Hello fellow nerds!

Hope you are all well and playing it safe.

The resale shop where I work closed as of March 24th and I’ve been home ever since. Just seven days, but it already feels much, much longer. How is it going for me? Well, as I told a friend of mine (phone call, not in person, social distancing and all) my moods seem to rotate among these three:

#1: “Oh, God, oh God, we’re all going to die,” which makes me think about Joss Whedon’s shiny Firefly ‘verse and helps to calm me down

#2: appreciating/enjoying time at home to catch up on reading, writing, and whatnot, and

#3: feeling guilty about enjoying anything with all that’s happening.

There is also the whole stressing over no incoming income going forward and the whole big circus of hoops that have to be jumped though to sign up for unemployment and any other help I can find to keep the lights turned on and the pets fed.

There’s also the feeling (maybe I’ll add a #4) that I am not being as productive as I could be each day. And so the decision to keep a daily list of what I have actually accomplished to help me feel less like I’m in limbo.

I won’t bore you all with a day-by-day account, but I thought I’d share today’s list of activities as an example of how one isolated, currently unemployed, writer is spending her days during this crisis.

March 31, 2020:

• hug dog, pet cat, get out of bed
• make breakfast (tea and oatmeal)
• eat breakfast while working through two lessons of Dan Brown’s MasterClass on writing thrillers (Note: a year’s access to MasterClass was a Christmas gift to myself)
• play with dog in back yard
• complete audit of week 1 of CalArt course “Story and Narrative Development for Video Games” (a skill I might need to apply for a remote job I saw on Indeed.com)
• make lunch (soup) and watch a Hallmark channel mystery while I also…
• did laundry (two loads)
• have small panic over paying bills (similar to #1 mood mentioned previously)
• hug dog, feed cat (she’s very demanding and vocal), play with dog in back yard
• mend old pair of sweatpants while watching PBS NewsHour, leading to…
• another tiny panic over the state of the pandemic in our country
• 1/2 hour on treadmill (I’ve been pretty good at doing that and have only slacked off one day so far. But, considering’that at work I’m on my feet for 8 hours moving and lifting merchandise, it’s not my usual amount of  physical activity.) The soundtrack for today’s workout? Rick Springfield’s Venus in Overdrive. Hey! No booing out there. Springfield’s music always keeps me moving.
• dinner (1 piece of leftover pizza, celery sticks, cauliflower florets, and a small dish of dry roasted peanuts) Not great nutrition, but not bad. And crunchy foods lessen stress, at least in my case.
• re-watched one episode of Chuck while eating dinner
• wrote blog post

Tomorrow and the days to follow will bring much of the same with the addition of auditing another Coursera course for a TESOL certificate (while waiting to see if I can get financial aid to actually get certification) for yet more jobs I’ve seen online. And writing? I’m averaging an hour or so every other day, so I really need to step up my game in that corner.

• next up: hot chocolate and Hallmark Christmas movie, then
• re-read one chapter of The Da Vinci Code before bed to study structure for that MasterClass with the added benefit that Langdon stories always bring to mind Tom Hanks and who could ask for a more comforting image to help me get to sleep?

So…how are your days going?