One Year Later: a Journal of the Plague Year and the Need to Extract Blog Posts

This has been a strange week-end, with schedule disruptions.  Yesterday I decided to save a walk/run until later, since we were expecting our landscaping guy to return to take out our palm trees.  I decided to savor the early morning quiet.  This morning, with Daylight Savings Time starting, I was off schedule.  My spouse and I went for a walk, and now I am writing a few hours later than usual.

The happy news:  the palm tree came down without incident.  Many of us probably think of palm trees as insignificant, and I did too, before I moved into this house that has so many of them in the yard.  The fronds that fall are heavy; we're taking out palm trees because the fronds fell on the neighbor's roof and smashed tiles, before they replaced the roof.

So I sat in the front room, listened to each thud and clink of china inside, and tried not to think about all that could go wrong.  Happily, I was able to get other tasks done too.  Our taxes are done and filed.  I organized the photos I had been taking.  I wrote my report on Julian of Norwich's A Book of Showings, a requirement for my certificate program in spiritual direction; I captured those ideas earlier in this post on my theology blog.

I also came across this article in The Washington Post, an article about the journals and diaries that people had been keeping since the start of the pandemic.  It made me wish that I had done that.

Of course, I did do that, but my entries were part of my blog or to a lesser extent, part of e-mails.  This morning I decided to go back through my blog and collect the entries that discuss the pandemic.  I'm going to put them into a separate document.  I'm not sure what I'll do with that document later, but it feels important to have it as a separate document.  I'd like to have it archived somewhere.

I am part of a generation of girls that grew up reading journals, knowing that journals are so important as a historical document.  When the pandemic started, I always had that idea in my mind as I blogged about it.  A year ago, I only had the barest glimmer of how our lives had changed.  Now that I know, I want a better document.