Bryce Moore's Blog, page 90
April 30, 2020
Health Accountability Update: Quarantine Edition
Here we are now, over five weeks since the day I started working from home all the time. (Staying at home all the time, really.) When I made the switch to working at home, one of the things high on my radar was what it would do to my health. I wasn’t that worried about changing my exercise habits. (I’m still jogging in place for 30 minutes a day, folks. I can do that in my home office as easily as I can do it at work . . .) But what about my eating routine? It’s harder to not eat like a pig when there’s a constant source of food (a stocked fridge) just 30 feet away all the time. Would I be able to resist the siren’s call?
I’m happy to report that for the most part, I have. My weight has bounced around a bit over the five weeks, going up as high as 192 or so, but as of today it’s at 187.6. Is it where I want to be? Well, no. I’d like to be around 170-180, but where I am now is still in the “Normal” BMI zone, and considering I’ve been through Easter and two birthday celebrations, I’m calling this a win. (I don’t think the current stress-filled days are the perfect time to try to diet aggressively.)
Of course, all is not perfect in Bryceville. My “no sugar” commitment isn’t really doing that well. It’s still miles better than how I used to eat, but I had Denisa pick up a few spare bags of Easter candy, and I’ve been munching away on that now and then throughout each day. Not enough that I’m worried my teeth are going to fall out, but certainly more than I’d like to, in ideal circumstances.
But these circumstances are far from ideal, and I’m having to continually remind myself of that. We cope the best we can, and I’ll take my victories where I can get them. For now, if some chocolate eggs are going to make me feel a bit better about sitting in front of my home computer for hours on end each day, slogging through 4-6 hours of Zoom meetings a day, then by golly I’m going to eat those chocolate eggs.
That said, I don’t want to eat too many, and that’s where the daily weigh-ins help . . .
Anyway. That’s where I am for now. Here’s hoping you’re handling this social distancing as best as you can. Cut yourself some slack, and try to keep a positive outlook on things. We need all the positive we can get.
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Like what you’ve read? Please consider supporting me on Patreon. Thanks to all my Patrons who support me! It only takes a minute or two, and then it’s automatic from there on out. I’ve posted the entirety of my book ICHABOD in installments, and I’m now putting up chapters from PAWN OF THE DEAD, another of my unreleased books. Where else are you going to get the undead and muppets all in the same YA package? Check it out.
If you’d rather not sign up for Patreon, you can also support the site by clicking the MEMORY THIEF Amazon link on the right of the page. That will take you to Amazon, where you can buy my books or anything else. During that visit, a portion of your purchase will go to me. It won’t cost you anything extra.
April 29, 2020
I Can’t Even
Sorry everybody. I just have too much to do today, and my stress levels aren’t leaving me time and attention to focus on a blog post. So instead, I’ll present you with a bit of Tim Conway and Don Knotts awesome. The gas station scene from Private Eyes. It’s a longtime favorite of mine, and helps take some of the bitter aftertaste of Apple Dumpling Gang: Electric Boogaloo out of my mind.
Hopefully tomorrow is better . . .
April 28, 2020
Quarantine Movie Review: The Apple Dumpling Gang Rides Again
You know, things went so well showing my kids The Apple Dumpling Gang that everyone was on board for the sequel. Don Knotts! Tim Conway! What more of a reason do you need than that? I mean, the first movie was so straightforward. If there were even an alley oop moment in the history of family movies, making a sequel to Dumpling should have been it.
They didn’t just fail to slam dunk this movie. They failed on pretty much every level of “how to make a passable film.” I mean, there were a few parts in the 88 minutes that were diverting, but I’ve seen Mystery Science Theater movies that made more sense than this film. What in the world went wrong?
First up, they decided to jettison the three kids from the first movie completely, choosing (it seemed) to rely wholly on the talents of Knotts and Conway. Except instead of just having Knotts and Conway do stupid pratfalls for 88 minutes, they decided to embroil them in a plot that is more complex than most modern day Mission Impossible movies. Allow me to try to explain. (I’d warn you that these are spoilers, but really, if you end up watching the movie, you’ll thank me for giving you the general gist ahead of time, just so you can keep track.)
