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Tuesday, April 21, 2020

what i've been up to, quarantine edition

Here is a brief update of things I've been doing/working on during the quarantine. This is not to say that I am productive every day, or even 50% of every day. I'm doing the best I can. Like most, I'm being thrown for a loop right now. Some evenings, I look back on my day and think, "what did I even do today?" And I refuse to shame myself for that.

Now, on to the good stuff. In the last couple weeks, I have been...

  • Making from-scratch meals at home. We had several cook books on our wedding registry, and since moving into our house with a full-size kitchen to work with (and all this newfound time on my hands), I've been keen to experiment more in the kitchen. I made a couple recipes from Cravings - lemony arugula spaghetti caccio e peppe (with linguine, since that's all we had) and sriracha caesar salad (with added sardines...because I discovered that I like them?!). I even threw together a prosciutto and arugula salad with cherry tomatoes and mozzarella tossed together with lemon juice and olive oil for lunch one day last week. Putting together meals that are a couple steps outside of my comfort zone has been a lot of fun for me - I think my husband has especially enjoyed this new hobby of mine, as well.
    *Food photography to improve over the course of this quarantine, hopefully.



  • Researching home decor + furniture until my fingertips bleed. Dramatic, but seemingly accurate. I haven't spent time thinking about how to decorate in so long, and it feels overwhelming. I'm the queen of indecision (trying to work on it), and I'm also torn between wanting to invest our money in quality pieces and stretching our budget by spending money on cheaper alternatives. Style wise, I'm drawn to a combination of modern, bohemian, and farmhouse. Isn't that called "eclectic?" To be determined. 
  • Reading. I've already read two and a half books since the start of COVID-19 (half a book meaning I finished a book I'd been reading for about a month beforehand). I set my GoodReads goal a little lower this year (12 books instead of 25) so that I could alleviate my focus from how many books I'm reading to how much I am actually enjoying a book. I've been mostly sticking to contemporary romance novels this year. I'm planning on writing a post about the books I've read in the last year soon!

  • Wondering why I've never attempted to make my blog a full-time job. Ha! Just kidding, but really. In truth, I know I've never put forth a great effort to monetize this blog. It's always been fun for me to write about my life, and even though I talk about things I buy and enjoy, I hardly consider myself an "influencer." I love to write and share stories, and that's why I blog. I've (personally) always felt like it's kind of hard to capitalize on that. Unless, of course, I wrote a book. 
  • Signing up for SkillShare. My aforementioned point. I've always loved writing, ever since I was little. It's even been said that I'm a good writer (...you know, by my family and composition professors in early college). I used to have book ideas flittering about in my brain pretty frequently. In the last few years, my inspiration, motivation, and dedication to the craft fell by the wayside. I've been wanting to take a few creative writing and character development courses, just to see if I can spark an old flame. I may never write a book, but it'll certainly never write itself! 

If you have a lot of new time on your hands right now, what have you been doing with it?




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Thursday, April 16, 2020

officially joining the quarantine


Greetings, from the strangest days we've all lived through thus far.

What a month it has been, right?

We bought our house on Friday, March 13th. It feels like a lifetime ago when it's been just 34 days. Groups of less than 250 were still able to gather in public places. Ryan and I didn't think twice before going out to lunch as a mini-celebration of our closing. We went to a wedding the next evening. We were on the brink of change, and like many, didn't realize just how quickly it was going to alter every aspect of our lives.

But even though it's been about 4-6 weeks since everything started unraveling, it didn't really hit me until about a week ago, when my work situation officially changed.

I work as a speech-language pathologist at a pediatric outpatient facility. In the last month, we went from seeing our full caseloads, to no patients, to medical-priority patients. More recently, I went from working my usual four days per week to one day per week. I have to take PTO (up to negative 80 hours) for the other three days until that runs out. Or that's the plan for now, anyway. What I've learned lately is that while nothing is certain, things could certainly be worse for me. All I can do is roll with the punches, and that's what I will continue to do.

Until this point, it's been difficult for me to relate to everyone "quarantining." Going to work each day (sans patients), seeing my co-workers, taking a lunch break all felt relatively normal. I watched TikTok's to "bored in the house and I'm in the house bored," and I thought to myself, "what's that like?"

Alas, now I know, because I'm among the people whose worlds have been totally flipped upside down. I might be late on the uptake, but I think it's finally time I let myself grieve the loss of normalcy. I know this is not forever. But it is right now, and it is for the foreseeable future. And while society is telling me to make the most of this time, I think it's okay to figure out what that is going to look like for me...and if that means I've spent the last day and a half on the couch with my head in a spin trying to figure out how to proceed, then that's what that means.

How have you been handling COVID-19? What does life look like for you right now?


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