It's time for the April roundup! This month marks the month I really started to feel the mental strain from the pandemic. It took a lot longer than most people, for which I am grateful, but when it hit me, it really hit. I've been feeling completely de-motivated to do anything, but at the same time I am bored and restless. I wanted a distraction I could focus on, but I also couldn't focus even on reading a book I really wanted to read.
Thanks to filling the second weekend of the month up with fun activities with my vaccinated friends, I was able to start to feel a little less hopeless and lost. Though I wrote this post before feeling like this, I used my "stuff that sucks list" concept to organize my scattered thoughts. Perhaps it goes without saying because I am a writer, but I always believe in the power of using paper or a keyboard to take the mess of words in your brain and spill them out into a document to make sense of visually.
I've been reading a lot of think pieces on how people are handling their own version of pandemic senioritis, fear of returning to normal, and lack of motivation in their personal lives. In our own ways, almost everyone is feeling some sort of discord about what we've all experienced and what we're all about to experience as our lives "go back", whether we want that or not. I especially feel it this week as my work keeps talking more keenly about returning to... "normal".
April Recipes
Lemongrass and Blood Orange Italian Cream Sodas
Roasted Strawberries Ice Cream Topping
California Dreaming Salad + Honey Butter Croissants
April Home Updates
I didn't think we'd have much going on this month except adding a few new plants, but I do. We took AWAY a plant, a huge one in front of our house!
While this gigantic oak tree has been a pain for us in terms of the amount of leaves it drops every year, it's been part of the landscape of our street for decades. But it's causing a huge drop in efficiency for our solar panels since the leaves grew in. We thought this might happen, but wanted to see for sure before we made the drastic decision to cut down the whole tree. You can see where the darker blue areas are shaded and not pulling in as many kwh as the ones on the sides that are getting full sunlight.
I hate that we had to do this, but I will certainly be planting more (smaller) trees in its stead. Later, we'll come up with a plan for re-doing the front yard, which will need grading. I also put a line of stones in front of the plant bed. It looks so much better. Then I went to the Midlands Plant & Flower Show and got some little doodads to add in there for whimsy. One is a rain gauge, and the other is a weather vane so we can see how windy it is or isn't.
Unfortunately, we have a really bad poison ivy problem back there. I got another rash of it early in the month and will hire out having someone far less allergic and more trained to pull it out. I cannot handle another outbreak, this one was my fourth in a year!
And Everything Else
I am so fortunate to still be working from home still, but nervous as my company's head keeps emailing us to remind us that we still belong in the office because they say so. I cannot imagine going back to all of the prep work required to show up at an office. Being hygienically prepared, looking presentable, having a matching/weather appropriate outfit, preparing two meals to eat at a desk, having the car is ready to be used daily, preparing the animals for 9-10 hours. And there's stuff I'm probably forgetting because it's been so long.
South Carolina has been in the news a LOT this month, and all for awful stuff. The mass shooting at Rock Hill hit me hard because my childhood friend's family were the victims. My friend's little children were killed by an unstable former NFL football player for reasons that we may never know and do not really matter because it doesn't change the outcome. Meanwhile the state legislature is continually trying their hardest to make guns more accessible to more people, more easily. Just what we need, right? They might as well just toss guns out from parade floats like candy and beads at Mardi Gras to prove how bought they all are by gun manufacturers and pro-gun groups.
Closer to home, but on the other side of town, an out of control soldier harassed a Black person for walking down the sidewalk in a neighborhood. This neighborhood has families of many races. But he did get arrested and will probably have to move. Leave people alone, people.
Then we have COVID seesawing back and forth. The numbers go down. Then the numbers swing back up because people are too stupid to realize that it isn't over. Man, this section of the roundup got dark and tragic. Here's to a better May?
