It’s All in the Details—CoronaLife Day 418

May 6, 2021 By Leave a Comment

I’m doing my family research, and I’m waiting on 2 more books before it is complete. One I have asked the library to get, but they have not had luck finding it. Which is strange because they are who I got it from the first time! The other book I will likely have to buy.

While I am waiting for those books, I can get started on the work of putting my family book together. It is pretty much written, but it’s a far cry from done. I need to go through and do a lot of cleaning up—making sure the chapter headings  and subheadings are all the same font and size, that the children lists are all the same format, re-learn how to do the indexes, and make sure the family trees are complete and up to date with the latest research.

The biggest issue will be reading through and correcting the verb tense. It seems natural sometimes to write about these ancestors in present tense, but really the book should be in past tense. This all happened long ago, after all. Right now the book’s tense is all over the place, and it will take a good deal of concentration to make sure I catch all the tense changes needed.

Once I get all of that done, it will be time to lay out the book design and do the cover. So many details to deal with when you self-publish a book! I have done it once before, though, so I know what is coming. A lot of meticulous work—but it will be worth it in the end.

So that’s what’s on my plate for the next few months, writing-wise.

On a side note, my hands are feeling much better, about 95%. And I get my second COVID shot today. Here’s hoping the side effects don’t knock me out too badly.

What’s on your schedule these days?

My Hands—CoronaLife Day 411

April 29, 2021 By Leave a Comment

I think I’m getting old. I hit 50 last year (thanks, 2020!) and I am now disintegrating. I was doing a plank challenge with a group online, and when I got to 2 minutes my knees started hurting, forcing me to switch to a modified plank.

But worse is my hands. Last week, I totally overdid it. A ton of computer work, and mostly repetitive motion. Unfortunately, I did not listen to my hands and stop when they started complaining, but pushed on. Finally, I had to stop—my hands were stiff, sore, and had pinpricks.

Since then, I have tried not to use the computer much. I have been taking my research notes with pen and paper. I also switched to a mouse instead of the touchpad, to change up the motions needed. My hands have calmed down somewhat. They still ache a bit, and the pinpricks come and go depending on the activity. I fear I have done permanent damage. Is this the first flare-up of arthritis? Some kind of carpel tunnel?

Whatever it is, I don’t care for it. It is almost impossible not to use your hands, especially for the computer or smart phone. I have no idea what I will do if I have to severely curtail my computer use. Everything I do is on the computer!

Anyway, I am keeping this short to spare my hands, which are already starting to complain again. Hopefully by next week I will have better news!

A Year in Flux—CoronaLife Day 404

April 22, 2021 By Leave a Comment

Last year was the year things stood still. The pandemic brought life as we know it to a screeching halt. Even though essential life functions went on, everything felt like it just…stopped.

This year is a different year. It is a year of flux. Life is changing, the world is changing. As we move back toward a more normal life, everything feels in motion.

We need to take time to look at what we want to go back to, though. The pandemic, the year of slowing down, has changed the way many see the world. Some people really like working from home, wasting less time commuting, spending more time with family. Some businesses are seeing the value of people working from home, and thinking about changing their business models. Many of us realized the value of the family and friends we were cut off from for so long. Many people’s priorities shifted, because it is true that you don’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone.

The pandemic gave us a chance to really look at the world we live in. It highlighted so many things that need to be addressed. Workers deemed “essential” who don’t make enough to pay their bills. Decades of medical inequity that left minority populations exponentially more vulnerable to the virus. Income inequity that allowed the better off to stay safely home while the poor exposed themselves to the virus every day. A rise in violence against Jewish people, and Asian-Americans, and Blacks—some done by the very people supposed to protect our communities. The mental health crisis that is deep in our culture and that is exploding with the pandemic stress.

Some things that used to be “normal” should never be normal again.

Normal didn’t work for so many people in our society. We have a chance now to do better, be better. To build a society that truly reaches for the ideals America was built on. As we rebuild from the pandemic, we need to figure out what parts of the old society are worth saving—and what parts we want to build from scratch.

