SIP Day 42, wearing light blue sleeveless top and black linen joggers, writing from my home office; 77 degrees outside today
Of late I’ve been feeling fairly neutral about being stuck at home. I have an easy rhythm to my days and I’m not nearly as angry or scared as I was that first week or two.
Until today. For some reason I feel really sad, and I am actively having to hold back tears so I can continue on with my all-day Zoom-meeting schedule. I don’t really know why I’m sad, I just am.
I want to escape the sad and a glass of wine and a bowl of ice cream both occur to me as ways I might escape, but at the same time I don’t want to escape at all. I just want to cry.
I don’t know if this is corona-related sadness or just the result of too much time spent typing at a keyboard and some attendant stress from some of my work situation. And of course I know it’s okay to be sad and to cry and I can do that if I want to. I just wonder, why today?
SIP Day 41, wearing a green striped top and tan linen crops, writing from the living room couch; 73 degrees outside today
It is very rare that I’ve ever written about work on my blog and I am not sure that I plan to change that in the future. But it seemed right to mention a few things today.
I enjoy my work as an IT Director for Chapman University and I take it very seriously. I wouldn’t say that I am a workaholic but others sometimes observe to me that I work a lot. My work is not hard, but it is consuming and I like to do it well. Also, I feel what I do is important and that I can make a difference and that drives some of my persistence about work-related tasks.
My role in the past six weeks has been particularly challenging due to moving the faculty from teaching face-to-face to teaching online. It has given me more than enough to do to fill the days at home and has caused the days to slide by incredibly quickly. I start the day on camera with a Teams meeting in my home office and often find myself sitting in that same chair eight hours later after back-to-back meetings. Many weekends I am also sitting in that same chair doing grading, class prep, or solving work-related problems.
During S-I-P Stijn has also been working while at home and the two of us are generally on opposite ends of the house in Zoom/Teams calls. We meet for lunch and occasionally bump into each other while using the restroom or getting a drink of water. It’s great to get to eat in the garden together nearly everyday, but this also means that work is an ever-present part of nearly every waking hour because work happens in my own living space. So as much as I enjoy the short commute and lunch hour with my spouse, I will relish the moment when I can, once, again, leave my work “at the office” and come home.
SIP Day 40, wearing a grey cotton tshirt dress (so cozy), writing from my home office; 75 degrees outside today
I feel that I am talking so much more than I used to when I was working in person, on campus. Perhaps it is because it seems so much easier to call a colleague through Teams or Zoom than it does to fire off an email. Perhaps because I’m craving the satisfaction of hearing a voice on the other end of the line rather than seeing another email message piling up in my inbox.
In normal times I almost-never call my friends or family on the phone. That has changed so much. Now most days I call someone after work or after dinner. And the weekend is full of calls and online meetings with the folks that I care about.
In normal times when I get home from work I typically want a few hours where I don’t talk to anybody. I want to stop hearing the sound of my own voice for awhile.
SIP Day 39, wearing a navy blue cotton top and cropped chinos, writing from my home office; 83 degrees outside today
We planted corn 2 weeks ago and the stalks are now about 3″ high. Watching the seeds emerge and grow taller every day has been a good way to mark time.
SIP Day 38, wearing a navy blue cotton sundress, writing from my home office; 80 degrees outside today
Many years ago, when I was an avid blogger, I would share or link to poetry on Mondays. I can’t remember exactly how this began, but it came from my love of Mary Oliver’s poetry and so I called this weekly feature “Mary Monday.”
Since I began blogging two decades ago, I have all-but-lapsed the past few years, posting only once or twice per year, when I used to post twice per day (generally one text post, one photo post). It feels right to pick up this practice again now, if only in some small effort to document my daily tasks/thoughts/work/reveries. Also, in the past 10 years WordPress has changed significantly, and it seems a worthy project to teach myself how to use the new editor.
So true to the roots of Mary Monday, you might consider spending some time with poet Mary Oliver today, being interviewed about her craft, and specifically, about her mornings:
And below is a bit of a Mary Oliver poem that resonates specifically with me, as she seems to be imagining herself becoming a fish or a mermaid, or remembering some past primordial self where she was a creature of the water:
An excerpt from The Sea, by Mary Oliver
Stroke by stroke my body remembers that life and cries for the lost parts of itself– fins, gills opening like flowers into the flesh–my legs want to lock and become one muscle, I swear I know just what the blue-gray scales shingling the rest of me would feel like!
