Bryce Moore's Blog, page 67

Final Weigh In (for now)

Let’s cut to the chase. I was 177.4 this morning, meaning that I’m down 11.4 pounds since I began six and a half weeks ago. And I’ll be honest: my heart’s just not in this anymore. I know my goal was 175, but I’m low enough now that I don’t feel like continuing, and 6.5 weeks of oatmeal and peanut butter sandwiches has proven to be as many weeks as I want to go.

The good news is that I was still going along at a good clip, even at the end here. I mean, I’m down 1.6 pounds for this last week, which is the most I’ve been down in a single week for well over a month. Clearly if I wanted to keep going, I could. And two or three weeks from now, I’d make it to 175. I might end up doing that after a bit of a break, but . . . I guess there’s a balance between how bad I want to lose weight and how much I want to eat pizza, and it’s Tomas’s birthday, so the “eating pizza” part of me just veto’ed the rest.

Still, I’m considering this “mission accomplished.” In a month and a half I got my weight back down to a spot I’m very comfortable with. I’ve added some weight lifting back into my regimen, and so I’m still going to be working at doing things to keep getting into (slightly) better shape. Where will I go from here? Well, for now I’ll be transitioning back to a maintain eating style, meaning that I’ll still generally be eating a small breakfast and lunch, but I’ll eat more for dinner than I have been, and occasionally have some dessert. I’m going to do that for 3-4 weeks and see where I am.

Thanks for putting up with these weekly posts from me. They honestly help a ton in making and keeping and reaching goals, even if I know they’re not the most interesting topic to all of you. It’s amazing what a little accountability will do for even the least attractive goals out there. If any of you have something that you’ve always wanted to do (whether it’s losing weight or writing a book or learning a language or whatever), I wholeheartedly recommend making a public goal. It doesn’t have to be on Facebook. It can be nothing more than telling your family about it, though the more people you tell, the better this life hack works. Also commit (publicly) to a regular check in, and ask them for help remembering. Once you’ve got that in place, it’s really just a matter of sticking to the plan. I know this doesn’t work for everyone, but it definitely works for me.

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Like what you’ve read? Please consider supporting me on Patreon. Thanks to all my Patrons who support me! It only takes a minute or two, and then it’s automatic from there on out. I’ve posted the entirety of my book ICHABOD in installments, and I’m now putting up chapters from PAWN OF THE DEAD, another of my unreleased books. Where else are you going to get the undead and muppets all in the same YA package? Check it out.

If you’d rather not sign up for Patreon, you can also support the site by clicking the MEMORY THIEF Amazon link on the right of the page. That will take you to Amazon, where you can buy my books or anything else. During that visit, a portion of your purchase will go to me. It won’t cost you anything extra.

The Birthday Week

Tomas and MC have birthdays within a week of each other. MC had hers on Saturday, the day Denisa and I were laid out by the vaccine. We did our best to try and still make sure she had a special day (Denisa and the kids blew up balloons and put up streamers the night before, knowing there was a fair chance we might not feel great the next day), but it still wasn’t quite what we could have made it, and we felt bad about that. The good news is that MC is eight, and she didn’t seem to notice anything was that different. She was ecstatic to get presents, eat cake and ice cream, and have vegan mac & cheese (her request) for dinner. “Best birthday ever,” she proclaimed at the end, though she has a tendency to say that about every day, so I’m trying not to wonder just how bad all the birthdays were before this one.

Of particular note is the fact that she turned 8, and so she’s now able to be baptized. We’ll be doing that May 1st at 10am, and at the moment it’s looking like it’ll be in Waterville of all places, since the baptismal font in our local building has some technical issues. If you’re interested in Zooming into the proceedings, let me know and I can get you a link. If you’re interested in coming in person, I think we can accommodate that too, as long as you don’t have anything against wearing masks. MC’s very excited.

She’s also particularly proud of herself for learning how to ride a bike before she turned 8. Denisa suggested she set that as a personal goal, and MC worked hard to get there. It was a rush of effort at the end that finally pushed her over (and a ton of attention from Denisa), but it’s amazing to see how fast she went from “can’t stay on the bike” to “pedaling wherever she wants.” And for bike riding, at least, the paved back driveway to the assisted living center they put in front of our house turns out to be pretty perfect.

