Write to this prompt: Five minutes about your lives in the pandemic.

I'm now zooming with my writing group instead of meeting in person and it's so not the same. On the bright side, no COVID. I’m pretty much stressed about just the normal things: work, being overweight, getting old, worrying about my kids, feeling bored. I’m also worried about writing and need a new project so I can go back and forth between my thesis and something without dying of despair from being doomed because it’s too hard to write my thesis.

In the past whenever I’ve been stuck, I’d spend the morning at Acre or Starbucks and would leave feeling mildly accomplished. Now I schlep from one part of my house to another and the coffee is undrinkable. We have to sneak by the kitchen or the puppy will cry and look at us with her sad bloodhound face and trick us into trying to gently pet her and then bait and switch us with her puppy piranha teeth.