Well, this clearly didn’t become a habit.
I’ve started writing this post I can’t remember how many times, and deleted most of it almost as many times. It’s been a challenge to build new routines now that my usual ones have been upended or just plain eliminated. Maybe we’re all having that. My sleep routines have gone haywire, and some nights I’ll go to bed at 9 o’clock and others I’ll look up and it’s midnight and wonder what the hell happened.
What day is it? I’ll ask myself, and sometimes I won’t know the answer.
Today, at least, I’m pretty sure it’s Friday. (No, do not ask how many times I’ve had to scroll up and change that.) It’s the Fifteenth of May (don’t ask how many times I’ve had to update that, either), and I finished teaching my creative writing class last week. I’m taking off from teaching for the fall, because in mid-August I’ll start a yoga teacher training program. It’s something I’ve wanted to do for years, and I finally decided, well, if not now then when.
Planning for the future seems like a positive thing to do in the middle of so much uncertainty.
That leaves me the summer to do with as I please, and that means I’m going to try and read more, and I’m going to work on finishing this novel revision. It is moving slowly, as you might have guessed.
Speaking of planning for the future, I’m also working on putting out a science fiction novella myself. I may have mentioned this before, but if I haven’t, well, here you go. It’s been edited and a cover design is in process, and so far, it looks pretty damn amazing.
Oh wait, I did mention this before, didn’t I? I may have said that it was inspired by this animated GIF:
How do we get from a cat fight in 1980s Denver to a barren world under siege on the other side of the galaxy? Stay tuned to find out.
Like everyone else living under self-quarantine, I’ve also been baking a lot more than usual. I swear by the book Flour Water Salt Yeast by Ken Forkish, but I’d really only made a couple different loaves from the book before now. But since sourdough has become the thing that people are occupying their time with, and because it’s been a long time since I’ve sustained a levain (the fancy French word because we fancy), I now have a colony of hungry yeasts chilling in my fridge and I’ve made a number of things, including this, perhaps my most aesthetically pleasing loaf.
St. Louis, where I live, eases its quarantine order on Monday, and I’m honestly still leery about going, well, anywhere. I plan to keep having groceries delivered. I’m not going to get my hair cut (and I’m looking pretty shaggy, let’s be honest, because it’s been about three months since my last haircut). I’m still going to be working from home for a while, and when I must return to the office… well, as my mother is fond of saying, we’ll fall off that bridge when we come to it.