Schrodinger’s plague

I’m trying to be a good employee and dutiful citizen, but dang, it’s depressing.

The library is a maze of quarantined boxes of books, and the phone rings all day with people I have to disappoint. "You're open!" "No!" Two weeks after reintegrating with coworkers, our staff PPE arrived - one pair of gardening gloves and two reflective vests. Very helpful.

It’s cool, I have a lineup of homemade masks. My coworker has a favorite mask that she won’t wash or change, and keeps taking off. It’s cool, it’s cool. Because it turns out I am also very bad at wearing a mask for 9 hours a day. It’s hard to go back to your normal, safe workplace with your normal, safe coworkers and remember to try to treat everything like it might kill you. Without meaning to,  I pull the mask down to breathe, sneeze into it, and forget to put it back on after answering the phone. Also, the mask does nothing to curtail my horrible face-touching habits. I rub my eyebrows in exasperation, sit through meetings with my forehead in my hands, nap with my face smashed flat on my non-disinfected desk because I'm low on oxygen/vitamin D/living essence and can't stay awake. It's ridiculous.

applying virus to face 

So it will surprise exactly nobody that I’ve spent the weekend like a wet sock on the couch, tired, headachey, feeling my lungs struggle with a painful pressure in my chest, wondering if I’ve been exposed or if I’m just having a reaction to breathing through masks my cat has been sitting on. Statewide, we’re down to 0-2 cases a day, but I wonder how much that has to do with assholes like me just not wanting to get a swab up the nose for vague symptoms. I don’t know. It’s Sunday on a holiday weekend, my doctor’s office is closed, and I don’t have a fever. It’s fine, probably.

In positive news, Billy Boy has learned how to be a proper kitten this week. He eats wet food and sleeps through the night. He’s the best. Except that I caught him peeing in the dining room and ran through the house with him held at arm’s length while he sprinkled like a tiny hose, catching Leif across the chest with the spray as I went screaming by. Had to wipe up a trail through the entire house. But that was my fault for forgetting how peeing babies work.

Also some renovation happened, because the kitchen faucet broke and wouldn’t shut off, and we decided to do the bathroom fixture while we were at it. 

I’ll get back to painting if I can stay awake long enough. Spending most of my down time watching Korean time-traveling detective shows with the kitten sleeping across my neck while the kids work on their tiktok choreography. Only feeling motivated to solve crimes with a tough-yet-wholesome partner who lives 30 years in the past, sorry paint.

How to storytime

Spent an entire week filming storytime videos, following the state guidelines.

Shoot in landscape. Long, separate clips. Dress professionally. No background music. 

So, not any of this. 

(I’m on tiktok now, I guess - same user name)

The beaches reopened, and the kids went to maintain social distance with the sea turtles while I had the house to myself for the first time in 2 months. Painted another African Tulip - local flowers that look like demogorgons.

Next week we interface with the public.

Well

It’s going great, everyone. 28 takes and I finally pronounced my own name correctly. Wrapped my scarf around the mic three times. Got mad at my own cheeks.

Acting is hard.

Phase 1

Officially back in the library every day, though we’ll remain closed for checkouts for a week or two. My main job is to film storytime and how-to videos, which is fun except that my hands have been shredded into bloody ribbons by the kitten. I‘ll need to muppet-flap fast enough to keep them blurry, wear sock puppets for everything, or tell stories dressed in a cotillion gown and elbow-length gloves.

Pleeease may I gnaw your remaining fingers off

During these mostly-homebound weeks, there was one thing I said I would do and had been putting off; paint a landscape. I haven’t painted a street scene since my workshop two years ago, and I have an attitude about the color green, so it seemed like a good time to stretch myself. But I did not. Now my time is up. When I received the news, I got off the phone with my boss, marched straight outside, and painted a potted taro in my yard until the rain mercifully chased me inside. It is not a landscape, but it was painted outdoors, SO THERE.

The chickens dug through all my barricades and murdered the apocalypse garden I had been trying to grow. In an actual apocalypse, they’d better watch their drumsticks. Luckily, three of the banana trees are growing bunches, and the lychee tree is fruiting. We’ll live.

And so I have traded in my hippie clown pants for jeans and cardigan. I’m glad to get my hands on some fresh books and warm up my quacking voice again. A change of scenery is nice, because the neighbors have purchased a trampoline and let their preschool boys jump on it naked while riding BMX bikes with their dog. The sight of flying dog paws and bike wheels and unprotected wieners in that netted battle arena is more than my “this is about to end in an ER visit” alarms can comfortably handle.

I’ll post links to the videos on the library website once the editing committee finishes with them. There will be clapping, mooing, and a stuffed cat pillow being jostled like a baby. Quality content, folks.

Maybe we can qualify as a nonprofit

Midmorning, three days ago, Leif looked up and shushed us. “Do you hear that? It sounds like a kitten.”

There was no kitten. There were baby birds in the tree, some crooning chickens, a cooing dove, but no phantom kitten. We looked around anyway. “Huh, it really sounded like a kitten that needed help.”

A few hours later, a distressed teenager showed up at the house with a very small and desperate kitten in her passenger seat. The humane society told her they wouldn’t take unweaned kittens, her mother wouldn’t let her keep it, and Gavin is the high school ‘cat guy’, so there she was. We took it.

This is Leif’s fault. He summoned it. Luckily, he’s focusing his powers on summoning mug cakes now. He found a recipe in his mug cake cookbook that called for mayonnaise, and made an awful face, but I assured him that mayo makes a good substitute for oil in some cake recipes -  20 minutes later I got Twitter ads for mayonnaise in mug cakes. Smashed my phone with a hammer.

Babies are intense, even the ones that weigh as much as a sausage. Driving to the school today to pick up worksheet packets, I turned onto the winding road and was halfway through the snaking curves when the pavement suddenly seemed to rise up and roll like waves toward me. Realized I had slept a total of 6 hours in 3 days, and would have been safer driving tipsy. Not going out again until the night bottles stop.

Before getting completely derailed by bottle feeding, I painted another portrait of Plucky.

I wonder if painting while having sleep deprivation hallucinations would be better or worse? Like the LSD portrait experiment. But slower, and more confused, and with a call to poison control after dipping the brush into coffee and drinking paint thinner.

Probably going to pass on that.

GO TO BED