Tomas, on the other hand, is turning 17 tomorrow. His life is in a very different spot compared to MC’s, filled with things like SATs and AP classes and finding jobs and learning how to drive. He had a surprise birthday party earlier in the week, socially distant and outside, but thrown completely unbeknownst to him. We even managed to rope his driving instructor into it. It was Tomas’s first day of actually driving, and his instructor pretended to get lost in town, having Tomas take wrong turn after wrong turn, until he ended up at one of his friend’s houses. (It really helped that Tomas hadn’t been to that house before. It also helps that non-drivers generally don’t pay any attention to where they’re being driven, so it wasn’t like Tomas already had a good sense of where he was in town in the first place.)

Last year his 16th birthday was pretty much swallowed up by COVID, so it was really nice to see him have such a good one this year.

In any case, if you see or talk to either of those two this week, make sure to wish them a happy birthday.

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Like what you’ve read? Please consider supporting me on Patreon. Thanks to all my Patrons who support me! It only takes a minute or two, and then it’s automatic from there on out. I’ve posted the entirety of my book ICHABOD in installments, and I’m now putting up chapters from PAWN OF THE DEAD, another of my unreleased books. Where else are you going to get the undead and muppets all in the same YA package? Check it out.

If you’d rather not sign up for Patreon, you can also support the site by clicking the MEMORY THIEF Amazon link on the right of the page. That will take you to Amazon, where you can buy my books or anything else. During that visit, a portion of your purchase will go to me. It won’t cost you anything extra.

The Big Puppy Snip

My entire life growing up, Bob Barker drilled one fact into my brain. When I had a dog, I was going to get it spayed or neutered. And now that we finally had a puppy, you bet your booties I wasn’t going to let Bob Barker down. Of course, I discovered it was one thing to say that at the end of every Price is Right episode, and another to try and figure out the right time to do it. There are quite a few articles out there telling people that you need to fix a dog at a certain date. Unfortunately, most of them don’t agree with each other. Some say do it when the puppers is 6 months, because if you wait, Bad Things Will Happen. Then again, others say if you don’t wait until the pooch is a year old, then Bad Things Will Happen.

I don’t want bad things to happen to Ferris. After talking it over with our vet, as well as a friend who’s a vet, I took the typical Bryce approach and pretty much split the difference. Ferris went in for his procedure yesterday, when he was about 9.5 months old.

(Mind you, when I say “I took the typical Bryce approach,” I mean what I typically mean by that, which is that Denisa did all the work and I clapped from the sidelines. In my defense, I was at work that day, and she wasn’t, but full points to Denisa for puppy wrangling Ferris to and from his appointment.)

Ferris was very excited to go to the vet, probably because he typically gets to meet different people and pets when he goes, and that one time when they fed him different food as well. So he was on cloud nine when Denisa took him in at 7am yesterday morning. Sometimes you get questions you’re not expecting. “Do you want to pay for resuscitation if he needs it?” was one such question. I mean, how are you supposed to answer that? No? We said yes, obviously, but still . . .

The good news is that Ferris came out of it all very much alive. The bad news (for Ferris) is that it was much less of a fun day than he was really planning on. But he also avoided needing to wear the cone of shame, so he’s got that going for him. (Though we were told if he doesn’t leave the wound alone, he’ll have to don the Cone. Here’s hoping he can resist the temptation.)

Then again, MC was pretty upset with us when she found out the night before that “big snip” was not, actually, a puppy hair cut. Sometimes using euphemisms can be pretty bewildering to people who aren’t fully in on how those phrases work . . .

But the thing that really matters is that I didn’t let Bob Barker down, right?

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Like what you’ve read? Please consider supporting me on Patreon. Thanks to all my Patrons who support me! It only takes a minute or two, and then it’s automatic from there on out. I’ve posted the entirety of my book ICHABOD in installments, and I’m now putting up chapters from PAWN OF THE DEAD, another of my unreleased books. Where else are you going to get the undead and muppets all in the same YA package? Check it out.

If you’d rather not sign up for Patreon, you can also support the site by clicking the MEMORY THIEF Amazon link on the right of the page. That will take you to Amazon, where you can buy my books or anything else. During that visit, a portion of your purchase will go to me. It won’t cost you anything extra.

