Meme Monday – Bay Area Edition

Exciting new feature! In an attempt to come here a bit more often, I will post some meme or another every Monday. It may have commentary, it may not. We’ll see how long it lasts.

Saturday I woke up to exactly the feelings expressed in the meme above. I was bored and depressed, and it looked very much like the highlight of my day would be pushing back my cuticles. Of course, the fact that we are safe in our home, unlike friends who have had to evacuate from the fires, means that I am just bitching and should probably shut up. But yeah, it got me down. During this pandemic, one thing that has been nice is getting out for a long walk in the mornings. On weekends it is even nicer because I don’t have to watch the time, and sometimes Mulder gets a ‘three boss walk’, meaning we all go together. This last week, the air quality has been horrible, so we can’t even do that. We do give him a little 10 minute walk, so he will feel like he got out of the house a bit, but that’s it. In a normal year, maybe we would go to a movie. Or a bookstore. Or a restaurant. Get away from the heat and the smoke. This year, COVID says no, stay home.

Due to the heat wave (which we are thankfully coming out of now, I don’t think it will get much above 90 this upcoming week), our local power company has being doing planned blackouts. What that means is that during the highest period of power use (2pm – 7 or 8) they plan to turn off the power, to ease the strain on our grid. The thought is that if it is planned, they can do it in a sensible way, only for about 2 hours, then turn your power back on and someone else’s power off. The first time they did this, they gave hardly any warning (because they suck) and people were of course very angry. We are fortunate in that the local grid is such that our house never gets a planned blackout. Too close to a hospital perhaps, or maybe it’s the BART station across the way from us, I don’t know.

I came out of it eventually. Took a shower. Pushed back my cuticles. Had a nap. Read my book. Then Ted and I left the house and ran some errands, which included picking up a bottle of my favorite Sancerre and going to the grocery store to get things for dinner. Just being out and about with Ted cheered me mightily. The perfect baked potato that I had as part of my dinner, along with the Sancerre, helped a lot. The blueberry pancakes I made for breakfast on Sunday helped as well. Too much good food and not enough exercise are probably not great, so I have been doing some light weights. But I feel like so much mental health is connected to getting time outside. I hope our air clears up soon, though I am not sure, as we are expecting another stupid lightening storm in the next day or so. UGH.

So, my current mood is still grumpy, but not AS grumpy as I was Saturday morning, and that’s a good thing.

Here’s your bonus meme, though likely this shit will still be going on next Monday and I could have saved it.