Light and Momentary

Further dispatches from the world's leading bunyip blogger

You may remember our ductwork bunyip, who lurks in search of tasty nibbles or at least nice yoga pants. It's been a while since we've had a bunyip update on the blog, but today our quiet bunyip reminded us that the ducts are a sad and lonely place, and residents thereof will seize comfort where they can find it.

A couple of years ago Pete was given an AeroGarden for Christmas [affiliate link]. You guys, it was so much fun. New life and green sprouts in the middle of a bitter January! Fresh basil whenever we wanted it! It brought us a lot of joy (and some chimichurri too), and so last winter we tried to start a new one. Alas, it molded. We were sad, watching those tiny baby hopeful sprouts succumb to the tentacles of mold. Next year, we said, we bleach it.

Today we sat down in the middle of the office floor. We were all set to bleach and rinse and plant! We could practically taste the pesto!

Enter the bunyip.

Somewhere in our house or garage there are herb seeds and little planting containers. I could give you a long list of places they are not, but this is not especially helpful information when you want to take the seeds and put them in the little planting containers. Stella has a vague memory of grownups moving them when a foster dog was sniffing at them, but the grownups do not seem to have put them in any of the logical places.

Clearly, the grownups set them down in a corner near a vent, and then turned around to deal with the foster dog.

Sluuuuuurp, went the bunyip, seizing his advantage. Oh, how he must loved those tasty crunchy seeds after long weeks of eating dust and spiderlings! (I would guess the dirt was not quite as tasty as the nice crunchy seeds, but what do I really know about bunyip dietary preferences?)

My past experiences with our bunyip suggest that it might be most sensible to buy some new basil seeds.

Sunday night musings

It is two below (-19°C) and getting colder, and we are expecting 3-6 inches of snow.

One of the things I often mutter about when Hollywood attempts to do winter weather is that usually you don't get a ton of snow when the temperatures are really cold. (Have I blogged about this pet peeve of mine before? I fear my middle-aged brain is getting repetitive here in year 17 of blogging. Luckily most of my readers are middle-aged too, so maybe you don't remember when I grouse about the same things all over again.)

Maybe I have even told this specific story: I once read a kid's book, set in Pennsylvania or somewhere not far off, in which it got down to twenty below and three feet of snow fell. Except (A) three-foot snowfalls don't happen overnight in Pennsylvania and (B) you're not very likely to get even a one-foot snowfall at twenty below. That's too cold for heavy snow.

***

There's a bunch of stuff I am not-blogging, and it's interfering with my blogging rhythm. 

Work is really hard -- really, really hard. It's going okay. I am working a lot of hours. Once I posted about my tendency to monitor fractions of difficult tasks completed. On Tuesday I will be a third of the way through the semester. I don't really want to live a life in which I am counting down the days until the next thing, but sometimes that's how it goes.

***

My sister-in-law is out of the hospital. I appreciate your prayers for her. It's almost the anniversary of my friend David's death. He died with symptoms very much like hers, back when it was shocking and unprecedented for a previously healthy person in his fifties to go from minor annoying symptoms to dead within a few hours, back before we knew there was already community spread in California.

I wonder how many previously healthy people in their 50s have died since then.

***

COVID numbers have been falling here; we're finally back to October levels across all of our metrics. And as much as I want to be a good neighbor, I am feeling the itch to get back to normal or at least normal-er. Yesterday at Mass they added one more musician. The two vocalists and I form the vertices of a roughly equilateral triangle with 12-foot legs, and yesterday our friend Joe played guitar in the middle of the triangle. Earlier in the pandemic I think I might have been skeptical. Higher density! He's closer to the vocalists, who are singing without masks! Don't want Joe to get COVID! But yesterday I was just plain glad to see him, glad to be back in a larger ensemble, glad to be doing something different and familiar at the same time. Playing bass is comfortable enough now that when one of my strings went out of tune during Mass I could work around it without being stressed out about it.

Our parish is distributing individual bags of blessed ashes on Wednesday, so the weirdness does not appear to be over.

A different local parish offers drive-through confession on Friday afternoons. I'm a fan of that particular flavor of weirdness, it turns out.

I'm thinking about going vegetarian for Lent. How about you?

Truth

I am up to Leviticus in my annual read-through of the Bible. This is probably the eighth time I've read Leviticus, and always before it's been a slog. "Historical interest!" I tell myself. "The struggle for holiness!" I tell myself. "It's only 27 chapters!" I tell myself. 

But this year it's landing differently. Leviticus says, "When you have a contagious disease -- or even if you might have a contagious disease -- you have a non-negotiable responsibility to protect the members of your community. Even if it's lonely! Even if it's costly! The well-being of your community demands personal sacrifice."

That's a striking passage to read after a year in which Christians have been some of the loudest proponents of defying COVID precautions.