Today is Day Number 36 of California’s “Shelter-in-Place” order. For most of those 36 days I have been preoccupied with work tasks related to aiding our faculty in moving from face-to-face instruction to online instruction. Thus far, very few people in my social circle have been directly impacted by COVID-19.
Our world is small. Our bedroom, our backyard, the hours spent looking at my computer screen in my office. I Zoom several hours per day. I run all of my calls and chats through Microsoft Teams. I check in with my kids via text message and cellphone calls a few times each week. My eldest is living with my Mom in Utah and my youngest is living in Washington D.C. with her toothless cat.Some days I am afraid, some days I am bored. Some days I want to eat something other than the groceries we have delivered via Instacart.
Today’s projects included planting dill, basil, and tarragon that we grew from seed, in our herb garden. I also folded some laundry, mopped the kitchen floor, and finished reading The Parable of the Sower. Ironically, it’s the first novel I’ve been able to start and finish since S-I-P. My attention span has been so short and novels haven’t been able to hold my interest. Next, I plan to read through the stack of books that I bought from a charming little bookshop we discovered in Avila Beach, when we went to Central California in early March (which now feels a lifetime ago).
This is the story of Elly (nee Ellan Vannin) who joined our family seventeen years ago. We chose her at the local animal shelter, she was born there in a litter of other tuxedo kittens. All of her siblings were adopted and only she remained out of the bunch, likely because all of them had symmetrical masks and her face was not. We fell in love with her liveliness right away. As a kitten she loved to climb up my body like a tree and sit on my shoulder under my hair and watch everything I was doing. She especially loved to sit on my shoulder while I was cooking.
She was our “high places” kitty, who loved standing on the tops of doorways, on mantles, and on high bookshelves.
As the years passed she gained great fame for her hunting skills, and would terrorize me by bringing home possums, birds, lizards and rodents (both dead and alive). No one who attended our wedding dinner will ever forget the rat-of-unusual-size that she killed that night (photo not included).
One thing that most people did not know about Elly, was how she would comfort me if I ever was crying–she could tell if I was upset and would come right over to me and stand at my feet mewing until I’d pick her up and she would snuggle into my chest and purr until I’d calmed down. She saw me through some hard times: hospitalizations, surgeries, divorce, and those awful days that I put Stijn or the kids on a plane and would come home and sob into my pillow.
She loved to eat the strangest things: such as bolognese sauce, avocadoes, hummus, raspberries:
This past week I could see that she was not quite herself, she stopped enjoying cheese treats and was only barely able to nibble on the scrambled egg with cream that we prepared for her last night.
This morning it was obvious that she was not going to bounce back this time and so she and I spent a few hours telling stories and visiting all of her favorite haunts in the house and the backyard. She got a last nap in the sun and a last roll on the pavement and then just an hour ago she curled up in my arms in front of the fire and took her last breaths.
It’s just so hard to believe that I will never get to kiss that velvety little nose ever again.
There is nothing like staying at home for real comfort.
Jane Austen
While I know that getting “outside of my comfort zone” is a fine way to challenge myself into trying something new, so much of this past year I’ve spent finding and curating my “comfort zone” through making our house into a space that I’m eager to come home to every evening (and hate to leave every morning). It’s certainly no coincidence that my most-used hashtag on social media is #theresnoplacelikehome, because it’s really true for me, at this stage of my life.
A few things that have made our home even more cosy and hard-to-resist:
Kitties who race to the door to meet me whenever I cross the hearth.
Two fireplaces that we use every night in winter–it is so hard to top the coziness of a glowing hearth on a winter night.
My office, for “getting things done.” This space helps me to be perfectly productive because it has everything I need (and want) at hand and I am rarely interrupted when I’m working there.
Houseplants that make my heart sing, each one carefully selected for shape/color/texture. I not only talk to my plants all of the time, but I also give them a weekly leaf massage.
