My First Pandemic "Monday"

 One of things I thought might change with the whole "everyone stays home to work now" goings-on, is the whole idea of Monday being.... well, so very Monday.  

Nope. 

I had a full-on Monday yesterday.

It started, as you saw in my blog yesterday, with the news of my rather poor pre-order showing. (Thank you to everyone who boosted my signal, dug up reviewer ideas, and/or bought copies! I think all those things will really help, so THANK YOU, THANK YOU, THANK YOU!!)  

I also went to order myself a coffee from my favorite, locally-owned coffee shop and discovered they had suddenly closed. I was initially worried that they were gone for good. A lot of places are really struggling to make it happen and can't afford this dramatic a loss in profit. But, the news is actually maybe... worse? One of the staff was in contact with someone with COVID-19, so everyone now has to quarantine for the full two-weeks. I'm not worried about my interactions with them--they were doing everything reasonable and I had started wearing a mask, too.  But, I'm so worried about the staff. I know that the owner does her best for them, but they don't have health care as part of their job. Many of them are young, but some are immune compromised, too. 

So, that weighed heavily on my mind, on top of everything else.

Then, near the end of the day, through other annoying circumstances, I found out that my tate hallaway domain has been taken over by some Turkish outfit. Probably most of you didn't even know I had a tate hallaway page, seperate from my lyda morehouse stuff, and that's fine. You can actually still get to all my Tate stuff via the lyda morehouse portal. It's just if you type in www.tatehallaway.com you get the crap site (I mean, maybe it's very important Turkish stuff that just happens to be named Tate Hallaway, but SOMEHOW I DOUBT IT.)

Obviously, this is INCREDIBLY BAD TIMING, what, with a book coming out tomorrow.

To be fair, that website always needed a complete overhaul. But, this is not exactly how I wanted to have to go about doing it. Before you offer, I do have several solutions in mind and are working on them. We are thinking about buying an adjacent website like tatehallaway/author or some such, but we'll figure it out. And, yes, this isn't just hijacked. I completely lost ownership. I went though my records and discovered that I had somehow let the domain lapse, so I kind of did this to myself at some point.  I feel really stupid about it, honestly. Also, this may have been going on for some time, so this tells you a lot about my feelings towards my pseudonym....

It was also incredibly gray and gloomy yesterday. Mason and I did end up going for a walk, which was really lovely.


image: blurry shot of a very tall young man headed off into the woods.

Mason and I used to do adventure hikes (there's a tag for them) all the time when he was very small, so I was feeling very nostalgic as I took this picture. It's blurry because I took it in a hurry, but this is the classic shot I used to take of my smol as he dashed ahead of me into the woods with glee. 

Now he's six foot tall.

And growing a quarantine beard.

I'm so moved that Mason can still find solace in nature. One of Mason's big coping methods during our forced togetherness has been to take himself out of the equation some days and go for extremely long walks. He's found himself a hideaway somewhere along the Mississippi where he can sit with a book and read while surrounded by trees and the sound of the mighty river.  I used to have secret places like this. LaCrosse is divided by a marsh, and I would find places there to camp out. And, of course, I was a weird kid, so one of my favorite places was a forgotten cemetery that was just a short bike ride from my high school.

But, other than our one lovely walk, it was one helluva Monday yesterday.

Did other people experience this?