What a difference...

What a difference a week makes. Or a day, even. Today is Saturday, March 21st, the twins have been out of school for just over a week, Colorado has shut down lots of stuff though we don't have to shelter-in-place (I'm sure that's coming), and last night I cancelled Rocket Boy's reservation to fly here today for Spring Break. He's 65 years old with an underlying health condition. I want him here but I also want him to stay safe, and airports don't seem like very safe places right now. The safest thing seems to be to keep him in St. Louis. He's working from home, interacting with almost no one, and St. Louis has just issued a "stay at home" order, effective Monday. And I'm so sad.

Things have been happening so quickly it's hard for me to remember what happened when, but I don't suppose that matters. We're all undergoing the same things, the social distancing, the school and office closings, the lack of toilet paper in the stores (see photo), though some places are ahead of others. It's weird to have the entire world dealing with this all at once. I've been following the news from California closely, because my family is there, and sometimes I get mixed up about their rules and ours. Our governor, Jared Polis, is being very cautious, so whatever California or New York decrees, we get soon after. Colorado has 363 known cases of the virus right now but only 4 deaths (California has 1200 known cases and 24 deaths; New York has over 10,000 cases and 45 deaths), but of course we all know the numbers are completely different from the official total.

The twins and I are doing OK, helped along by endless hours of computer time. I've all but given up regulating it. This past week I decided that they couldn't get on their iPads/laptops until 10 or 10:30 each day, but this morning they got on at 8 and I remembered it was Saturday, when the rules are usually more lax. As I type this, it's now about 3 pm, so they've been on for about 7 hours so far and probably will stay on until I physically pull them off. And then they'll have a fight about something. We were doing better for a while, going for a walk to the park and their old elementary school every day and playing on the equipment and in the gaga ball pit (see photo at top) and in the creek. That was fun -- many of our neighbors were also out walking around, or riding bikes.

But then on Thursday it snowed all day long, 8.4 inches of heavy, wet snow, and Friday (yesterday) it was 23 degrees all day and cloudy, and the wet snow congealed into ice and no one wanted to set foot outside (I did go out to get the paper, and to put the trash and compost out and then pull the carts back up to the house). A neighbor cleared our walks with his snowblower. Today it's starting to melt, but there's still a lot of white stuff out there and it's so icy. So nobody wants to do anything or go anywhere, and thus we sit in front of our screens, wasting all the time in the world. What are you doing, oh world out there?

So now we have Spring Break -- and I keep thinking how weird it is for this to be the first day of Spring Break and none of us care at all. Dad's not here, we have nothing planned, we have nowhere to go, we haven't done anything school-related for the past week, so what's so special about it? I need to think of some activities for Monday through Friday, a theme for each day perhaps? Something to learn about? We have newly installed fiber internet -- enabling us to all be online at the same time, on all sorts of devices, and for some reason also improving our over-the-air TV reception. So maybe we'll do a virtual tour of a museum or one of the other things that are being recommended by everyone.

On March 30th the kids were expecting to go back to school, but instead we'll be starting online school, which I am not looking forward to at all. They're expected to do school stuff for four hours a day. The principal sent out a bunch of sample schedules, depending on when you want to start in the morning. We get up fairly early, so I think we'll follow the 9 to 2 schedule (which includes two 30-minute breaks). I'm hoping it won't actually take four hours to accomplish the tasks for the day, but knowing my kids, it'll very possibly take longer, and I will lose my mind.

I've already lost my job. I was doing a little work for my niece and her husband, who run an eBay business, but they had to lay me off earlier this week so that they could continue to employ someone who doesn't have a husband with a good government job. I was enjoying the work, but I'm happy to give it up to keep someone else going. We are so lucky that Rocket Boy has his job. I think about that all the time.

That's about all I have to say today. I have, I think, 13 books in my current to-read pile -- some of them very long -- and really, that should be enough. BUT WHAT IF THIS LASTS FOR MONTHS?!?! What will I read then? I desperately want to drive off to our local used bookstore (I spent $40 there earlier in the week), but I think they may already be closed for the day (they have special coronavirus hours) and anyway, 13 books should be plenty for now. I just hope the used bookstore is still there when the virus scare is over.