I’m sitting in a coffee shop, butt in chair, hands on keyboard. I have Richard and Ana sitting near me, and we are talking sometimes, working on our different projects other times.

Until this moment, I don’t think I realized how long it has been since we’ve done this.

A few weeks ago, my coworker Bryan invited me out to have a beer with him after work, and it felt amazing. It was absolutely a normal thing to do, and it’s the normalcy that delighted me. There’s something of that same flavor happening right now.

I think some part of me gave up on feeling normal again. I spend most of my time at home, and I keep a mask in the car, and I look at the world and worry about how many people are dying, and how so many people don’t seem to care. It’s frustrating. It’s soul crushing.

So, these moments of normalcy feel like revelations. I get why people are trying not to think about Covid anymore. It’s a huge bummer. It has robbed us of so many of these precious normal moments where we can just hang out with friends and enjoy each other.

I still think that we need to remain vigilant. I’m certain we can strike a balance between taking necessary precautions and holding onto these moments that make life feel good.

It does feel good to be writing in a coffee shop on a Sunday morning again. I wish Michael was here, but I think he’s busy this weekend. I’m using his keyboard, continuing to test it before I hand it off to him. It’s working very, very well.

I know what it takes for us to get to the point of “getting back to normal.” It means getting everyone vaccinated. It means normalizing staying home when sick, and not forcing kids or workers to be around other people when they could spread a deadly disease. It means becoming more sensitive to the idea that 300 or more people are dying every day to this pandemic that didn’t actually go away. It means not standing in front of the nation and saying stupid things like “the pandemic is over.” It means keeping the masks around, for the times when we have another wave.

Masks work. We have lots of data that supports this. We have data just from the Writing Excuses Retreat. The infections in our group were exponential until we enacted the mask policy, and then the number of new infections dropped dramatically. We have the data. Masks work.

I think I got off on a little bit of a tangent there, but it’s all related. I’m at CoffeeWorks, writing again. With friends. It is good.

When I’m done with this blog post, I’m going to do some more prep work for the Cyberpunk story. November is approaching faster than I like, and as Illidan might say, I am not prepared.

If you are preparing for NaNoWriMo, I hope your preparations are coming along nicely. If you’re participating in Inktober this month, I hope your drawings are delighting you. And if you’re just trying to enjoy some normalcy while the world continues to burn around us, I hope the time is as sweet and delightful as my time writing in CoffeeWorks.