You know you’re in a pandemic when…

• You are devastated that your DMV Real ID Appointment has been cancelled
• You can’t donate blood at the time you’ve made an appointment to
• You spend twenty minutes practicing a challenge issued by a local museum to replicate famous paintings with what you have at home.

• 

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• You spend another giddy half hour trying to find the ingredients in your home to copy a Vermeer Painting to meet the collegial challenge from a friend and discover yourself at 11:00PM, standing next to your closet wearing a white collared shirt, brown sweater, pearl necklace over one ear, with a shawl (the wrong color but the closest color you have) wrapped around your head, sprouting a yellow necktie out of the top to drape over your shoulder. You look beguilingly into the mirror in what you hope looks vaguely like Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring and realize what an idiot you look like and are and then end up giggling like a teenager until the reality of what you are doing and why you are doing it renders you mute and very sober.

So this is where we are in the middle of the second/third week of isolation. Don’t get me wrong. I have many things to be thankful for. I have a job still, no symptoms yet of having been infected, am able to reach out to friends and family via multiple means of technological wizardry that render the distance almost fictional. Almost. I’m certainly one of the lucky ones and I’m so very aware of that.

I share the above with the hopes that it will buoy your spirits a little, and let you know that there are a lot of ways to keep your mind occupied in this strange limbo time we find ourselves.

Ah! Limbo! Oh wait – I’d need someone else to hold the stick….

Hang in there, friends.