The film takes place on the frontier. A US fort has been having continual raids of their supplies by (they believe) Native Americans. The commander orders his second in command to get to the bottom of things. His second in command is also engaged to his daughter, who arrives in the same town Knotts and Conway come to in the beginning. She’s picked up by a Random Army Guy, who slinks around looking generally suspicious and fraternizes with equally suspicious characters.
Knotts and Conway manage to accidentally be the suspects of another bank robbery, but in the course of the robbery, they (also accidentally) disarm the famous lawman who tries to stop them. They become folk heroes instantly, but then try to give the money they accidentally stole back, in the process accidentally injuring the lawman again. They flee the town with the law in hot pursuit. In order to get away, they hide in the same wagon the Random Army Guy is picking up the commander’s daughter in. They accidentally drink a whole ton of champagne (long story) and end up falling asleep in the wagon. When it arrives at the fort, they’re discovered and . . . immediately enlisted in the army, because the army’s down on troops. (Native American raids, remember?)
Except the army quickly discovers there’s no greater destructive force in the world than Knotts and Conway, so they’re demoted to the kitchen, where they’re entrusted to get things ready for the engagement party that’s going to be thrown for the commander’s daughter. The Famous Lawman shows up in the middle of the party and (long story short), Knotts and Conway succeed in burning the entire fort to the ground. But not before Random Army Guy can flee the scene, abducting the Commander’s Daughter in the process.
Famous Lawman goes crazy and tries to start shooting Knotts and Conway, who naturally can’t be shot. They go to prison, where they discover another prisoner is actually using the prison as a hideout from which to stage raids on the army supply shipments. He decides Knotts and Conway (who accidentally came on him while he was monologuing about his plans) should come with, because they managed to get the drop on Famous Lawman.
Meanwhile, Random Army Guy takes the Commander’s Daughter to a random cabin the woods, where Random Matronly Figure reassures the daughter that Random Army Guy actually loves her. The daughter is disgusted, but intrigued. Because love.
Knotts and Conway run away from the Big Evil Dude, managing in the process to dress themselves first in drag and then as Native American women, because there was no stereotype they were afraid of using back in the 1979. They finally successfully run away and get on a train, which just so happens to have the Commander’s Daughter on it, as well as the latest batch of army supplies.
In a reveal that startles no one, the Second in Command Army Guy turns out to be bad, and the Random Army Guy is actually good, and they all fight on the train until the war party shows up and starts firing on the train. Except apparently the Native Americans are just there because they’re pissed off that Knotts and Conway swindled them out of some blankets. (Hyuk hyuk.)
Knotts and Conway manage to accidentally save the day, and . . . the end?
Did you follow that? I didn’t, and I’m the one who just tried to write it. I have to hand it to the movie, though. They did blow a fair number of things up, and they actually burned a fort down, which was pretty thrilling in a non-CGI way you typically don’t get these days. But other than that? The movie made absolutely no sense, and there were only one or two times that Knotts and Conway were actually able to do their slapstick humor.
Bottom line: avoid this movie. I gave it a 2/10, and only because there were a few genuine laughs in there. Even being stuck in quarantine can’t make this movie watchable.
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Like what you’ve read? Please consider supporting me on Patreon. Thanks to all my Patrons who support me! It only takes a minute or two, and then it’s automatic from there on out. I’ve posted the entirety of my book ICHABOD in installments, and I’m now putting up chapters from PAWN OF THE DEAD, another of my unreleased books. Where else are you going to get the undead and muppets all in the same YA package? Check it out.
If you’d rather not sign up for Patreon, you can also support the site by clicking the MEMORY THIEF Amazon link on the right of the page. That will take you to Amazon, where you can buy my books or anything else. During that visit, a portion of your purchase will go to me. It won’t cost you anything extra.
April 27, 2020
Happy Birthday, Gretel
What’s this? Another birthday post, after I’ve already written about birthdays and anniversaries three times this month? Allow me to explain. While I’ve written many times about the other birthdays on my blog, I know for a fact that I have never once written about my sister’s. Why not? Because . . . I don’t typically barge into other people’s social media space to say HAPPY BIRTHDAY. Not my typical MO. I almost never wish people on Facebook happy birthday, even. I probably should, since I know I appreciate the birthday wishes, but it seems too expected, somehow. I have never liked doing the expected. (Which sounds funny, seeing as how so much of my life seems very conform-y. What can I say? I like to conform in my own way, and part of that is not conforming in certain areas.)
