Coronavocations

Brian J., so how are you spending your new free time during the coronavacation? Are you learning a new skill? Catching up on old projects? Writing that novel whose first pages you most recently pecked out some years ago? Working on your renewed interest in poetry?

Well, of course not. Those would be productive uses of my time.

For the most part, my life has not changed. I’ve been a remote employee for a long time, so my working life has not really changed.

I do have my children home all day, but it’s almost like they’re on spring break or summer vacation. They have some school assignments and Zoom meetings with their classes, but it’s a lot of video game time, arguing that they should have more video game time, and some basketball in the driveway. I have been Coronaschooling them, though, even though they’ve got a handful of assignments from me which mostly serve as an excuse to watch old movies.

The only thing I can really say that I’ve been getting done, really, this coronavacation are:

  • Blogging more frequently.
     
  • A bit more housecleaning, such as the light fixtures, which I only do semi-annually.
     
  • Installing red lights outside our office doors for visual indicators that my beautiful wife or I are on the phone:

    Although, to be honest, these are little battery operated LED lights, so it’s not like I wired up electricity and switches for them ($11 for two on Amazon). I did, however, not use the big piece of double-stick tape that came with each unit, instead opting for Velcro like I did with the old hand-held games because a two-sided tape solution was going to make for a problem when the batteries died.

    Although it gives me another idea for a project: Taking down those old games, replacing the batteries/cleaning out the battery acid/testing those games.
     

  • Spending like a half an hour putting one of our cats in a box, photographing my cat jumping out of the box, and trying to get a relatively unblurry image so I can put text on it.

    I am not kidding. I tried the iPhone, I tried a digital camera, I tried a lot of things before settling on this one. Man, cats are fast when they’re jumping out of boxes. Also, when trying not to be put back into boxes.
     

  • Sleeping. No kidding; my FitBit sleep scores are edging into the 70s and sometimes into the 80s on Saturdays, which means eight fitful hours of sleep a night. I’m going to miss it when the boys go back to school next August and I have to set an early alarm.

So this is unlike my beautiful wife who is practicing piano, trumpet, and flute and continues with her normal self-improvement programs.

Within the next week or so, I am thinking about organizing the record collection at Nogglestead now that we have received our order of record dividers from Amazon. Perhaps I will paint the fence and deck and will do this in a short amount of time (unlike years past, where the endeavor took weeks or, well, to be honest, I’ve never actually finished painting the fence).

Or I can sit at the keyboard and continue refreshing blogs for the latest news or panicked speculation about the death toll of coronavirus or, more as time passes, the erosion of civil liberties and niceties that the coronareaction has brought.

I will leave it to you, gentle reader, to speculate as to which direction I will go. Or continue.

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