It’s been a bit since I did an update, and I’m not going to go through all the various details, but here’s how things are going:
Coven
We continue to have four Dedicants – we’re just at the halfway mark for classes right now, which is great.
We’re currently sorting out details to do Beltane in person (in my apartment, we don’t have a good option for outdoor space that is both transit accessible and has a sufficient lack of interruptions). While I (specifically myself) still need to be cautious about Covid, I think we’re at a point where we can make this work with some thought.
(There are two particular complications here for me. One is that if I do get more than marginally ill, quite possibly means putting the coven on hiatus. Having already had massive exhaustion and brain fog from a previous viral infection back in 2009, I’m more prone to it again, and that’s no way to run a coven. The second is that my ongoing chronic stuff basically means I always have some degree of cough, some degree of sniffling from allergies, and some degree of minor aches, which can make it hard to tell if there’s anything else going on in my body.)
On the other hand, I really really miss having coven in person, at least sometimes, so I’m hoping that “Sabbats in person with some precautions and carefulness” with classes and discussions online (which work fine, and save everyone else transit time and save me house cleaning on a schedule) will work out. And as I’ve said to a friend, if you can’t trust your coven to be honest with you about health stuff before they come over, you are probably doing something wrong, because “perfect love and perfect trust” ought to apply here.
So basically, I’m at “this is where I want to spend my risk budget”, and going to trust it’ll be okay (after some specific consultation with my doctors, including this week with my allergist, who is the one most likely to make faces at the state of my lungs. They’re actually doing really well right now, because it turns out three years with only one respiratory infection is really good for me.)
What we’re doing, for a group of seven people.
- Testing beforehand (the morning of)
- Staying home if there’s any doubt (the people with kids are using their best judgement re: their kids, because, well, toddler in childcare gets everything, and so do teenagers.)
- I will have multiple air filters and a fan running to improve ventilation, likely also the windows open.
- People who want to mask can mask. (It’s my apartment, so I’m a little at “let me think if that’s worth doing” for myself, since people will be in my living room, bathroom, and the kitchen between them at various points, though I can let all the filters run for a bit before venturing out into them.)
Other things
A lot of my time and energy has been going into the fiction writing, and I’m very excited about the books coming out in May and June, which among other things include the 1940 Lammas ritual (as discussed by Gerald Gardner and some other sources, though how reliable that information is is an entirely different question) intended to keep Hitler on the far side of the Channel. I’m very pleased with how it came out, and a chance to dig into some specific bits of witchcraft history.
