the situation in india, and other stuff
I don't exactly have less to get done today but the stress level at work seems to have gone down dramatically. I'm getting less frequent emails from stores at the moment, anyway, and honestly what a huge difference that makes cannot be overestimated.
Also my finally figuring out that I can manually sort the tasks in my Outlook tasks lists makes a big difference too. I just figure out what needs to get done first, focus on that, and don't worry about the rest. This is proving to be an incredibly useful approach.
There's not much to update you on today. Well, maybe I can take that back: I had an email from Mary Ann to respond to, which I finally thought to do last night after basically just chilling and scrolling through TikTok on my bed for a while. She had emailed last week expressing concern over the state of health emergency with COVID in India right now, and how Shobhit's family is doing. She was not the first to express concern to me; both Mimi and Gabriel texted me about it last week. So, I'll provide the information I have, which was just updated yesterday when I asked Shobhit about it, here:
Shobhit's mom is now vaccinated. I actually don't know how far past her second shot she is yet—it likely is not yet two weeks—but she has indeed had both her shots. Given her 75 years of age, that's of the greatest concern and therefore the greatest relief. I guess Shobhit's older brother has had both of his shots as well. According to the Google search I did just now, roughly 150 million shots have been given, which is "the equivalent" of about 12% of their 1.3 billion population, and does not clarify regarding how many of those 150 million shots are 2 shots given to the same person, which is probably a good portion. I know basically nothing about how they are handling eligibility processes, but evidently Shobhit's mom and his brother found a way.
His younger sister, on the other hand, is a little more complicated. I had forgotten that a few years ago she had some "mini strokes," which is why she is on blood thinner medication. And, she has to be off of that medication for some period of time before she can get vaccinated. Her husband is still somewhere for work in the Middle East, I think, but she and their two kids are actually staying with Shobhit's mom in Delhi right now. This is relatively ideal for everyone involved at least for now, but especially for Shobhit's mom, who has been terribly lonely (according to Shobhit, anyway) living alone even before the pandemic hit. Now, she's got company and family to cook for.
Anyway. Aside from all that, Shobhit had his Project Management class last night, before which we watched the latest episode of Last Week Tonight with John Oliver—about, you guessed it, vaccines—and during which I finally got around to Sunday's episode of Mare of Easttown on HBO Max. It was after that when I killed time just lounging around looking at TikTok, which frankly was quite nice and almost felt luxurious. Oh, and I worked on another project that I just don't want to share a lot of details about right now; it was mostly done already and I just put the finishing touches on it right before going to bed.
And now! I just finished with Office Lunch Meetup #40—now my 38th, as last week's was the second-ever that I did not attend, thanks to my week off of work. (The first was when I worked the CD store Thanksgiving week.) I really am very good about just totally rejecting any and everything regarding work while taking time off; I did not look at work email a single time between the end of my work day on Friday April 23, and starting work this past Monday May 3.
We had four people today, kind of on a technicality: Michelle joined the call by accident, then told us she meant to log onto a concurrent call for the office Book Club group she's a part of. But, she did stay on for a couple of minutes, just long enough to show me her brand new puppy, which was brown and white and so cute I could hardly stand it. And I'm a cat person!
Michelle left the call and within a few minutes Noah joined, in a face mask this time as he is apparently working at the office today. I sure am eager to get news on a plan for returning to the office; I have to be on the All-Merchandising meeting next (we stopped the lunch call with just about five minutes of the hour left, leaving me just enough time to finish this up), maybe someone will mention something about it then? Probably not. Whatever.
Anyway, the other person on the call was Rebecca as always—still the only person never to miss any one of them since we started last August. So, she's been on 40 calls; I've been on 38; Noah comes in third with 25. Even though we had four on the call today, we never had more than three at once. It was really nice catching up as always, though, and now I need to get this posted so I can move on into the next Teams video chat meeting.
[posted 1:01 pm]