Greetings from Quarantine!

Hello world!

It's been a minute. In fact, it's been nearly two years. A million and ten things have happened in these two years but the biggest thing is definitely that in February I packed up my life and loaded it all into my trusty Honda Civic, Guthrie, and went on a winding road trip all over the country before ending in Austin, Texas.

I'd been here for all of three weeks when the Covid 19 craziness hit...and I now find myself sheltering in place with someone I've known for a month (hey, Sam!). It's going probably a lot like you might expect. And by that I mean we are surviving and it is sometimes odd and I am almost definitely talking more than Sam wants me to. Another roommate, Lily, has been here some of the time but is primary elsewhere for the time being, and so it's just Sam and I here at the house, day after day.

Have any of you had a hard time keeping track of the days? This is not something I particularly struggle with in a normal world, and I'm mostly still keeping track of the days now (it's FRIDAY as I write this), but also knowing what day it is matters very little to me because each day is just another day in a world that isn't demarcated by working days and non-working days. Allll of my days stretch out before me as non-working days (for at least the next four weeks, anyway) and there just doesn't seem much point to me in differentiating. I wonder if that's considered unhealthy? It's sort of the way I operated as a kid during summer, too. *shrug*

Speaking of summer! Since I'm in Texas now, the best thing about the quarantine has been the fact that it's NOT WINTER here and I can go outside and walk on trails and at parks and pick flowers. It's actually not summer here, which is probably good since Texas summer is supposed to be oppressively hot, but Texas spring, it turns out, is basically exactly what Maine summer is. I am a big fan. That being said, we're currently on day two of a ten-ish day rainy forecast. It's....not great. It's significantly harder to stay positive during quarantine when the sun isn't shining. I know a lot of you feel the same and I totally sympathize with all of you who are stuck inside because it's still winter where you live. Don't worry - it's April now and SPRING IS COMING!

Anyway. Life in Texas, before the shelter-in-place orders went into effect was going fairly well. I got a job almost immediately when I got here (at a restaurant which has since shut down and will hopefully open up again eventually) which was cool, and I was just starting to try to make some friends. I know that everyone (like, EVERYONE. In the whole world) is in the same weird limbo that I am in right now, but in some ways I still feel like I am in a stranger position than a lot of other people. Most of you were living your normal lives when business as usual either came to a grinding halt or was dramatically changed. Now you're in a season of pause before hopefully picking back up where you were (or close to it) and living life again. And yes, I know that for a lot of people things aren't just going to pick right back up. Nobody is going back to exactly where they were when the world got put on pause. Things will be different for all of us. I know this. But part of me is still really jealous of the people who get to resume something a lot closer to normal when this is all over. Because the life I was leading when we hit pause was very much already a pause for me - a transitional period that had been going on for a month already and I'd been working to settle in and move out of. So now I'm in a limbo in the middle of what was already a limbo for me! So strange. When everyone is allowed to go out and socialize again, I'm not going to have anyone to meet up with. The life I'm trying to settle into is now confined to one house and one other person. And while I'll be fine, and I know that there'll be all the time in the world to make friends on the other side of this quarantine, it's hard right now for me to imagine the world I'll be entering into. It's a free/bonus side order of scary along with the already overwhelming emotions that we're all having together (but separately) right now. It just feels like one more thing when I think about it.

So mostly I'm trying not to think about it. I'm living day to day. I'm figuring out each day what I want and need to do with it, and giving myself the space to do those things. I did come up with a list of goals for myself for this quarantine and typed them up on my typewriter (which somehow still works even though I've never replaced the ink ribbon and lord only knows how old it was before I got it about 8 years ago) but one of the items on my overarching goals list is to come up with goals for each day.

Today, my quarantine looked like barely getting my ass out of the house by noon and going for a walk and then changing into clothes that I haven't worn since I left my office job almost two months ago and even wearing high heels because I needed to feel something closer to normal and I wanted to sit down and FINALLY write this blog post. So that's what I did. I didn't manage to put together a fika for Sam, which I've been able to do every other weekday since I started them last week, but that's okay. It fell off the list of things to get done for today and I think the biggest gift we can all give ourselves right now is grace. It's okay to have days where you didn't get done what you thought would be your minimum. It's okay to have days where you literally have to force yourself into things just to get them done - but no day HAS to be like that, and certainly every day shouldn't. Only you can know what you need at any given moment. I think we're all just doing our best and that is - and needs to be - okay.

Anyway. More soon, hopefully.

For now, I hope all of you are safe and healthy. We're gonna make it. Warm and sunny days and happy times are coming. You're gonna make it.

Life Update.

