The "covid" normal

I am tired. While I basically stayed and worked from home for well over a month after each of my knee replacement surgeries and my hip replacement surgery and my neck fusion surgery, this is different. This time it’s not my choice.  While I may go to the grocery store occasionally or to Walmart to get supplies for making masks, I find my days filled with nothing, yet totally full.

I start the day by reading the paper, part of which I already read in online articles the day before. Then I check my emails and find an overwhelming number of COVID 19 updates and “Breaking News”, which essentially are a conglomeration of all the news reports that have been being sent out.  MAYBE, they have updated the numbers, or MAYBE, there is one short article that is actually new, but definitely wouldn’t be considered NEWS, just a filler article. As soon as I think I have finished and can go on to something else, another one comes in, that is again, just filler.  I am at the point, where I glance at the title of the articles and then just delete the email.

Then there are all the emails that come almost daily from different companies I have done business with.  They seem to alternate between “We’re here for YOU”, to “We need you to keep using our services or giving us money so we don’t close”, to “we are closing to keep our employees safe”. Then there are the business news reports that talk about companies that don’t expect to reopen.

When I read the paper, I check the obituaries, wondering if anyone I know is in them.  I start to wonder, how many people I know who won’t be around a year from now, whether it’s due to COVID19 or other causes.  How will I know what they succumbed to or when? I use to joke that I would probably end up being one of those people who were dead in their house for over a year before anyone realized it, because people would just think I was off someplace.  Now I wonder how many people I know will actually have that happen to them and I am thankful that the church and other organizations are calling people and checking in on them (though having a guy I didn’t know from Bank of America call me today, gave me pause as I wasn’t sure if he was really from Bank of America or was a scammer who was trying to get personal info from me).  I’m sure many small business owners feel that their companies will end up being forgotten about while they are closed and if they never reopen, most people won’t realize it for quite awhile, if ever. I’m digressing aren’t I?

I find that I can spend hours trying to find the “best” pattern and method for making a face mask.  But does it really matter?  I think what matters is having something, even if it’s not the “best”.  Besides, I can’t make one of the BEST masks and even if I could, those are (rightly so) reserved for medical personnel and first responders.  All I need is something that will protect my family and getting something DONE, will protect them faster than getting nothing done while I search for the “best” pattern. 

By the way, I found an article in HuffPost and MSN.com that said to use nonwoven grocery bags for filters, said it was the same polypropylene material used in the N95 masks, whether that is really true or not, I don’t know.  CDC says just to use layers of cotton fabric. Wonder if my cotton polyester blend will be ok??????  It’s what I started with, then I went through old linens and found some cloth napkins and old tea towels – made them mistake of washing them with some new red cloth napkins and even with a Shout Color Catcher in the wash, everything came out pink….  Except for the items that were all synthetic..  Think I may have found a solution for elastic – am going to take it out of old contour sheets that are in the rag bin (one is now pink) and maybe cut up the sheets for masks as well.  But then how many masks do I need?????  A clean one everyday, but I do the laundry several times a week and can wash by hand.  My son however, probably needs at least 7.  But I digress again…

As I go through my days, I think of my military career and times that somehow seen similar to now.  When I was stationed in Korea, very much a 2nd world country 40+ years ago, where for most of the population the toilet was a hole in the ground (not even an outhouse, just a hole) and even the sewer lines from the house I lived in off base, just dumped into the lot behind the house, but I digress.  The higher ups, wanted to keep the guys out of the off base bars as much as possible (they had uni-sex bathrooms in the bars with the stalls (they at least did have stalls) located past the urinals.  That was also during the age of “one piece party suits” where women had to undress almost totally to use the toilet), but again, I digress – somehow my focus doesn’t seem to stay very focused these days.  In order to keep the guys out of the bars a bit more, we worked 5 ½ days a week.  And every day was basically the same. It was a REALLY BIG DEAL, when the BX got in tiny little black and white portable TVs!!!  I managed to get over there fast enough to get one, but even with that distraction available (mainly old British TV shows), when we were off work, the days and nights were basically all the same.  Mike had to buy me a Seiko watch that had both the DAY and the DATE on it, because I could never tell what the day or date were.  My fit bit doesn’t do that for me, and I get tired of looking at my phone to figure it out, so I may go back to wearing my old watch.

