Second verse, same as the first

Happy New Year!

See how chipper that was? Fake it ’till you make it, that’s our motto around here. We’re starting the new year – not quite the way we’d hoped. First, on Sunday we decided to go skating. We went round and round a few times on the skate-path, and Elliot (in his own words) fell down “a thousandy hundred of times” always bouncing up cheerfully.

After a while the cold got to him (it really was pretty fierce) and I took him off the ice to start changing into boots and such, and Joe said he thought he’d take one more lap and off he went. Well, he was back about 5 minutes later, hat askew and looking pretty wild, and pointing desperately at his arm behind Elliie’s back and mouthing the word “broken”. He was right. He’d dodged a kid whipping past at a thousand kilometres an hour and something went wrong and unlike Elliot, he didn’t bounce. I drove him to the hospital straight from the park and he spent about 30 of the next 36 hours in hospital having first a procedure to try and straighten it out, and then finally a surgery when that didn’t work as well as it could have. Covid rules in place here mean that he was alone the whole time he was in hospital and that added a layer of anxiety for both of us, but on the upside he’s got a partly bionic arm now, with lots of fancy plates and screws and the surgeon assured him that it’s now one part of his body that can never break again.

Second, the province is back in a modified lockdown. It makes sense (though I sincerely think that if they’d acted a little sooner things wouldn’t be so bad) and now our gathering limit is five people indoors and ten outside, and restaurants, gyms and other businesses like that are closed again, and all others have capacity limits back in place, again. Worst of all, schools are closed again, and health care is too overwhelmed to treat anyone for anything but covid (I refuse to use a capital letter for that word any longer) pushing off other kinds of non-emergency treatments. It is craptastic in the extreme, and a demoralized fog has settled over the city as we all hunker down to try and relieve the stress on the system.

Personally, I am fighting back with mittens. It seems like a completely reasonable response to the state of things, and if I can only see my people outside, we’re all going to need them.

I am adding thrums because it’s freezing cold, and also I think that puffy mittens are uplifting and cheerful.* I know maybe other people are making better use of their lockdown by cleaning something, taking care of their taxes or learning another language, but while I’m knitting these mittens I find it very hard to believe there’s a more worthy endeavor.

*I have a feeling that I might not be the only one, so in the next few weeks I’m going to do a thrum-a-long over on the Patreon. If you can’t resist the urge to thrum, find more there. Also this is not my first obsession with thrumming, so the archives here can be your friend.