Finally!!!!

 

Have I neglected my blog? Yes.

 

Horribly so? Double yes.

 

Do I swear I will update once a week from now on? No.

 

I don’t like to make promises that I don’t know if I’ll keep. And let’s be honest here. I get distracted, easily.

 

I had big plans for this blog. Then things started getting busy at work, but then in November 2019, I had the BEST day ever!!!!!!!! There are not enough exclamation points for how wonderful this day was.

 

November 11, 2019 in Fort Worth, Texas at Dickies Arena. That was the first day of SuperM’s first ever concert tour. It was their FIRST concert! And I was there!

 

You guys, you know how you have a goal that you really want to achieve but you just know you won’t. Well, my goal was to see Baekhyun. I wanted to breathe the same air as that man. And that happened that night. The concert was amazing. Baekhyun, Taemin, Kai, Taeyong, Ten, Lucas, Mark, they were amazing, perfect, and so talented, and so funny. Seriously, best day ever!

 

Actually, really best day ever was when my daughter was born, but shhhhh!

 

I had tons of amazing pictures and videos I was going to post. I mean, hello SuperM in their first concert! But then that next week had one of the worst days ever.

 

On a Monday, the week of Thanksgiving, my mom was in a car accident and broke her neck. It was terrifying. Thankfully, she is completely healed now, but at the time… It was just an awful time.

 

And then she finally gets the neck brace off, and two weeks later we’re in Covid hell. Seriously, what was I going to write about while we were sheltering at home. I’m not hilarious enough to post all these amazing and witty things about it. What did I do?

 

What I should have done was write, but I didn’t. Not at all. I was too unsure of the world at that time. I would try to write, but it wasn’t turning out at all. Even though I was at home from my job as a teacher, there was more stress then. Not only was I worried about the state of the world, but I was worried about those kids that I wasn’t seeing.

 

The only thing I did was sit around and play Animal Crossing. Yeah, a lot to show for my self-imposed homebound, but that’s what I did.

 

Then in August when school started back up, there was even more stress. Coming from a town that thinks Covid precautions are a joke…

 

You know guys, people talk about kids and peer pressure, but man is it hard to go against what seems like everyone else. I wore masks; one of the few staff members over there that did it the entire school year. I had people looking at me as if I was crazy, but I still did. As well as I should have, no. And that came to bite me as in March of 2021 I tested positive for Covid. School was on spring break when I got the results, so my spring break was spent in isolation. Did I get it at school? Pretty sure since I didn’t go anywhere else. Working with computers and students, a person has to touch a lot of things, a person gets coughed and sneezed on a lot when helping students with said computers.

 

Luckily my symptoms were mild.

 

But the entire 2020-2021 school year was one gigantic stress. Covid, my daughter in her first year of college away from home…it was a lot. I came home exhausted. I would immediately shower, and then I wanted to do nothing.

 

Years prior, even my students knew that I hated to sleep. I feel like it is a waste of time. It was nothing for me to stay up until two or three and get up at six, and I would still feel well rested. But last school year, I was in bed by ten at the latest. I knew the stress was getting to me, so I definitely was not writing.

 

Then when March first hit, I thought the end is in sight. I started feeling better, and so I started really writing the sequel to Dark Secrets. And then I tested positive for Covid. And while I had a mild case, it messed with my mind more than me actually being sick. All you hear on the news is hospital, ventilators, death, so I felt like I was just waiting for that. Thankfully, it didn’t happen, but I was convinced it was going to. Even after I was supposedly done with quarantine, I still ran a low-grade fever, something I still do now if I get warm. I’ve never heard of that side effect with Covid, but I have developed that. If it’s hot outside, and I’m out there for very long, when I come in, I’m running a fever. It’s odd. What’s even stranger as with the Covid, my temperature never got over 100.

 

So I don’t know.

 

Anyway, long story all just to say I have finished the sequel to Dark Secrets. I am now on the revision stage!!!! So excited!! I’m really happy with this one!

 

I do hope I write more on this blog. I actually like doing it. I feel like it’s my diary, sort of, but we’ll see. Fingers crossed!

 

If you’re reading this, hopefully, you are doing well and are healthy.

 

Wishing the best for everyone!

 

V.A.