Sylvia's Journal

For about two years now I have been baking our own bread.  In April 2020 I took an online workshop on bread making that was organized by our local library. The title of the workshop appealed to me: five minutes a day no knead bread. Up till that time I had assumed and accepted that I could not make bread. All my effort resulted in bricks, dense hard loaves that were basically inedible.

Ever since that workshop I have been wildly successful in making my own bread. I have developed variations to the master recipe, experimented with different grains, including the spent wheat from Axel’s beer making. There are only four ingredients in the basic recipe: water, salt, yeast, and flour. No preservatives, so you know what you’re eating. Because of that the bread doesn’t stay “fresh” for very long. But that’s never a problem because it tastes so good.

We have some division of responsibilities in our household: I make the bread an Axel makes the beer.  After my mishap early January, breadmaking became his responsibility since it was impossible for me to do with my right hand in a cast. 

And so, it was time for Axel to learn the trade. I tried to explain the different steps. One of the important things to do once you have taken the bread dough out of its container, is to quickly “cloak” the dough to keep the gas bubbles inside. This produces the holes in the bread. 

Apparently, my explanations were not good enough. Goaded by my, “you should do this only for 20 to 40 seconds,” Axel was frantically turning the ball of dough in his hands, not understanding where the ‘cloak’ was supposed to come from. The cool refrigerated dough became more and more sticky as it warmed up in his hands, sticking to everything as the seconds ticked by.  He didn’t understand the “cloaking” part, not the theory and not the practice. We watched some YouTube videos, but because the hands of the baker were so fast and the clip so short, that even playing it over and over did not get the concept or practice across. 

This morning Axel announced that he will master this, seriously! If we don’t want to buy bread, he will have to be the bread maker because I’m still in a brace until the middle of February.  His second attempt was already much better: it was a thin loaf that was so delicious that we ate the entire thing for lunch.  When I come out of my brace in three or four weeks, we will be able to share bread making responsibilities and I better get started on learning to make beer.

I have been upgraded (or downgraded) from a plaster cast to a plastic brace with a lot of padding and Velcro. The break is healing but not yet fully healed, hence the brace. My fourth and fifth digits still need to be immobilized for at least 3 weeks.  

It remains difficult to write by hand. This morning one of the members of my Music and Imagery group suggested that I do my drawings with my left hand. I did. I even wrote the titles of my drawings with my left hand. Axel mentioned that this will be good for my brain, forcing it to rewire my writing circuitry. I think my brain is generally in good condition, what with all the reading and studying I do. But I should probably have started to practice writing with my left hand several weeks ago. Right now, my left-handwriting looks a bit like the writing of my six-year-old granddaughter. In the coming weeks I will be doing several interviews over Zoom. I don’t think note taking with my left hand will be possible quite yet. I will have to record.  Luckily, technology will help me with the transcribing.

Talking about technology, a few days ago I attended a demo of a platform called Gatherly. I would like to use this with one of my clients that is embarking on a (mostly remote) strategic planning process in the coming year. I am so impressed with the young people who are creating these amazing platforms (Wonder.me is another among many) that allow us to be together-apart in ways much more interesting and fun than Zoom, Google Meet or MS Teams.

The pandemic has forced us to go inside because we could not go outside. This appears to have triggered tremendous creativity and innovation. Not just in the technology field, but also of art in its many shapes and forms. There are amazing pieces of music being composed. There is so much art rising out of pandemic despair. 

Although I am not much in pandemic despair – we are weathering the pandemic under extremely lucky conditions—and I’m not creating new things in an artsy way, my brain is very busy with sense making.  I am reading and studying a lot, absorbing other peoples’ great ideas and thoughts about teams and group processes, converting them into approaches to deal with challenges my clients are throwing in my lap. I am going a bit out on a limb, especially about team coaching. My next, more advanced, team coaching training won’t start until another two weeks from now and practicing my new craft under supervision is even further out in the future. Fake it till you make it?

With new variants of the no longer novel coronavirus, I hear less and less people saying, “when we get back to normal again.” Although we are adapting, we cannot quite suspend the longing to connect with each other the way we used to.  Is this really the end of our familiar world? 

I am reading Station Eleven, which was released as a TV miniseries in 2016, created by Patrick Somerville based on the 2014 novel of the same name by Emily St. John Mandel.

At that period (2014-2016) I still worked at MSH. I was marginally involved in one of several projects funded by the US government, to predict and prepare for pandemics. Americans were shaken only a little bit by SARS and MERS, and then by Zika. But life continued pretty much the old way. Our former president, who’s name shall not be mentioned, stopped the funding of any project related to pandemic preparedness. The elaborate and painstakingly built network of institutions around the world, collaborating on pandemic preparedness, lost its funding and weakened as a result. We are now paying an enormous price for that pennywise and pound-foolish act.

And so now I’m reading this dystopian story of Station Eleven, where society has completely collapsed and the few survivors of the ‘Georgia virus’ must fend for themselves and learn to live without electricity, without fuel, without healthcare, without medicine, without jobs and shops, without money and banks, and without any form of governance other than arms and power.

It is a dark story, with occasional sparks of caring and compassion. But it is a story nevertheless that has sprouted out of the imaginative mind of Emily St. John Mandel. Not real.

But then I read the NYT (1/19) story about a mink farms in various parts of the world that have turned out to be reservoirs of coronavirus. It explains the concept of spillback, when a virus first spills over from animals into humans and then spills back into animals again, where it can freely mutate and jump from species to species. The preventive measures that we take as humans seemed very insignificant in stopping this very clever virus. It is a story about the consequences of how we treat animals for profit. And now the chickens are coming home to roost. This is not an imaginary story that came out of somebody’s imagination. This is real.