Today’s Daily Stoic writing prompt:  Where does my lack of self-control create problems?

Sometimes when life outside of you is out of control, you default to bad habits as a way of comforting yourself.  Both my husband and I have gained weight during the pandemic–eating tasty foods is one of the things that hasn’t really changed during that time, and we’re indulging more than we should.  It’s not massively excessive, but it does feel like losing a handle to some extent on something we’d pretty much gotten down a few years ago.  In the grand scheme of things, this is not a “problem”–it’s more a concern.

I’ve talked as well about some of my other minor self-control issues, such as buying jewellery (largely no longer an issue).  I generally deal with it fairly well, which means when I notice something going wrong it really does indicate there’s a larger issue that needs to be dealt with first.  Because self-control issues for me are less a matter of will and more a matter of some kind of underlying issue that I need to understand.

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So, in the continuing Chernobyl deep dive, I decided I needed to understand how close the plant was to Pripyat.  It was 2.8 km away, which I figured was really close, but understanding that that’s about the distance to the Fortino’s where we food shop or to Devil’s Punchbowl really brings it home. The city was more or less immediately adjacent to the plant.  Of course, there are also houses right near the Pickering Nuclear Power Plant in Pickering, so I guess it’s not that odd–it just seems so in retrospect, like “why on earth would you build next to one of those scary RBMK reactors?  Of course, they had no idea of the issue at the time, which is why the accident happened.

Started my fun little interim embroidery project last night and it’s going fast.  I’m going to need to spend time this weekend doing the scroll for the Bardic War, so I’m hoping I can finish it in the next couple of days.

The news today was that they’re going to stop administering the AstraZeneca vaccine as a first shot.  It remains to be seen what those of us who’ve already had that shot will get for the second, but apparently there may be promising research on a “mix and match” approach, so we could possibly end up with Pfizer and Moderna. Makes perfect sense–both are based around the spike protein, so that should work.  Cases today were in the low 2000s–moving in the right direction, but all indications are that stay-at-home will last at least until early June.

Another great meeting for the CWH book.  We’re making progress.  I’ve also had an inquiring about being an editor for a new medieval reenactment publication.

I’m having another bout of pandemic exhaustion, however.  This time the inability to get out of the house and to see people again really is wearing on me.   My creativity continues to spark along nicely–although it’s tipped almost all into the embroidery side and away from the writing side right now, so I’m having problems sometimes finding things to say in these daily updates.  But I keep at them, and am allowing myself to be satisfied with not coming up with huge, deep insights.

That being said–it’s been ages since I’ve listened to the Shostakovich 4th Symphony on a Tuesday night.  Decided to do something about that right now.