Adventures in Quarantine

Whirlwind of a week.... Mike got a positive result on a rapid test that Saturday morning. The line was very faint, but I insisted that I was the pro from years of reading pregnancy tests. A line is a line, any line is showing that you have virus in your system... The next few hours were a whirlwind of deciding what to do. Mike contact tracing, calling anyone he had been with at work for the past few days. Us deciding who to test next and how.  Rapid tests have been missing from store shelves for weeks now. It seems impossible to find them anywhere. School sent home one box (2 test) per child in the days before winter break ended (shout out to VTrans for getting that done!), but we used those, as requested, to test the kids after break before they went back to school. The state also recently let us sign up to get 2 boxes free online, so we had those in the house. Because the rest of us were asymptomatic, I took the boys skiing on Sunday, followed by a PCR test. It was MLK weekend, s...

 Today, Saturday January 15th 2022, we finally saw the first positive covid case in our household. The lucky winner was my husband, Mike! Omicron is here!  Feels pretty lucky that we made it this far, honestly. But had to update, will post more details soon. So far Mike just has very mild symptoms!  (From the beginning of the pandemic, I have included case count numbers in the footer. But since the omicron variant spreading so quickly, and with the advent of at home testing, counting individual cases has stopped being practical.  Some official said recently that for every positive case that is counted, there are probably 5-10 more actual cases out there. Soon Vermont will transition to just counting hospitalizations and deaths, and not counting individual cases any more. I may continue to include some statistics, but this may phase out slowly).

 First of all...it has been a long hiatus. I have not written since December of 2020. Where did 2021 go? January 2021 had me in a pretty dark place. Teaching was the hardest it has ever been, we were all in "survival" mode, overwhelmed with several different cohorts in a hybrid model AND trying to work with fully remote students who were at home full time. I really didn't have the emotional bandwidth to write anything down. It was a difficult time.  I was working on (and still working on) having a better shield between myself and all the secondary trauma we experience as teachers.  February I suffered a pretty serious concussion. Recovery was long, screen time was extremely limited.  Limiting screen time, with everything happening on zoom and pretty much all instruction and grading needing to be done on electronic platforms made my recover even longer. I resented everything about my job and had a hard time finding any joy at all at work. Recovery in a noisy house wit...

 Hey, something happening today. The US set records for covid hospitalizations for the 8th day in a row. Covid related deaths broke the 300,000 mark.  BUT two Good Things: 1. The first person in the USA received a vaccine for Covid-19. It is terribly exciting and quite emotional to watch the nurses and doctors on TV getting the first shots.  (I want to do another post about the folly the vaccine: reflections on how Mother Nature is communicating her displeasure for human activity, how we should be listening and changing our polluting ways and not just relying on science to get us our of this time and and time again...but for the moment I'll let science have this moment, and express my deep gratitude for all the amazing scientists who developed this vaccine.   I cannot wait to get mine! ) 2. The electoral college voted and Joe Biden was officially declared President Elect of the US. While some legal offices were closed due to legitimate threats of violence from Trump ...

 This is a piece I originally wrote for 7 Days Newspaper in August/September of 2020.  Wednesday August 19th First day of Inservice I haven’t been inside the building since March 18th. (In June I stood out front and waved at our parade of seniors, but other than that, I haven’t been back). As I pull into the school parking lot, the tears stream down, it all comes out. So many big feelings: fear, anxiety, hope, a desperation to return to some kind of normal. I feel a driving determination to get this right for the students, excitement to see them again, but also an underlying current of fear that is difficult to put my finger on. It isn’t just a fear about getting sick, but a fear of the heavy lift we are about to undertake, a worry about serving our community in the best way we can, anxiety for our students and everything they’ve been going through during the closure. I don’t know what to expect, but I’m here.   Friday August 28th.  8th day of inservice, 5 ...

 Back to Work Today is my last day at home, at least for now. Tomorrow, I will drive back to the high school, march up to my classroom that I have not set foot in since March 18th, and get to work. Or, march up to my classroom and be totally immobilized by anxiety and overwhelmed by the enormity of it all. Or have a panic attack? Or maybe all of those things. The thing is, I don't know what is going to happen. It is a strange feeling, suddenly having your chosen profession thrust into the national spotlight. A job I've been quietly doing for 15 years is suddenly at the center of our national story. And everyone has an opinion. There are a lot of hot takes out there, from a lot of angles (from the virus angle about why schools really  need better ventilation, or what community transmission rate makes it safe to open, to the education angle about how schools have been increasingly left to solve all of society's problems while remaining underfunded and underpaid, and how unfai...

Day 142 I'm wondering about even numbering the days anymore...142 days since school shut down, we sheltered in place, and my world stopped. But slowly life has opened back up, and in a few weeks we will head back to school in a hybrid model. Maybe I'll find a new ways to count the days once school starts again? Anyway, "The Hard Days".  We've all had them. It is hard to really comprehend the enormity of what we are living through.  But when I'm stressed, and anxious, and ready to scream at the kids, and just when I'm at the brink of exhaustion and anxiety and I'm reeling with uncertainty... I think of my Grandma Millie.  Alfred and Millie before World War 2: It was March of 1945. My Grandmother Millie lived in a small apartment, in Attleboro Massachusetts.  Her husband, my Grandpa Alfred, had just been deployed in the Pacific. She had two small children, a 1 year old and a 3 year old. She was pregnant with her third child, who would be born in July.  S...