This pandemic showed in glaring spotlight that a large portion of our nation does not understand social responsibility. They do not understand that with freedom comes responsibility, that individualism does not mean ignoring the needs of others as long as you’ve got yours. Like it or not, we are all connected—what we do impacts others. The pandemic showed us that, too.

A rising tide lifts all boats. Let us strive, in this year of flux, to make sure that as we rise from this pandemic, we leave no one behind.

Power Mad—CoronaLife Day 397

April 15, 2021 By Leave a Comment

I am researching the Kings of England, after having researched the Kings of Scotland, and I have read about war upon war for power, power, and more power. This seemed especially true of English monarchs. It wasn’t enough to be King of England, you had to also be King of Ireland, and King of Scotland, and, what the heck, King of France. War after war, so much death and destruction because whatever they had, it was never enough.

I admit that I do not understand this mindset. Maybe it’s because I am an introvert and I would never in a million years want to rule all those people, have all those administrative nightmares. Or because I am highly empathetic, and the responsibility for the well-being of all those people would weigh terribly heavy on me.

These people were mad. In two separate cases, a nobleman murdered children to get what he wanted. In 1440, the Regent of Scotland, Crichton, invited the 16-year-old (some sources say he was only 14) Earl of Douglas, William, and his younger brother David, to dinner at his castle—a meal that has come to be known as the Black Dinner. Crichton trumped up charges against them and had them beheaded, in the presence of the distraught 9-year-old King James II of Scotland. This was done as part of a larger power struggle, and many historians believe it was with the full consent of Crichton’s ally, the powerful head of the Douglas family, James the Gross. As James was next in line, he became the 7th Earl of Douglas, and so had much to gain by their deaths.

The better known instance is Richard III of England. When his brother, King Edward IV, died in 1483, Edward’s 12-year-old son Edward became King Edward V. Richard had other ideas, and locked Edward and his 9-year-old brother Richard up in the Tower of London. They were never seen again, and two skeletons found in the Tower in 1674 may have been theirs. Whether they were murdered or simply allowed to die of starvation is not known, but the heinous crime was immortalized in Shakespeare’s Richard III.

I cannot imagine wanted power so much as to murder children. Then again, I cannot see wanting power so much I would start a war, either. So I guess it’s just as well that none of my villains are power-mad. Or maybe my inherent lack of understanding of their nature is why they aren’t. It’s hard to write believable characters if you cannot grasp what makes them tick.

Speaking of writing, both the above stories had satisfying, if not happy, endings. In 1452, King James II of Scotland, now 22 years old, invited James the Gross, Earl of Douglas to dinner. They argued and, in a scene that eerily echoes that of the Black Dinner, King James stabs the Earl to death. King Richard III also did not profit from the deaths of the Princes. Disgust for the murder was a main driver for the nobles to back Henry Tudor, who claimed the crown for himself. Richard III’s reign lasted only 2 years, and the usurper was himself usurped by the incoming Henry VII.

Do you think it’s possible to write believable villains if you yourself don’t understand their emotional and psychological underpinnings?

A Bit of Normalcy–CoronaLife Day 383

April 1, 2021 By Leave a Comment

The coronavirus pandemic turned a lot of things upside down, and made everyday activities fraught with danger. Now that the vaccines are here, we can look ahead to a time where normalcy inches its way back into our lives. Today, I went to visit my parents for the first time since October.

I have not driven for so long, nor on a high speed road, since then, and it was strangely exhausting. It didn’t help that it was raining and the traffic was heavy with tractor-trailers.

Because of the rain, we met inside the house—the first time I have been inside their house since the pandemic started last March. All previous visits were outside.

Because we were inside, we all remained masked, except when eating, and that we did 6 feet apart with the porch door open for ventilation.

What will it feel like to be normal again?

To hop in the car and drive wherever, whenever?

To enter other people’s houses without precautions?

To see each other’s faces?

We have forgotten so much. It will be an adjustment to find our way back.

