It’s 2021 now. Good luck.

When I started my COVID-19 Journal last March did I expect it to last until now? No!

Did I expect to take a couple months off from writing about my experiences of the COVID year? Also no, but I did.

• A) I was writing other things.
• B) I am an inconsistent journaller anyway.
• C) How much can I write about writing about myself staying at home? Well. Lots. And I shall continue to do so.

It occurs to me as I review my past entries that I didn’t take the opportunity to write in October and November how it was a year since my trip to China – which ended up being my last overseas trip for a while. I did ponder this in late October: how it didn’t feel like it had been a year already, but how it also felt like way more than a year since I’d been there. When the pandemic started, it had only been a few months since I got back. In October the pandemic was still going on, but it couldn’t have been that long, could it? But it was.

About a year ago today I was amazed at my good timing, leaving Asia just 6 weeks or so before news of the new coronavirus started coming out. Maybe it wasn’t a year ago today. Maybe it was a bit longer before I realized. I don’t remember exactly. Maybe it was Christmas. I remember at some point I opened Google maps so I could show Dad how far exactly I was from Wuhan during my trip. I spent a day looking at the Three Gorges Dam in Yichang, and that’s about 350km away, which was the closest I got. (However, as someone on my tour pointed out later, Wuhan was on a possible alternate route if our original plan went astray, but that part of the tour went according to the itinerary.)

---

This week I’ve been thinking about February, 2020 or “The Last Normal Month.” Just in regular life I would have been going to work. We had settled into a schedule where we could work from home one day per week. My day was Thursday. Then I had dance three times per week, on Monday, Wednesday and Friday.

February is the last month in my calendar that has events that aren’t marked with a CANCELLED. I took to adding CANCELLED to things as they were called off in the spring as a sort of memento, but that was later, in March, April and May. In February, I saw a Kidd Pivot show in Victoria, and Dear Evan Hanson in Vancouver. I went to a Carlson’s School of Dance fundraiser for their Disney kids in Duncan. I think I saw a play at UVic, too, but I didn’t have it written down.

At the end of Feb I had a dentist appointment, which led to a consultation with the endodontist at t the beginning of March, which led to half a root canal being done the next day because I thought it would be good to get it over with. I remember the endodontist saying that he’d be away at a conference that weekend, but there was an emergency line I could call if I had any issues The conference he attended ended up being the first superspreader event in BC, leading to all dentist offices being shut down for a while. My root canal wasn’t completed until July.

I remember thinking at the start of February that I had a busy month coming up. Thank goodness that it was.