Monday, June 15, 2020

The View from the Hermitage, Day 92

The husband is upstairs doing his first session of office hours via Zoom. He was going to do them in his office on the second floor until I pointed out that he might want to use the whiteboard that's hanging in his "home classroom." After office hours, he'll be taping Wednesday's lecture. I could have stayed up there, but figured staying down here was safer. No accidental noise this way. I'm hermitting within hermitting, and I do kind of like how that sounds.

The first day of summer approaches. I began this hermitting near the end of winter and honestly don't know when I might finish. I'm about to work my way through the entirety of spring, though. Yesterday marked 13 weeks of hermitting, which is one-fourth of a year or one out of four seasons in the year.Tomorrow is trash and recycling day, so I know it's Monday today. Monday sits between dog-walking at the park and trash day. The other four days of the week run together. I have gotten up in the morning and had to think for a moment to figure out what day it is.

The public health folks in Tulsa would like He Who Shall Not Be Named (HWSNBN) not to hold his rally there on Saturday. They say the potential for a second wave of coronavirus is too high. Will he move it? I doubt it. It's not about the people at the rally, his base; it's about him. An inner part of me I sometimes wish did not exist would love to see him come down with covid-19. I don't necessarily want him to die from it, but a good dose of it might help him acknowledge the seriousness of the problem. That said, I'm not sure if Boris Johnson's bout, including time in the ICU, affected his way of thinking about it.

The protests continue. Richmond had its largest one yesterday. I have not asked younger son if he attended. It's probably better that way. Charlottesville had a "defund the police" rally over the weekend, but shouts from the crowd suggested that by "defund" they meant "abolish." I can see moving some of the money in a police department's budget to social services that address root causes such as poverty, homelessness, etc. Abolishing a police department? If you think the chaos can get bad now, you just wait.



2 comments:

Caroline M said...

My day count is the same as yours, when I did the weekly shop tonight it felt as if it had been this way forever. I really don't want to think that I've spent a quarter of a year on hold. What a waste.

I have one fixed point in the week now, it's the same as yours - bin day. I used to be anchored with Sunday, Tuesday, Thursday and Friday but now all I have is Sunday.

cbott said...

Mondays are my anchor days because the chorus has virtual rehearsals Monday nights. Just for chatting and catching up with people is the main reason I tune in--the singing is WAY down the list of reasons to Zoom!

We have an honest-to-goodness Guest Room now, thanks to this quarantine and the possibility of Thing 2 having to move in. So I don't think of it as 1/4 year on hold--simply focused on a different (and much closer) horizon.