#MicroblogMondays: Pre-holiday odds & ends

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• It's a William Tell Overture kind of day/week/month around here...! (The link goes to a past post where I explain what I mean!) 
• The Childless Collective Virtual Summit is over for another year. It was a busy week (see above, lol), so I wasn't able to watch as much of it on the day-of as I would have liked -- although what I did see was pretty great!  Thank goodness for the Pace Yourself Pass! (which will let me watch the segments I missed on my own timetable for the next 365 days).   
• I think Katy (Seppi, who organized the event) said there were something like 3,000 people registered this year, and 500 who joined the pop-up group on Mighty Networks.  As someone who's been around online childless communities for 20+ years now (!), those numbers are MINDBLOWING. 
• Among the stuff keeping us busy last week (besides the summit):  setting up & decorating the Christmas tree, doing my Christmas cards, Christmas shopping at two different malls plus other stores, haircuts and a cemetery visit back in our old community, and the usual laundry, housecleaning, etc.  
• Also this:  A week ago Saturday (Dec. 2nd), BIL called to ask if we wanted to go with him & SIL that afternoon to see one of his & dh's cousins, who recently got the all-clear after almost a year of dealing with cancer surgery and treatment. We said yes. The cousin's adult daughter, who teaches kindergarten and lives with her parents, was there, and the cousin's brother (who was our neighbour in our old community) also came over. We all had a really nice visit, laughing and talking and eating for several hours, and celebrating her clean bill of health, as well as BIL's successful liver transplant last summer. 
• You can probably guess where this is going.  Wednesday, this cousin texted us:  her teacher daughter had just tested positive for covid.  :(   (It's running rampant through her school right now.)  
• Almost immediately, I started feeling a tickle in my throat. I woke up the next morning and it was still there. I was also horribly fatigued all day. :(  
• There were logical explanations:  it's been very dry in our condo unit (even though we have the humidifier running constantly) -- plus I woke up around 3 a.m. that morning and couldn't go back to sleep, so I wound up getting up around 5 (!). (So yeah, I was tired...!) 
• Nevertheless, I worked myself into a panic. WHY had we taken a risk and exposed ourselves, so close to our departure to see my parents for Christmas??  I debated whether to test, and decided I'd gargle with saltwater, pop a few ibuprofen, rub on some Saje Immune essential oil blend (including eucalyptus, tea tree oil and cinnamon) and see how I felt the next day. (And started checking out alternate flight availability up to Christmas Eve, just in case we had to postpone out travel plans...!) 
• The next day I woke up feeling a whole lot better. (A better night's sleep definitely helped.)  And I've felt fine since then. No further potential symptoms. THANK GOODNESS.   
• BIL & SIL tested negative, and the cousin & her husband are fine too. 
• I texted her last night to see how they were doing, and she said there were 7 kids absent from her daughter's class last week, and enough teachers at her school out sick that they had to hold their planned professional development day last Friday over Zoom, instead of in person. 
• (ETA:  See comments for a further update!) 
• Older Nephew posted a photo from Little Great-Nephew's classroom on Instagram last week:  the teachers made a construction paper tree with a leaf for each student, and they printed something about each child on it. For LGN:  "[LGN] likes to share and is always kind."  Older Nephew said he got all choked up when he saw that. Dh & I did too!  :)  
• (It should be noted that LGN is not always enthusiastic to share -- especially when it comes to his baby cousin, lol.  But he is generally a kind-hearted little guy, just like his dad & uncle!)  
• My L.M. Montgomery Readathon Facebook group just announced our next book, which we'll begin discussing together, chapter by chapter, on Jan. 15th: "Anne's House of Dreams." This is one that's a big favourite among our group -- and I know it's near & dear to many loss mothers' hearts, including mine. (Nevertheless, I will NOT be volunteering to do a video reading of Chapter 19...!)
• (But -- do I have time before then to squeeze in the previous book, in the series, "Anne of Windy Poplars"?? -- known as "Anne of Windy Willows" in the UK. I do like to keep to chronological story order, where possible...!) 
• My brand-new Kobo e-reader (purchased in late October) recently stopped syncing and downloading new books -- AGAIN.  I decided to try signing out of my account & then signing back in again, and once again, it worked like a charm.  :)  The drawback being that I had to reinput the wifi password and re-download books all over again. And all my bookmarks were gone too. (If I'd had any non-Kobo-purchased books on there, those would have been deleted too.)  But! -- I can download books to read again!  
• Myles Goodwyn, the lead singer of the classic Canadian rock band April Wine, died in Halifax on Dec. 3.   He was 75.  April Wine was one of the few big CanRock bands of my youth that I never did see in concert, but their music -- his distinctive voice -- was part of the soundtrack of my growing-up years. (I can always pick out an April Wine song instantly.)  
• It's impossible to pick a favourite April Wine song, but (as I wrote in a review of his memoir on this blog, a few years ago), " "Bad Side of the Moon" (written by Elton John & Bernie Taupin) was played endlessly at the (ice) skating rink when I was about 13; hearing "You Won't Dance With Me" takes me back to junior high dances, where I watched the boy(s) I had crushes on slow-dancing with someone else. (Oh, the angst!!)"  (More great song links in the blog post I linked to.)
• The last thing he posted on his Facebook page, on Nov. 16th, was a song: "Will the Last Voice I Hear Be an Angel?"  CHILLS. 
• From The Guardian: "‘I fret about the years that lie ahead’: the unique caring burden of single childless daughters." (Subhead:  "A ‘highly naturalised’ assumption within many families about who will care for ageing parents can be a vexed issue for the daughters left carrying the load.")  So glad to see articles like this that reflect the reality of so many aging childless women (and dispel some of the myths too!). 
• A thoughtful story from the New York Times ("Why Anonymous Sperm Donation Is Over, and Why That Matters") explores the implications -- pro & con -- of ending secrecy for sperm and egg donors.  
• Bruce Grierson nails the allure -- and problems -- with Substack newsletters in this (gift-linked) opinion piece from the Globe & Mail. (Ummm... *cough*)  (I have 6 paid Substack subscriptions, but many more freebies...)  
• Speaking of Substacks (lol), I loved this wonderful essay about infertility from Helen Davenport-Peace. Worth a read! 
• And I could really relate to this piece from Jennie Agg:  "What a performance: On other people's pregnancies and the roles we're required to play." 
• I loved this opinion piece by Brad Stulberg from the New York Times: "Not Everything Has to Be Meaningful."  Sample quote: 

“Why does what you are experiencing right now need to have some greater purpose?” she asked me. “Not everything has to be meaningful and you don’t have to grow from it. Why can’t it just suck, at least for the time being?” 

 

• Not ALI-related, but also Substack-related, and totally relatable (to me, anyway): I've been reading "The Direction of Motion" by Kathy Valentine of the Go-Gos, who is packing up her life in preparation for a move to England, where her mother was from.  (Her memoir, which I read & reviewed a few years back, is also a great read!) This passage from her latest post really resonated:  
  

This is maybe the hardest thing of aging. They’d have you think it’s all about your appearance and physicality changing, your health changing. We know about supplements and wellness and the likelihood of meds for ailing systems, and if I choose, I can get my neck or eyes or jowls lifted. But the real thing is time. The acute, stinging awareness of time as a finite resource, pulsing alongside my heartbeat, underneath every impulse and thought. There’s nothing to fix there, and damn it makes me ruthless and harsh about protecting my mystery allotment of time while becoming simutaneously more gentle and tolerant of everything else, even people. Even me sometimes.

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