So why am I making an exception today? Because I have Permission. You see, Gretel’s husband reached out to her siblings to see if they’d send her a birthday message in this socially distant time. A good prod, since I rarely reach out to anyone specifically just to reach out. I’m all over Facebook, I figure. It’s a constant reach out by yours truly, and all you have to do is reach back. Sending an email or text message just to Gretel felt very un-Bryce-y, so I asked if I could write a blog post, instead.
He thought that was a great idea, which shows he’s either too trusting or just that confident I’d have nothing but good things to say about my sister.
“What are you going to write about?” Denisa asked me last night when I told her the topic of today’s post.
“I don’t know,” I said. “That’s part of the fun about blogging. I’ll sit down, put my fingers on the keyboard, and see what comes out.”
I won’t tell you how old my sister is, but I will tell you she’s enough younger than I am for me to have opined on the subject of her actual birth. While I don’t remember saying it, it’s a matter of accepted family lore that after seeing what life was like before Gretel and after Gretel, I consistently said she was a “frubblemaker,” and that we were better off without her. (So I had difficulty with “trouble.” You try saying that word when you’re under five.)
For the first while, I remember being frustrated by her. She was always trying to do whatever I was trying to do, and since what I really wanted to do was hang out with people who were older than I was, that got in the way of my plans. (I’ve said before on the blog that often what frustrates us most about other people is the things they do that mirror what we do, that we’re potentially not that happy about ourselves. Gretel was trying to hang out with the older crowd, just as I was . . .)
There are certainly a fair number of stories I could share about my sister. Some of them I’ve sworn not to share, and I certainly wouldn’t share them on my blog, but she knows what they are, and I’m pretty sure that if she’s reading this, then she considers it a pretty nice birthday gift that I’m staying quiet about those stories, even given such a lovely platform. But I will share a few things:
Gretel is responsible for an inordinately large amount of the way my life has turned out, because she’s the one who suggested I apply for a job at BYU’s library. The Periodicals Department, to be specific. She’d gotten work there when she got to BYU, and when I returned from my mission, she suggested it as a great place to work. They paid a bunch ($8.25/hour, people!), and it wasn’t too hard, and there were lots of nice people there. “Not too hard” and “paid a bunch” was all it took for me to give it a go, and I worked there with her for quite some time. I don’t know where I would have ended up if I hadn’t taken that first job. Probably curing cancer, so maybe we should all blame Gretel for that. Way to go, Gretel.
April 24, 2020
Nineteen Years
Tomorrow Denisa and I will celebrate our nineteenth anniversary. Seeing as how I’ve been writing this blog pretty regularly since around 2007, that means I’ve already written about our anniversary multiple times. Shall we see what I had to say about it? Why not.
I didn’t mention it for the first few years of the blog. That was back in the days that I didn’t share practically everything online. My blog posts were much shorter back then too. But in 2011, I wrote up a piece that discussed how Denisa and I eloped. (Pro tip: eloping is awesome, and I encourage everyone to do it.) In 2012 I was back to my sparse blogging style, just noting that I mowed the lawn and built a degu house. 2013 was slightly longer, with a few more thoughts on marriage in general, and in 2014 I talked more about how Denisa and I first met and started dating. I didn’t post about the anniversary again until 2016, in a bundled post about Tomas’s birthday (his twelfth, still a poignant memory) and my fifteenth anniversary. 2017 was a revisit to the early dating days, and in 2018 I wrote some deep thoughts on marriage in general and ours in specific. 2019 was a followup on that.
So there you go. Eight separate posts on marriage. That ought to keep you reading for quite some time, if you’re looking for something to do today. To me, what’s most interesting is seeing how the background of each of those pieces changed. How it went from just a small family, to other children appearing in mentions in the background, to having those children move into the foreground as time progressed. Life changes in increments. It’s a series of small day to day alterations, interrupted now and then by huge life altering events. But even after those events have happened, life goes back to those series of small changes.
