Lockdown: How now ground cow?

Still late Sunday night as I try to recap Thursday. I’m beginning to think the effort here is madness.

I banged out a quick story Thursday morning based on a bio someone else wrote, and it went over pretty well. Rewriting someone else’s work? I could do that all day, I think, pretty easily. I don’t mind saying I think I can do it better than most people. I’d get a little tired of it, and that’s where a major conflict in my professional life arises. I want to write, but writing is so difficult and so draining. Tasks like this donor story based on an existing bio are more like puzzles, and I like puzzles. They keep me engaged, they’re generally not very time-consuming (this took about two hours), and people applaud the work. If I actually had to do it all day, though, I know my fingers would get a little itchy.

We had our department meeting on Zoom, and I don’t know how it went. We’re trying to do some planning and I think we’re spending more talking about planning than actual planning, and I admit I’m a little frustrated. It is the nature of collaboration for all invested parties to be unsatisfied, I think, so I suspect this is leading to something good, because we’re good people who do good work. Just got to get past whatever is holding us in place.

At five, our alumni relations office held an online event, featuring flavored syrups made by a recent UH Manoa grad. There were about fifty of us in the call, and the people running the business presented a bit of their history and then led the group in a cocktail-mocktail mix-along. Many participants signed up early and ordered a little sampler box of the syrups, so they made some cool cocktails. I missed the early signup, which might have been okay anyway because I’m a coworker, but Sharon got a little busy and didn’t get me my samples in time for me to participate.

Still, it was pretty fun, and I was actually there to critique the event (thereby justifying my attendance on company time), and I think everyone involved did a really nice job. Definitely the kind of thing our alumni people should do more often.

After, I tied up a few things and called it a day. I (sing it with me) took a long nap. Then got up and made hamburgers.

Burgers used to be in my regular rotation, but it’d been years since I made them, and I was craving ground beef. I went simple this time: salt, pepper, Worcestershire, garlic powder. Simple and delicious. I went a little overboard and had three burgers as I went through everyone’s brackets to prepare an update for participants.

It wasn’t one of my better days because I’m pretty sure breakfast was tortilla chips and fresh salsa, followed by a slice of snickerdoodle pie.

Crush Girl and I texted a little during her lunch break, which was nice. The writing partner sent me a photo, asking for a little bit of editing help, which I was happy to do, even though it was a baby photo. I texted a bunch of people to remind them that the brackets were locking in Friday at six in the morning.

Short recap because although it was busy, most of what I have to say I already wrote, either recapping Wednesday or in my Friday non-lockdown writing. Also because I need to get some sleep!

Leave a comment if you need someone to connect with over the remaining days (whatever they may be) of this pandemic. Don’t pandemic in loneliness!

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