It seems like every time I decide I'm going to start blogging regularly again, all that happens is a series of post, ever further apart, starting with something along the lines of "how can it already be [x amount of time] since the last time I posted. I was going to start journalling, thinking maybe putting an actual pen to actual paper might help me to sort out some of the swirl happening in my head. And then I remembered that that was part of what I first loved about blogging: that typing allowed me to get more of the swirl out of my head since I can type so much faster (and more accurately, not to mention legibly) than handwriting anything. There is definitely a lot of swirl happening in my head though, so time to do something about it. Perhaps I'll start wearing a beret and strolling around with a notebook and pencil to jot notes and ideas in. I'm not quite sure why a beret is essential to this activity but it feels like it is.
I got through January well enough. Didn't do as well with the 30-day Yoga with Adrienne challenge as I would have liked to but on the other hand, I did a whole lot more yoga in January than I have otherwise ever done. Food is starting to get a bit out of control although on the whole is also better in general than it has been for a long time. And I was really glad to have a freezer with quite a lot of batch-cooked food in it when this happened at the end of Feburary.
Actually, now that I'm thinking about it, January ended up kind of going off the rails because there was a shooting close to where I work. I wasn't immediately under threat in the sense that I had no gun pointing directly at me at any stage but I was close enough to see the shooter and be one of the people calling the police. Not an experience I care to repeat any time soon although I'm pleased enough with how calmly I reacted in the moment.
At the start of February then, I was moving pretty slowly in general. I had texted a friend on the day of the shooting that I was definitely going to do TOMM that evening and the entire 30 minutes was going to be dedicated to clearing off the table. So, yeah, that didn't happen that day.
It took me a couple of weeks to get back to doing anything much at all other than work and sleep but finally I did manage to make it look like this (after three evenings worth of work!) I even managed to keep it that way for several weeks.
I was really happy to head off to Halle at the end of the month to once more participate in the Happy Birthday Handel performance of Messiah. A far smaller choir and smaller crowd this year, given the Corona restrictions still i place. Not that those restrictions (everyone testing everyday, masks on when not in seat, everybody vaccinated) helped much in the end because on the day I left I had a bit of a scratchy throat so while waiting for a train change, I decided to do another test just in case and that's the first positive one I got. The picture above is from day 10 after first testing positive and it was another three days before I managed to get a negative test. I had what they call a mild case but it still fairly knocked me out for two weeks. Fever the first four or five days, coughing and sneezing and blowing my nose a million times the entire time, and a week since I've been testing negative I'm still coughing. It's just not fun. And that's a mild case in someone who's vaccinated and boosted. Le big sigh. Ok, that's enough for now - I'm supposed to be working so I suppose I'll go and do a bit of that.