"Well," I said to myself, "that was a little gift! Applicability! In Leviticus! Now I will soldier on through the rest of it." But then! This morning I was struck again by the timeliness of today's passage. It says, "You shall not act dishonestly in rendering judgment. Show neither partiality to the weak nor deference to the mighty, but judge your neighbor justly."

Show no deference to the mighty when rendering judgment. Maybe I'll send that one to Ted Cruz.

Superpowers

It's bitterly cold here in Gladlyville today, as it is across much of the Midwest. It was nine below when I got out of bed (-23°C, for my non-US friends), and I was listening to our furnace labor in the basement. My eye fell on one of the living room windows.

I feel strongly that our 1923 windows are part of the charm of our house, but they are not energy-efficient. One of them has developed a slight sag in its top half, and the draft is irksome even when the weather is more temperate. "Elwood," I said, "can we do something about this window?"

He considered and discarded a couple of possibilities. "I was wondering about getting a piece of wood from the basement and pushing it up from below," I said. "Sure," he said, "you could do that." But you guys, it felt like such a hassle: I'd have to measure, I'd have to sift through the messy pile of wood on the basement workbench, there probably wouldn't be an exact match, there might be sawing involved, blah blah blah. And I hadn't quite finished my coffee, so I wandered off.

Minutes later my husband disappeared into the basement and then reappeared immediately, holding a piece of wood. He opened the window, eased the wood into place, and hey presto! --it fit perfectly.

Surely somewhere in almost 17 years of archives I have posts about my husband's strange knack for sizing up dimensions by eye. He helped my college roommates and me move in the summer of 1991, and I still remember their awed voices: "Elwood is a spatial-visual GENIUS," they said, after they watched him magic a crammed apartment's worth of stuff into a too-small U-Haul. In our family we call him the Master Packer, because he can just see how things should fit together.

Sometimes this is mildly annoying. He wants the leftovers to fit precisely in their Tupperware. If he realizes too late that there is room at the top, he will scrape the food into something smaller, and I will grumble to myself later about washing the first container because it wasn't exactly right. But sometimes it just feels remarkable: he looked at the window, he looked at the wood in the basement, and he grabbed something that fit perfectly on the first try without any measurements.

"If there were a game show where people competed at scraping leftovers into just-right Tupperware, you would bring home the big bucks," I told him afterward. "Ah, yes," he said, "I'm sure the ratings for that show would be stratospheric."

Whiplash

Today the phone rang and I learned that a loved one has been hospitalized with COVID -- someone my age, previously healthy. Ten minutes later I learned that my parents received their first vaccine dose. I'd been so worried about them because of where they live. It had seemed almost inevitable that they would get it. 

Such a weird mix of gratitude and relief and worry and uncertainty. Prayers appreciated.

Truth vs. fiction, epidemiology version

Elwood and I were talking about maybe watching the movie Contagion together, and it made me think about the ways that fictional plagues are different from actual plagues. Books like The Stand and Station Eleven had prepared me for a pandemic in which everybody got the disease quickly and severely, and lo-- actual viruses don't work like that. (Or at least not yet? It feels a little jinx-y to type that out loud.) Things that make more sense almost a year into an actual pandemic: a virus as contagious and as virulent as the ones in those books would kill all of its hosts too quickly and have nowhere to go, and human bodies are pretty good at fighting off infections.

This would make a lousy novel in a lot of ways, this yearlong anti-festival of uncertainty and heartbreak and boredom. ("I miss going places," said Stella this weekend.) But plenty of it has also been too strange for fiction. If I had read a novel in which government officials said "what if we just let 'er rip?" in the face of a pandemic with the potential to cause a seven-digit number of deaths in the US alone, I would have thought they were too cartoonishly evil for plausibility. I wonder if we would have had more buy-in for containment measures if the virus had been more deadly. Neither The Stand nor Station Eleven featured any long-haulers: either you got it and died, or you didn't and lived. The things most of us didn't know about epidemiology going in -- that 1% is a grievously high mortality rate, that there is usually a sizable middle ground between fine and dead -- I wonder if those things could have shifted the landscape.

I would not have believed the vaccine part of this hypothetical novel either. "Come on," I would have said, "vaccines are hardly ever >90% effective! And you want me to believe that you just knocked together two of them and got FDA approval for them both in less than a year? No, that would never happen." Hypothetical Me reading this hypothetical novel might also have said, "Come on! You give your characters two improbably effective vaccines and NO PLAN WHATSOEVER for distributing them? I don't buy it!"

But here we are, living our actual lives instead of reading a hypothetical novel. The last time I read a dystopian novel (Leave the World Behind) it reminded me forcibly that there is plenty of dystopia in the here and now. I don't know if I will watch Contagion or not. If I do, I'll be sure to take notes so we can discuss.