It’s OK to grieve what’s lost.

I grieve for:

• Trying out new restaurants
• Sitting at a bar with X with a couple of interesting beers waiting for food to come
• Montreal
• Boston
• Planning a vacation
• Cirque du Soleil
• Our annual bike down the St. Jean Richilieu
• New York
• Extreme Beer Fests
• Getting my eyebrows done
• Hitting downtown Burlington and being able to enter places & pick a restaurant at whim
• Seeing my mother-in-law in North Carolina for the holidays
• Having Tgiving at Ruth & John’s
• The Route 66 road trip I was supposed to take with Maggie
• My High Holydays at sheep & wool

And I am grateful for:

• Food. Lots of it. The good stuff.
• That I enjoy cooking
• Takeout
• Books
• The library & Phoenix bookstore are still functional
• Fiber to make beautiful things with
• Healthy goats who don’t even know what’s going on
• Vermont – never been more grateful for you than this year
• My health
• My marriage
• My home
• That I have always worked from home and can continue to do so

Alcohol purchases are up something like 10-20% in Vermont, I think I read. FB is full of memes about how drunk we are all getting. But in fact I’m drinking less than ever. Without going out, I don’t find myself sitting there with a tempting draft list waiting for food to come. I was never big on drinking at home in the first place. I’ve cut back now more than ever. For me, the pleasure of alcohol is how it makes me happy in a social situation or a one-on-one. I particularly like wine on an empty stomach with some carbs – i.e. red wine at an Italian restaurant with your bread basket waiting for the food. The booze + carbs is a good combo for me. And I just don’t indulge that way at home. I’d rather eat calories than drink them. I’d rather have a good dessert. Because drinking doesn’t make me feel good per se, or let me really forget any of the problems of the world. So why do it? I have less and less reason.

Avoid this paragraph if you don’t want anything depressing: the other day I listened to a podcast featuring an expert other than Dr. Osterholm (yes, I cheated on him). It was a Dr. Foege and here’s what kind of depressed me. He recently worked with the CDC to come up with four phases of prioritization for getting a hypothetical COVID vaccine. And basically, people like me and Xopher, who aren’t essential workers, don’t have pre-existing conditions, etc.? We’re last in line. Next, the hypothetical vaccine is not likely to be 100% effective, far from it. So even with vaccines, we all still have to wear masks, avoid crowds, and socially distance. So wait a minute. We’re all pining for the vaccine, and even once it gets here, and even once WE get it, it still won’t change a damn thing about our day to day life? What will? Apparently, we can all only get back to “normal” when the virus is effectively eliminated. Take a look at how many assholes live in this country, who are so uncooperative with mitigations strategies as to be openly hostile at times. Think long and hard about how long it’s going to take to effectively eliminate the virus under the conditions we’ve got.

Told you it would be depressing.

I’m not done yet. Time for my workday to begin.

I (and each of my teammates) won an award at work, because things went south in August and we all worked so hard to make them right. I searched the website and actually could not find a kitchen gadget I wanted. This bag caught my eye though, for the color, obviously. It’s called “arugula.” I’ve never owned such a chichi bag in my life. It actually came with another bag to keep the bag in. I look forward to sporting it at Hannaford’s.

I had off today. Xopher did not. The guy doing the trim on the never-ending window replacement did not. So I could not sleep late and I could not go anywhere with my S.O. I passed the morning making a mini pumpkin chocolate chip bread, carding some ruby-amethyst mohair, doing a bit of an easy 16×16 sudoku, raking out the barn a bit. After lunch I took a bike to town hall to drop off our ballots! Then I went to Phoenix Books to slake my never-ending bookthirst, and then took a scenic drive to capture a couple of more Vermont towns for my VT251 club project. Was an OK day.

My endorphins for some reason are on the rise.

Below is my new office window, twice the size as it was before; and my new Verilux, which is a SAD*-alleviating light source put out by a company in Waitsfield VT. My neurologist recommended it. So far it’s 100% effective!

And OMG just look at the pretty fall picture outside those windows. I like to think of my widows as picture frames. Lots of people would pay money for pictures like that.

* Seasonal Affective Disorder

This barn was full of 184 bales of hay; they were all transported from the wagon into the barn, and then from the barn up into the hayloft, by the two of us, this weekend.

I need to quit Facebook and I need to quit the news. I MEAN IT.

I asked my friends, if any of them started talking about the debate, to please not talk to me about it. And of course they obliged. But when I tried to look at my FB feed that’s all it was! It’s all national politics. I wish there were no such thing as cross-posting. If everyone had to think up their own things whenever they wanted to share, there’d be so much less talk about anything.

National politics is a dumb game. I don’t care if I’m called a coward or willfully ignorant. It’s such a stupid shitshow. How little of it actually trickles down to affect our lives? I’m not saying I won’t vote. I’m saying I’m not tuning into the soap opera.

And I know the fault’s with me. I look at FB or the news telling myself I won’t read anything about Trumpass, but I do. I realize it’s an addiction. That’s why I’m trying to hold myself accountable here.

My display this year is set up in the mudroom, whence I will be participating in the Virtual Fair.

I’m not going to wear the Party Goat shirt, though.

Me doing nothing on my screen porch this morning:

And my entire carrot crop:

I feel like today was god’s way of telling me, “I got your back.”

The absolutely unbelievably idyllic setting would be reason enough.

But I need. I want. I am drawn. I want to work those looms.