It was a survey class, so we didn’t pause long enough to fully read and examine the text, but I remember hearing how Thoreau retreated into a simple life connected to nature. Even when I learned that Thoreau considered “without support of any kind” to include his mother providing him with food and doing his laundry, I was still drawn to the idea of a space where I let go of my regular pursuits and focused instead on a life of contemplation. I always pictured traveling somewhere to achieve this. Yet when I did go to writing retreats, I often discovered myself beset with anxiety. Social anxiety around living with other people, and anxiety for the tasks and people I’d left behind. Anxiety and contemplation don’t co-exist very well.

One of the surprises of having all my travel canceled has been an increased connection to my house and my gardens. Neither is particularly large, nor particularly natural. Yet my house is surrounded by green things. Most of them are green things that I planted years ago that have thrived through benign neglect.

This evening I went to look at my grape vines. I was looking to see if there were any seedless grapes left. I thought there might be in the overgrown corner where the grape vines had swamped both a lilac bush and a rose of sharon bush. The under layers of the bushes had died for lack of sunlight leaving a twiggy impenetrable tangle where ripe grapes might be hiding. I’d only intended to seek grapes, instead I found myself slowly clipping away dead twigs and branches. I accumulated quite a pile that would make excellent starter material for a fire in our fire pit. In the process I created and arched hideaway where I could stand out of sight of most everything. Greenery overhead and on all sides. It was the kind of secret garden space I always longed for as a child. It was calming and contemplative to slowly transform the space clip after clip, twig after twig.

Last night I had a friend over for a visit. I placed our fire pit on the new patio flanked with chairs on opposite sides, a good six feet apart. We sat and talked for hours my friend and I as flames consumed branches that we cut from our trees years ago and stacked. Those stacks gathered spiders and bugs and dust. Now they are finally getting used. I want to burn all the old pest ridden sticks. It will make space for a new accumulation of dead wood from various corners of my garden. The contemplative act of tending my plants provides material for contemplating next to a fire. Strange how profoundly peaceful it can be to sit by a fire surrounded by darkness, even when the darkness is only my yard, and is ringed on most sides by street lamps and lights from signs or cars.

For so many years I had abandoned gardening as something I did not have time for. Life was too hectic. I lost something in choosing to let go of that piece. I also failed to comprehend that “gardening” isn’t just growing a vegetable garden or flower beds. Gardening is tending my outdoor spaces. It can be trimming trees or digging a patio. It can be trimming back twigs and marking vines according to which flavor of grape they grew, so that next spring I can make cuttings to give to friends. Gardening is tending. And it happens right here at home in between all my other things. I didn’t need to find time to run away from all my things so that I could be contemplative. I had to rearrange and re-prioritize so that mundane, time-consuming tasks forced me to slow down in contemplative ways.

There are things we all want back when the pandemic is over. However there are also changes I don’t want to lose.

I’ve been watching the Covid-19 numbers in my state pretty closely. At times it has felt like I was watching much more closely than my state leaders. They were being so very pleased about how the statewide numbers were going down while I was watching Utah County numbers hit new highs week after week. Until suddenly the Utah County numbers were high enough to drive up the statewide numbers. Which is how we land in this week. The governor moved Provo and Orem back to Orange alert level, and the Utah County Commissioners issued a mask mandate. Both steps toward quelling the increase in cases. But we still have to watch the spike play out for another two weeks before we can determine if enough has been done. For today, we hit another record high.

I would like for Orange status and more mask wearing to be sufficient. However I have concerns that this won’t be the case because I watch the news articles as well as the numbers. In just the past two weeks there have been two news articles about high school events which attempted to circumvent restrictions. Provo high attempted to move their football game one town south so they could have spectators in the stands (not allowed under the new Orange restrictions) The move was blocked, but the fact that it was attempted shows a mis-comprehension or denial of the need for restrictions.

Then a cheerleading fundraiser was run in opposition to guidelines one day after the school was shut down for two weeks because of a case spike. The spike was in part because of exposures in the cheerleading squad.

These two events are certainly not the only ones. The hard part is that I don’t think any of the people involved meant to do harm. Yet when a planned event collides with a pandemic restriction, it can be hugely difficult for the people involved in that event to change to meet the restriction. Any time an organizer changes an event, even when they are legally obligated to, they will have people angry at them. Also people become coaches or teachers because they want to provide opportunities for kids. It is very hard to ask them to disappoint those kids, hence the desire to somehow still deliver something, often a something that skirts the restrictions. The (admirable) desire to provide opportunities for kids is going to drive infection rates up as long as extra-curricular activities are allowed to meet in person.

Let’s go back to that “people will get mad” piece, because we have actual lawsuits where college students are suing their schools because of sub-par educational offerings. I saw a similar article a month ago featuring a different student and school.

