#MicroblogMondays: Odds & ends

• 
  BIL called dh on Friday afternoon... Someone he works with had had close contact with someone else who had COVID-19 symptoms and was being tested... so this coworker was getting tested too. Of course, BIL won't hear what the results were until sometime today, when he's back at work. To date, the only person in our circle (that we know of) who's had COVID is dh/BIL's cousin's husband. But it feels like it's getting closer & closer all the time... Reports of the new, more contagious variants, are scary.  And meanwhile, the vaccine rollout here continues to be painfully slow...  
• Our region is reopening today (moving from grey to code red), after more than two months under lockdown/stay-at-home orders (with capacity restrictions, etc., in place). (The city proper and one other nearby region remain closed for at least another two weeks.)  The region where we used to live -- and where we still go for haircuts and doctor visits -- reopened last week. I've been calling the hair salon almost daily for the past week, trying to book haircuts, but I just keep getting voice mail. It's been almost 12 weeks since our last haircuts -- I may eventually get desperate enough to just leave a message and hope for the best, lol.  
• I've heard that salons, restaurants, etc., in some regions are asking people for ID/proof of address, and if you're from out of region, they will not serve you -- trying to discourage people from regions still under lockdown from coming there for "frivolous" reasons. That's fine with me, but it's not like we're just roaming around looking for haircuts -- we've been customers of our stylist for several years now (if not at this particular salon -- she moved over there last year after the one we'd been going to for years closed). 
• Fire alarm testing in our building today... uggghhhh.... SO. LOUD!!  
• Thank you, Jody Day, for introducing me to Yael Wolfe and her beautiful, thoughtful writing about childlessness and other subjects. This recent piece was just about perfect -- about the experience of childlessness, about motherhood, about labels (the ones we choose for ourselves and the ones that get applied to us), about the stories we tell and the ones we don't and why...  Definintely worth a read! 
• Brandi at Not So Mommy recently pondered the "childless vs childfree" label question too. 
• I wrote about this issue early in my blogging career (the third post on this blog, actually!). 

You can find more of this week's #MicroblogMondays posts here.