The Bubble

The COVID circle continues to tighten.  A close friend got it.  Then Alec's work closed down due to a co-worker having a confirmed case.  Alec had worked with the person and had to get tested again.  It was much different than the first time, he was there over three hours in a line of cars that snaked through a neighborhood and was told to wait seven to ten business days for the result.  It's just coming closer and closer.

School decided to begin classes virtually and re-assess the situation in September.  I am relieved but would really like more information.  Is the teacher start date the same?  And in this talk of budget cuts and furloughs....can we discuss my payment for the next fiscal year, which started on Monday?  Again, I am incredibly relieved that they are not going to force us into an unsafe situation on July 27th.  I just wish we could minimize some of this uncertainty, especially when we are talking salary and schedule.  And as for the Housing Authority, that is still up in the air too.  And it's about 500 degrees in Atlanta right now, Georgia is clocking in at over four thousand new cases a day, the redneck governor is trying to silence our mayor and all of our heroes are dying.

Strange products keep going missing.  I'm not talking about the early explicables like toilet paper, masks, hand sanitizer, yeast, flour and Emergen-C, but really odd, inexplicable stuff.  Windex is gone, which I don't get.  It doesn't have all the anti-bacterial stuff of the other sprays, it's just like benign blue chemical.  My niece tried to make seafood and couldn't find Old Bay anywhere.  Fresca is like a black market item at this point.  Radishes are AWOL.  For a bit, cooking spray was some sort of hot commodity.

Two years ago, I began my thirteenth year teaching, crossing my fingers that I could make it through one more year of abusive bosses and weird-ass interdepartmental insanity, before making a change.  I didn't make it and asked out of my contract during the second week of the school year.  They let me out about six weeks and eight hundred dollars later and I embarked on an extensive tour of schools that lasted four months, only to decide on an ESOL job at a Title I school that actually felt right.  I finished the school year and felt revived, finally, about my place in the universe.  Year fourteen brought COVID and March school shutdowns and the shift to virtual teaching.  Year fifteen begins soon, online.  For almost two years, I have had the sensation that I can't imagine what next month might bring, or how different next year might be and I wonder even more now.  I found it kind of exciting at first.  It still is, but with an underlying feeling of not so nice uncertainty.