Our first Zoom event at work last night. We had ninety reservations and roughly sixty people showed up. I’m becoming comfortable managing a Zoom meeting, though I miss being there, standing in the back of the room, watching the audience, hearing the sound of laughter and claps. In a way, this was a leap back to when I first started my job seventeen years ago. Back then, before automated reservation systems, I had to handle every reservation via phone-calls and emails. Now I’m sending out Zoom links to every attendee, and keeping track of the list all the way up to the minute of the event. Looks like I’ll have to return to my old habit of doing follow up calls/emails on the morning of the event asking reserved attendees to notify me if they can’t show up, so I can make room for people on the waiting list.

So, events online are both more personal and more impersonal. I must interact directly with every member one way or another, and when they show up, just before I turn off the camera, I often catch glimpses of tiny corners of their homes, a sofa, a picture on the wall, a book-case.

We need to do laundry today. It’s been piling up, and while Michael handles that downstairs at the laundromat, I’ll be cleaning out the refrigerator. When you spend the majority of your time in one living space, never going out, but moving constantly from room to room, opening and closing the same cabinets and closets, it leaves deeper, grottier tracks.

I think the cat is losing patience with us. Not only is she retreating into the bedroom beside the radiator in the afternoons, she’s begun holing up under the bed and unplugging our bedside lights. Our bed is one of those platforms that sits flush on the floor except under the headboard, where there’s a narrow passage, so once she’s under there, it’s hard to get her out. It’s also a pain in the ass to plug the lights back in, because it involves pulling back the mattress, folding back the slats of the platform, and lying full length on the frame, craning to see the plug. If it happens after dark, forget it. I’ll be reading in bed with a flashlight. This morning at about 6:30 am we had a battle of wills in which, after stomping repeatedly across us to wake us up for kibble, she burrowed under the bed and began thumping around because she knows if I hear that, I won’t pretend to be asleep any more but will roll over on my back yelling her name.