My new acupressure mat and pillow arrived last week. I have been eyeing these for a while, probably since Early Pandemic, and finally decided to buy one when I read in one of my crone newsletters that it was helping the author feel less creaky every day. I laid on it Saturday morning and while the needles (which are really plastic spikes) are QUITE SHARP my back did feel good after 10 minutes. Soon I will graduate to 15-20 minute needle baths, I can’t wait.
Work has reached a new weird place that mostly involves people offering free workout classes via Zoom. One of my colleagues is a certified barre instructor and she did this a couple of times last March but it tapered off quickly. Now there are 100+ more people at the company so there’s more traction, and Pilates and Zumba classes have also been offered. A lot of people are also buying treadmill desks (or putting pieces of MDF across their regular-ass treadmills) and then there’s me with my balance board, swaying back and forth. I’ve been working from home for a few years now but this is definitely a new level of WFH achievements being unlocked.
Saturday night my husband I were talking about the deep strangeness of having walked out of an office one day and then just never going back, “never” in this case being a year, and how even when more people are vaccinated and we have something approaching “herd immunity” things are still going to be forever changed. People have remade their lives in response to this. It won’t be easy to unmake that.
LOL sometimes I just can’t believe this happened to the world. Nearly a year on, I can’t believe it. Like can you believe it? A YEAR. Lately, I’ve been forgetting to grab a mask when I get out of the car to go to the store or pick up the dogs, the two things I mainly do outside of our house. I suppose that could be because I am stressed and I forget things but also I am maybe just ready to be done with this.
I mentioned on Twitter that I really clowned myself in early February when I agreed to write three knowledge base articles for one of my side work jobs. These aren’t hard to write but to be honest with you I forgot about them for a while and then I procrastinated a while longer. I turned them in very last-minute and they were all accepted with no revisions, and this is why I keep doing this to myself: NO CONSEQUENCES. Shouts to my peeps who all-nightered most of their literature papers in college and still got an A-. We’re the real MVPs.
Honestly, dreading/putting off simple tasks that end up taking about 20 minutes to complete is very Classic Me™ going back to at least the late 1980s, but clearly I must be getting something out of it because I keep doing it. Maybe it’s the rush of not knowing whether or not I will miss an important deadline or the thrill of all the anxiety OR maybe it’s that dreamy feeling of impending doom, what’s not to love? If you are a young person let this be a lesson to you that much of who you were right before finals your junior year of high school is preeeetttttyyyy much who you will still be when you start shopping around for life insurance and reading glasses, just saying.
Allow me to present the return of FOOD CORNER! Tonight I am making pepperoni-braised chicken in the Crock-Pot. I have not been excited about a new recipe in a while so this is a good sign. Also, it warmed up very briefly here over the weekend and I feel compelled to make more cozy braised things and soups before the weather turns and it’s salad season again. I’ve never thought of pepperoni as an ingredient beyond something I a) put on pizza or b) include in my garbage-person version of “charcuterie” but there you have it, you learn something new every day, even in Pandemic Year Two.