Featured Refresh
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Would you describe yourself as someone who's healthy at this point? Why or why not? If this has changed during the pandemic, talk about what's changed.
Gardening has helped to keep me sane. I survived quarantine by seeing change in a sweet potato vine that sprouted, despite 3 months of sameness. I remember Hugh Downs on a tv show” Over Easy” asking elderly why they were growing bonsais when bonsai take decades & even century to grow. “ It gives us hope”, was the answer. Gardening is an act of faith and hope. It can sustain you physically and spiritually-and keeps you out of stores if it is successful. This is my current project. I purchased this Garden Tower as a Christmas gift for myself and have waited months for the weather to allow me to start plants by seed. I was looking at consolidating my garden and not thinking about composting in it when I purchased it. Now I’m excited to trim my vegetables and add to the compost so my worms have food to make compost tea, which gives my plants nutrients. This has been great so far . I’m eating more vegetables, growing future vegetables as well as herbs and flowers & enjoying watching things leaf out. I bought a 2nd tower and spent time setting it up and transplanting basil and poppies into it today. I planted some seeds, too. Growing things is exciting. You get to see and be a part of change. In addition to hope it gives agency and is fun. I can’t wait to make Caprese salad with my own basil and tomatoes. I hope to stay curious and try to make my own ricotta and mozzarella. There is always something new to try.
August 1, 2022
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Talk about any major life events, milestones, or other important things in life that have been disrupted by the pandemic.
I lost a lot of time on my dissertation this year, and it absolutely set me back in my progress. It terrifies me. I think I can still finish "on time," (i.e., before too much time has passed for me to finish). I know that if I were in danger of not finishing in that window, my advisor would warn me, and I'm reasonably confident that if I were in danger of not finishing on time, the university would take the pandemic into consideration, but it still terrifies me. I just couldn't bring myself to write during the pandemic because it felt so monumental and I really didn't know how long it was going to go on. I managed to complete one chapter draft during the pandemic; I really should have completed two. I was barely still managing to meet my obligations with my remote job. And at one point, the power company was doing some work and caused such an enormous power surge that it fried my desktop's hard drive, even plugged into a surge protector (several other less important appliances never worked again after that, too). Nothing from the power company, no acknowledgement of what happened, let alone an apology or some sort of compensation. So, while I couldn't set foot on campus to use a real computer due to the pandemic, I was trying to do my job and write my dissertation on the crappiest, tiniest old laptop that I'd been meaning to discard. I was just extremely lucky that none of my writing or archival research was only saved to that computer. I was supposed to teach a summer course last semester, which was cancelled. I was supposed to present my research at a conference, which was postponed and then cancelled. I'm an Irish dancer, a hobby I keep up because I enjoy it and it keeps me in shape. We abruptly lost St. Patrick's Day 2020. We had one performance, on March 8th, and everything after that was cancelled. I never in a million years would have guessed that we wouldn't have St. Patrick's Day 2021, either. It feels horrible to be upset about any of this when I have not lost my income and no one I am close to has been sick. And unlike most PhD students, I wasn't teaching or taking courses, so I never once had to deal with Zoom classes (except dance classes). I am lonely being single and living alone, but at least I am not responsible for a child's needs (especially educational) during this pandemic. I'm simultaneously totally broken from being all alone for nine months and feel like the biggest piece of shit for not having anything really bad happen to me or anyone I love.
January 8, 2021