NaPoWriMo 2024 Day 20

Today is the last “official” day of isolation for me. Yes I could have gone out after day 5 (and I did get some needed groceries, masked and ducking in and out of the store one day). I am advised my tests can be positive for three months! I am advised, rather too mildly I think, to wear a mask in crowded places. I think we’ve lost track of what we’re doing here but I’m not an advisor to the CDC etc.

Today is also day twenty of NaPoWriMo and the prompt today was “write a poem that recounts a historical event. In writing your poem, you could draw on your memory, encyclopedias, history books, or primary documents.” I do sometimes tell people about how I went to a lecture in early March 2020 and felt iffy, had a headache and then was sick in bed for two weeks. Luckily I stayed home. And when I went to the doctor on the twelth to get a note to return to work he said, well, we’ll never know for sure… And right after that, the world shut down. And I never went back to my workplace to work.

March 6, 2020

I hope you are well.
Tuesday night I went to a lecture
it turned out to be surprisingly a bust
but I had a headache. Maybe it was me.
I drove home wishing I was home.
I crawled into bed and woke up sick.

I slept most of today. I have a cough
and think I have a fever but I
can’t find my thermometer
just the one I use for the cats.
So I went back to bed.

A few days later and the radio voice
says there’s some sickness
filling hospitals and they don’t know.
I stayed home trying to breathe
I fixed a thermos of hot tea and
I’m crawling back into bed
trying not to cough
the news says stay home.

Hope you are well. Be safe.

NaPoWriMo 2024 Day 20

December 2020

I’ve been home for a little over nine months now. You would think something would have come of that time and stuff has, just maybe not the stuff you might imagine. I’ve painted. I’ve taken photos. I’ve written. I’ve read. I’ve learned to interact to others via a plethora of online platforms.

I had gone to a lecture at the Clark and felt like I had a headache. Didn’t much enjoy the presentation, drove home and went to bed. Was sick with mildly flu-like symptoms and was more than glad to stay in bed napping for quite a number of days, long enough that for the first time in my working history I had to go to a doctor for a note in order to return to work. By then it was clear that something was going on. I had no way of knowing if I’d had the flu (yes, I’d gotten the shot), bronchitis, or whatever this new virus was. But I went to the doctor and he had nothing to offer because now, two weeks later, I was well. I seized the moment to get a test for Lyme and other tick-borne diseases which came back negative.

I got the note and sent it in and then my workplace was shut down.

So began my time at home. I stayed home a little longer, just to be sure about whatever it was I had early in March. Then work evolved and food shopping turned to delivery and pick up and life went on. I officially started doing real work-from-home stuff in early June. In September I signed up officially to do that for six months. And then another round of scheduling fuzziness ended my research into different retirement scenarios and my last working day was October 28. After that I was on “vacation” for a little over a month and now I am officially retired.

Last night I erased the computer I’d been sent to work on and packaged it up. I cleared out a little drawer that held a stack of post it notes – tallies of each day’s work. Yes our work was trackable online – so many interactions over the course of the day and all, but for me, it was a pleasure to tick each chat and perhaps note what the question was. I think the largest number of ticks was 46 or 48. Some days, due to outages or events were much lower. Thirty plus was the norm. I laughed as I quickly flipped through the stack looking at all the slashes. Each a person, for a few minutes or longer.

Now, as I have since March, I can take a few minutes to look around each morning as I go out to offer my coffee grounds to the garden or get the mail. The things to see are many. I fill the bird feeders. I look at the sky. I don’t have a long daily commute to think about things or listen to audio books, although I’ve finished several long audio books since being home. My Prius was showing 112.2 “mpg” the other day because many of my travels are within the electric range of the car. I don’t stop in a store just to look around. I took a pass on the normal Thanksgiving because it seemed like the best thing to do.

Today is 42 days away from Inauguration Day and that is good, even though the fight goes on to turn our country towards what it was before 2016 and maybe towards what we would like it to be. The fight continues to keep people healthy. The stay at home thing continues. So I look around and see what the world has to offer each morning and go from there.

To live a creative life, we must lose our fear of being wrong.
— Joseph Chilton Pearce

December 2020

New Stuff

why parsnips, you may ask? New iPhone day! Yes indeed. Photos TBD.

The person who will not stand for something will fall for anything.
— Zig Ziglar

New Stuff

Summer Doldrums

Yes apparently this time of year I wander off and do – not much.

I’ve been working – from home, and adjusting to this more and more. It’s nice to have lunch just a few steps away. My commute is up or down a flight of stairs. I miss the audio-book time but I don’t mind having that time back.

I’ve been painting (you people doing Instagram can find me using mbfrezon) and writing because it’s officially August Poetry Postcard Festival again, although this time, having started in April, it’s more just PoPo 2020.

I’ve been taking photos, and reminding myself to be grateful for things large and small, often small. Tomato and corn season has arrived along with local peaches.

When I started working from home, I moved (strong like bull) the AC to the room where I’m working, in hopes that I could not pass out from heat. I rigged up a doubled sheet over the door and left just a few inches open at the bottom, and made a looped way to keep the door open just open just wide enough for cat whiskers. Ginny and Harry come in to visit. They plop themselves down and are generally quiet. Sometimes they jump up to surprise me but Ginny often lays in the sunny window and Harry finds himself a soft place even if it’s just a sheet of paper.

