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We’re once again entering a state of COVID whiplash. It’s those periods of time when they announce the end of COVID restrictions or masking while simultaneously announcing a new variant. Is it problematic? This doctor says no. These doctors say yes. And this doctor says we just don’t know enough yet, but we’ve seen this situation before and can look at country X and learn Y…

THIS. This more than the unknowns at the beginning of the pandemic is exhausting. The conversation around removing masks is exhausting. Our area is moving to optional masking this weekend because case loads are going down and the CDC issued new guidance. But we’ve been here before. At least three times so far.

The Atlantic captured where I am right now: “The pandemic is not over. But if we let it, this stretch may be defined less by what we can’t do, and more by what we safely, carefully, finally can.”

I don’t feel limited at all by my limits. I mean, yes, I do not do as much as I did pre-COVID, but that makes sense because we’re not pre-COVID. We’re still in the pandemic. Life has changed, and I’ve changed with it. But I don’t feel limited like I did pre-vaccine when I went nowhere and did nothing. I now go to the theater regularly. The kids go to school. We visit people indoors while masked. We socialize outdoors unmasked and distanced. We are considering traveling.

The only things we don’t do are things that require us to remove our masks while near people. So we still only do takeaway and not dine-in (or even dine outside because most tables are too close together). We don’t socialize with food or drink indoors. And we’re waiting for caseloads to be low enough for maskless sleepovers. All things we’d love to do, but we’re willing to wait to keep ourselves and others safer.

Others may make other decisions, and I think all decisions are valid when they are made using the information we have (eg. I am triple-vaccinated and always wear a KN-95 mask tightly to my face, and these two things make me less likely to infect anyone else or become infected while socializing) vs. ignoring information that we don’t like and hoping for an outcome that may or may not happen. At this point, we know what spreads the virus.

It all falls under the Atlantic’s advice at the end that we need to: “come to a mutual understanding about taking risks wisely, about selecting joys judiciously, about distributing protection as widely and equitably as we can.”

I am tired thinking about this next variant and watching the stories move from “nothing to worry about” to “wait, should we be worried?” to “yes, we should be worried” to “the hospitals are full but how could we have ever known this would happen?” I wish we could just skip from “yes, we should be worried” to “look at us — we stopped a spike from happening and saved X number of lives.” THAT would be amazing — a chance to actually stamp down the pandemic vs. ignoring the still glowing embers.

Cup of Jo asked back in January, “What is your pro tip?” and people dropped over a thousand comments of life hacks.

Like this one:”I have a whiteboard on my fridge, but instead of writing what the meal plan for the week is (which I have written elsewhere), I write what I actually cooked for dinner each night as I’m putting leftovers in the fridge. Then I know what leftovers are no longer good.”

So smart. And this one we already do and have for years: “Travel with a plastic doorstop in your suitcase. Once in the room, wedge it under the door, making it impossible to open.”

And a perfect one: “Make a decision and then make it work.”

I am pulling out my top 10 from this list because there are too many good ideas to let float by. I’m capturing them in my bullet journal. What are your favourites?

I saw a bunch of people posting on Facebook about a “soup mother.” I assumed that it was a mother… who made soup? Which begged the question of why the soup maker needed her parental status in her name. But a quick Google session brought me here, to the idea of a soup mother.

It is sort of the soup equivalent to sourdough starter. Sort of. You take the remains of one soup and you add more ingredients to it to create the next soup. More like soup tag, maybe. Soup never goes to waste because one of the ingredients of your current soup is the leftovers of your last soup.

We did something similar with Stanley Tucci’s marinara sauce. We made it, and it was fine. But then his pasta e fagioli called for two cups of his marinara sauce. So we used the leftovers of the night before to make the soup, which was fantastic. In a true soup mother, we would take the pasta e fagioli and turn it into a vegetable soup by adding more stock and vegetables.

This appeals to my desire for zero waste, though I wonder how it works once you’ve added ingredients that don’t work in the direction you want to take the soup. Can you back yourself into a soup corner?

I saw this super pretty way of capturing the year. (Or the month or, really, any time period. Don’t feel like you can’t start it today just because we’re in February.) You divide up a piece of fabric into 12 pie slices, and you embroider a tiny picture to remember the day. So, for instance, if you got coffee with a friend that day, you may embroider a tiny coffee mug. Or if you went on a trip, you may embroider a tiny landmark.

At the end of the year, you have a circle of fabric covered with tiny moments from your year, and you can frame it or turn it into a pillow, etc.

And then you start all over again.

I don’t embroider, but I loved the idea of doing the same concept with a doodle on a piece of paper. Make a tiny doodle to represent once moment in my day, and at the end of the time period, frame it.

Um, I LOVE this. If I ever posted anything to Instagram, I would totally do Faceless Friday. I mean, yes, it started as a creative project to capture all the beauty that exists outside of the face, but it’s also inadvertently a way to give kids privacy.

We never post pictures of the twins’ faces because we wanted to leave the decision to be up on the internet in their hands. We’re glad we did because as they’ve grown up, they’ve been able to express to us that they don’t want to be online. But this project is a perfect way to share an image and capture a life while giving the child the ability to choose differently in the future.

Plus every image in that feed feels like it’s on the brink of telling a story.