28 May 2020

Started the day by driving to the local medical center for a routine mammogram, an event which could hardly be described as routine. Stressful under the best of circumstances. Suffice it to say that in a pandemic, hanging around a place with lots of sick people and lots of people exposed to sick people lands somewhere on the continuum between unsettling and terrifying.

While I have admired our health care workers for a long time now, today I felt like I glimpsed a tiny slice of how mentally exhausting serving in the pandemic must be for them. One hour of low-grade terror and constant mental calculus of how to move in a public space with wildly unpredictable humans left me craving a Bloody Mary when I got home at 9 am, and I’m basically a social drinker. Even when everything was clearly marked for me–I knew where the clinic was, there were helpful enormous blue spots spaced 6’+ apart showing visitors where to stand or sit, and nobody got in the building without screening and a temperature check–in other words, when I should not have had to think about it, every decision I made had to be run through multiple mental IF-THEN-ELSE loops. God bless you all, health care workers. You’re made of stronger stuff than I am.

So. Got home, decompressed by potting up more of these eternal tomato plants and re-homing 6 of them plus 2 cucumbers to my friend Lydia. My skills at contactless delivery are well honed by this point.

Spent the afternoon netting blueberries in ankle-deep mud and bingeing the Wind of Change podcast. It’s a deliciously crazy story, well told, and a fun way to spend an otherwise dull afternoon. Highly recommend if you can safely and responsibly entertain an occasional conspiracy theory.