My parents gave me an electric kettle for Christmas. The kettle needed a place to live, so I set it up on a tray, along with assorted beverages and snacks, on a corner of the desk in my office. Now, though the pandemic may keep me from going out to eat, at least there’s this great snack bar that I can go to any time I want. It’s always open, never crowded, and has exactly the kinds of drinks and treats that I like.
Earlier tonight I couldn’t remember what the traditional name for a January full moon was, but I ought to have been able to guess. When you see a moon so clear and bright on such a frosty night, the instinct is to howl at it like a wolf, as Livia did when she first saw it. It is obviously a Wolf Moon.
Today I was tired, grouchy, and cold. The last thing I wanted to do was go outside, where it was even colder than our partially unheated house. But I needed to do my daily walk, so outside I went.
As I walked the first lap, I thought about how much I missed having snow. We’d came close to having a White Christmas last year, but the same storm that almost flooded us on Christmas Day also washed away all the snow. This less than cheerful memory wasn’t helping, and I felt even more tired and dispirited. I paused to rest at the top of the driveway.
As I was standing there, staring off into the dark of evening, I saw a tiny snowflake drift by. Then another, and another, until the air was all a-flurry.
I’m not so arrogant as to believe that the snow was a special gift for me, but it was a gift. I accepted it as such and said a thank-you to the sky. Then, with the snow as my encouragement, I powered through the rest of my walk.
My husband thinks that our heating system has a leak. The system is pulling in fresh water, which it would only need to do if water were leaving the system. We don’t see any puddles or water stains on the walls. That suggests that the leak is in a section of pipe that runs under or through the foundation. There used to be several sections like that, but my husband fixed all but the one that lies below our front entrance. We knew it would need to be fixed eventually. I guess the day has finally arrived to deal with it. It’s just a nuisance in many ways, the most obvious and immediate being that for the moment we cannot run the heat in that zone (which encompasses all of the downstairs except the great room). We do, however, have two working zones plus two electric space heaters and a fireplace, so we will not freeze to death. Any problem that doesn’t result in death seems like a very manageable thing to me these days.
The other day I spent some time reading about ARGs (alternate reality games), how QAnon is like an ARG, and a phenomenon called “apophenia.” Apophenia is, according to Merriam-Webster, “the tendency to perceive a connection or meaningful pattern between unrelated or random things (such as objects or ideas).” Every article that I read had links to other articles, which linked to yet others, and so on. I could have lost hours to the research if I’d had the patience. Reading about QAnon’s rabbit holes is a rabbit hole itself!
The pandemic’s end is within sight now that there are vaccines for the coronavirus, but it’s still far away. The kids won’t return to school until we’ve all been vaccinated, and we don’t know yet when that will be. Though I once said that I’d keep numbering my blog posts until our lockdown had ended, I no longer see the point of counting the days, especially now that we’re approaching a year since the coronavirus was first identified in the country. And, though I’m not sure exactly when it happened, my sense of normalcy has changed. I accept that my life is different now, I accept that some of the changes may be long-term, and I accept that the “return to normal,” whatever that means, will happen slowly and by degrees. I am done counting.
Looking back at my blog posts for 2020, I am happy that I wrote so much. It is, for me, one tiny bright side of the pandemic. But, by forcing myself to write a post for nearly every day, I may have inadvertently pushed some of what ought to have gone into my journal onto the blog instead. My posts were sometimes longer, angrier, and more introspective than was ideal. Meanwhile, I hardly wrote in my journal at all.
That’s fine. It’s subjective and doesn’t much matter to anyone but myself. But I think for 2021 I would like for my journal to be fuller and my blog to be bloggier.
© 2007-2025 Author of Blue-Footed Musings All Rights Reserved