The Difference between a Good Book and a Great Book

I’m still plugging away at my weekly reading goal, something that’s been harder this year than it’s been in years past. Not really because I’m reading less, but I got hooked into reading Steven Erikson’s Malazan Book of the Fallen. 10 books that are each over 1,000 pages, and a lot of those 1,000 pages are pretty bewildering, especially at the beginning. I’ve only read two of them this year (I’ve got three to go), but when you plot 1,000 pages in front of you and try to read it in a week, you don’t get very far. (At least you don’t if your name is Bryce.)

Which is definitely a downside of the reading goal, because at the moment I have a number of 1,000 word books I’d really like to be reading. I’d like to finish the Malazan series, and I’d like to reread The Way of Kings so that I can finally read the new one Brandon just published. But instead of reading those books, I keep reading shorter books to try to make up the time so that I can stay on target. This doesn’t always lead to the best of reading experiences. Reading something because you feel like you should is very different from reading something that you want to.

This is something that I’ve really been reminded of as I read my current choice: Bloodline, by Will Wight. It’s book 9 of the Cradle series, and it’s very much a popcorn book for me. I love the series. It zips along, has great action scenes, and is just very . . . readable. I’m breezing through the pages in a way that other books that are just “good” don’t.

One of the tricks of the Malazan books is that for long swathes of them, they can be just “good.” And when you’ve got tons of pages left in a “good” book, it’s hard to push yourself to get through them. I would have set the series aside long ago, except usually about a third into each book, it goes from “good” to “great,” and it’s very much worth the price to get there.

A great book demands to be read. A great book is one that you give up sleep for. That you find yourself skipping Netflix or video games or basic hygiene so that you can have more time for reading. I don’t mean “great” as in “a work of great literature.” Those aren’t always (or often) synonymous. In this form of “great,” it can be very unique from person to person. You typically find an author that really works for you. The style clicks, and you can just devour books by the chapter.

So maybe I should just set the reading goal aside for the moment and read what I want. I’m not sure about that just yet. Or maybe I just need more great books to read. Anyone got any recommendations? I don’t need a book to change me for life: I just want something that keeps me turning the pages at a feverish pace.

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Like what you’ve read? Please consider supporting me on Patreon. Thanks to all my Patrons who support me! It only takes a minute or two, and then it’s automatic from there on out. I’ve posted the entirety of my book ICHABOD in installments, and I’m now putting up chapters from PAWN OF THE DEAD, another of my unreleased books. Where else are you going to get the undead and muppets all in the same YA package? Check it out.

If you’d rather not sign up for Patreon, you can also support the site by clicking the MEMORY THIEF Amazon link on the right of the page. That will take you to Amazon, where you can buy my books or anything else. During that visit, a portion of your purchase will go to me. It won’t cost you anything extra.

Weekend Fun: Moderna Side Effects

I’m at the front end of many of the people I know who are getting vaccinated, and I know I had a lot of questions going into the second vaccine (Moderna for me), so I thought it might be helpful/interesting to go over what the experience of having side effects was like for yours truly. Heading into the shot, I thought I might get some side effects (definitely worried enough about them to Google a fair bit beforehand), but I also thought I’d be able to power through them okay. It was a day of feeling crummy, and I’d know I wasn’t actually sick. How hard could it be?

Very hard, friends.

First, this all comes with the big disclaimer that plenty of people are just having sore arms, or no side effects whatsoever. That’s fantastic, and I’m very happy for them. After the first shot, my injection site hurt for about a week afterward, and then it got red and itchy for a while as well. But that was the extent of it.

I got the second shot on Friday at 11:40am. It hurt a fair bit more than the first shot. Enough that I wondered if somehow it had gone into a muscle wrong or something. (Denisa got hers at the same time. She didn’t feel a thing.) Both of us felt fine for the rest of Friday. I was perhaps a bit more tired, and I had a slight headache, but nothing really to write home about. We went to bed around 11pm, and I was feeling pretty optimistic. It had been almost 12 hours since the shot, and maybe I’d dodged a bullet.

