COVID from Home: Day 34

My bronchitis seems to have cleared up this weekend. I was actually able to work out for the first time in ages, and even took Elder on a three mile bike ride yesterday. I’m pretty proud of her for trekking it out. It was fun, and good for her to get our of the house and get some exercise. Both of the girls are having problems getting to sleep on the weekends since we don’t give them melatonin Fridays and Saturdays, so I figured I’d see if physical exhaustion would do the trick. She did have trouble falling asleep, but here it is almost eight AM and she’s still in bed. Like clockwork, Monday comes around and she sleeps in.

We watched the last trio of the Star Wars movies this weekend. The Last Jedi is my fave of the bunch, especially the encounter between Luke and Kylo Ren in front of the salt mine. I was expecting problems going into Rise of Skywalker, having seen spoilers and reviews on Twitter. As a result I wasn’t too disappointed. The plot was contrived, and the whole movie was just too much for me. The girls liked it. Not sure if I want to go back and watch the prequels with them; we’re near the end of season one of Clone Wars, so we’ll probably just stick to that for now.

My mind seems to be pre-occupied with work. My boss had dismissed my comment about shuttering two weeks ago, but I noticed that payroll had been slipping again, from Thursday or Friday until the following week. I haven’t checked for this week yet, but I seem to be working out what my response is going to be. I’m not going to be working for free. I’ve been on unemployment before, and assuming the state’s infrastructure is holding up with the number of claimants, I have no problem going back on it for a while. Ultimately this is all unnecessary worry; I’ll have my degree in two weeks anyways.

I’m still not sure what my plan is. It’s become very hard to get things done with the girls home. My wife is locked in the office from eight to four, and I can’t take my little breaks on the piano or my upstairs workstation like I’m used to. I don’t see how I would take a full-time work from home position with them at home. Not without parking them in front of a screen all day. My priority is finishing my school work, and making sure that they’re getting some sort of structure learning. Younger still has to learn her letters and writing. As much as I like the idea of home-schooling them, I’m not sure I want to unschool them and just let them loose.

Our grocery lists now look less like a trip to the grocery store and more like the starting loadout for a trip on the Oregon Trail. Getting meat and cheese has been difficult lately, and with all of the COVID infections at the Smithfield pork plants, now seems like a really good time to stop eating meat. I’ve been cooking up a storm, but keeping fresh fruits and vegetables means that we have to get food orders in more than we had originally planned.

So far our gardening experiments have proved fruitless. We may have some things finally starting to sprout; I suppose it was a bit too cold outside for things to start on their own, and we’ve had a lot of rain the past week or two. We’ve got a clear, 30-count egg carton that will make a nice greenhouse for seeds, it will be our project with the kids later today. My wife brought home her plants from the office, so the kitchen is looking like a little atrium with all the greenery around.

We’re in a bit of disarray with my wife working from home now. She got a new desk, so we wound up getting rid of the bed in the guest room via the local buy nothing group. Thankfully I set Elder up with a laptop that she can use in her room for school, and I’m planning on setting up my old workstation for her that we can share somewhere else.

Finally, our dishwasher has decided to stop cleaning anything. I can’t tell if it’s water pressure, or crappy detergent, but nothing comes through clean anymore. So it looks like we’ll be buying a new one sometime this week.

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