It's been a tradition for me to do NaNoWriMo just about every year for several years now. It started out as a thing that I did with Stargazer along side NaBloPoMo. I have about two weeks to prepare for a potential NaNoWriMo project and right now I am editing one book as I am working furiously to finish another. I got something of a casual book contract offer from a good friend of mine. What he's offering is really good in the world of publishing. So, of course, as I flail about trying to pick a pen name, I started writing what was supposed to be back story for one of the fanfiction scenes I wrote.
At the same time, I have been really struggling with depression because it's that time of year for seasonal depression to team up with bipolar depression to create a bucket of suck. I feel awful and I'm exhausted all the time. I am filled with dread of everything from failure to this election going sideways and Covid-19 getting into my home and killing us. I keep plugging away and doing the bare minimum to keep the household going. My humor has been grim but its still there. My psychiatrist said that I am his 'rock' and that he really admires my stability and how well I have been about taking my medications. I was uncomfortable with the compliment but kept it to myself as I thanked him for it.
The kids are doing school "in person" with masks and all of the NYSDOH safety protocols in place. So far there has only been one isolated Covid-19 incident. It was cleaned up, people were sent home to get tested/treated/recover and it didn't impact the school as a whole. The only reason it really was a news story was because of the fact that our school district is the only one in the county (if not the entire region) doing 'in person' classes. Approximately a quarter of the students in the district are doing remote learning. The region is sill below the 1% infected threshold that would mandate all schools going to remote learning only. Gods willing, we'll stay like this because we're a very rural area.
Downstate in the NYC region, they're experiencing a second wave of cases. I'm not surprised. I figured it was going to hit around now when people are indoors more because of the cooler weather. I can't say if the problem is that the state opened up too early because the numbers are skewed. A big percentage of the state population is concentrated in and around NYC. A big enough percentage that it swings everything from the numbers on how the state is doing with this pandemic business to state politics hard in the direction of NYC and environs. It's been a running joke that NYC should be divided off from the rest of the state and turned into its own state for decades.
Here in the Finger Lakes region, we're doing ok. There isn't much to report in a change in the Covid-19 case status of the region. We are both wine country and cow country. Most of the area here is made up of farms. I think the largest population center in the entire Finger Lakes region is the small city of Canadaguia. I don't think they count Rochester as part of the Finger Lakes region. If they did, the bump in population isn't a big deal because people from Rochester and Canadaguia tend to stay in their cities because there's nothing interesting outside of them. Drive 20 minutes in any direction and you're surrounded by farms. That fact insulated most of my county from the effects of the first wave back in March-April. If we're lucky, it'll remain that way for a bit longer.
Some of the parents who are doing distance learning are giving us parents who are doing 'face to face' instruction the side eye. If I had the spoons to keep doing distance learning, that's what we would have done. My disability is running smack into the needs of the kids and their learning disabilities. It made things hard up until school re-opened. Keeping a rigid schedule was helpful. Doing work at the appointed time every day except Saturdays and Sundays helped. The only way really that we could tell it was a week day was that Beloved was going to work (because he is in an essential industry). The kids did more or less fine through it all. It was me who was having the difficulties.
I just don't have the energy to rapid switch between two very different sets of educational needs anymore. I run out of energy faster because I'm juggling my anxiety and mental health issues even as I am struggling to keep up with the kids needs for stimulus and educational content. That doesn't even begin to get into the problem of how to I keep up with all of this distance learning stuff and still get time in for the things that are restorative and help me regain my personal equilibrium. I'm trying to prepare myself for the next round of distance learning. My intuition and my anxiety are telling me it is going to happen relatively soon.
The school has the distance learning stuff set up differently this time. The kids have a better grasp of how to navigate their digital classrooms. Now the problems are minor bugs like a website being glitchy (probably because everybody and their brother is on it to practice their language arts work). From what I hear of it, things are running more smoothly. The hangups shows up when there are technial problems with the internet access. The students who are in school are working off the same platform and with the same expectations as the students who are working remotely. The plan is for it to be a relatively seamless switch if they have to go to remote learning for the entire district. I am trying to be hopeful that it will work out well.
Every Sunday, Beloved and I go to check on his parents. The kids get to play a bit outside in a really big yard and we don't have to worry about traffic. His mother and I are both fiber arts geeks, so we spend time chatting and working on our respective projects. I have a massive version of the wingspan shawl that I am trying to finish. I have the final triangle one quarter of the way complete. It took a whole ball of yarn to do it (that would be 8 oz if you're keeping score). My mistake with this thing was thinking it would work up faster and lacier with a larger hook. It didn't but it increased the size of it by an order of magnitude. The thing acquired the nickname of the Monstrosity because of how big it has gotten. I've changed that to Mothra. It really was the only logical name because wingspan and Mothra has a GINORMOUS wingspan. It's functionally a really weirdly shaped blanket. I was going to make it in the full spectrum of colors from red to indigo. I'm stopping at green because that's four balls of yarn. Blue would be eight. Purple would be 16. And indigo would be 32. You can't pay me to do that much. NOPE. It's already big enough to cover the couch.
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