I said in my first post that I did not think of this blog as a diary. I am terrible about keeping a diary. I am not disciplined enough and I simply don’t have enough interesting things to share on a regular basis.
My last post was May 8th, however, and that is not because nothing interesting has happened. Quite the opposite. So much has happened that I have not taken much time to reflect on anything.
Well, maybe that is not true. I have done plenty of reflecting but I felt stuck. I finished school and stopped staying up until 3 a.m., writing and reading. I started working full-time and trying to be as devoted to my job as I was to my schoolwork. (Yeah, I am a dork and have made some adjustments in my attitude. That is a topic for another post.) I shared this blog with my parents and my niece and wanted to write well…so I wrote nothing, just in case it wasn’t perfect. Both children were home and any minute they had to spend with me, I was prepared to drop everything else I was doing to spend time with them. I knew, I know, I won’t get this time back with them, in just this way, ever again and I intended to take advantage of every second.
So, I stopped writing. But it looks like I could be working from home for another nine to twelve months. 9 to 12 months! My temporary routine is turning into something more routine routine. I think I want to schedule time to write, just like I make time to exercise every day. For weeks, I have kept a list of things I want to write about and practiced writing opening paragraphs. Argh! Why not just sit down and write? Well, partly because my “office” is in the family room but that is not a great excuse. It’s 2 a.m. right now and no one is here in the family room. Nor is anyone here at 7 a.m.
All of this is to say, I started this post several months ago because I assumed I would be going back into the office by August, and wouldn’t it be interesting to post a timeline that tracked COVID-19 in Kansas, and then match those dates to other significant events in our lives? (That sounds so naive to me now.) But using the pandemic as the measure against which to trace other personal events does not feel right. I know the pandemic is “unprecedented” but it is also depressing and making it serve as the backdrop to other things in our lives gives it more power than I want to give it, even if I probably should.
Anyway, I am going to post this graphic now. It will change tomorrow and in a month and 6 months – hopefully for the better – but it is a snapshot of where we are now, and why I am working from my family room for the foreseeable future, hoping to continue to write. (If you click on the graphic, you will go to Johns Hopkins site, where they are updating the graphs everyday.)
References
Timeline of COVID-19 policies, cases, and deaths in your state. (n.d.). Retrieved July 22, 2020, from https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/data/state-timeline