The cosiest-imaginable bed, with the plushest flannel winter sheets(I first experienced these sheets in an AirBnb and had to go right out and get my own set). We also recently upgraded to a Casper mattress and pillows, which are pure comfort and make my back and neck so happy.
And this is what I was repeating in my mind last night as I sat alone at home listening to porting rain and thunder and wondering if it was worth keeping the commitment I’d made to race in my one-person canoe this morning. Because, for all the many hours that I’ve spent out on the water on my canoe, I’ve never actually raced on it. And so I when I registered for the “Off Da Couch”race a few weeks ago, I was actually on half-sure that I would follow through. Not only is racing hard work, but it’s so different than setting out for a solo Lido loop where I can go at my own pace and avoid everyone else. Racing puts you into a pack of boats and you need to be aggressive (i.e. hold your line even when others are around you) rather than go the long way around anyone else. I’m not particularly good at being aggressive and I loathe when others cut in front of me and put me at risk of capsizing. And of course deep down I was wondering if I had the courage to deal with the fact that I could possibly be DFL if I were to race…
But I did it.
I wasn’t last place and I did cut someone else off around a turn but it wasn’t intentional (I apologized even as he cursed me). I came in 3rd in my division (Masters) and smack-dab in the middle of the pack of racers. Perhaps my brightest moment during the race was in the last third where everyone else was obviously tired out, but I got my second wind. I was right between two other women on canoes and I realized that being the middle I was going to get sandwiched and I considered putting my paddle into the water to stop my boat from being squeezed and let them go ahead. But instead I turned on my power, paddled super-hard for about 45 seconds and zoomed between and past both of them. That felt pretty good.
But besides the logistics of the race itself, there’s one more part of this story I need to tell. Eight years ago I bought my one-man canoe with a little bit of money that I inherited from my grandmother. The canoe was used, but sturdy and lightweight, and I knew when I saw her that she was just perfect for me. However, it was an OC-1 canoe, which was steered with foot pedals. I knew I couldn’t steer it with the pegleg I wear on my right side in the water, so I brought my boat to Sam Couch who had a repair shop at the Newport Aquatic Center (NAC), and asked him for some help in modifying it to meet my needs. We talked through a few strategies for re-routing the steering and he made a few other fixes (including a rudder upgrade) to the boat so it would suit me well. In the years since it’s been perfect for me and all my miles of solo paddling, and of course I’ve never forgotten Sam’s helpfulness and creativity in making my boat work just right for me. So it was a privilege to paddle in today’s race, which was named in his honor for all of his contributions to the NAC and the outrigger community over the years. Paddling has been my primary physical outlet through so many hard times and I am so very fortunate to have a vibrant community (NAC, ImuaOCC, OffshoreOCC, SCORA, etc) to support me.*
*hats off to my Offshore teammates Mark and Bob who helped with transporting my boat to the race, too!
The past few days I’ve been moving to a new office space at work. The new digs are modeled on thecompletely open office concept of Facebook (fwiw, I know FB is evil, but I do think they do some things right):
I know there’s been a lot of research showing that completely open office plans can disrupt attention. However, it can also contribute to an ethos of collaboration and openness, which is what I’m seeking to create in this new space. In our division we are working to bring people into the space to experiment with technology, and want to reinforce the ideas of visibility and creativity. I believe this open-office concept is a very visual and impactful way to send that message.
Was happiness so bound up with the knowledge that it was also ephemeral? And was it therefore always to be accompanied by the stubborn fear of its loss? Something wasn’t right. And yet she believed that she had developed an unusual capacity to ruin her own good fortune with this anxiety, this expectation of something going wrong.
~Richard Bausch, Hello to the Cannibals
This was one moment in the book that resonated with me on a fairly deep level. I was raised on the notion that one could not know happiness without also knowing a corresponding sadness, and it seems to me that every happy moment in my life has held the shadow of the days where things have been equally awful.
I love how Bausch is able to capture that so well in this quotation. It happens in a moment where the protagonist has no idea that there is a huge amount of sadness in her future, it’s a foreshadowing of what’s to come. But of course life is not as tidily constructed as a novel and I wonder if it isn’t possible just to be happy for awhile, without it inevitably leading to a time of despair?