We still have a long way to go, before normalcy becomes, well…normal again. My parents both had their second shot, but are not yet two weeks past to full immunity (my daughter and I got tested before going over). I am not yet eligible in my state, but hopefully by May. My daughter will likely not be eligible until the end of the year. So it will be a long time yet before I can breathe easier about my family. Before we can all be immunized and gather without precautions.

Meanwhile, case numbers are rising again, this time among the younger people who are now starting to fill our hospital beds. I know they, and the rest of us, are tired of the precautions, but now is not the time to let down our guard. We are in the final minutes of the game, and the score is tied. We must keep up our defense until we regain possession of the ball. Then we can slam it home for the final victory.

We must continue to hold the line.

Hold the Line—CoronaLife Day 376

March 25, 2021 By Leave a Comment

Sometimes in life you can feel change coming. It comes slowly, inching along…until all of a sudden it flips, and it’s like you are rolling downhill. I feel rather like that with this virus right now. We have a vaccine, people are taking it…but I’m not seeing any effect.

Case rates are at best plateaued where I live, at worst climbing a bit. We are at a transmission rate of 1.09, when we need to be below one, ideally closer to 0.8. We have gotten a second case of Covid in our school (thankfully only 2 since all this began), just as we are all hoping for things to get better. I feel that we are at a tipping point…but I’m not sure which way we will fall.

Honestly, I was hoping to see a greater impact from the vaccinations at this point. And maybe that’s just me not understanding how this all works. Maybe the plateau is because of the vaccines. I was hoping, though, to see a steady decrease in cases as the vaccination rate went up.

Now, the vaccines were not tested to see if they stopped transmission, and with the new variants that are more contagious, maybe the transmission rate is higher than expected. The vaccines WERE intended to decrease hospitalizations and deaths, but both of those are lagging indicators, and I don’t expect to see impact from them for a while.

But I also feel like people have given up, have stopped taking precautions. Like, “The vaccine is here, and so is spring, so let’s just pretend everything is normal.” And that might be one reason why the cases aren’t going down.

We need to hold the line.

I know people are sick of it. I am sick of it, exhausted of the precautions and the remote learning and not seeing my parents often. I get it. We’re tired and we’re fed up.

But we need to hold the line—just for a few more weeks.

We are at the tipping point in this fight. But the vaccines aren’t a cure-all, they were never meant to be a silver bullet, and we all still have to do our part. Even after we’re vaccinated. If we can hold the line just a little longer, we will tip this thing in our favor.

For all that lots of people are being vaccinated, many of us aren’t eligible yet. I won’t be for possibly another month or more. And none of our kids are, and probably won’t be until fall.

So please, for me, for my kid, hold the line just a little longer. Wear the mask. Keep the distance. Stay home as much as possible. The longer people ignore the precautions, the longer the end of this will take to arrive.

We’re so close.

Just hold the line.

Civil War—CoronaLife Day 369

March 18, 2021 By Leave a Comment

In the year 1292, Scotland had a problem: it had no direct heir to the throne. There were multiple claimants, but how to choose between them? King Edward I of England, who desired to claim Scotland as his own, kindly offered to choose between the claimants, and promptly chose the one who would swear fealty to him, making Edward overlord of both England and Scotland, with Scotland in the subservient condition.

This caused more problems. King John Balliol, Edward’s pick, was disliked by a large portion of the population because they were furious that Scotland had been handed to her hereditary enemy. But Scotland was full of Anglo-Norman nobles, who held land in both countries and therefore wanted the merger. So a double war broke out.

The Scottish Wars of Independence, headed first by William Wallace, then by the future King Robert the Bruce, mirrored America’s Revolution in many ways. But it also held a second war inside the first, because the nobles who wanted England to rule were also fighting the Scottish armies who were fighting for their freedom. Many a noble family was torn apart by these wars. Robert Bruce himself fought WITH the English before finally switching to the Scottish side and rising to King. Within noble families, father and son often fought on opposite sides, such as the Earl of Strathearn fighting with Edward of England and getting captured in battle by his own son. Which was lucky for the Earl, since his son begged mercy for his father of Robert Bruce and thus saved his father’s life.