I woke up at 1:30am with chills so bad it felt like every muscle in my body was tensed up. Teeth chattering non-stop, despite being under my down comforter still. Denisa hadn’t fallen asleep yet, because she’d come down with a fever as well. I stumbled out to get a couple of extra strength Tylenol, and I managed to fall asleep about a half hour later. I slept through the night (Denisa didn’t sleep much at all), and got up at 8am to go let the dog out and check on how the rest of the house was doing. I thought I felt okay-ish. Still fevered, perhaps, but no more chills.

An hour later, and I gave up. The chills were back, headache, sensitive skin, sweating, and bad muscle aches. I went back to bed after taking some more Tylenol, and I stayed in bed for most of the rest of the day. I slept about 5 hours. I might have thought I’d just push through it, but I realized that’s a very easy thing to say when you’re well, and totally different when you’re actually in the middle of it all. I was very glad we’d prepped ahead of time to get things in order for the day. Denisa was feeling 70% better by around 5pm or so. I managed to get up and out of bed for a bit, mainly because I wanted to have some hope of sleeping later that night, but I had no energy and did very little other than lay there and read or watch TV.

I slept again the whole night (very abnormal for me during the pandemic, but I’m not complaining!). When I woke up, the chills were gone, as was the sensitive skin, headache, and muscle aches. I felt less feverish, as well. Instead, I felt more like I feel after a long bout of the flu. Very tired and dizzy. Again, I stayed in bed for most of the day. I got up for an hour long Zoom meeting in the evening, but that was enough to really drain my energy levels. Denisa felt well enough to go for a 4 mile jog. That said, neither of us had much of an appetite for the whole day. We both skipped lunch, and I think I had about 1000 calories total.

Today, I feel back to normal, as if I’d never been sick at all. My shoulder hurts maybe a tinge, but that’s it. It wasn’t a fun weekend, but it was definitely better than getting some of the longterm COVID side-effects I’ve read about, and infinitely better than being hospitalized and dying, or getting the disease and passing it on to someone who has that happen to them. I’m very much looking forward to being immune in a little less than two weeks, and I’m feeling quite a bit more optimistic about things than I’ve felt in a good long while.

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Like what you’ve read? Please consider supporting me on Patreon. Thanks to all my Patrons who support me! It only takes a minute or two, and then it’s automatic from there on out. I’ve posted the entirety of my book ICHABOD in installments, and I’m now putting up chapters from PAWN OF THE DEAD, another of my unreleased books. Where else are you going to get the undead and muppets all in the same YA package? Check it out.

If you’d rather not sign up for Patreon, you can also support the site by clicking the MEMORY THIEF Amazon link on the right of the page. That will take you to Amazon, where you can buy my books or anything else. During that visit, a portion of your purchase will go to me. It won’t cost you anything extra.

Weekly Weigh In: Week Six

Another week gone, and another pound lighter. That’s right: 179 as of this morning. Interestingly (to me, at any rate), that 1 pound came all in one day. Last Saturday I dropped from 180 to 179, and I’ve been around 179 since. Weight loss is strange, what can I say?

I know I don’t have that much more of this left in me. I’ve already begun looking at ways to game the system so that I can meet my goal and just be done with this earlier rather than later. My father’s going to be here in two weeks, so I’ve set that as my “be done by the diet by then” date. That means I’d have to lose 4 pounds in 2 weeks, which is definitely not going to happen the way I’m currently going. (It would likely take me 4 more weeks. 3 at the outside.) But I’m not above fasting for the last day just to cross the finish line. I think I can use a trick like that at the last minute, though it’ll be important that I try to toe the line and not eat like a pig too much.

Although who knows? I just got my second shot of the Moderna vaccine, and I know that gives some people some sever reactions. Maybe mine will be of the “lose 4 pounds in two weeks” variety. What are the odds?

For now, I’m just happy that the diet has continued to work. I’m down 9.8 pounds in 6 weeks, which doesn’t feel too incredibly fast to me. (Which is good. I didn’t want to just plummet down the weight, only to have it all come back the next week. That’s for the end of the diet, right?)

Onward and downward!

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Like what you’ve read? Please consider supporting me on Patreon. Thanks to all my Patrons who support me! It only takes a minute or two, and then it’s automatic from there on out. I’ve posted the entirety of my book ICHABOD in installments, and I’m now putting up chapters from PAWN OF THE DEAD, another of my unreleased books. Where else are you going to get the undead and muppets all in the same YA package? Check it out.

