"Sorry Things Suck" chocolate cake from Wednesday's return to online school

Hey -

For a many of us, this has been a hard week.

While those of us getting the Omicron variant of COVID-19 are hopefully facing a milder bout of illness than when Delta was prominent, or than we did when there were not vaccines, it still feels like everyone is getting COVID.

We tried to order food for delivery over the weekend from literal food delivery restaurants, like places that deliver Freaky Fast, and after three tries at three different restaurants we gave up, because none of them were able to deliver anything that day - there was simply not enough staff.

People are getting notices that their COVID test results are delayed because the staff at the lab has COVID.

And after massive staffing shortages, some of us are suddenly schooling from home again. The emotional whiplash in our house has been rough. Just like that all progress feels lost - we're back to four different zoom meetings in four different rooms at the same time like the last 18 months never happened. And the one week plan they were sent home with just stretched to 3 1/2 weeks, and that feels like some kind of PTSD inducing agony up in here.

(And, sorry, but just to drop a cherry of insult on top of this whipped mess of injury we're all muddling through at the moment, when the week began, the milk wasn't stretching. This is a thing. For reals. It was so cold last week, in those double digits below zero, that something happened to glass-bottled milk in transit, and in our house, and in some local coffee shops, there was a froth shortage. It's like the universe wanted to punish us for hoping).

Go gentle on yourselves and each other, dear ones. Some practical suggestions:

There's good TV right now. (Station 11 is fantastic, if you can stomach the initial pandemic part - and the whole thing is like 8 episodes, so you get the satisfaction of a really well told story from beginning to end. And there's a new season of All Creatures Great and Small on PBS. I mean, come on).
Here's a recipe for chocolate pudding.
Here's a recipe for that zucchini butter spaghetti that got us through last summer.
Old music is feeding me. I can't get enough of October Project's two albums with Mary Fahl (October Project and Bury My Lovely). Maybe there's old music you loved and forgot about that might call out to you if you let it.
Slower. Less. More deliberately. Everything this way.

And I thought I'd circle back to some devotions from last year and the year before- something that helped us get through this back then, and maybe it can help us get through it now too.