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  2021-04-21

  Enjoying the Chaos Wastes while I wait for my second Covid shot

  On the twenty first of April, a new free DLC for the video game Vermintide 2 released called Chaos Wastes. Like a previous video game I posted about in these archive which has occupied my time during the pandemic, Vermintide is set in the Warhammer Fantasy Universe. WHF is essentially Tolkien high fantasy turned up to eleven, more over the top in every way. Vermintide takes place during the End Times, a narrative event from the tabletop game from around 2014. The venerable franchise with 30+ years of writing and stories by that point was destroyed in real life by its replacement Warhammer Age of Sigmar, and in the story the world was finally consumed by the powers of Chaos. In Vermintide, teams of four players team up to fight the horrors that assail the Empire of Mankind right at the beginning of the End Times. This new DLC, focusing on an expedition straight into the heart of the Chaos Wastes, takes the game in a new narrative direction and ties it in more broadly with the End Times narrative itself. The Ubersreik 5, as the protagonist group is referred to after their exploits from the first game, is primarily opposed to two elements of disease and decay: the Skaven, human-sized rats that live in a massive Under-Empire that seek to spread plague and take over the surface, and the Norscans, basically fantasy power-metal viking marauders who worship the chaos god Nurgle, lord of decay and disease. Our protagonists travel to a fortress deep in the reality-warped wasteland near the North Pole in order to contact their respective gods to seek aid to combat the End Times. While they are not fighting fantasy characters straight out of the 1980s, modern scientists and healthcare professionals have been fighting a virus which has threatened us all in a global pandemic. I go to get my second shot of Moderna tomorrow, and while I have been enjoying this new DLC and embarking on heroic quests with my friends online, others have worked to allow people like me to finally protect ourselves from Covid with a vaccine.
• 
  2021

  Covid-19 in the background of life

  I have a lot of photos taken in this spot. Our animals and children are cute and tend to hang out on the sofa. I was scrolling back through my online albums and noticed something the background of my photos from the last year all have in common. The tote bag hanging off the closet door is for used masks as we come in. The little table across the stairs is our home PPE station. It wasn’t there a year ago. The baskets are filled with cloth masks of various sizes and styles (it took a lot of trial and error to find masks that fit both kids) and the drawer has a touchless thermometer, among other things. The top has wipes, hand sanitizer, and a UV phone sanitizer that was on back order for months before it arrived. We will always be able to identify the year these photos were taken thanks to a collection of stuff I couldn’t imagine having eighteen months ago. I wonder how long it will stay?
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  2021-02-17

  THIS IS YOUR NECK ON ZOOM

  Many years ago, there was a public service ad that said ‘This is your brain on drugs.” It featured an egg cracking into a frying pan, sizzling crisply. I feel the same way about my neck on zoom. It is a horrifying sight. For many of us, ZOOM is the funhouse mirror we do not wish to look into. It has been suggested that staring at ourselves on ZOOM calls sucks the life out of our brains and that it might be better to simply not be able to see ourselves. Apparently, you can block yourself from being able to see your own face while allowing your fellow ZOOM-ers to gaze at you. Honestly, that seems worse to me. What if I look like a Salvador Dali painting? And what about my NECK? Chin high, neck elongated is my mantra. Channeling Audrey Hepburn helps. Otherwise, I look like a candidate for a Thanksgiving carving board. This is what COVID hath wrought. Not a fear of disease or death (although THAT is responsible for the extra furrows between my brows), but a conversation about inner beauty and wisdom vs. gravity and slackness of skin. For women of a certain age COVID has brought a dollop of fear, and a hefty helping of self-pity at the mere thought of newborn grandchildren we cannot hold. And it has also rendered us as insecure and self-conscious as a teenager with a pimple on the tip of the nose. The state of the skin beneath my chin should not matter, and yet it does.
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  2021-01-26

  Pandemic Kindness

  The pandemic has caused so much death, destruction, and sadness. I wanted to share something positive that has happened to me during this difficult event. While this begins in tragedy, I promise it turns around... My service dog passed away suddenly from cancer one month after his first birthday. It was April and the virus was spreading rapidly so there were new restrictions being imposed everywhere. I had to go through the process of my dog passing away all on my own and my dog had to spend a lot of the time alone in a cage in the vet's office while I was forced to wait in my car. My mind was plagued with thoughts of my dog long after he had passed. I could no longer ride in my car that I had spent so much of my dog's last hours in. Everything was closed because of the pandemic so I was forced to stay at home and everything in my house reminded me of my dog. I became very depressed and barely came out of my room. I forced myself to get up and get a blanket from the living room and I saw a rock on the table near my daughter's crafts. I don't know what it was, but I just decided to paint one. One had a triangular shape and I turned it into a shark head because it reminded me of a shark tooth. I had never drawn or painted prior to this but I was proud of my work and, at the end of it all, I realized that I had spent hours in my living room! I decided to get up the next day and paint another rock. I did this for a week and once I gathered a small pile, I put a few in my pocket and went for a walk, dropping painted rocks in random places along the way. The rocks had made me so happy at one of the darkest moments of my life and I wanted to spread that feeling to others. The whole thing really taught me how something really small can make a big difference. Painting rocks has helped keep me connected with others during the pandemic. I've found communities of rock artists and we share ideas with one another. I've also discovered I have a talent for drawing and painting and have recently begun taking commissioned art requests. I still make sure to paint plenty of "freebies" and I leave them everywhere from gas pumps to hidden in trees. I am so grateful to be able to spread even a little bit of kindness during this difficult time.
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  2021-01-22

  A Covid Experience

  I learn about myself through the stories of others; this account is both a recounting of my friend Stephanie’s story, a conversation we had after she contracted Covid19, and my own introspection about the different impact that written and spoken stories have.
• 2021-01-22

  The Silver Lining of Pandemic Community Building

  I have a busier schedule now than I did when I left the house for more than grocery runs and work. I spend a lot of my time on Zoom, as we all do, but doing things I was not doing before. In April, quickly after Friday the 13th, my #twitterstorian dreams came true when Dr. Joanne Freeman launched History Matters…. And So Does Coffee with the National Council for History Education. A couple of months later, The Gilder Lehrman Institute launched a weekly series talking with a historian about their book called Book Breaks. I could never attend conferences like the Southern Historical Association annual meeting, and now they were available to me virtually. The Western History Association annual meeting was online in October 2020 and was one of the best conferences and online meeting experiences that I think is possible given the circumstances. I have seen Joanne Freeman and Dr. Heather Cox Richardson speak together frequently over the last few months, and each experience is just as fun as the previous. I am on the board of the Arizona Technology in Education Association. The ability to host events and PD without needing to secure locations and catering has increased the number of events that we host by what feels like tenfold. I also started my Ph.D. in history at ASU, and with those added time blocks to my schedule expanded my little world with cohort and classmates. The pandemic has forced us to come together in new ways. By trying to carry on, those components of our lives shifted to the internet and thus actually made them more accessible to our larger communities than they were before. It has prompted even more of the existing conversations about virtual conferencing from an economic and environmental perspective. Don’t get me wrong, I am eagerly awaiting my 2nd vaccine and the days when I can travel for conferencing, community, and research again, but I think I will frame my plans around a different question. I don’t believe that I will have to ask myself to choose what to attend and not attend. Instead, it will be what things do I want to engage with in person (and what things can I) and what things I will still attend, but from afar. We are closing in on a year in this pandemic, and with the new year, I think it is essential to try and find some kind of silver lining – and it is that I think the communities that we have built over the last year and continue to build will be larger and stronger. Now I suppose I need to mull over the ramifications of overscheduling, burnout, and prioritization.