Future fears

My sister has left for the airport. She graciously spent a day while the kids were at camp cleaning out their room. I sifted through the remains, tossing everything but play weapons, costumes, books and a few favorite other toys. Gone are the first reader books, legos, little kid stuff, cars and trucks, dinosaurs, etc. Let’s be honest - the kids spend 99% of their time playing video games or watching other people play video games. This is our life now. Some toys went to a four year old grand nephew of my brother-in-law; the rest went on the street for people to drive by and pick up. This worked well for the first round of giveaways from the attic clean up I did last week, but this time I discovered to my horror that someone had dumped all of it in our recycle bin (none of it is recyclable). I had a minor meltdown about this, then the BF went and dug it all out to put in the trash instead, and then he was somewhat butthurt at discovering we’d gotten rid of all of the very expensive toys he’d bought the kids that they never once played with that he’s convinced they’ll still play with. Then in the last few days several boxes have shown up of things he’s ordered them - giant expensive remote control cars, kites that don’t work, etc. And so goes the saga of the stuff. No matter what, the big clean out has undone years of neglect around here - I used to do a toy cull a couple of times a year, but have not done it in at least three years, and it showed. Now there’s very little left in their room - you can actually walk on the floor; it’s a miracle! I won’t let it get to that point again. And I’ve got to convince the BF to stop wasting his money on piles of plastic crap. 

With my sister on her way home, now begins Phase 2 of our summer - the Month of Camping. Day after tomorrow we leave for the Kern River for 4th of July weekend, then we have a coastal camping trip the weekend after, then we leave for our great southwest road trip after that, for ten days. I’ve started plotting out our road trip, and tbh the prognosis is not good. Some portion of it was dedicated to Zion National Park, which, as it turns out, has turned into Disneyland. Apparently the lines to get in are so long you have to show up before dawn to even think about getting a parking spot or getting on any kind of shuttle. Lines are hours long and everything is packed. I still want to hike The Narrows, but I’m starting to wonder if we’ll even make it to the inside of the park. I’m looking into (expensive) private tours that can maybe get us in there so we can at least have one day there. Then the next portion of our trip is exploring Navajo Nation...which is completely closed. While the tribal council has voted to reopen all the parks and monuments, the president has vetoed this, and I don’t see movement by the time we’re there in three weeks. Thanks, covid. So I’ve spent the last few nights frantically looking for alternatives, and finding a few. However, everything we want to do is informed by the heat, which may be unbearable. This may end up being a very different trip than I’d envisioned. It’s time to adjust my expectations now because we’re probably not going to end up doing any of the activities we’d originally planned. Now I’m really wishing I’d booked us for Hawaii instead.

Registration for my event has been glacially slow since opening night. I’m getting cancellations practically every day from people who transferred from last year but now realize they can’t or don’t want to go. I am very concerned about the Delta variant fucking everything up for me. This is pretty much the worst scenario I could have imagined - opening up again and receiving tons of abuse from right wingers (who are now organizing their own competing event, I might add), then the left wingers staying home out of (justified) fear, and basically no one supporting me and the whole thing being a big money-losing failure. Right now I’m really wishing I had preemptively canceled early in the spring like I wanted to.

But with all that negativity happening, I will say that a) there’s a chance that while Delta shows its teeth soon, it may not very much affect vaccinated people and may only spike certain low-vaccine areas, which is not our area, and b) in two months people’s tolerance for risk could be pretty high, especially after a summer of safe activities and c) I would be more concerned for winter events, two of which have announced their re-opening. Concerts, shows and events are re-opening all over and have no plans of canceling, Delta or no Delta. I can still limp through this one even if more people cancel, hardly anyone else shows up, and we stay more or less at this level of attendance. But oh, this all sucks so much. Between this and my still unapproved loan (which has been knocked back to “under review” and has stagnated there for a week now) I have been a ball of anxiety for weeks. Ugh. Just make it all stop.