Lately

So

Starting the second round of staying at home for a week. Things I'd like to do differently:

1. Work on my mental health. Work sent out something from our EAP about a service/app called Whil with all sorts of educational resources for mindfulness, anxiety calming, meditation, and stress release. I went ahead and signed up at work (as it required the work e-mail) and now I'm set. My goal is to spend an hour a day on these. They include video and audio programmes, and it's free with our EAP up to June.
2. Try to actually read. Again, an hour a day is my goal, whether it's an audiobook, e-book, or physical book.
3. Finish 'Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance' with my friend on Netflix.
4. Survive my bread cravings from Pesach/Passover since I can't get something and bring it home until Thursday after sunset.
5. Do almost no travelling out of the house, with some planning. Today I do have to go out to two pharmacies, one of which is Kroger, so I'll try to do a grocery run in and out at the same time.
6. Do some writing, whether it's on my blog or other things. Something to keep me from being on Facebook all day and feeling that I accomplished something.
7. Get my brakes fixed, as my mechanic is only open on weekdays and I'm off. Also, I'd be supporting a local small business.

That's a start, anyway. I'm off through Tuesday before I return to work this time.

So it's been a week

Kentucky is up to 87 cases and 3 deaths.  But I think our governor, Andy Beshear, is acting appropriately and quickly to try to 'flatten the curve' of infection.  That refers to a much-used graph comparing the response of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and St Louis, Missouri back in the 1918 pandemic of Spanish influenza.

In that graph, Philadelphia's spikes quickly and far beyond the capability of the medical community to respond.  Among other things, Philadelphia held a parade right as the flu started to spread in their community with 200,000 in the crowd.  Things rapidly escalated.  In St Louis, they worked at reducing the infection and slowed the rate that it was happening, and stayed a flatter curve, right about or under the medical community's capacity.  People still got it.  People still died.  There is even an uptick on the graph and one point as the cases were going down, as people began to loosen their reactions.  But it worked, for the most part.

Gov. Beshear is giving daily updates at 5 pm, and has also geared parts of the update to children or to dealing with the mental effects of the pandemic.  The numbers have climbed since the first case was detected in the Commonwealth on March 6th, and testing is becoming better.  Testing has been a barrier here in the US.  It's hard to get tested unless you are very symptomatic and in the hospital, so we're missing a lot of cases that are not being quarantined, most likely.  But the testing is getting better.  Today the FDA announced a rapid point-of-care test approved that can give results in 45 minutes.  That's what we need.  It should start shipping next week.  And we need them in great numbers.  In Italy, which has been absolutely devastated by the disease, a town of 3,3000 where everyone was tested was able to quarantine those with the disease--including the ones without symptoms--and halted the infection.

Now Kentucky has 4.468 million residents as of 2018, according to Google.  That's a lot to test, but not as populous as some.  The governor's aim is to get testing so that anyone who feels they should be tested either due to symptoms or exposure has the opportunity to do so.  That's laudable.

Another graph I find interesting is the difference between Kentucky and neighbouring Tennessee and their response:

Granted, it's early yet.  But unfortunately, the federal response has been sluggish and so different states are basically issuing their own rules, and some are responding better than others.  For example, the governor of Michigan has exempted churches from the ban on 50+ persons gathering.

This is what I posted on Facebook on that subject:

I'm not Christian. My faith doesn't really have a 'church' or 'synagogue' or 'mosque' or 'temple'. Our temples were either destroyed years ago or are tourist attractions these days. Mine is a more solitary spirituality.

However, I care about people's ability to worship in these trying times. And no, a building is not the church, or synagogue, or mosque, or temple. Remember the old children's rhyme/fingerplay where you say, 'here's the church, here's the steeple, open the door and here's the people' and you wiggle your fingers, the people? They're what matter. Protecting the lives of members of congregations matter. You can still be religious. You can still interact from a distance. You can still pray. God and/or the Gods will understand. You can still be a faith. Just think of staying home as a way of doing a good thing, a blessing. In Judaism, it's called a mitzvah. You are doing something good for others, and it costs very little. Stay safe. Make sure you don't pass it to others. And keep the faith.