If you’d rather not sign up for Patreon, you can also support the site by clicking the MEMORY THIEF Amazon link on the right of the page. That will take you to Amazon, where you can buy my books or anything else. During that visit, a portion of your purchase will go to me. It won’t cost you anything extra.

Tortoise and the Hare: COVID Style

Back in the days after Thanksgiving last year, I remember feeling a general tension among my friends and associates here in Maine. COVID numbers were rising higher than we’d seen them before, and there was a real sense that we might have a serious problem on our hands. After all, we’d had our biggest surge back in May 2020, when there were case rates in the high double digits each day. (78 was the peak on May 20th.) December 9th. about 2 weeks after Thanksgiving, we were up to 405 cases in a day.

It definitely felt (to me, at least) like people were taking this seriously. That said, it didn’t stop the trend. By January 13th, we had our most cases recorded in a single day: 824. Thankfully. people seemed to get the message by then (or perhaps they just stopped getting together for family holidays, since there were no more family holidays to get together for?). Since then, the case rates dropped into February, when we bottomed out in the low 200s. That seems low in comparison to January 13th, but it felt high right around Thanksgiving.

Case numbers have only gone up since then. We’ve now had our third day in a row of more than 500 cases a day, and we’re running 30% fewer tests each day than we were in January. The case trend is more troubling now than it was back then, so why is there not more of the tension in the area around the spread?

There’s a couple of obvious reasons I can identify. People are just tired of following restrictions, for one thing. Even when the restrictions are relatively easy (like wearing a mask), it feels like a lot of people just don’t want to do them anymore. There’s also the fact that we have yet to see the corresponding spike in hospitalizations and deaths, almost certainly due to more than 80% of our population older than 70 being vaccinated now.

Then there’s the fact that many people are already vaccinated to one degree or another. The end is in sight, after all. I will be getting my second shot tomorrow and two weeks after that, I’ll be good to go. Denisa’s on the same schedule as me. Tomas will get his second shot by the end of the month. The odds of COVID having a drastic impact on my immediate family will be drastically lower. So at this point, my general approach has been to shake my head at people who seem unable to follow some basic guidelines for the last few weeks, but to not really stress about it other than that.

It doesn’t mean those case rates don’t concern me, however, especially since there’s nothing to point at to show why they’re going up so much. No Thanksgiving or Christmas, though perhaps some of it is from Easter? It seems very probable right now that we might have our worst surge of cases now, just before we ought to be at the point where our cases are dwindling. Also troubling: the spread is happening in more rural areas instead of cities.

Perhaps it won’t end up mattering. Perhaps the hospitalization rates will stay down (even if they might be higher than they would have been by following guidelines better). Same for deaths. But I’m concerned more right now that some of the shut downs across the state might have to be put into place again. I want this to all be done as much as the next guy, but I realize from a public planning standpoint, the dramatic rise in cases might well slow that down.

But who really knows? Not me, that’s for sure. I’m just focusing on the things I can control. Once I’m vaccinated, I’m definitely going to be going out more and doing more. There’s a trip to Puerto Rico in my future already, and I think I’ll start going back to restaurants and maybe even a movie theater if there’s something worth seeing. That is to say, I completely understand wanting to be done with all of this, I just don’t understand the insistence on doing so prematurely, and the lack of general concern I’m feeling around me about the direction my state is currently heading. The numbers we have now were grounds for “very concerned” back in November/December. I wonder what they’ll have to get to for the same response now.

Here’s hoping I’m worrying over nothing.

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Like what you’ve read? Please consider supporting me on Patreon. Thanks to all my Patrons who support me! It only takes a minute or two, and then it’s automatic from there on out. I’ve posted the entirety of my book ICHABOD in installments, and I’m now putting up chapters from PAWN OF THE DEAD, another of my unreleased books. Where else are you going to get the undead and muppets all in the same YA package? Check it out.

If you’d rather not sign up for Patreon, you can also support the site by clicking the MEMORY THIEF Amazon link on the right of the page. That will take you to Amazon, where you can buy my books or anything else. During that visit, a portion of your purchase will go to me. It won’t cost you anything extra.

