am I there?

Tonight is the first time this pandemic that I'm not going to a concert for a reason other than covid. Not surprisingly in this drought season, a number of wildfires have sprung up around the area, and one of them knocked out a power transformer, cutting off power for the next few days to a sheaf of customers, one of which happens to be Stanford University. The whole university. So they're shutting down for a few days and cancelling everything, including tonight's chamber music marathon concert. So I'll be home.

One thing which was on today, fortunately, was the city recycling center's free paper-shredding event. After a clerk checks your ID, you drive up to a dump truck, the workers unload the contents of your car trunk into a large trash container, and then the truck's mechanical arms upend it into the inbuilt shredder. I brought along such of my mother's financial and legal papers that I'd kept after her estate closed - I needed to get into those boxes fairly frequently for a couple of years, but they've been untouched for five years now, so time to go, except for a few things like the deed to the cemetery plot and the remaining copies of her death certificate, plus one three-ring binder (see below) and about 5,271,009 paper clips - and the surprising discovery of a box of 1996 Hugo ballots, which should have been disposed of years ago. They have now been terminated with extreme prejudice.

And I've received the final PDF of the book I'm indexing, which I printed out at FedEx, punched three holes in, and loaded into a binder I'd emptied and rescued from my mother's papers with the name of my grandfather's lawyers on the cover.

Now I've received an invitation to a large party in mid-August. Not counting family events, nor Mythcon which is coming up at the end of July, neither of which feels like quite the same thing, this is the first in-person social event I'm facing in two-and-a-half years, not since the Andi Shechter memorial in Seattle. (And wasn't that an emotional kicker, with grief + people I hadn't seen for 30 years.) The thing about the party is, to my surprise I'm not sure if I'm up to going. I've been living in extreme introvert mode now for so long I no longer feel the urge to get out of it, nor sure if I can do so. That's not mentioning the whole covid situation. I'll have to think about this one for a bit before replying.