New times, new digs

Hello friends!

 

The Spud, Miss Pickle and I were out at the park today, it was a lovely day for a game of Sticks.  But if you are Miss Pickle, every day is a lovely day for sticks.

It has been lovely hearing from many of you either in your blogs, comments or by email.  I am glad many of you are doing well.  My heart goes out to those who have been hit close to home, I send well wishes and will keep you close in my thoughts.

I have been thinking about life in our new reality and decided I want to document these days, because it feels like something good should come out of this.  So, I have opened up a new blog, something I have thought about doing for a long time.  And, I have decided to go transparent, no aliases for myself.

If you are interested in reading the real life and times of Janie Jones, drop me an email and I will send you my new address.

janiejones.greatwhitenorth@gmail.com

Keeping tabs

Hello everyone.

I just read a post from Sarsm, and it made me think outside of my four walls.  So many of you in the blogosphere are emotionally near and dear, and being as how you are spread out across the globe, please spare a minute occasionally and let us know how you are doing in the wake of COVID-19.

So far we have been fortunate as there have been no cases reported by authorities in my neck of the great white north.  However, our local officials are being proactive and schools have been shut down and many businesses are closing or reducing hours to limit large gatherings.  Many programs are popping up to help people obtain food and maintain wages if their workplace is closed.  Stickittoyou U has cancelled all in-person events and mandated all non-essential employees to stay home.  I am fortunate that the vast majority of my work can be done from home, so I am not financially affected at this time.

Our primary and secondary schools have also shut down.  For the time being all lessons are suspended, but schools are to resume at the end of the month using online learning methods, and it sounds like they will remain that way for the rest of the school year.  I don’t know what this will look like exactly for the spud, but I am glad she will not have to be riding the public bus to school every day.

So, the spud and I are doing our best to stay at home and have supplies delivered as much as possible.  Even if we were to catch the virus, we are probably not at high risk for complications beside severe flu symptoms.  But Leif has a lot of other complicating health issues, so we worry about him.  And we worry about our other friends and family members who are also in high risk groups or areas where the virus is hitting hard.

It has been a very surreal time, but we are trying to stay calm and do what we can to be as safe as possible.  I just wanted to check in with everyone out there.  Please let me know how you are doing!  I will try to check in regularly, and I hope you will find a way to pause in the midst of adjusting to the new normal yourselves and keep up with your bloggy buddies.

My best wishes that you, your family and friends all whether this crisis with good health.

Hugs,

Janie

 

 

 

Happy Anniversary to me!

It’s the 5th Anniversary of Janie’s Place today!  Hurray!

Wow.  A lot happens in five years.

I went and looked back to the beginning.  To a time when I had struggles and frustrations, but was generally happy.  I had a beautiful affordable home to live in, a solid relationship, free time, and while not filthy rich by any means, I had some money.

I look how I’m now living, and I can’t help but develop a new worry:  What if when I finally finish school I still can’t get a good paying job?

This one’s for Frangipani

This morning I was not feeling particularly motivated, so I dawdled my way through my morning routine.  In the midst of the dawdling, for some reason, I was suddenly compelled to read the bottle of lotion I bought last January.  It’s from Bath and Body Works, the fragrance is called Amazon Rain.  Don’t ask, I have no idea how they come up with this stuff, but I think it smells nice. What caught my fancy was the list of ingredients which included frangipani.

I have a reader who goes by Frangipani.  I have not been a reliable reciprocal visitor, but she does some touching posts on life and a lot of beautiful and interesting photo posts.  All this time though, I never gave much thought her blog handle. 

Lots of people have blog handles that I don’t get. So when I read that bottle I had to know what a frangipani was.  Turns out, I learned something new!  Frangipani is another name for what I’m used to thinking of as plumeria, a lovely scented and beautifully flowering shrub.  What a wonderful blog handle.  It is a shame it took me so long to truly appreciate it.

Frangipanis_by_gemstars, click image to go to the site

 

So here’s to you, Frangipani!  What a beautiful name for a beautiful blogger.