Don’t Skip Leg Day

It’s a pretty well-documented fact that I’ve spent the last five or more years trying to do get myself into better shape, bit by bit. Reducing my sugar intake. Lowering my weight. Standing up straighter. Exercising more regularly. I added weight lifting to the mix for a while, though I stepped away from that when I hurt my shoulder. I’ve recently come back to it again, though. (Yay for a shoulder that’s feeling much better.)

One area I’ve never really paid any attention to is my legs, however. They move me around from place to place, and that’s about all the thought I’ve given them. A year and a half ago, however, I went to an exercise class with my sister, and after that one class, my legs stopped working. My muscles pretty much resigned and said they were taking a three day vacation in protest to what I’d put them through. Mind you, I hadn’t put them through anything that strenuous. Just some basic strength exercises. It was not a fun few days after that.

That experience inspired me to begin paying more attention to building up some leg muscle. As has been typical for me, however, it takes a while between having the first thought of doing something that will get me into better shape and then actually doing that thing to get into better shape. Now that I’m coming into the home stretch on my dieting goal, I’ve been focusing on building muscle again. (Mainly because muscle burns fat, and I thought if I were to add some more muscle, it would be easier to keep off the pounds.)

I’m not going to the gym. I’m still just too lazy to do anything that elaborate. Instead, I try to do basic things that I can do wherever I am. In this case, it’s just squats. 20 of them in a row, which you’d think would be something anyone in reasonable health could do. Let’s just say that my legs clearly aren’t in “reasonable health” I guess. I did 20 yesterday, and I’ve been walling wobbly since then. Which, of course, just highlights the need for me to keep this up.

The plan isn’t to turn myself into some supermensch. The plan is just to get myself to the point that I can do 20 or 40 squats at a time without feeling like my legs have turned to jello the next day. It’s a low bar. Wish me luck.

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Like what you’ve read? Please consider supporting me on Patreon. Thanks to all my Patrons who support me! It only takes a minute or two, and then it’s automatic from there on out. I’ve posted the entirety of my book ICHABOD in installments, and I’m now putting up chapters from PAWN OF THE DEAD, another of my unreleased books. Where else are you going to get the undead and muppets all in the same YA package? Check it out.

If you’d rather not sign up for Patreon, you can also support the site by clicking the MEMORY THIEF Amazon link on the right of the page. That will take you to Amazon, where you can buy my books or anything else. During that visit, a portion of your purchase will go to me. It won’t cost you anything extra.

Driver’s Ed at Last

Tomas is coming up on his seventeenth birthday, but COVID derailed his driving plans until just last night. He had been planning on signing up for driver’s ed right about when COVID struck, and then . . . 2020 happened. He got on the waiting list for the program, and they just barely caught up with him.

It’s interesting to see how Maine approaches driver’s ed differently than Pennsylvania, where I got my license. He has to get ready for a written exam at the beginning of May. Once he’s passed that and taken the driving course as well as had some online instruction, he’ll have 6 months to get 70 hours of driving practice in with his parents. (10 hours of that has to be at night.) Then he’ll be eligible to take the road test. So the earliest he’ll be able to have his license at this point is the beginning of November.

It’s been so long ago that I got my license that I’ve forgotten a lot of what I had to do. I remember going to a driver’s ed course at the middle school, but as I recall, that was mainly because if you did that, then you qualified for reduced insurance rates? Something like that. I remember practicing driving with my mom and about giving her a heart attack multiple times, but I’m almost sure I didn’t do anywhere near 70 hours of practice before I went in for my road test. (I passed that my first time. The trickiest part was parallel parking, but I somehow fumbled my way through it.)

I also found out yesterday about these miraculous apps you can have installed on your kids’ phones. They’ll track how fast they’re actually going when they’re driving. That might strike some people as a bit too Orwellian, but I remember driving at 16, and I remember some of the idiotic things I did. Driving too fast was definitely one of them. Fast enough that I remember thinking, “This is way too fast. I shouldn’t do this again.” If a sixteen year old brain can recognize that, you can only imagine how fast I was going. At night. On narrow Pennsylvania roads.

Ugh.