I’m not sure what the student hopes to achieve. A refund maybe? Because I know that the school and teachers have delivered the best they possibly could under bad circumstances. I think the best response from the school would be a full tuition refund accompanied by revoking the credits the student earned during the semester. Unfortunately I don’t think that is a solution that universities can afford to apply often. In fact the economics of universities already mean that they lose money when students aren’t on campus. Having lawsuits just increases the financial pressure to bring students back to campus, and college students are a proven driver of infection.

So are prisons, and Utah has a problem there too.

Public health officials are trying to get the message out.

After all, when SLC issued a mask mandate in July, cases started declining. This leads officials to be hopeful that people wearing masks is all that is needed. Perhaps it was when kids weren’t in school, but now they are. And every day little Betsy sees her friend in class and begs for a play date. There are only so many times that Mom will say no before beginning to rationalize that they’re together at school anyway…

The thing is, Utah cases started to decline exactly when cases started declining nationwide. But right now cases are on the rise nationwide.

And the CDC thinks that 90% of the US population is still susceptible.

And locally, people are wrestling with whether to open things back up or shut them down. We’ve got some school districts returning to in person while others are going hybrid or going fully online.

There is no cohesive strategy for the state. And that is a problem because infection does not pay attention to county lines or district boundaries. A spike in cases leaks outward in unpredictable ways. Also as much as I believe it is important to prioritize lives over money, my state leaders tend to lean toward making sure the economy is healthy. They respond to economic decline by loosening restrictions, and now the jobs reports are saying that Utah unemployment is headed up.

I’m not surprised about that news either, because I notice my own behavior. As case counts rise, I begin mentally and emotionally hunkering down. I go fewer places and I spend less money. If others respond as I do, then high case counts will drive up unemployment even without government restrictions. This conclusion is supported in an analysis done by Chicago Booth Review. Though I argue that framing it as fear instead of public health awareness is a bit biased.

There are so many pressures on so many people from so many angles. I will be surprised if all we need is Orange status and a mask mandate. I think those can slow the spike, but not turn it around. We really need to turn it around before Halloween tempts people to trick or treat and Thanksgiving tempts families to gather for dinner.

9/27/2020 Edited to add: Saw an article about outbreaks at homeless shelters. Today’s numbers were steady with Saturday numbers when Sunday usually has a drop. If Monday stays steady too, we’re aimed for yet another new high. And I’m afraid that any gain made by the mask mandate and Orange restrictions will be offset by the fact that local LDS congregations are moving back to meeting weekly in a single session instead of once per month in two sessions. Meetings will be streamed for those who stay at home, but that still puts a group of people together every week on a schedule perfectly timed for transmission. Nope, mask mandate isn’t going to be enough.

Years ago we planted fruit trees and grape vines. The person who planted those things was one who did lots of home canning both for personal enjoyment and as part of a frugal lifestyle. Then I became a person who did not have time for canning. I was too busy with piles of other things to can more than occasionally. One of the unexpected things that 2020 has brought is the return of food preservation. It isn’t surprising really since I’ve spent significantly more time managing food resources since the beginning of quarantimes. We’ve been rotating our food stocks and making sure things are replaced as they are used. Noticing that the grapes are ripe and making plans to store them for later falls right into that food management process. So far we’ve put up two batches of grape juice, one batch of home made raisins, and one batch of pear butter. I’ve got some cooking pumpkins waiting to be turned into puree for making pies and pumpkin bread. The grape vines are still covered, so I’ve looked up a recipe for a savory compote. It is a cherry compote, but I’m going to see if it works with grapes.

I am not the only one with a renewed interest in home canning. The shelves were bare when I went looking for more mason jars. I was fortunate enough to grab some quart jars, which I’m going to need because the grape vines are still loaded. The reason I have time to delve back into home canning is that much of the actual labor of it has been off-loaded onto my in-house assistants. Two young adults with a vested interest in getting a paycheck are much better at getting the work done than they were as younger children whose Mom just asked them to work. Is all this home canning economical? Am I saving money? Probably not. In my very frugal years I did the math and home canning saved money only if I already had the jars and equipment and if the fruit was free. Also, you have to squint hard at the fruit being “free” because owning grape vines or fruit trees means vine/tree related chores. There are hours spend pruning and tending. Time-spent is a cost, even if it isn’t measured in dollars. However it does deliver flavors and foods that simply aren’t available in commercially produced products.

Mostly I know that there is something deeply soothing in preserving food for later use. It speaks to the panicky portions of my brain that want to be assured that no matter what happens we’ll be able to eat. It may not make sense financially, but I’ll take small reassurances and happiness where I can find them.