Finally, there's the mental health issue with all these cases, deaths, and restrictions. I found this helpful:

I have OCD and anxiety disorder. I think this has a lot of good advice, although it's really hard to unplug from social media, as some things (like changes in hours or scope of operations and meetings cancelled) I've only found on Facebook, etc. Just remember, take care of your mental health, too:

Coronavirus: How to protect your mental health

Okay, I guess I'll sign off for now.  Just remember, Gov. Beshear is right.  We are all in this together.  #TeamKY #TeamUSA #TeamWorld

So how are you doing?

Well

Today was a good day at work. I kept up with everything, and didn't feel exhausted afterwards from that much mental juggling and human interaction. I even had enough energy to work on the house, and my boss gave me an extra day off next week to pack. But... being an introverted person with bipolar depression, anxiety, and OCD, I think work is taking a toll on me, but I haven't really had the energy to do job hunting lately. So, goals for the next few weeks: 1) take care of my health, physical and mental, meaning taking my medicine on schedule, eating well, and getting rest, 2) resume job hunting, 3) get moved with the least stress possible, and 4) do a great job at work. I think that's enough to work on, don't you?

We need more of these programmes

Suspension Is Not the Answer: Investing in Students' Mental Health Yields Academic Gains

Unfortunately, "support structures" and "second chances" are severely lacking for many in America today, particularly in minority and low-income communities. The United States has the most prisoners of any developed country in the world, both in terms of raw numbers and by percentage of the population. More citizens are behind bars in the US than in Russia, Mexico, Iran, India and China.

Who makes up America's prison population? Often inmates are adults who endured terrible violence and trauma as children, such as witnessing a parent's murder. A study by The Sentencing Project found that juveniles who received sentences of life in prison reported witnessing violence in their homes 79% of the time, and more than half (54.1%) witnessed weekly violence in their neighborhoods.

Children who are exposed to violence tend to suffer from a range of psychological issues, and often have "difficulties with attachment, regressive behavior, anxiety and depression and conduct problems." Without mental health support services, few are able to cope with the emotional stress in a productive manner on their own. Confused, angry or scared, a student's cries for help are commonly first expressed by acting out in school.

Regrettably, a school's frequent response to a student's "misbehavior" is ineffectual: just when the young person needs support and professional help the most, they are suspended, kicked back to the streets alone and vulnerable. According to the US Department of Education, the number of students who receive some form of academic suspension in America each year could fill 45 Super Bowl stadiums.

I'm not into tattoos, but this is nice

If You See Someone With A Semicolon On Their Body, Here’s What It Really Means

The symbolism of the semicolon is explained on Project Semicolon’s website,

“A semicolon is used when an author could’ve chosen to end their sentence, but chose not to. The author is you and the sentence is your life.”

By encouraging people to share their marks and stories, Project Semicolon seeks to instill hope and open up a dialogue about mental health.

For one day, at least

I was a domestic goddess and kicked butt at work. Maybe it's because I got rest this weekend, or maybe it's because the house is clean. Or maybe it's because while I have eaten less than normal today, I feel so much better. I don't know. I got up at 6 am, started bread in the bread machine, and then finished the few things I needed to do to help get the apartment ready for inspection week. I made the bed (which given the number of shams and pillows I have, is no small task for one person), vacuumed, and took out the last of the trash and recyclables. Somewhere in all that I also burned some incense and cooked four cups of basmati rice, because one of the things I do have in my cupboard are heat-and-serve microwavable Indian dishes from Kitchens of India. So today for breakfast, I had a slice of bread and some peanut butter. For a mid-morning snack, there was yet another piece of bread alone. For lunch I had rice (for some reason, my spell-checker wants 'astigmatism' instead of 'basmati') and a chickpea and potato curry. I haven't eaten anything since then. I'm just now starting to get a little hungry. I think I'll go for just a little bread with something on it, as I'm not very hungry.