So we’ll almost definitely be getting that app for Tomas’s phone once he can drive.

In any case, it’s exciting to see him get to this point. Having another driver in the house will make a lot of things much, much easier, even if we’re not planning on getting a third car. (Because expensive, and also because by the time he’s actually driving, he’ll have less than a year before he’s off. Any other parents out there have any tips on what to do to prepare for a new driver?

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Like what you’ve read? Please consider supporting me on Patreon. Thanks to all my Patrons who support me! It only takes a minute or two, and then it’s automatic from there on out. I’ve posted the entirety of my book ICHABOD in installments, and I’m now putting up chapters from PAWN OF THE DEAD, another of my unreleased books. Where else are you going to get the undead and muppets all in the same YA package? Check it out.

If you’d rather not sign up for Patreon, you can also support the site by clicking the MEMORY THIEF Amazon link on the right of the page. That will take you to Amazon, where you can buy my books or anything else. During that visit, a portion of your purchase will go to me. It won’t cost you anything extra.

You’re Not the COVID Police

I get it. We’ve all been dealing with COVID (in one way or another) for well over a year now. We’re all getting very tired of this whole ordeal. (At least, I assume I speak for everyone with that statement. Maybe there’s someone out there who thinks this is all a blast?) But one thing that’s definitely not helping is to have people start sniping at other people over the things those people are doing when it comes to COVID.

This goes both ways. You’ve got people who are yelling at other people for not wearing masks and others who are yelling at them because they’re wearing masks. You’ve got people upset that others are going on vacations, and others who are upset because more people aren’t going out and living their lives.

I have plenty of friends on Facebook. My feed is filled right now with pictures of them out and about, having fun in different places. Some of the places they’re having fun seem like situations I personally wouldn’t go to at the moment. Anything in-doors, unmasked, basically. Most of the places are out of doors, and I wouldn’t blink at doing that, especially if you can stay somewhat distant from other people.

But what I’m not doing is wasting time worrying about what they’re doing. My friends are grown adults, capable of making their own decisions, and they certainly don’t need to clear their activities with me before they go out and have fun. So instead, I’m trying to assume the best. Assume they’re all vaccinated. Assume they’ve already had COVID and so are immune for at least 6 months. Assume the people they’re with are in their personal bubbles. Assume they’re making the best decisions they can with the information they have available to them.

Right now, there are a million different approaches to “what’s right” when it comes to COVID. I went out to play tennis with a friend Saturday. We were at the local high school in the morning. Sunny. Breezy. Gorgeous. Neither of us was wearing a mask, because everything I know about this disease says that outside playing tennis is not the way I’m going to catch it. We never got within six feet of each other. It felt very safe to me. But then someone from the high school came to inform us that we all had to be wearing masks to use the court.

I went and put my mask on. I didn’t complain. I didn’t protest about my rights or about this being America or whatever. I was grateful I could use the public courts, and I’m willing to do whatever I’m asked to do, even if I may feel it’s overkill. (I’ve been on the other side of that interaction, having to tell people they can’t eat or drink in the library, and that they need to put their mask on. When it comes to my building, I am the COVID police, because I need to ensure people are following the rules for using our space.)

I’m sure if I had posted a picture of my friend and I playing tennis, some would have seen it and been disappointed we weren’t masked. I in turn would be disappointed in them for thinking so little of me as to assume I wasn’t being careful. Right now, it feels like following COVID guidelines is a lot like being a good driver. Everyone sees the choices they’re making as being justified and necessary and right, and it’s too easy to see the things other people are doing as reckless or too concerned.

This is coming from a person who very much believes this pandemic is real, and who’s very much concerned that people are treating it too lightly, on the whole. That said, I don’t believe people are going to be guilt tripped into following “the rules,” regardless of what you may believe those rules to be. (And that’s the thing, isn’t it? We all have different opinions of what you should and shouldn’t be doing, and it’s pretty much impossible to “prove” your opinion is right.) And so since pointing fingers isn’t going to do any good at all, what use is it to waste all that time, energy, and goodwill on something that does nothing to actually help the situation other than (debatably) make you feel better for having “done something”?

It’s easier to assume the best, remind ourselves we’re all in this together, and just keep plugging away as best we can.

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