Today marks 5 months living in the new place. And we just clocked over 3 months in "social isolation". I haven't done much with the place. I more or less vapor locked for a couple of months with making any kind of move in progress. But the last few weekends I've managed some progress. Most of the books are on shelves, and organized by subject/genre. Yes, the Cthulhu Mythos/weird fic takes up the most room still, history is crammed into 1.5 shelves, with about the same for esoterica, and some other random subjects shelved. Things like generic horror, sci-fi, and historical fiction are all still boxed up, due to a lack of shelf space, and a lack of minions to help me assemble replacement and upgrade shelves. Last post I talked about a reorg, but after some fan rearranging I've got the study back to something comfortable most of the time. So I'm mostly focusing on getting the library and home theatre areas done. Yeah, I bought a new large-ish TV to watch stuff in the living room. The idea, and practice, is that I can watch movies with less distraction there. Especially foreign flicks that are subbed. Still have the original TV in the study, along with most of the knickknacks, some books, and computers. I'm still tempted to combine the two, especially when I remember one of my dream layouts with a giant library and computers and stuff. But that's a bunch of effort, and I like the current study layout. So I guess we'll see what happens once social distancing doesn't need to be so distant.

Mental health is still all over the place. Really, this is the worst time to be afraid to reach out to folks, but I'm even less social than I was before this. I hate phone calls even more, I ramble, I try to be funny and fill in the silences. Then I over analyze what I say and feel horrible. Going back to whatever constitutes the 'new normal' is anxiety generating as heck, because my various coping skills are now designed around keeping me sane without outside contact. Stress is high enough that I don't read a whole lot, save audiobooks and podcasts and wiki pages. I watch a lot of movies, especially my comfort flicks. Work is...well lets just not go there right now. I saw my pshrink last week, via telemed. I'm doing the right things as best as I can, I'm not utterly strung out (The unspoken why we had a tele call vs a regular call, harder to cover up being majorly fucked up). The one thing he wants me to do is 'go walking' which, given it's the season of Hot, is pretty limited to me pacing in my apartment. Which is bugging me, because I really wish I could go to the Atlantic and soak my feet like last year, or go walking through the woods without dying of heat. But, I can't. I can at least daydream about the outside world. "natural" white noise at night allows me to daydream (before the meds kick in), and a lot of those daydreams involve the ocean, or rock scrambling like I used to do. Maybe when fall hits, I'll be able to do something that feels like that. Assuming Covid19 hasn't gone from bad to worse. Oh...to let you know how serious I'm taking it, It's been over 100 days since I entered a bookstore. I've gotten plenty of books, yay small bookstores with online browsing, plus Amazon. But I have to have some idea what I want. Bookstore I can walk into, and follow where the book calls take me...and then I find the book I didn't know I needed. *sigh* Texas says "It's safe" but the numbers beg to differ. But that being said, I'm probably going to say fuck it one of these days, go the full monty, and then wash myself in salt water and/or hydrogen peroxide when I get home.

So what's good in life, by Crom? Well, I'm having a staycation this week. Taking Thursday and Friday off so I can focus on the online Portland Horror Film Festival, run by my friends who do the HPLFF in October. I'd actually quasi planned coming out to Portland for it last year, see what Portland in June is like. But with Covid19, they have to social distance, so they moved everything online. So I now have horror fun from Wednesday night to Sunday day. And nothing major to do but watch movies and shorts, whatever online snarkery happens, Good to have something to look forward to, because beyond that it's a field of unknown. Let us pray that Tsathoggua and Cthulhu see fit to grant us some kind of break. Or at least the strength to suck it up a while longer, or the bravery to risk the virus for something more important than retail therapy or boredom (and that's as close as I'm getting the politics on my blog)