At work I spent the morning planning out what books I need to update in the library (with a grant that we will hopefully get) for next year, as well as our family resource centre updates and access to electronic resources. I worked at a good pace at my data entry job, including referrals, reconciliation of charges, putting in charges, and the like. It's a detailed-oriented job, and I managed to catch something that could have cost the hospital reimbursement. So I felt good about that aspect of my job today. But the day flew by, and I felt alert and energised all day. Usually by this time of day I'm dragging and ready for a nap.

When I got home I spent a little while caring for my indoor garden (spacing the houseplants out and taking off dead flowers and leaves). I opened all the windows. The Christmas cactus has a bud on it. Only the prayer plant is blooming right now; the African violets did for a long time. I did have to toss a croton because it had been killed off by those dratted little white mealybugs. The other croton might live; it has one leaf left. The violets have them, too, and they're hard to eradicate from fuzzy leaves. But the others seem resistant, thankfully.

I also have an ailing fish. The fish actually made it through the Time of Low Water and No Filter pretty well, but when I filled up the tank yesterday, I found that one had become stuck in the java moss. I freed it and cleared out a lot of the moss. It's pretty, but it can be pretty invasive. So since then, that fish has kept to the bottom and is slowly dying. I'm sorry for that. Fortunately it's a 19 cent feeder goldfish, but still, I feel guilty for letting the moss overgrow, and letting the water get low enough that it became a problem. That leaves me four-and-a-half fish, the betta in the bedroom's 3-gallon tank, and the goldfish in the 29-gallon long tank. Once a few days pass, I'm going to vacuum out the tanks really well and test the water. If it's doing pretty well, I'll maybe add some feeder goldfish. They're actually a nice size and pretty, and don't require an awful lot of babying. I'm used to livebearers, but they haven't done well in the tank since I set it back up a few years ago. Even with a staggered biological filter, water changes, and the addition of nitrogen-eating bacteria, I've had trouble with nitrates. That's not as bad as nitrites, but the fish don't flourish as well. I used to do much better at keeping fish, and livebearers reproduced readily. But sadly, this is not the case since the tank was set back up, and as a result, I've tended to let it get a little too dirty. So after a few days so I don't totally freak the fish out, since vacuuming means adding more new (although conditioned) water, I hope to rectify that. But just getting the filter back up and running has helped immensely. I'd had a power outage from a storm about a month ago and couldn't get the thing to pump the water up from the tube, even though it was clear, and isn't really the type that needs priming (but I primed it anyway, to no avail). This time, after being off for awhile, it started right up and pumped immediately. So I'm not sure what the deal was at the time. But I didn't mean to keep the filter off so long--I was just really, really busy.

I am very low on gas for the car, and have $1 in change to put into it tomorrow, which might get me to and from work through Wednesday. I haven't been quite this broke in awhile. I think I have a total of fifty-two cents in my checking and savings accounts combined--so that's part of the stress lately. So I'm saving the gas if at all possible. Still, I should call a friend and see how he is doing. I'm not sure things will get a lot better when I get paid, but they will get better. I called Friday and got several doctors' offices to agree to return co-pays I mistakenly paid (this is the first year I've had insurance with a maximum out-of-pocket expense amount, and I didn't realise that once I met it, co-pays were not to be collected. This came to the tune of $180. So sometime in the next six weeks those refunds should trickle in. That would help.)

After talking with YKWIA last night, I decided that my mood was a little less stable than it had been and with the shorter days and perhaps being a little further into perimenopause than I thought I was, my medicine might need adjusting. So I called the practice I used to go to a few years ago and asked if I could get an appointment. The receptionist said he would check my records and with the doctors and get back with me. He didn't today, but I hope he'll call tomorrow. The nurse practitioner I was seeing is gone from the practice now, but that's okay. I was going until the car died, and then really couldn't get there, even though it's only a short distance from my house. Now I think the connector bus does go by, but I don't think it did then. So my general practitioner has been handling my meds. I think they need a little fine tuning.

Okay, it's nearly 6:30. Time to get some of that bread and some peanut butter, I think. Or maybe spaghetti with vegetarian meatballs. Mmmmm. I have the ingredients, including frozen soy meatballs in the fridge. I've never had soy meatballs. Yeah. I could do that, and take anything left over to work tomorrow. :)