Scotland won her freedom, although she did eventually merge with England when the Scottish King James the VI inherited the throne of England to become King James I of England in 1603. Today, Scotland is semi-autonomous, with its own Parliament, and a movement is growing to vote to break from England completely. This time, any break with England will be significantly less bloody, and hopefully peaceful, leaving families intact.

We in America have heard of the family fractures in our Civil War, with brother fighting against brother. Like Scotland and England, the warring sides came together afterwards.

The past 4 years, with Trump in office, we have seen the outbreak of civil strife again. Families once again fractured, and old national scars burst wide open. I have to wonder if, unlike Scotland and England, we never did really heal from the Civil War, and instead just buried the old resentments to fester. The same questions seem to be raised now as then: Who holds the power in America? When it says “We the people,” does it mean the rich, or all of us? What does freedom mean in America? When it says “all men are created equal” exactly which men does it mean? The questions of justice and equality and equity are as stark now as they were in 1861, even if the context looks different.

I admit that some days the American divide depresses me. I so clearly see two Americas inside the same borders, and I despair that we can live together, the ideas held are so different. But other days, I read history and I see the bloody conflicts that tore countries and families apart, and see eventual peace and hope. Maybe, someday, historians will look back at this epoch of American life and be able to say that our country managed to heal and move forward together, knitting the wounds closed once and for all.

The story of whether we remain the United States, or whether we evolve peacefully into separate but allied nations is yet unwritten. We each have our part in history to play. Choose your path wisely.

The future is watching us.

New Starts—CoronaLife Day 362

March 11, 2021 By Leave a Comment

It is coming up on a year of coronalife for me. I started counting the day my daughter’s school shut. Other people have slightly different timelines. But about a year ago, life drastically changed for all of us.

This week, as well as marking the end of an incredibly long year, has also seen some new starts. The weather where I live has been warm, with a breath of spring on the air. Daffodils and crocuses are blooming, and people are wearing light coats or even none at all. It is much easier to take a walk when not trussed up like a sausage.

I am helping an adopted friend find her bio family. We have determined her mother, and are close to finding her father. So that, too, is a new start. A new family, and a new journey of getting to know who she is, who they are, and who they may be together.

My mother retired in January, and lamented the loss of her work laptop. So my brother’s family and mine bought her a new one as a retirement gift. I have spent many hours already on the phone helping her get it set up, since the virus means I can’t just pop over there this weekend to do it myself. (Me being tech support is not new, LOL.)

A year into pandemic life, there is finally something new in the air: hope. People are getting vaccinated. My folks have gotten their first shots. My husband just got his second. 10% of my state are fully vaccinated, with another nearly 10% having gotten their first dose. While the need for precautions is just as strong as ever, there is finally light at the end of the tunnel.

So this week has seen many a new start. I hope to build on these fresh starts to find a new way forward this year, and build a more productive and less stressed life. My greatest wish would be for my creativity to come back. The anxiety and demands of coronalife crushed it. As the weather warms and we begin breathing easier, maybe it will come back

That is the new start I long to see.

Marching On—CoronLife Day 355

March 4, 2021 By Leave a Comment

It is hard to believe we are in March of 2021 already. It is also hard to believe we are approaching a year of the pandemic. Some people have already marked the first year, depending what their marker is. For me, it is the week the schools closed in March. That’s when my family’s world shifted.

My daughter was home every day. My husband switched to working from home. I had to figure out how to snag a spot for grocery pickup (it was as bad as trying to get a vaccine appointment for a while). Everything stopped, but at the same time the change was moving at lightspeed. Life became disorienting and stressful, with even minor things that had been on autopilot now taking a great deal of conscious thought.

Now we are about a year in. Vigilance is still necessary, but we have learned. We have learned what activities are safe, what risks we are willing to take (this differs from person to person), what precautions to ingrain in our habits. Will I ever be able to feel comfortable standing closer than 6 feet from someone again? How weird will it be to someday be able to leave the masks at home, gathering dust in a drawer?