Here’s hoping in a year from now, we’re looking back on this social distancing time as a distant memory. That life as we knew it has returned (more or less) to normal. How are Denisa and I celebrating this year?
Something tells me we’re going to be staying home . . .
Happy anniversary, Denisa!
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Like what you’ve read? Please consider supporting me on Patreon. Thanks to all my Patrons who support me! It only takes a minute or two, and then it’s automatic from there on out. I’ve posted the entirety of my book ICHABOD in installments, and I’m now putting up chapters from PAWN OF THE DEAD, another of my unreleased books. Where else are you going to get the undead and muppets all in the same YA package? Check it out.
If you’d rather not sign up for Patreon, you can also support the site by clicking the MEMORY THIEF Amazon link on the right of the page. That will take you to Amazon, where you can buy my books or anything else. During that visit, a portion of your purchase will go to me. It won’t cost you anything extra.
April 23, 2020
Sixteen at Last!
When I was growing up, my sixteenth birthday was a Pretty Big Deal. I remember looking forward to it (like, I assume, most of you) for a long time. The family rule in our house was that you couldn’t date until you were 16, so there was that to look forward to, coupled with the possibility of driving. (Though I was in no rush on the driving front. My brother got in a serious car accident when I was around 15. I saw what that did to an automobile, so I wasn’t jumping at the gun to get behind a steering wheel myself.) I had a big party with a bunch of friends. It was a good time.
Fast forward 25 years, and my son is turning 16 today. How is he celebrating? Well, he can’t go see his friends, so no party. There’s not even the chance of driving school, so no car is in the works. How do you socially distant dating?
So how is he celebrating? At the moment, he’s working on an English assignment that’s due soon, so . . . I don’t think it’s an incredibly wonderful birthday for him. I feel bad that his experience is being overshadowed by all this sickness and drama in the world, though at the same time, I’m grateful that our family continues to deal with it without major impact. We don’t go out much, but Denisa and I are still employed and we’re all healthy.
How does a freshly-made 16 year old spend his time (when he’s not working on English projects)? Tomas is a big fan of video games (Overwatch and Animal Crossing are two current favorites, I believe), reading, and he used to be very active with after school activities, back in the day. We’ve been working our way through Stranger Things in the evenings. No job yet, though he’s worked as a part time swim instructor in the past. This summer was looking packed with camps and trips, so it wasn’t looking like he’d be able to work. Now it just looks like no camps, no trips, and . . . no jobs.
What a time we live in . . .
Anyway, if you see Tomas lurking around online somewhere today, make sure to wish him a happy birthday. When this is all over, we should have one giant bash just to celebrate.
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Like what you’ve read? Please consider supporting me on Patreon. Thanks to all my Patrons who support me! It only takes a minute or two, and then it’s automatic from there on out. I’ve posted the entirety of my book ICHABOD in installments, and I’m now putting up chapters from PAWN OF THE DEAD, another of my unreleased books. Where else are you going to get the undead and muppets all in the same YA package? Check it out.
If you’d rather not sign up for Patreon, you can also support the site by clicking the MEMORY THIEF Amazon link on the right of the page. That will take you to Amazon, where you can buy my books or anything else. During that visit, a portion of your purchase will go to me. It won’t cost you anything extra.
April 22, 2020
Quarantine Movie Review: The Apple Dumpling Gang
I still have a subscription to Disney+. and it’s still getting regular use by my kids. MC loves being able to watch as much Frozen as her eyes can handle, and I found her doing a Cinderella marathon yesterday. (Actually watching (and enjoying!) the two direct-to-video sequels. I hope she grows out of it . . .) Daniela, meanwhile, is working her way through all the Marvel movies, and Tomas is doing the same with The Clone Wars.
I decided that the time had come for them to stop treading water at the top of the Disney catalog, however. One of the best things about Disney+ (in my book) is the fact that I have all these movies I grew up with, ready to inflict on my family at the drop of a hat. Sometimes it goes well. Sometimes, they’re not nearly as good as I remembered. But there’s always something to talk about at least.
This time, I decided to show them The Apple Dumpling Gang, a movie I watched multiple times growing up. I remembered thinking it was hilarious, and I told my family as much. They eyed me with skepticism. “Really hilarious, or just ‘you used to think it was hilarious’?” Denisa asked.
