Aside from the usual challenges of trying to market a debut book of poetry during a pandemic, there have been other obstacles that have weighed on me since February.

The vaccine rollout has been a washout

I’m posting a more in-depth treatise on the state of the vaccine dis/union here at the blog soon.

Let’s just say, even though I will be receiving my second dose next week (the first one having come to me in the form of a “leftover”), I’m not going to jump for joy when the doing’s done.

Listen closely: Not until ALL PEOPLE OF ALL AGES are protected can we, as a society, authentically celebrate.

I hope I’m wrong, but I suspect things are about to get even more ugly. I fear a Hunger Games scenario coming around May 1.

Like digging a road through the desert with a plastic pail and shovel…

On February 21, my laptop lost hardware functionality. In other words, it was running, and then it stopped working. It took me about a month to replace it with one of only two used ones still available for sale IN THE WORLD.

It’s not an ordinary laptop like a Dell, it’s an ASUS with “super-user” functionality for creating multimedia. It was also over three years old, and buying a newer version would make swapping hard drives impossible.

Believe it or not, my hard drive was intact. It was actually just a broken on/off button connection that couldn’t be fixed by Best Buy or the local repair shop.

I was a tad bit worried about buying a used laptop off of eBay, but that was the only way to swap out my hardware and reclaim my hard drive (which is my second brain, and I don’t say that as a joke).

Meanwhile, I have been working on an old low-speed laptop leftover from one of my kids. It lacks the very basics, like Office, so I couldn’t do much of anything with the files I had saved on an external drive.

So March felt a bit like digging a new road through a desert using a plastic pail and shovel. Thanking my lucky stars the replacement went smoothly when it did arrive and I am now back to the races.

If I only had a (functional) brain!

This troubleshooting and organizational pivoting has been extremely hard on my personal processor (aka brain).

Thanks to MS, you can take your pick from the setbacks: multiple memory issues, attention deficit, focus and concentration, vision and speech problems).

Indeed, I missed about a month’s worth of work because of it. (Let’s not talk about the money lost part.) Anything you’ve seen from me was either created using a web-based program, an underachieving word processing program or some other clever workaround that took a lot more time and brainspace than would have been normal for me, had my laptop been functional.

My brain is tiiiiiiiiired. 

Dear April: Be kind to me

Here’s to hoping April will bring better news. The new-to-me computer is a great start, as is the completion of vaccines for me and my family. We will be able to meet live indoors safely for the first time since Christmas 2019 by my daughter’s 23rd birthday, and I couldn’t be more grateful.

We’ll definitely be serving lemonade on that day, because what else do you do with a windfall of lemons over almost a year and a half?