Well, as you can see my blog post a day resolve crumbled when the time change hit me with the tired stick. (Not to mention that I’ve been unhealthily glued to the coronavirus news.) But I’m going to do my best to get back up and try again. So here goes.
I just joined an online book club that is reading Black Lamb Grey Falcon during the quarantine. I’ve been meaning to read it for a while, I love online book clubs, and it seems sort of romantic: what did you do during the Great Quarantine of 2020?
I am also currently reading Eifelheim, a science fiction novel about aliens in the Black Forest the time of the Black Death. So that seems a little apropos. Maybe I’ll re-read The Doomsday Book and Station Eleven too. Or is that too much?
So, really, though, not much has changed except that the world around us seems to be settling in to imitate my status quo. I feel like mostly I’m all set.
We will continue homeschooling as usual.
Bella says she thinks she should begin writing a diary so her descendants can see what she was doing and thinking during this historic time. I approve of this writing project and hope it takes off.
My husband working from home as usual– people will still be listening to podcasts, right? Perhaps now more than ever.
Not many changes for us low key homebody homeschoolers.
Although, scouts is cancelled for the time being, no merit badge university, no meetings. That will make life a little quieter. I’m going to make sure Bella keeps working on her merit badges, though.
I had looked forward to planning some field trips this spring, but museum field trips are out for now. All the Boston museums have now announced that they are closing. Fortunately Harvard Museum’s Edo exhibit is supposed to be up till July, so hopefully we’ll get a chance to see it on the other side of the Great Quarantine.
But we can still do nature walks. Lots of nature preserves around us are open, says Massachusetts Audubon society. And it’s spring and birds are nesting. I’ve heard rumors of herons nesting at a couple of nearby places and I want to find them.
Spring is still springing. I saw daffodil buds ready to open this morning. The world is greening. There’s still a lot to hope about.
We are home-body homeschoolers as well. Really the only places I go are the rec center for running, the grocery store, church, and occasionally a bookstore or a restaurant. Now the rec center is closing for the next three weeks (a lot of parents drop their kids off there when there’s no school, so I bet they don’t want to get swamped and violate the “no gatherings over 100 people” rule our governor laid down). So we’ll be running/walking outside. I hope the parks don’t get too crowded! We have yard work to do. So I think we’ll keep busy. Really, I think introverts and homebodies are going to be fine during this period of hunkering down–the grocery stores are a little nuts, but we don’t take the kids there.
I actually did take the 13 year old to the grocery store yesterday. She’d planned to make salmon for dinner as the next meal for her cooking merit badge. The store was crowded and a little crazy. She was very interested to see how panic buying works. And she’s thinking of keeping a journal to record her experience of the Coronavirus Epidemic for posterity. We had opportunity to talk about all sorts of things like pandemics, disease vectors, supply chains, meal planning…