corona diary

SIP Day 54, wearing a black tank and brown linen pants; writing from the desk in my home office; 73 degrees outside today.

To offset some of the strangeness and outright difficulty of sheltering-in-place for two months, I’ve allowed myself a variety of small pleasures to offset stress:

• Not wearing shoes (unless I am mowing the lawn)
• buying a package of rainbow Tombow marker pens and using them to take notes in my (endless) Zoom meetings
• drinking an afternoon cuppa, with tea from the Tea Grotto
• a cheery vial of essential oils to freshen my yoga mat
• a Kundalini yoga course on the Insight Meditation App

What are your simple pleasures during this stressful time?

SIP Day 53, wearing a brown sleeveless maxi-dress, writing from the desk in my home office; 73 degrees outside today.

Today was back-to-back meetings and emails coming in faster than I could read them. 
It was a lunch of homemade chicken salad on homemade bread, by Stijn. 
It was students anxious about the end of the semester. 
It was colleagues with so many questions about what's next for our campus. 
It was text messages from friends and kiddos throughout the day
 reminding me to re-connect.  
It was a cat throwing up at my feet during a Zoom thesis defense. 
It was beautiful weather that I forgot to notice until the sun was setting and then 
it was some small flies hovering over our pasta dinner as we ate together and shared all that had happened.

SIP Day 52, wearing a striped cotton tank and black linen joggers, writing from the desk in my home office; 73 degrees outside today.

It’s the last week of the semester. We will spend this weeks’ classes getting closure on many of the big ideas that we’ve worked with throughout the semester as well as having the student groups get peer feedback on the final draft of the their Final Projects. It’s a time of many endings.

I have also been taking a class this semester, in User Experience Design. I thought it would be wise for me to have more background in this area due to the fact that I am working with software interfaces all day long. Though many come “out of the box” and we don’t have control over the design, we can control customize some elements of the software experience, and of course we can control how we do outreach and training on the software. Most of what I learned this semester has underscored to me that users have very idiosyncratic ways of approaching new tools based on past behavior and that it’s important to take that into account. I also had my own “user experience” this weekend by playing around with a new to me application: TikTok. I learned a lot from “fiddling” around with it and am getting some ideas about how I would like to create some content for my little homestead garden for the platform.

Bonus: so much kawaii on Tiktok: I am especially loving the goat, calf, and piglet videos.

SIP Day 45, wearing black tshirt and blue cotton shorts, writing from my home office; 82 degrees outside today

The garden is exploding with plants and about-to-be-ripe tomatoes and zucchini. The corn is about 5″ tall now, although we have lost some to crows. My garden tasks this evening include planting some parsley that we raised from seed, piling some more soil on the potato beds, and pulling weeds.

Other things I have accomplished today:

• worked for 8 hours and wrote 32 emails and uncounted numbers of Teams messages
• ate a large salad that Stijn made, for lunch
• ordered a Mother’s Day gift for Mom and a book-gift for a dear friend who was recently released from the hospital
• made a to-do list in my day planner

Reading: Nightingale

Watching: Crip Camp (which made me sob. I owe so much to the folks who sat-in for 504 and agitated for the ADA)

SIP Day 44, wearing black tank top and blue cotton shorts, writing from my the living room couch; 78 degrees outside today and slightly windy

My favorite household chore is vacuuming. So much so that if I am really upset I will just go through the house and give it a good vacuuming to calm down.

Like vacuuming, I love mowing the lawn. Generally we employ a gardener to mow our front and back lawns, but at the beginning of S-I-P, we asked the gardener to only mow the front and we took over the care of the backyard. We are letting the “middle” of the back lawn grow wild and tall and I am mowing each week around the garden beds, trees, and around the outdoor kitchen area. While I am mowing I am ebullient, and then after I’m done I have to sit on the back porch for about an hour admiring my handiwork. I also have an edger and I “edge” around the garden beds, trees, and the cinderblock walls.

It’s nice to have the time to vacuum and mow and also the time to admire the investment of effort.

SIP Day 43, wearing maroon tank top and blue linen shorts, writing from my the living room couch; 82 degrees outside today

A friend came by today and we sat ten feet away from each other in the backyard and talked for 2 hours. The last time I spent time with a friend was March 14.