Dispatches from Quarantine Times
I feel bad that all of my posts as of late have been links to trivia or posts about Quarantine Times but that is about all I can do. It is hard to think about anything else as I am sure that you know.
Some good things have come out of these quarantine days like:
1) In my house, we all see each other more than we used to.
2) I have been doing more reading. I treated myself to the new Glennon Doyle book Untamed and before that I read an e-book that I got from Libby called Spinster. At the beginning of the quarantine, I had time to finish my library book called: There Are No Grownups: A Midlife Coming of-Age-Story by the lady who wrote Bringing Up Bebe. In short, have been keeping the memoir industry in business with my ravenous reading appetities for dramatized true stories.
3) Both Mr. Katie and I get more exercise. The exercise apps on my phone (I have multiple ones, but it isn’t because I signed up all of them, the Google one came on my phone) keep congratulating me for getting enough steps and then they raise my step count and I meet that goal too.
4) We feel comfortable now making pizza crust out both regular dough and cauliflower in a way that we might never have achieved in the real world.
5) I am open to online suggestions of things that I can do with my children in a way that I might never have been otherwise. For example, one time more than two years ago Mr. Man and I took a children’s nature class called Tinkergarten. Ever since then, they have been sending me e-mails. If the e-mail readers “Something about book recommendations” I read it, otherwise I ignore it. Lately, I have been eating up everything they tell me, sometimes I read them begrudgingly because they seem kind of haughty, but they actually do have some good ideas.
6) The boys and I are getting creative about the definition of what constitutes a morning activity. For example, yesterday when it was rainy, we did the experiment that they advertise on PBS kids where you put raisins in a cup of clear soda and watch them “dance”. Then I used the Little Free Library finder to find to two Little Free Libraries that we had never been to before, just so we could have a ride in the car and I could listen to the radio. It paid off though because we were able to share some of our books and find some good finds. Often, I ask the four-year-old what he wants to do today and he says, “Stay home”, I inwardly groan but give in, because it is easier to give in to what he wants than to convince him to go on the same walk around town we have been taking for the last month.
7) Positively, we have learned to do other things at the park besides go to the playground. The older son now loves to just go the park and wander. We pick up sticks, look for snakes and in general, have a lot of fun.
8) The two-year-old is adorable, but also very two-years-old in his behavior, so it is pretty nice for me that we have been doing less driving around in general because he can be difficult to get in his car seat. He likes to wander around the car and check things out when I lift him inside. We might even get to completely skip over this kicking while being strapped in stage.
9) Reaching out to family and friends on Voom or Facebook messenger has been fun. We have had birthday parties, happy hours, and an Easter visit. I am in almost daily contact with my sisters.
10) Mr. Katie’s cooking! He has really taken to perfecting his sour dough starter and like clockwork, feeds it every night. Here is a picture of the fishcakes he made this past weekend.
Some bad things about quarantine days:
1) I still can’t spell quarantine. Microsoft 360 has caught me misspelling this word at least 4 times in this post this far. You’d think I could spell it by now.
2) For some reason, I have trouble sleeping any later than 5:15 am on many days, that is why it is 6:09 am right now and I am halfway finished this post.
3) I haven’t been going to bed any earlier to compensate for how early I am waking up so walk around like a zombie in the afternoon. I then make myself a coffee in the late in the day and even though I fall asleep relatively easily at night, I still can’t sleep in until 7:00 am when the boys are allowed to leave their room.
4) The two year old doesn’t like to stay in our backyard. He likes to run into our neighbors’ yard or run down the street. This isn’t a huge problem because we live towards to edge of a dead-end street, so he will likely not get run over if I can’t catch up to him right away, but still, it is annoying. He is fast and if I, or the four-year-old, give chase and call, he just runs faster. Luckily, the dead-end street abuts the back end of a shopping center parking lot, which doesn’t see a lot of traffic, so it is good. We have actually been recreating a lot in that shopping center parking lot. Who would have ever thought that I would be happy that we have a parking lot to play in as an extension of our yard? I used to worry that we would pick up the coronavirus from playing in a parking lot, but now my expectations have been lowered. We have also been rolling down the hill that is adjacent to the parking lot. It sometimes has a little trash in the grassy area, but we just stay away from the trash.
5) I feel desensitized to the news. It used to make a me feel bad. It used to feel shocking, now it doesn’t feel like anything. The numbers don’t sink in anymore.
6) I don’t care about planning dinner anymore. For a while, it was fun to plan something interesting for dinner as a way to enjoy the time, and I am not saying that isn’t still nice to have something interesting for dinner but planning dinner isn’t as fun as it was in the beginning.
7) I worry that I am driving my friends and family nuts by sending out links to my trivia twice a week. I also worry that I need to provide a different type or trivia question or do something else to make it more interesting. It can take some time to compose so I want to make sure that what I am doing is fun and not something that people see as a burden to complete twice a week.
That is about all I have for you today. I hope you are hanging in there! Happy Wednesday.
