Just about three weeks in, I am finally feeling a bit of routine here. I have almost stopped writing myself a nightly list of tasks to take care of the following day. There is nothing, really, that needs to be done on a given day save to put the trash and/or recycling at the top of the driveway Tuesday mornings. And whereas I used to feel discomfort on the rare day for which I had no list, I feel just fine without one now. Perhaps the novelty of the new normal is wearing off.
The lack of things on a list seems to be making me calmer. The husband has described me as a light switch--two extremes, on or off, when it comes to my reactions. I appear to be moving toward rheostat mode. After three or so days of mask-making, I cleared the mask materials up and picked up the quilt I had been quilting before the mask intervention. The quilt is basically one large piece of fabric over another. My quilting is following lines in the the top fabric. The fabric is a beige shade, a faintly yellow white. After cleaning up the mask detritus, I switched Xena (Xena, the warrior Bernina) to her walking foot, picked up the thread in the little catch-all to the right of Xena, and commenced quilting. As I was picking things up to go upstairs for lunch, my eye caught the fact that I was using an ever-so-slightly different shade of thread. The difference did not really show up on the front, but it was evident, at least to my eye, on the back. I found the correct spool of thread to Xena's left. You can imagine the profane thoughts accompanying this discovery.
While lunching and reading some of the morning papers, I went back and forth as to whether I should take out the quilting I had done and replace it using the correct thread. And that's what I did after lunch. I descended to the sewing room/studio and picked out the off-color quilting. I then folded the quilt up with the proper colored spool of thread in the middle, and postponed additional quilting until a new day. No fuss. No muss. No profanity uttered out loud. I knew what I needed to do and did it.
Is the sheltering, quarantining, or hermitting making me more mellow? That appears to be the case. I wonder if that is because there is so much less in my life now that I can really control that I don't feel as bad when I screw something up. I let older son know what we need from a store; I choose what to wear each day; I decide what to make for meals; etc. I can control my own little world within the hermitage, but view the outside world as one in which what will be will be. Whether this state of mind will persist post-pandemic, I have no idea. That would be nice, though.
1 comment:
i don't have a to do list at the moment, there are so many things that are simply impossible to do now. It all comes under the heading of "later", whenever that turns out to be. The website of the local doctors still says that there have been no cases locally except that I know someone not half a mile from here who has been symptomatic for a week. There is no point in them contacting the GP practice and so no way of knowing how many people are following guidance and treating themselves at home. Saying that there have been no postitive cases at the practice is meaningless. Today the number of reported cases nationally will dip because it's Sunday and something goes wrong with the reporting at the weekends. Tomorrow it will bounce back up. I wish I could turn off my critical thinking because I suspect that I'd be better off without it.
I've put the machine away, I just can't settle to it at all.
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