Ugh June. Usually a fairly good month, after the oppression of May, but the unrelenting heat, stressful goodbyes, re-rise of covid, and horrific politics has made June probably the worst month of 2022. Oy. It’s been a monotonous haze of tv, puzzles, cats, heat, and cabin fever. Unlikely to change any time soon, but I’m glad to put June behind me!

Reading and Watching
Reading hasn’t been my top priority this month, with only three books finished. I’ve mostly been watching Murdoch reruns to occupy my brain when I get too angry or depressed or stressed (and all the rest), though I did take a break from reruns to finally watch SpiderMan: Far From Home. It was pretty good. I’m sad I missed it on the big screen (re: covid).

Goals
It’s the time of year when I evaluate my yearly goals and either decide to scrap them or continue. This year, it seems as if my goals have either been completed – or will be soon – or have been canceled due to circumstances beyond my control. There’s not much left to look at, and I think I’m just going to say f*ck it. Perhaps I’ll start again. I guess I did cross the bowling goal off my 50×50-goals this month.

House
What to do, what to do…if we plan to move out of Texas at some point in a few years, plans on the house must change, so new evaluation begins…

(June’s only hike)

Health/Fitness
More doctor visits. More stuff ruled out. More procedures suggested. More hopelessness. I did finally see a therapist this month. It was an evaluation visit, and it turned out that this office was just a newer location for a practice that I went to in 2015. I left that practice because they were suggesting ridiculous, costly procedures my insurance wouldn’t cover, plus they were selling weight loss products at the front desk. Red flags all around. The search begins anew.

In other news, the second quarter comes in with 23 medical visits/procedures, for a total of 46 in 2021 so far. If things continue this way, I’m looking at not-quite-100 for 2022, down from the 120+ in 2021. Still, I’m no closer to answers. This is exhausting.

Quarantine Diaries
San Antonio is back at it again, next round. So many of my friends are falling to covid. We got our first letter from Ambrose, dated 6/25, and he’d been diagnosed with covid that day, and moved to a special covid dorm. I have no idea how he’ll finish boot camp with covid symptoms (apparently the symptoms that got him sent to the hospital were trouble breathing and fever/chills) but hopefully they have protocols in place. The same day we got that letter, we heard that Morrigan and his fiancé also had covid. Technically, that’s part of July’s Quarantine Diaries, but I might as well include it here. Hopefully they come through it okay, too. We’ll see when/if our house-family falls this time. I need to get my second booster shot soon.

Favorite Photos
I took very few photos this month, and even those that I took, none really stood out as strong favorites. These six are the ones that best represented specific emotions of the month, instead.

Top: Angus and Gherkin cuddling; Hulud’s last photo before surrender; Shai’s last photo before surrender. Bottom: Ambrose and Laurence laughing right before Ambrose left for the AF; deconstructing a puzzle (this is more satisfying than bubble wrap); Tillie and Penny cuddling.

Highlights of June
I’m glad I kept track, because the end of this month has been angry, angry, angry…

• mindset shift towards daily movement
• baby armadillos in my yard!
• cuddling with my permanent cats, who were so excited to be let back into my bedroom for the first time in two weeks
• J and I accidentally sending each other the same TT vid at the same time
• silly bowling challenges
• the absolute ridiculousness of playing Pictionary with my family (and laughing so hard at times that I couldn’t breathe)
• baby skunks, possums, and foxes showed up this month too!
• finally going out with friends again after a long time being confined at home
• getting to see Tipsy (now named Mojito) settle into his new home
• this amazing article and news segment about my hiking group!
• fostering Sunflower –>
• we finally got a tree guy out and it turns out we don’t have oak wilt after all!
• RAIN!!!!! We finally got much-needed rain near the end of the month, in the form of thunderstorms, too!

Coming up in July
Ambrose’s birthday, though he won’t be here with us to celebrate for the first time. Actually, lots of birthdays, as July is the second biggest birthday month of my family. But given the covid situation, I doubt there’ll be much celebration. There also likely won’t be any kind of mini-vacation like I talked about in a previous post. So maybe more short-term foster cats like Sunflower. Something useful to bring light to the tiny corner of the world I can control.