I’ve decided to start a weekly online concert series. Concert is a stretch as it’ll just be a few pieces each time, but that will give me more structure and something to look forward to. It’ll be on facebook live and I’ll post it to my page there as well if you’d like to follow me. I am planning for Mondays at 12:30 Central Time, but it will be up after that as well. I’m thinking of calling it Hannah’s Virtual Violin Luncheon, but that is a fluid brainstorming idea.

I don’t know how long it will go, but I would think I will want to continue over the summer at a minimum. I doubt we’ll be able to do much if any travel, and that means I’ll have more time than ever. I hope most of my students continue (and for the record I am still accepting new online students) and I am thinking of having a few extra classes for them as well…but I don’t know what the future will bring. They may want to take a break, or perhaps people will be traveling, or perhaps their financial situations will go downhill and they’ll need to stop lessons because of that. I’m hoping that it doesn’t happen to many students, or any.

And then of course, people may get sick. We don’t know. This is all to help stop that from happening, but as expected, the lower the numbers get, the more people say, oh well, there was no pandemic, and then states are “opening up” again (which is a weird phrase that we have started using “opening up the economy” as if the ruling party hasn’t claimed for years that the economy is the stock market and it’s BEEN open…and yet suddenly the low wage workers and small businesses are the economy? I’d say they can’t have it both ways but they’ve lied and cheated so much that their supporters believe—somehow—that only the liberals are bad, and therefore they seem to be able to have it both ways), and because of the “opening up” places will likely (sadly) have a resurgence. Don’t get me wrong, I’d love to have the virus not be as big of an issue as scientists, doctors, and such thought, but the way to truly determine that is testing. More testing. Not making low wage workers go back to work or lose their unemployment benefits, while the rich stay hidden away.

Sigh. In a nutshell, the world is terrible. And yes, we are all going to die eventually, but I think most of us don’t actually welcome that and have a lot of things we want to do first!

So, not to be a downer. Ooh, we made nachos last night for dinner. I have never done that before, put chips out, sauteed some peppers, onions, and squash and put that on top, added a can of black beans, some cheese (not enough really, but it seemed like so much that I had to stop), then made a little slaw of red cabbage, rice vinegar, and lime, and added that on top after baking the nachos, and garnished with salsa and plain greek yogurt. It felt decadent but wasn’t too unhealthy, and was delicious!

I’d had a mildly annoying day: three students canceled on me the day of (my policies cover these things so it wasn’t a big deal, but) and then our imperfect foods box contained only the produce I’d ordered but nothing else—one thing we had been looking forward to was a piece of salmon, hence the nachos for dinner. I’m headed to the grocery store shortly to do a shopping trip—I haven’t gone in over two weeks so that seems pretty good. We did have to get milk the other day at the gas station—I’d purchased two gallons of milk the previous visit, and the expiration dates were far in the future, but the second gallon just had a weird taste, so we decided to dump it. I don’t know what went wrong—maybe we just got unlucky.

I have a variety of supplies of toilet paper being shipped to me. We had a fair amount, but once I started using one of the kinds, I realized the rolls are much smaller than I thought and we’re going through a whole roll about every day and a half in the busier bathroom. That made me nervous, and I already had a shipment coming, but maybe not until mid-May…I managed to find something to ship sooner, and we’ll see what the quality of any of those are, but I’m not having to run from store to store and make a bunch of trips in two weeks or so looking desperately for toilet paper. If this pandemic continues through the summer, who knows if the TP supply issues will also continue. It still stands to assume that things can and will get worse, even as we all remain hopeful that they won’t and that school will return as usual in the fall.

Sorry, I’m kind of a downer today. I definitely find my moods go up and down a lot. I get pretty stressed about grocery shopping, but it’s the job I’ve agreed to do in the house, and I have decided I want to do my own grocery shopping rather than get it delivered—with delivery I grow to not expect exactly what I want and that’s fine. If I go on my own I can select exactly what I want, from the choices in front of me.

I’m using too many parentheses and dashes as well, and probably using them incorrectly. Oh well!

We finished the Marvelous Mrs. Maisel last night, and will be picking a new TV show tonight. I’m not sure what direction we will go.  I’m looking forward to doing a few more things in the garden this weekend, and as a summer project we may be tearing down our back porch (it is quite rotted in places) and not replacing it, but instead just building a little stairway. That would give a larger patio around instead which could be a place to use the grill or just hang out on in certain kinds of sunlight. If we aren’t doing much travel this summer (or any, though the thought of not getting to see my niece and nephew in person this summer absolutely breaks my heart) that means it’s a good time to do a few more home improvement projects we haven’t had time for.

Here’s to a more positive mindset and a good rest of the week!