Then there were always the known “slow times”, times like between Christmas and New Years, when many people took leave and things didn’t have their normal quick turn around pace. We would all say to each other, I’ll be able to “catch up” then, to take care of some of those projects that needed to get done, but didn’t  have a priority or a deadline associated with them.  Then those times would come, and we would find that without the normal fast pace of things going on around us, we found it hard to concentrate and to get those things done after all. Somehow our mindset was more: I have time, so I don’t need to rush to get it done now, I can actually take time, and then suddenly, the slow period would be over and the project might have been touched, but seldom was it completed.

I have tons of things that I “THINK” I need to do, from watching training podcasts, “live” virtual meetings and webnars, on for work.  But I find that as I sit there, trying to focus, they either tend to go too slowly with information that is too basic and I lose interest, or they aren’t set up where I can be physically attempting to do the things they are teaching while they are showing me how to do it, so while I take notes, I don’t get as much out of them.  

There’s always sorting through things, trying to “cull” the assortment of “stuff” in the house, but as boxes fill up with things to donate and the recycle bin is filled time and again, it’s difficult to try to focus on how to “reorganize” things to put away the things that are going to be kept and then hopefully know where they are later, since the place they were in originally and where I had kept them for years, isn’t as appropriate any longer.  It was easier when we moved every few years, since that forced us to get rid of things before we moved and then organize them anew when we moved into a new home, since storage areas never remained the same from home to home.

Marketing is always on my “to-do” list.  As a Realtor, I only get paid when a home closes.  I can market my services to someone for years, only to have them, when they are ready to work with a realtor, chose the first one who crosses their path, so I have to constantly keep marketing to keep my name first in their minds.  In today’s COVID19 stress filled world, though, it is hard to know how to do that. There are a massive amount of companies and “speakers” who want to tell me how to do it and more importantly sell me THEIR product to help me do it, but in my head, I keep pointing out to myself, that we’ve never been in this situation before, so you are only guessing on what will work, you really don’t know any more than I know and am already doing.  That said, the company keeps providing me with more and more resources to help me not only do business in a virtual reality real estate world, but to market myself in it as well, but that does get back to all those webnars, podcasts and virtual meetings that I need to sit through.

Making masks has a certain appeal, as I can actually finish several masks and see progress!! Rather than just feel like I am moving things around, once I’ve found the right pattern and the right materials, of course.

Over the past few years, Mike has gradually taken over doing more and more of the cooking, but now I find myself looking for something to creatively fix – today I actually went out to the yard and picked wild violets, because a recent St Louis Mag online article gave a recipe for wild violet simple syrup and I thought to myself, why not? I have plenty of wild violets in the yard and I have the rest of the ingredients on hand.  Not quite sure what I’m going to do with it once I have it made (the accompanying article was about making cocktails with it, and I don’t plan to do that, but maybe adding it to a baked good for a difference in flavor might be interesting…… I digress again.

Where was I??  Oh yes, trying to stay focused. I feel like I am in a maze, rather than a labyrinth, since it’s easy to get lost in a maze as you have different paths you can chose, while a labyrinth has only one path that leads you to the center and back out again as you meditate and lean on GOD for help. Perhaps, I should draw a path in my head that goes through the rooms on my house as a labyrinth and leads me to the center and back out again, rather than the convoluted, winding, twisting paths that I keep making that remind me of the paths little Jeffrey in Family Circus makes as he goes through the neighborhood on his way home, making a short trip into a very long one…  But that’s what I just did, didn’t I?  My short little tale got longer and longer as I digressed and my mind splintered and wove its way through what I was trying to say.  

Before I digress once more, it’s time to say Adieu and go seek my labyrinth to bring me back home and into focus.