Our county commissioners, God bless ’em, reinstated a mask mandate for the entire county on Thursday night. At first they excluded the two main cities. I guess that they thought that the cities’ leadership would do the right thing. But they weaseled out, and so the county health department took charge.
It’s hard to come up with stuff to write about right now…we don’t really go anywhere. Sandy went shopping a couple of places with his N95 mask on. There’s a winter storm coming, about which the forecasters are wildly divergent in predicting the severity. This morning the forecast for here doesn’t seem as bad, but it doesn’t take a lot of freezing rain to be a bad storm here. I need to go out and buy some ingredients for lasagna and soup, as well as beer and my favorite sparkling water. My expectation is that there will be shortages, so I will adjust accordingly.
I’ve dropped a few pounds, but I don’t recommend the anxiety diet. It’s nice that anxiety has one perk, though.
Recently several old friends from the 80s and 90s have gotten in touch. It’s been a little weird. I find it touching that they want to reconnect, but I don’t feel like I am at all the same person that I was back then. I have the same twisted sense of humor, but I have zero tolerance for any behavior that I find uncomfortable, including heavy partying. Have I mentioned that I used to regularly close down a dive bar, and drink until I blacked out on occasion? My guess is that these folks have had to cut back way back as well, because our aging livers can’t take it any more. So it’s probably fine. We can’t go out and meet each other anyway. At least, I won’t.
It’s a relief that I am not an alcoholic. I worried that I was for years because it runs in my family, as my mother used to warn me. Now one beer at the end of a work day is enough. And I don’t always do that. This is another way that anti-depressants saved my life.
I guess I’ll run over to the arts center and pack up some more stuff. I need to clear out some space for it first. Maybe I should get going on those collage packets that I keep saying I’ll make for sale or for giving away? I still will need to store them though. I’ve decided that I will probably ship the Macomber loom and my yarns and other fiber supplies to Portugal when we move, but I can pick up collage material anywhere. That’s part of the magic of it.
Focus on Book Arts published their schedule yesterday and as usual it is really hard to choose, especially since I’ve not taken a class with any of the instructors. Some of the ones that I gravitate to are offered on the same days, of course. Maybe I will have to pin the schedule to a bulletin board and throw darts at it. The last time I went I took a two day workshop, took one day off, then took another two day workshop. It was pretty nice to have that break, but I have a feeling that I won’t be able to resist filling up every day of the retreat. We’ll probably stay in the dorms this time since they now let us use the air conditioned dorms and the AirBNB that we loved doubled its price. The last time we stayed on the top floor of a dorm without AC it was 95-100 degrees. Tough weather these days in the Pacific Northwest. We’re used to having AC in the South, but their weather has more extreme heat that ours does!
Okay, time to get out of here before the ice starts, if it starts, tonight. I gathered up some kindling and a few of the driest logs I could find in case we lose power and put them on the front porch, but – knock wood – we seldom lose power here. It’s one of the excellent virtues of this house. Then I’ll focus on weaving tapestry and clearing out some collage material over the three day weekend. If the weather is bad, I may have some nice ice photos later.
slowly she turned 