The stress has morphed throughout the year. It started as near-panic, and the steep learning curve of living in our new reality. As we got used to working from home, learning from home, shopping from home, zooming from home, the stress became a steady thrum of “stay safe” in the background of our lives. We learned to deal with too much togetherness and too little emotional and mental space. Creatives either saw their Muses flourish, or saw them flee (mine fled). And losing one’s creative outlet is another kind of stress.

Finally, we are at the beginning of the end of the pandemic, and the stress has shifted again. Now the scarcity of vaccines is causing stress as people scramble to get their loved ones protected. We spend hours on sites trying to snag appointments that disappear as fast as concert tickets on Ticketmaster. And we brace ourselves against pandemic fatigue, the very real desire to just toss all precautions to the wind and forget for a while.

But we cannot let down our guard. The pandemic is not over, it is not done, and it will find those moments of forgetfulness and gleefully infect a new batch of people—perhaps creating a new and deadlier variant in the process. We must stand strong for a while longer. Just a few more months, then we can perhaps breathe easier without worrying what respiratory droplets we are breathing in. We will not achieve full return to normalcy in a few months, but we should be much closer. We should be in the middle of the end of the pandemic.

So in the meantime, I am simply marching on. I am distracting myself with my genealogy work. Today I have spent a long time with 9th- to 11th-century Norwegian Jarls of Orkney and the Norse Dukes of Normandy. All I can say is that with all the fighting warring, and raiding everyone did back then, it’s a wonder any of us are here at all.

So as I march with them into their next battle, I urge us all not to give up our current battle. The vaccine cavalry, with all its delivery flaws, has arrived, but the war is far from won. Stay strategic. Stay strong. Stay safe.

I want all of us to be here a year from now, when the end of the end of this pandemic will be behind us.

Do What You Can—CoronaLife Day 348

February 25, 2021 By Leave a Comment

Everyone I know is hitting the pandemic wall. As we approach a year of CoronaLife, many of us have exhausted our reserves of patience, grace, and stay-insidedness. I, for one, have actually felt worse anxiety and stress since the vaccines came out, a desperate feeling of “so near and yet so far.” Like starving on the street and seeing food on the other side of a shop window.

So seeing as I—and many of us—am mentally and emotionally drained, it is hardly surprising that my creativity has crashed and burned. As much as I want to get to writing, I just have nothing in the tank nor the quiet space needed to go there. I am far from alone in this—many, many writers have commented on the same phenomenon. They have the time to write, but just…can’t.

Not being able to write drives me to berate myself often. The lack of productivity makes me feel not like myself, further unsettling me in this time of upheaval. So what’s a writer to do?

Do what you can.

For me, I decided to turn to non-fiction and my favorite hobby, genealogy. Many years ago, I published a book on my father’s side of the family. I began one for my mother, but never seemed to complete it. This month, I decided to try and get to THE END.

I have revamped several chapters, including updated information newly discovered since last time I looked at it, including indicating which ancestral couples have DNA matches to them. I am now wading through the rest of the chapters, finding them in various states of disarray. Some are written but the source citations are missing, some are partly written, and one hasn’t even been started yet.

Years ago I made a hasty mistake that has come back to haunt me (and would cause all of my college professors to cry). I failed to source my notes. You see, my mother’s line leads back to royalty, so a number of her families have a substantial amount of scholarly research on them. I read some of the works, jotted down notes in my genealogy program, made note of the book’s citation—and didn’t cite page numbers. Even worse, I didn’t cite which pieces of information came from which book, and just had a long prose piece on each person that mixed all the info together.

I have placed orders with the Interlibrary Loan people (who got these books for me before), and hopefully as they come in I can scan them quickly and reunite facts with sources. With my luck, all the books will arrive at the same time, and then I will have only 2 weeks to go through 6 books. I also ordered 2 books via ILL that were completely new and I will have to read in full to write the chapter that I haven’t even started yet.

So far, my plan has been fruitful. I am making progress and feeling productive. A little bit like my pre-pandemic self.

So for all of you, writers or not, who are struggling to feel more like yourself, know that aspiring to pre-pandemic productivity and goals right now may be making you feel worse rather than better. And if it is—as it was with me—take my advice and reset your goal:

Just do what you can.

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