Dispatches From the Fortress – Day 637

In the past 637 days, I've learned to be very comfy — and to even enjoy in some ways — not leaving my house much. Or maybe I should say "my neighborhood" because I do go out and walk around my block and surrounding blocks and sometimes over to local merchants for supplies and eats. And I have been out for a few lunches — mostly eaten outta doors or in a restaurant with no one else in it but my dining companion(s) and masked servers. And I go to the occasional doctor appointment…

…but I've been here a lot and I recognize that that's not the healthiest lifestyle in the world. Avoiding viruses is healthy. Never getting out is not. I've known people who in non-COVID times were terrified to leave their homes and it damaged their careers, made them socially distant from others, impacted their health and generally made their world smaller and smaller and smaller. I need to enlarge mine judiciously.

I'm still adhering to my belief that the true answer to the questions "When will this all be over and when will life be normal again?" is "Nobody knows." When I say I'm expecting to be at WonderCon next April, there's a little implied asterisk (*) on that statement and a footnote that says "Coronavirus permitting." And it's based on the assumption that there will be an in-person WonderCon next April.

This dispatch is being written, like many things that appear on this blog, more for me than for you. I expect to look back on this and other posts here and kind of chart my Pandemic Experience. This is to remind me of when it was I became a little more assertive in slowly and safely getting out of my house.

But it is kinda nice here…