Love in the Time of Corona

Yo. So I am sitting on my couch staring at the rain coming down. Today is my first of four days off. Since I have been reduced to hiking and trail running I had planned on hitting the trails once a day in the mountains to stay sane on my time off. But wouldn’t you know, yesterday as I was getting ready to leave work I saw the headline that all the state and national forests are now closed here. Like, they’ve actually shutdown the Columbia River Gorge, Gifford-Pinchot and Mount Hood National Forest. WHAT. The outdoors is closed. UNTIL MAY. DISTRAUGHT.

Yesterday I JUST had skins delivered for my skis so I could get out in the backcountry. I am supposed to go skinning next weekend. My ski instructor turned buddy ol’ pal (I’m trying to get him to adopt me as his student of the outdoors and so far it’s working) is taking me out for my first time backcountry skiing and I have been ecstatic. I am hoping he still wants to go – this guy was just over in Europe to do a month long ski tour in the Alps and literally fled Italy in the middle of the night to get out since the borders were closed. If this is any indication I think some skiing still might happen but we’ll see. Until then it looks like I will be wandering the neighborhood parks.

The moral of this story is that I’m bored and writing a blog post.

I hope everyone is holding up out there both physical and mental health wise. I think the mental health is going to hit harder for most of us than anything else. This is nuts dude. I have told a lot of you but living alone during a month(s) long quarantine and being an extremely social human is basically the worst. I sent my friend a meme the other day that said “introverts, put your books down and check on your extrovert friends, we are not ok.” SEND HELP. I am sooooo happy that I am “essential” (obviously) and have to go to the hospital for work because at least I get to interact with people and have a purpose. Also I am working and still getting a paycheck which I am thankful for on a daily basis right now. I will not have to worry about that at all probably ever. Very very thankful.

Oregon’s numbers are moving way slower than anticipated so work is actually dead. They definitely emptied out the hospital way too quick, not that anyone was able to predict which way this was going to go. It’s odd though. We are just sitting waiting for the “surge” to happen and it hasn’t so far. Considering we are sandwhiched in between Cali and Washington both of which have significant amount of cases – Washington more so – it feels strange that we are just chillin’. But they are predicting us to be in crisis mode in the next two weeks, so we’ll see what happens. I do much better in crisis mode. The more stressful things are the more calm I get and just get things done. I do not do well being anxiety ridden waiting for the storm to hit. So I am hoping we either get slammed or we start going back to “normal” procedures in the hospital in a few weeks. I actually feel guilty about us not being busy. I reached out to my travel nurse recruiter to see if I could help with crisis response up in Seattle. I’ve also gotten daily emails from NYC to see if I can help out there – I still have my license in NY from when I was supposed to move there and take the ER job. If I wasn’t on the other side of the country I would probably consider flying out there on my days off to help. Maybe I should check into that now that I type this outloud. What a weird time.

I’m going to veer off the virus path here and get back to regularly scheduled programming. Pretend things are normal for a second. Chat you guys up about life.

Since my New Year’s post I have done quite a bit, as per usual. I’d say it’s extremely obvious how obsessed with skiing I am. I am lucky to have seven days off every other week so I went 3 to 4 times during those days off. Early in the season I wanted to practice what I had learned last year and then have another session with John (my instructor) to have him critique me. Not interested in picking up bad form or bad habits. In February he and I went out and to my happy suprise he said everything looks amazing. On one of the runs he told me he could have taken a picture of me and it could have been put on a poster. SO basically I am going to the Olympics in 2022. Looking forward to bringin a gold home for the US of A. Thank you athleticism for helping a 33 year old girl out when learning to ski later in life. But now I’ll humble myself by telling you guys about going down a black diamond and a half pipe.

So, John and I were skiing along and he stopped me at one point and he showed me this drill he wanted me to do. I was to do very quick and short turns without edging my skis. So we went down a small hill doing this and then skiied on. We arrive at the top of a run and I just knew it was a black diamond. He stopped me at the top and he goes “ok you ready to tackle this!?” Doing what I do best I confidently said HECK YA. The run was super narrow and steep. We start going down and the first couple turns are ok – the snow was pretty much garbage on this run and there were a ton of moguls. Anyway on my 4th or 5th turn I got nervous and ate it. Well, it was steep enough that I just slid for a bit haha. I finally stopped myself with my skis and then I couldn’t get back up so poor John had to side step his way back up the hill to grab my arm and help me stand up. It was quite hilarious. He goes “I may have been too aggressive with this” – but in my stubbornness I got up and finished the rest of the run with no issues. Check off that black diamond. I am glad he was with me though. So I navigated that unscathed for the most part and we did a couple more runs through some trees so I could get used to skiing in powder. Turns out powder is hard to come by on Hood so I am trying to snatch it up any chance I get. I had been telling John how I was loving getting up to higher speeds and how I had been going off smaller “bumps” to do a little jumping. He quickly took this opportunity to ask me if I wanted to end by going down a natural half pipe. Off piste you can follow what is usually a stream and in winter it creates a half pipe. So I’m like YUP LET’S DO IT! I wish someone had been video taping me. John told me if I get going to fast to just go up the side and it will slow me down for obvious reasons. I start down the half pipe and make it half way through before I started going too fast, also the snow here was garbage as well and there were huge chunks of icey snow and huge snow boulders to navigate. I let myself go up the side to slow down and instead of turning I get to the top of one of the sides and just straight up faceplant right into the snow and proceed to slide face first down, lost a ski, couldn’t get back in my ski because we were going down hill and I was on ice. It was hilarious. I finally did get my ski on and made it down the rest of the pipe but the comedy was real.