 

It has been a grueling week;

Janie Jones has officially lost her marbles.

I had so much to do last week that I can’t even tell you how I survived.  Besides, that makes for a boring blog post I’m sure.  What you will probably find more interesting is reading about the signs of my marble losing.

So first, I was trying to cook a pork chop on my single burner hot plate.  It’s temperature control is  dodgy.  Well, it wasn’t getting hot, wasn’t getting hot, wasn’t getting hot, then suddenly it was starting to smoke.  So I pulled it off and set it on the wood cutting board, as I needed to cool it down.  I’ve used a wood cutting board as a trivet before, but apparently this time the hot plate meant business, super heating the pan to I’m-done-messing-around-and-only-sort-of-getting-hot-and-am-now-hot-damn-hot, and the pan scorched the wood.  Smelled like a wood burning shop in the basement for the next two days.

Twice I almost poured orange juice in my tea instead of milk, catching myself just in the nick of time.

I thought I forgot to hand in my physics homework, and ran all the way back to the drop box only to realize I had indeed turned it in already.

On several occasions I was completely incapable of forming a simple coherent answer to straight forward questions.  It was almost as if they were speaking pig latin.

And I forgot completely to bring my teaching manual to the extra session of Cell Biology Lab I had to supervise.  Way to look like you belong in charge, Janie.

I will spare you any more details as they become less becoming as I recall them.  Suffice to say, I survived somehow.

I actually had a couple bright spots.  I got a 96% on my seminar on Lyme disease vaccine research, and an 84% on my last physics test.  An 84%!  Me.  I couldn’t believe it.

Surviving the week and getting good news meant I wanted to celebrate.  I wanted to take some time off, kick back and chill.  But that wasn’t going to happen.  I had to work the tour guide gig yesterday.  Afterward, though, Leif came to town after one of his shows.  He only stayed for a little while, as he had to get back to the dogginses, who had been left at the farm all day and both of us were totally exhausted, but it was so nice to have a meal together and sit for a half hour and do nothing but drink tea, and talk and be together.  Almost as if I had a life.

College can be really lonely, you know?  You see people and talk to people all day, but you don’t really get that human contact factor.  And spending too much time in society with out having any society is tough.  It wears on your nerves.  I’m sure the solitude is messing with my marbles, too.

Anyway.

It’s a beautiful 60 degrees today.  I want to go walk down by the lake with Leif and the pupkisses.  But they are out at the farm, and I have a microbiology paper to write.  So, the grueling week isn’t quite over yet.  It’s back to the ol’ homework grind.

And as for WordPress, I still haven’t figured out the new system, but I did discover by accident that sometimes you can back-door your way into the classic format.  Which is enabling me to type this post in my comfort zone of normalcy.  We’ll see how long this lasts….

Such fun

I have just enjoyed creating quite a blog post explosion.

Just not here.  Sorry folks.  Actually I just set up 19 weeks of programmed jokes for the Spud on our personal blog.  I created it when she went to spend the school year with her dad for the first time in the fall of 2013.  I had hoped we’d be able to keep in touch better with a blog for us to post stuff on.  I tried to be very conscientious about making regular posts the first few months, but then the Spud’s dad said she wasn’t interested in reading it so I let it lapse for a while.

This past fall I was, well, miserable, but I tried to put a few posts up here and there.  I don’t know for sure, but she seemed to enjoy seeing them more this past fall, and so before the craziness of school starts back up I wanted to get in some serious blogging.  So I set it up as a way for us to count down the weeks until she comes for the summer vacation.  19 Fridays between now and then.  So, 19 jokes have been programmed.  Of all the jokes I waded through, some I thought were quite funny.  They might make an appearance on Tuesdays between now and then, so consider yourselves forewarned….

I also have now figured out how to use YouTube on our blog.  So now we can share videos of each other.

And, I added a countdown.  It’s 132 days until we get together for summer vacation.  Just in case you were wondering.