“We won’t know until we’ve watched it.” (I’ve learned not to make promises I can’t keep.) “Worst case scenario, we turn it off after a half hour.”
The agreed to go along for the ride, and in the end, the whole family thoroughly enjoyed some good, clean, rated G family fun. The plot is fairly straightforward: a gambler “inherits” three children by accident and doesn’t know what to do with them. Hilarity ensues, mainly due to the herculean efforts of Don Knotts and Tim Conway, who play two bungling highway robbers who have aspirations of infamy. They get into a number of physical comedy routines which are just flat out hilarious. The whole movie is worth watching for those two alone. Great stuff.
The rest of it? Entertaining for sure. It made me reflect how easy it is to get an audience to root for your character. Make them likable and then put them in situations that are dangerous or tense. It doesn’t matter that you know those kids are being idiots for going around an abandoned mine. You know they wouldn’t know that, and so you’re really concerned what might happen.
Are the special effects good? Not at all. Is the acting solid? Not really. But it’s not that kind of movie. It’s a light throwback to an earlier time, and I still had a lot of fun with it. 7/10, but worth the time to show it to your kids. (If I’m lucky, MC will decide to watch The Apple Dumpling Gang Rides Again instead of Aladdin 2 . . .)
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Like what you’ve read? Please consider supporting me on Patreon. Thanks to all my Patrons who support me! It only takes a minute or two, and then it’s automatic from there on out. I’ve posted the entirety of my book ICHABOD in installments, and I’m now putting up chapters from PAWN OF THE DEAD, another of my unreleased books. Where else are you going to get the undead and muppets all in the same YA package? Check it out.
If you’d rather not sign up for Patreon, you can also support the site by clicking the MEMORY THIEF Amazon link on the right of the page. That will take you to Amazon, where you can buy my books or anything else. During that visit, a portion of your purchase will go to me. It won’t cost you anything extra.
April 21, 2020
How I Scored $22 Plane Tickets to Puerto Rico
I’m not typically the world’s most spontaneous person. When I buy something significant, it’s usually after a long hard look at my finances, and there’s a fair bit of price comparison that goes into it as well. A vacation? I’ll stew on that for months. So if someone came up to me and said, “Do you want to go to Puerto Rico at Thanksgiving?” but said I had to make my mind up that instant, it would be a pretty easy pass.
Except last week I bought plane tickets to Puerto Rico twenty minutes after I first had the idea to go there for Thanksgiving. Why? Because they were $22 each, round trip. I bought tickets for my family of five to fly at Thanksgiving for a total of $110, including tax. (Technically, the tickets were $1 each way. The rest of the cost was airport fees.)
I posted about this on Facebook, hoping some friends might be able to nab the same deal. Within an hour or two, however, the deal was gone. So how did I manage to get such ridiculous airfare?
Honestly, I got lucky. But that said, I did a few things ahead of time to put myself in a position where luck could help me out.
First off, I have a travel deals blog that I check most days. The Flight Deal lists great prices on airfare from a number of American cities. I’ve been watching them for about two years. Boston is the largest close city that they cover, so I just skim the deals for mention of Boston, and then perk up if I see anything good. I’ve seen tickets to Asia for $400, for example. But often the prices are contingent on things I just can’t do right now. With kids at home, Denisa and I can’t just up and go to Tokyo two weeks from tomorrow. (Well, assuming anyone was going anywhere, that is.) So it’s been more an exercise of “someday maybe I’ll be able to buy one of those tickets . . .”
In light of all the garbage happening in the world right now, I’d stopped even looking at the blog for the last while. Then last week I saw a news story in the morning about how cheap airfare was right now, and how now was the time to buy. It was enough to make me curious. I poked around on Kayak some for European fares. They were low ($450 at the right times), but none of the times worked for me, and it wasn’t as if I was going to pick now to plunk down $2,500 in plane tickets for something six months from now.
I shrugged off the idea and moved on, but when it came time to check my daily blogs, the article was enough for me to check my travel blogs again. And that’s when I saw the rate: Boston to Puerto Rico for $20.
