Re-entry, Part 3

[CW: pandemic, mental health] Here in Toronto, the world hasn’t fully started up again yet. Lots of white-collar workers are still working from home at least some of the time, and downtown is still pretty empty. My contra dance group has just held its first dance since February 2020 (though I didn’t feel comfortable attending…maybe next time). And I’m tiptoeing back, one step at a time…but there are an awful lot of steps to take, somehow. (Case in point: this is my third re-entry post.) My spouse and I just got back from our first trip since summer 2020 — we took the train to Montreal to visit family for a week. It was wonderful to spend time with some of my immediate family members again, as well as hug a dear friend and pet a kitty and visit a bilingual indie SF&F bookstore. The travel and associated “new” experiences were less anxiety-inducing than I’d feared, especially since I had a really hard time with going back to the office pre-Omicron. My anxiety from earlier in the pandemic still flares up sometimes, but it’s back to being more manageable now. As long as I’m able to keep my mask on, I’m okay. (It gets harder as the hours stretch on or when I need to take the mask off in close quarters.) The part I found more exhausting was all the “peopling”, that is, spending time around people (other than my spouse, who doesn’t count). I’m an introvert and have…

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Years in the Making

Howdy, friends! I just returned from a trip. A trip I was supposed to take in 2020. In March of 2020. March 15, 2020. You can guess how that went. The trip in question was a Western Caribbean cruise out of New Orleans, making two stops in Mexico, one in Belize, and one in Honduras. Back in 2020, we’d been watching the situation closely. If you recall (and I know you do, though you may not remember when this happened because time has been weird since the pandemic started), in Feb 2020, the Diamond Princess, a cruise ship, had a major COVID-19 outbreak, which culminated in something like 700 people getting sick and the whole lot being stuck off the coast of Japan for weeks. And there was another Princess ship around then that had a COVID issue–the Grand Princess, which hung out off the coast of California forever. (We didn’t go on Princess, I just remember these situations in particular because they were awful.) In the end, we decided we wouldn’t go, because cruise ships were obviously death traps, and cancelled. And then they cancelled the cruise anyway. So we rebooked the trip for March 14, 2021. Surely we wouldn’t still be in lockdown and everything a year out. Ha. Haha. Anyway, when the 2021 cruise was cancelled, we again, dutifully, rebooked for 2022. Each time we rebooked we got a slightly bigger, nicer room due to incentives because the cruise lines were really hurting. With the Omicron wave…

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Mountain Memories

Two weeks ago, I blogged about my magical fantasy dream castle retreat, where I wished I was instead of plowing through a difficult month at work. Last week, I got to spend some time in a place that happened to resemble it more than a little. I spent the week in the Canadian Rockies, reconnecting with my siblings while hiking. (But not camping. Beds, showers, and easy meals are too much of a draw when you’ve spent the day walking.) I didn’t grow up there, but I did spend at least a week in the Rockies every summer, and they’re still one of my favourite places on the planet. Here, then, are just some of the things I want to remember, like talismans against the sometimes-grind of daily life… The way my siblings and I can still communicate with a look or half a sentence, or all acquire identical facial expressions at the same time, even though we are very different people and haven’t lived in the same house or even the same city for years now. The Technicolor wildflowers all over the mountainsides. Kananaskis Country, where we were, is famous for them. Some of the meadows are sloped 30 degrees or more, making for a very unpleasant climb, but the flowers don’t mind at all. They’re busy making the most of the short mountain summer. So are the butterflies. I’m no lepidopterist, but we kept seeing orange ones with wings that looked like lace, and I even spotted a…

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