Life has been astonishingly busy of late, and mostly that's been nice, although I could have done without the cold I think I got from not having three seconds to rest during the month of May. Oh well. You might have noticed that I didn't post here at all during the month of May and that this post is coming out on the very last day of June even though I was doing pretty well for the first four months of this year. All I can say is that life got crazy and it's pretty hard to write blog posts without a personal laptop. Shoutout to my friend Natasha who gave me her old iPad mini and even the little keyboard attachment that goes with it so that I could download things to watch on Netflix when I have wifi and watch things like Riverdale and Queer Eye (her suggestions) and which I've so far only used to read ebooks with. But it's also what I'm currently writing this blog post with, so I am grateful if bad at following directions/watching tv. Sue me.

Anyway, here are some of the things I've been up to in the past two months-ish. 

I went to Minnesota for a weekend and got to visit with many of the people I know and love there. It was really wonderful, although I wouldn't have hated having more time to spend than just Friday night through Monday morning. When I left Maine that day, it was still really cold here and hadn't really started feeling super Spring-y yet, and when I stepped out of the airport in Minnesota it was a balmy 74 DEGREES at 10pm. I was so pleased! My friend Sarah picked me up and we went to Pat's Tap and sat on the patio and ate cheese curds and caught up on life. Bliss, I tell you. 

I stayed with my friend Kendra, who was gracious enough to host me for the weekend even though it was the same weekend her boyfriend was moving in (whoops, my timing has rarely been excellent.) and it was really wonderful to get to catch up with her a bunch, too. On Saturday morning I headed out to get my hair officially un-purpled at my favorite salon in Minneapolis, because it'd been a while since I had a haircut I really loved. 

After my haircut I went back to Kendra's and we made our way to Northeast Minneapolis to check out art-a-whirl, which is a big art selling event that happens over a whole weekend, and also to meet up with my brother Jon and his girlfriend. We walked around for a while with them, checked out some cool art booths, chit chatted, whatever. Then Kendra and I headed out to the suburbs for dinner with my favorite family of ten. Well, actually, we visited the Johnson kids at the house for a while and then Nate drove Jen, Sarah, Kendra, and I to dinner in his new "dad van." (Shout out to Bethany for watching the kids so we could go out. That's not a fun thing to be stuck doing, but we appreciate that you did it!)

On Sunday, I went to the Kingfield Farmer's Market, which is tiny but lovely. Farmer's markets were something I loved about living in the city. Granted, Hallowell has a weekly farmer's market, too, but it only has like three booths and it's not the same. Then we walked around Lake Harriet and did some regular old errands and went to eat some yummy food at Hai-Hai and then went to IZZY'S where I bought an entire pint of midnight snack ice cream because it wasn't available as a flavor to get scoops of. #noregrets

That evening I went over to eat dinner with my former bosses from SiP and visit with them and their kids. It was really lovely to see them and catch up, especially since I got to see one's new house and hear about how the other just bought a house and it kind of blows my mind how much things can change in such a small amount of time. By the time I was done visiting with them, Kendra and Brian were already turned in for the night (I guess some people are better at going to sleep on time when they have to work in the morning....weird.) so I just headed straight to bed, too. In the morning my brother came to pick me up at Kendra's and then we got some coffee before hitting the road.






It was a long drive. Some ridiculous things happened over the course of the two day drive (like the part where the driver's side wiper went flying off as I took an exit just outside of Chicago in about five lanes of traffic and I couldn't see anything anymore cause the rain was no longer getting wiped away. Or the time my brother tried to get out of the car when we were at customs going into Canada because he didn't know that you should DEFINITELY NOT GET OUT OF THE CAR WHEN THERE ARE BORDER AGENTS WITH GUNS AROUND!!! You know, normal stuff like that.) but I'm not going to get into all of that. Suffice it to say that by the end of driving day two I was ready to not be in the car with him anymore.

A bunch of normal life stuff has happened since then, too, not least of which was my mom getting married (okay, that might not quite qualify as "normal life stuff" but whatever...) and getting a new position at my job with a lot more responsibility and just having very little time for anything at all. I also have a state park pass that gets a whole car full of people into Maine's parks, and I've been trying to utilize it every weekend. I've been to Popham a couple times and went to Damariscotta Lake with my friend Hailey and her kids one day, too. So if any of you want to hit up a state park beach this summer, let me know!





I'm attempting to do the expert level summer reading challenge on Goodreads, which means reading books that fulfill about ten categories for each June, July, and August (find it here). That's probably something I can do, except I forgot about it until June 20th which means I' started off pretty far behind....I think I'm only going to read books for mayyyybe 7 of the 11 categories for this month. Oh well. I have my whole list picked out for July, so I should do much better with that list.

And maybe I'll even write more than one blog post in the next two months. WHO KNOWS?!?!

