arduinna: photo of a group of yellow spring daffodils, with the word "Spring!" underneath them (spring daffodils)
[personal profile] arduinna
So, interesting times! Yeah.

In a bit of "wow, sometimes the timing is just really good" news, I discovered a couple of months ago that the house I had lived in for 25 years caught fire in the fall, and while no one was hurt and there was no real fire damage, there was TONS of smoke and water damage, so no one was living there and it was undergoing unreal amounts of repair/renovation.

Kinda glad I moved out on my own the year before that happened, me!

'Living in a pandemic but not ill' stuff:

My roommates and I are all anxious people in different ways, which has paid off outside of the occasional panic attack; one saw the pandemic coming in January, I'm an agoraphobe who has spent a lifetime preparing for a 'don't leave the house for a month or three' eventuality, and the other didn't take part in the pre-emptive prep but has taken over the during-pandemic disinfecting of everything using the supplies we prepped with and insisting on masks and gloves as appropriate. So basically we're still in good shape and intensely grateful for the ability to have reached this place.

Part of what that meant was shopping basically steadily through February and early March to build up our reserves, so we could take ourselves out of the equation if/when the panic buying started. That was a bizarre experience in shifting mindset, from normal shopping patterns to "I haven't been to a store today, I should go get things" to seeing the sudden tip over into panic buying all around me and thinking "welp, that's it, no more shopping, hope we got everything". That tip-over was amazing to see; before that, I could see that a few people here and there were doing the same sort of stocking up, but when you're in a store basically every day wow can you see the moment when Everyone Decides To Shop For The Pandemic.

We're not managing total isolation; someone walks the dog every day it's not pouring, and probably once a week someone has to go out for something at the pharmacy or the vet, and a couple of times now the corner store. But we keep it as limited as we can.

My job got intensely busy for a few weeks, but I was already working remotely almost 100% of the time so I didn't have to adjust to that on top of the workload, at least. There may or may not be layoffs down the road, but my boss thinks I'm safe. I do, too, honestly - the last few years have been great for my social capital at work, and I'm currently useful in a number of ways that many of my co-workers aren't. So that's good. My boss may not be as safe; he's great but he's also over 65, and it was pointed out to him that if we need to make cuts in the department, it might be better if retirement-age people took retirement voluntarily. Which is actually true and which doesn't change his timeline hugely - he was planning to retire next year sometime - but still. If he has to go I'll miss him like crazy, and selfishly I'm not thrilled at the idea of having to report to someone else; he's been my boss for nearly 25 years now, and I have a whole lot of autonomy as a result.

So overall the day-to-day is mostly the same, just with more company at home all day, more claustrophobia, and way too much candy because all of us wanted to be sure there was enough junk food for emergencies. /o\

Other stuff that's been happening:

I finally read Prairie Fires by Caroline Fraser, a biography of Laura Ingalls Wilder that had been on my vague list for several years. It was fascinating, not just for the background on Wilder but for the general history of it all, and especially the way it followed her entire life. Which, I know, biography, duh, but I read the books as a child in the early 70s and then watched the tv show not much later, and they were about Totally Olden Times and a generation long, long gone - but turns out not actually so much, really. Wilder died just a few years before I was born, during my oldest brother's actual lifetime. That is somehow a lot closer in time than my brain had ever parsed us as being before this. The early parts of her biography still felt like forever ago, but then it was also about things my parents lived through and talked about. It was weirdly hard to wrap my head around Half-Pint having electricity and a phone, but even more weirdly, it made it easier to grok the fictionalized-history aspect of the books. (Which Fraser addresses throughout, and it's clear that on some level Wilder was basically all about truthiness, which is just sort of mind-breaking. Stories were true even if they didn't really happen, or happened to different people in different ways, because they felt true emotionally.)

Anyway. The book is really interesting and I highly recommend it, although not if you're not prepared to see some serious feet of clay on Wilder about certain things, even though the biography is thoroughly sympathetic to her. The more personalized look at the history overall struck a ton of chords in me, with modern parallels that are just frustrating and fascinating. This has been sticking in my head a lot more than I expected it to. I don't want to turn this into a book report, but yeah. Highly recommend.

Other good nonfiction: A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry: A look at the history of battle in popular culture, a blog by military historian Bret Devereaux. Someone on Metafilter linked to this back in December for its series on The Siege of Gondor in Peter Jackson's Return of the King, which I didn't actually go read at the time, and still have queued up to read next. I suspect I'm going to be sucked right down the rabbit hole, so am holding off till I get this written up. (The danger of linking like that is that the tab is then open right there for reading, whoops. I am now 2 posts in to the series.)

But! A week or two back, someone in the comments on a totally different topic linked to a different "collection" of posts by Devereaux, This. Isn't. Sparta., talking about all the ways pop culture gets Sparta wrong, particularly as seen through the lens of the movie 300. I started reading on a whim, figuring I'd see what the first few paragraphs were like, and then just didn't stop reading. It's engaging and well-written and interesting, and I wish he'd been writing the blog for five years instead of just one so I'd have more of an archive to catch up on. Good, good stuff. Also highly recommended!

Randomly: My decades-old degree in English has paid off once again, in that I was idly doing Washington Post crosswords the other night and as soon as I saw that I'd filled in "ode-n------a--" realized it had to be Ode on a Grecian (x), because of a paper I wrote 30-odd years ago.

The daffodils are blooming (see icon), but then the other day out on a walk with the dog it randomly started to hail very intensely. Ah, April.

"The hell? Why is the snow HITTING me?"


Poor snow dog, so betrayed. <3

/end random post
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