Thinking is more stinking than drinking, but to feel is for real.
— Sufi Sam

Nothing can resist a human will that will stake even its existence on the extent of its purpose.
— Benjamin Disraeli

Summer Doldrums

Where did June Go?

Mainly it went in a swirling of brain-drain as I trained and adjusted to doing a new thing while working from home. It has taken really three weeks to go from abject terror to only moments of wondering what-the-heck-am-I-doing, LOL. Toward the end of last week, which ends on Saturday, I had moments of – oh, I know what to do here! Or hearing someone else asking a question in our support chat and thinking, ‘isn’t that…?’ So slow but sure.

Working at home means no forty-five minute plus commute each way, but also means I make my own coffee and breakfast and lunch. And dinner. Sometimes I get to eat one or all of those sitting on the front steps. Sometimes I get to dash out afterwork because the sun is out and I can get a painting in and take photos of the evening coming on.

July brings with it World Watercolor Month so get ready for a more regular appearance of paintings here. After that – August Poetry Postcard Festival 2020 – although with the pandemic in play, some of us started early on that. I did a month’s worth of postcards during NaPoWriMo in April.

I feel the rhythm of my year changing and yet it’s the same. A few photos popped up in facebook of watercolors I’d done in 2016 and 2019 and it was interesting to see what was the same and what was different. Since being home I found a place in New Lebanon where there is a 360 degree view of the sky. Looking back years from now I’ll be reminded of the pandemic by many many panoramas of the sky and clouds and landscape.

Here are photos from today. Mostly clouds and landscape but a few plants and flowers and a couple mushrooms that snuck in at the end. Look close – some of the clouds were being visited by birds and other things!

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Where did June Go?

June 2 More Clouds

I was busy doing training today, but dashed out after work to chase some clouds. Randall cattle make a guest appearance.

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June 2 More Clouds

NaPoWriMo – Day Twenty-Seven

LOL. It snowed! It rained! The delivery guys came! I had online meetings with work! I had a tuna sandwich for lunch! It was, my friends, quite the Monday.

Pandemonium

According to my believable source*,
this word was coined by Milton
combining the pan- of everywhere with
the -demon-ium that can only mean trouble
Imagine hearing this new word whiz by
in a crowded market place one morning
your brain perking up to parse it as
‘everywhere demons’ while your eyes
were talking to your feet about
where the closest exit was and your
hands were scooping up some extra garlic,
as you started suddenly for home,
your mouth tasting the pure dryness of ‘oh’
Or maybe it was more a tang of ‘oh oh’.

First: my lunch today, inspired by some wonderful celery:

and even though it had snowed before I got up, it poured during my lunchtime park on Darrow Rd.

I was just admiring some twelve over twelve light windows in the Shaker settlement buildings along Darrow Rd when I saw this:

I always admire this little building along Rte 20 near the school.

The UPS Man came just as I was coming back, with two packages: Watercolor paper, a new wool sweater and a car organizer for the front seat.

NaPoWriMo – Day Twenty-Seven

NaPoWriMo – Day 24

It was another rainy cold day and again the sun came out again at sunset time. No big sunset or anything, just sun and not much time to enjoy it. Well perhaps it’s part of the plan to keep us home and self-isolating.

Truth be told, this poem was twice as long as I wrote it and sent it off, but I remain unconvinced about the second half but felt pretty good about this half so here you go. Afterwards a few photos, one from yesterday and three from today.

I imagined a survey asking how I felt:
politically hopeless
but my painting is going well.
Because, frankly, we’re messy
all of us and all of this
so if I’m speaking honestly
if not to you then to myself
(that is what you’re wanting, right?)
I can truthfully admit
yes, I was dressed for that
online meeting but my hair
was uncombed and I
wanted to finish my oatmeal
so I kept it audio-only.

We become what we think about all day long. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

NaPoWriMo – Day 24

NaPoWriMo – Day Twenty

Today was a day about the day job. Felt strange and in a weird way lonelier than the past month and a half. But we trudge on folks, we trudge on. (And a hat tip to my Mom, Betty Frezon for a line in her chat tonight that ended up in this poem!)

I refilled the coffee grinder today
where it hangs ready to churn my
morning beans into a small jar.
I looked at the bigger jar with
its inch of oatmeal remaining.
I threw away the cheese wrapper
and rinsed the empty milk carton.
Took the trash out, bin rumbling
put some boxes in recycling too
gave coffee grounds to the garden.
The evening light shone out of
daffodils so delightfully happy
whatever time had been measured
was paused and pressed in amber.

NaPoWriMo – Day Twenty

NaPoWriMo – Day Six

I’m settling into a new routine…

this morning double yellow lines
veered off the center path
and into the April garden.
when I arrived, coffee in hand,
the daffodils were bobbing,
looking around, going nowhere.
Sat on the steps, frothy shadows,
sun and breeze my companions
thinking this a fine office
meeting in my ear, mug in hand
chickadees checking in
wings all a-whir, they dance
How will it be to leave this,
this strange and novel normal?

Afterwards, I pulled out my folding chair for a better view of the front garden and had a go at it with both my normal palette and a new set of colors. It’s hard not be fascinated by the light changing on yellow flowers as the sun moves across the day.

NaPoWriMo – Day Six