On Potable Water

As any of you who live or work near me probably know, my town is currently under construction. They're tearing up the main road in order to level it out because it's basically been a huge hump my entire life. They named the project "Down with the Crown" which is actually pretty clever. Anyway the construction started at the beginning of April when they tore up the Northbound side of the road and the Southbound side won't be done until November (fingers crossed it actually gets done early, but we'll see!) with a "ceasefire" for the month of July. The traffic all got rerouted so there are a bunch of one way streets and it's a real pain but ultimately isn't that big of a deal.

Unfortunately, on Monday they hit a water main. My mom came over to my apartment to ask if my water was working and when I turned it on, it was just a trickle. Then we discovered letters telling us that the construction had hit the water main and that we'd need to boil all our water before drinking it or brushing our teeth with it until Friday, when the test results would come back. May I remind you that it was MONDAY at this point?!?! And when I tried to wash my dishes later that night it came out of the faucet brown. Decidedly not potable.

(Side note: my friend Lexi from China Lake Camp is the person who taught me about the difference between potable and palatable water. Potable means safe to drink, palatable means tasty. Plenty of water is potable but not palatable. But when a sign tells you there's no potable water available at a spigot or something, you got problems. So this whole no potable water in my town thing keeps reminding me of my friend Lexi. Kind of a silver lining!)

Luckily I had a jug of water in my fridge that I could use for drinking that night and brushing my teeth (Although let's be real, I totally kept accidentally using the tap water to rinse my toothbrush because it's just a habit, ya know? But I haven't died- or even gotten sick- yet!) and I decided to just not do my dishes. It was a bit of a struggle finding clean dishes, but the good news is that my mom lives right next door and she has about a zillion, so it was all good.

And, ultimately, Friday came around and I found out that the water is, in fact, safe to drink. Life as usual resumed. The week was a bit of a pain in the ass, but all things considered it was a pretty minimal impact. When I was at work I filled up my water bottles to make sure that I would have water to drink, and my toilet still worked and I was able to shower in my water. I just couldn't actually consume any of the water. It wasn't potable.

Here's the thing though: at no point in that week was I ever unable to get clean water. See, even if I hadn't had a safe water source at work every day I could have just boiled some water for five minutes and it would've been fine. I never bothered to do that because I didn't actually need to and also because my only pot is one that holds about three cups of water and I just figured it wasn't worth the effort to sterilize water in such small quantities. But if I'd needed to, I could have. Or I could have borrowed a larger pot from someone. I had many options at my disposal for how to manage my mini water crisis.

You know who doesn't have that? The residents of Flint, Michigan.

I went four days without in-home access to drinking water. It has been over two years since the residents of Flint found out that they didn't have drinkable water. And it's been over four years since their water was safe to drink and they didn't even know about it. But that's not even their biggest issue- their water is full of lead and other chemicals that aren't safe to bathe in, either. When they take showers and baths, they get rashes. The lead absorbs through their skin and causes internal bleeding! That is way WAY worse than anything I dealt with.

Here's something I read about a while ago: parents in Flint have to keep paying for their deadly water because children living in a house without running water could be taken away by Child Protective Services. COOL. You might be wondering why they wouldn't just move away. Well, first of all that's not always something people have the resources to do. But you know what another factor is that I just learned? People who live there aren't able to sell their houses (not that anyone would want to move there and buy them anyway) because it is illegal to sell a house with leaded water.

How many of you would be able to pick up and move your family somewhere safe and just eat the cost of the house you own? Probably not many. These people are literally trapped by the legal system, and their government recently ended its bottled water distribution for them. Meanwhile, the state of Michigan just granted access to Nestle to pump 100 million gallons of groundwater for basically no cost. WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK. Something is seriously wrong with the world. It makes me sick.

Something needs to be done for those people, and the answer for sure isn't just ignoring the problem. It is absolutely unthinkable that the government hasn't stepped in to rectify this situation. It is horrific that here in America, where we consider ourselves one of the leaders in health and safety of our citizens, we have allowed this water crisis to go on for so long. I am ashamed. We should all be ashamed. Consider the fact that we just bombed Syria because of their chemical weapons attack (first of all, bombing another country because of their acts of war and aggression makes ZERO sense to me, but that's another story) and then think about the way we have responded as a nation to SO MANY humans rights violations here. If the rest of the world conducted themselves the way we do, the United States should have been bombed for the ongoing poisoning of an entire city for YEARS. It is absolute insanity.

On a slightly more positive note, below is a video that I saw the other day that gives me hope. I don't think that this girl's invention is going to be able to help the people in Flint directly (they already know their water is poisonous), but it absolutely blows my mind that a child can see a problem in the world and have more sympathy toward it than the United States government and actually do something about it. This kid is my hero. I hope she continues for the rest of her life to be as persistent and dedicated to making the world a better place as she is as a twelve year old. I wish that half of our elected leaders were as moved to help the people of this country as this girl is. I hope that someday we learn how to take care of each other a little better.