Covid-19 Life: Snow Days

I love this photo of the grandpup Sunny. She discovered the seat gave her a nice view of her domain. 

We are still waiting to be notified for a COVID vaccination. Meanwhile, winter came and left us a whole lot of snow. We are lucky; unlike some parts of the country, we did not lose heat or power or water. The stories are heart breaking.

We have a battery snowblower, which could be problematic if we lost electricity! It is light and easy to use, but not really up to tackling a heavy snowfall. 

The early robin hangs around the yard for the heated water bowl. I don't know why they return in the middle of winter!

I get the winter doldrums, which is amplified by the pandemic's necessary social isolation. The bitter cold temperatures keep me indoors, and this winter we can't go to the fitness center or mall to walk and exercise. When the temperature rises to 28 degrees, I bundle up and take a walk.

 Consequently, I am watching more television. Thank God for PBS! Right now we are enjoying Miss Scarlet and the Duke. And of course, the reboot of All Creatures Great and Small. We loved The Good Place which we watched earlier this winter, an now are watching Mr. Mayor which also stars Ted Danson with Holly Hunter. I am winding up The Good Wife, into season seven. And we are revisiting Chuck and The Gilmore Girls.

That's a lot of tv for me, and I don't even have a quilting project prepared as an excuse. Today I have to buckle down and layer the Water Lilies quilt for hand quilting.

A quilt friend gifted me a preprinted panel to make an apron. The pattern is called the Nancy, so she knew I had to have it. I am sewing it up.

My Goodreads win  Infinite Country by Patricia Engel arrived in record time!

Our library book club had a marvelous Zoom with Angie Kim to discuss her novel Miracle Creek. We were scheduled to read it and Skype with Angie a year ago. Then came the lock down and the library had to adjust and turn to Zoom meetings. Angie was a gracious, lovely person. We learned how the book was based on her own experiences and heard about her upcoming book, which we are eager to read.

My brother spent the long weekend at his cabin. The roads were bad, the snow storm caused a white out, and he discovered the propane had been left on and the tank was nearly empty! He returned home to discover the local deer had taken over the yard in his absence.

I did the taxes yesterday. And ordered more tea from Simpson & Vail, and a delivery from the drug store, and chose food for our weekly order from Imperfect Produce. 

I had a reprieve from cooking for two days; we order the $50 family special from a marvelous modern Italian restaurant in town and the food lasts us three meals. We have pizza and salad the fist night, and the pasta, salad, rolls, and green beans/broccoli the second night. And for lunch we have left over pizza and more salad. And, it comes with deserts! I had tiramisu and hubby the almond cake. The owner said in a news story that these deals have kept them open over the shut down. They do have the best, homemade pizza ever, everything is from scratch and amazing.

And so, life goes on.

My husband bakes bread and enjoys computer gaming and reading.

I keep busy with reading, quilting, writing, and reading social media and the many email newsletters I received. The quilters Zoom every week, and the book club every month. I order online for grocery and other deliveries. And like everyone else, miss family hugs and yes, I am even beginning to miss going to a store. 

Spring will come. And it will be so freeing to be able to sit outside and watch nature return to life, and take walks around the neighborhood. We can social distant visit outdoors. And, if we ever get that vaccination, we will don our double masks and venture into a store, perhaps to the bakery whose coffee cake we miss so much, or to the take-out place that sells the best pasties in Michigan.

The longer days bring hope of spring and rebirth and growth and healing.

Stay safe. Find your bliss. 

Mini-Reviews: Sontag and Knauusgaard

This post consists of shorter reviews of several books I am reading. At this time I have not finished these books, but likely will before year's end.

Debriefing by Susan Sontag gathers her short stories together in one volume. I will admit that I have never read Sontag, although I remember when her many books came out and garnered a great deal of press. I won this book from the publisher in a giveaway.

The first story, Pilgrimage, excited me. I related to the lightly fictionalized character, based on Sontag herself, who is overwhelmed when she has tea with Thomas Mann, a writer whose books had left an impression on the teenager. I discovered Mann as a teen, his story of Tonio Krueger especially resonating with me with it's view of the artist as outsider. I had collected his novels afterward, but never read them all.

In the story, two teenagers contact Mann and are invited to visit him over tea. "We were prodigious of appetite, of respect, not of accomplishments," we are told. The teens struggle to know what to say, and listen to Mann talk. What she remembers best was embarrassment.

The first time one meets one's idol can be a shock, learning "the gap between the person and the work" a jolt.

The narrator seeks to escape "childhood's asphyxiations, the "long prison sentence of childhood" and its enforced culture of suburban life which held no meaning for her.

In one story a successful man--good job, wife, children--is tired of his life and creates a robotic substitute to take his place. The original man just bums around, but is more content with sleeping in the train station. What a condemnation of the Middle Class way of life!

Many of the other stories left me perplexed and unsure of my own intellectual capacity: what was I missing? I asked myself. Some experimented with form, such as Unguided Tour which reminded me of a Monet painting of Rheims Cathedral, leaving an impression without real detail or form. Whereas Monet leaves me with an emotional reaction, Sontag seeks to elicit an intellectual one.

Are some of these stories inaccessible to the general reader, or are they mere failures in storytelling? I would guess it is some of each.

Debriefing: Collected Stories
by Susan Sontag
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 9780374100759
Hardcover $27.00

Winter by the Norwegian author Karl Ove Knausgaard is the second in his series of essays and letters written to his unborn daughter. Knausgaard is well known for his six volume biography My Struggle. His writing breaks all 'rules' about writing, and is spontaneous, unstudied, often confessional, and sometimes mundane. 

In almost daily meditations over December, January, and February, the author wrote about whatever was on his mind. Owls, Christmas, people he knows, the mythical legend Loki, and even toothbrushes. In the first letter, he warns his daughter that we expect life to be full of joy and light, but instead we encounter pain and suffering and loss. At times he shares an insight that sparks a new way of looking at things, such as the thought that society is based on a belief in the fiction that a coin has intrinsic value, but if our belief vanishes, so does a coin's value. He tries to describe inanimate things, but I note that his descriptions include concepts that are not concrete, which seems to defeat his intention. Some essays just left wondering what the point was.

I have been reading several essays each night before bed. I will finish the book, just to plumb it for those unexpected gems.

I won this book on a Goodreads giveaway.