Next order of business. The title of my blog. Sometime around December I felt like I wanted to at least go on some dates so as to avoid becoming a cat lady. Still not wanting anything serious I used good ol’ Tinder. Mainly because I did not want to put any effort whatsoever into being asked out – I just wanted dudes to message me, go on a date and call it a day. As it turns out I hate everyone. I would say I “swiped right” on probably one out of every 100 guys. No joke. Everyone is so lame, I can’t handle it. So I started going on some dates, I think in a two week span I went on like 10 dates. It must have been helpful with how picky I was because all of the dates with the exception of one were really awesome guys. Because they were all so awesome I have proceeded to hangout with a rotating crew of 6 or 7 guys at the same time. I don’t recommend. It’s exhausting trying to remember what conversations you had with whom. I’ve also invited some of these guys to do things with me and if one doesn’t answer quick enough I text the next guy leading to double booking on more than one occassion. So then I have to lie to the first guy because can you imagine showing up to a sound bath with 6 tinder dates. Yikes. In the last couple weeks I’ve decided it is too much work especially since I’m not romantically interested in any of them haha. So I’m letting some of these go by the wayside except the few that I’ve actually managed to establish good friendships with. I’m just going to meet someone in real life someday. But at least I got some friends and some dates out of this whole ordeal. One of the guys, actually most of them, are big into outdoors and climb and ski. So one of the guys I am definitely going to recruite to take me climbing this summer. And they’ve been useful when trying to navigate what gear to get for backcountry skiing. All good things. I have to say I love living in a place where first dates are climbing, hiking, going to a park etc. One guy who I was genuinely interested in and went on several dates with sings and plays the banjo in a bunch of bluegrass bands and our first date was me going to see him. Not too shabby. But turns out he is literally obsessed with climbing. Like one track mind type of thing and he told me if he could live anywhere it would be Bishop, CA. So that had to end. But it’s been good to somewhat get back into the game.

In January my mom called me one day and told me to pick a place, anywhere, and we would meet there for a birthday trip in March. I picked Santa Fe, New Mexico. I was just imaging the look on her face when I busted out that destination. But I had not done any exploring in the Southwest and wanted to check out a few things in NM, particularly the cliff dwellings of the Anasazi tribes. We had such a great trip there! Santa Fe is so adorable and it is settled in a bowl of mountains. Any direction you look there are mountains. It’s beautiful. The art scene there is huge so inbetween visiting archeological and geological sites we visited a bunch of galleries in town. The native american pottery is insane! It was extremely interesting to learn the methods in which they create their pottery. They do so without a wheel or any firing machine. It is all done completely by hand and then glazed by placing the pottery underneath huge piles of cow poop and lighting it on fire. The intricacies of the designs on the pottery are amazing as well. I wish I could afford a larger piece but even the smallest piece was about $200, and we are talking about something that is about two inches tall. And a lot of these native american families have been creating this pottery since the beginning of their time. It’s all very fascinating. I always love learning the cultural differences in our own country.

The food was also excellent. I had all these intentions of going down there and eating ALL the burritos. Turns out an intermittent fasting, vegan eating stomach can’t handle any of that. I managed to eat one burrito and that was on the last day only because I felt it was absolutely necessary before we left. But it was SO GOOD. Also, sopapillas. My goodness are these like pillows of heaven. I could have just had these the whole time and been happy but this is coming from someone who would live off bread if I could. You eat these with honey drizzled on them to tame the heat of the chiles. Hightly recommend a trip to NM. I want to go back to Taos someday to do both hiking and skiing. Plus I need to go back to make it to White Sands National Park. We had plans to go there but it was too far away. Put this state on your bucket list if you haven’t been!

Alright well this is probably absurdly long at this point. It looks like it may stop raining for a minute so I am going to try and go for a run. Depending on how long this quarantine lasts you may hear from me again.

I am supposed to go to Havasupai (look this up if you don’t know what it is, it looks amazing) to do that trek and camp in a month and I am still very hopeful but I’m pretty sure more likely than not it’ll be closed to us. I will actually cry because these permits are impossible to get. The only reason Casey and I actually got one is because my friend Mike here in pdx got two permits when the website messed up so we are going with him and his friend. Casey (my bff travel nurse friend) is doing an assignment in Phoenix so I’m hoping even if the reservation is closed that I can still get down there and then she and I are going to camp and hike in some southern Utah parks.

I’m also slated to climb and summit Mount St. Helens on Mother’s Day weekend with Adrienne and her friend Caitlin. And I’m supposed to go up to Squamish in Canada to climb for a week in July with a friend. So if this frappin’ virus ruins all these plans I’m going to be a sad panda. I’ll also probably weight 500 lbs if this continues because I’m being about 1/4 as active as I normally am and I don’t know what to do with myself. I’ve resorted to doing weightlifting with IV pumps at work and in an effort to attempt to keep any of my climbing strength I’ve been doing dead hangs from the hospital room doors. Great use of resources.

On that note, I am going to go for a run and then hit up the store. Speaking of being 500 lbs I decided to eat my feelings about not being able to recreate outdoors by making some muffins and a pan of brownies. I’ve been advised to watch Tiger King on Netflix. I have no idea what this is but based on the few photos I’ve seen I am thinking a pan of brownies and a dozen muffins will be needed while watching this show.

STAY SANE EVERYONE. AND HEALTHY. THAT TOO.