It had to be something weaselly, like you could only fly on the third Wednesday of a month on a red eye. Or maybe it was with some sketchy carrier. I checked it out, though. Jet Blue. And when I checked the travel dates, it was for anytime until the end of the year. Summer still seems like it might be iffy for travel, so the next window my family could go would be Thanksgiving. Surely that would be more expensive.
I checked. It wasn’t. I read the fine print. The tickets are fully refundable, meaning if the world hasn’t settled down by then, I could get my money back. I sent the price to Denisa, we talked about it for a couple of minutes, wondering what the angle was we weren’t seeing. How in the world could it be that cheap?
We bought the tickets.
As I said, a few hours later, the deal was gone. Those same tickets I had bought for $110 now would cost $3,800. I waited for JetBlue to contact me and explain it had all been a pricing error. A week later, the trip is still good to go. All signs point to yes, assuming flying is allowed by then.
So like I said, I was lucky with this airfare. But if I hadn’t been checking travel blogs, I wouldn’t have gotten lucky. Will I do it more often? Probably about the same as I’ve always done. There’s only so often I can pick up and head out on a big trip.
But it never hurts to check . . .
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Like what you’ve read? Please consider supporting me on Patreon. Thanks to all my Patrons who support me! It only takes a minute or two, and then it’s automatic from there on out. I’ve posted the entirety of my book ICHABOD in installments, and I’m now putting up chapters from PAWN OF THE DEAD, another of my unreleased books. Where else are you going to get the undead and muppets all in the same YA package? Check it out.
If you’d rather not sign up for Patreon, you can also support the site by clicking the MEMORY THIEF Amazon link on the right of the page. That will take you to Amazon, where you can buy my books or anything else. During that visit, a portion of your purchase will go to me. It won’t cost you anything extra.
April 17, 2020
Happy Birthday, MC!!
It’s April, which means we’re coming up to Peak Birthday season in my house. Daniela starts things off in February, Denisa continues the streak in March, and then MC and Tomas have the one-two April knock out. (I’m the weird one who was born in September . . .)
MC had been looking forward to this birthday for quite some time, mainly because the way the school calendar fell, this one she’d be able to celebrate with her friends during the school day. (Our school has spring break around this time each year, and it usually means MC is on vacation for her birthday. That sounds like a great thing to me, but things look different to a six (or seven) year old.) Of course, instead of this being her most social birthday ever, it’s her least social. Go figure.
She was pretty down about that back when the school closed down, but these days it’s a distant memory for her, I think. (I’m certainly not going to remind her.) She seems to be doing really well with social distancing. Denisa has her Zooming in with friends periodically, she’s now working on Khan Academy for math, has blazed through all the books we have in the house, and is becoming quite the interior decorator on Animal Crossing. These days she loves playing Temple Run and Chuzzles, watching Disney movies, and putting together crafts of any and all sizes. She will happily sit in one spot and entertain herself for hours at a time with almost no supervision.
We’ll be celebrating by having a chocolate cake this evening and eating vegan mac and cheese. (Both by request of MC.) I’d tell you to wish her a happy birthday if you see her, but since that’s not likely, just wish it here, and I’ll pass along the message.
Happy birthday, MC!
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Like what you’ve read? Please consider supporting me on Patreon. Thanks to all my Patrons who support me! It only takes a minute or two, and then it’s automatic from there on out. I’ve posted the entirety of my book ICHABOD in installments, and I’m now putting up chapters from PAWN OF THE DEAD, another of my unreleased books. Where else are you going to get the undead and muppets all in the same YA package? Check it out.
If you’d rather not sign up for Patreon, you can also support the site by clicking the MEMORY THIEF Amazon link on the right of the page. That will take you to Amazon, where you can buy my books or anything else. During that visit, a portion of your purchase will go to me. It won’t cost you anything extra.
April 16, 2020
Far from “Fine”
I keep running into people virtually, typically in Zoom, and the social niceties are still playing out the way they’ve always played out. “How are you doing” people will ask, and I always say, “Fine.” Sometimes I say it with a bit more sarcasm. Sometimes I switch it up by saying, “I’m holding in there.” But the general gist doesn’t change: I say I’m doing okay, and we move on with whatever we’re meeting about.
But here’s the thing, people. I am far from “fine” these days. I’m not melting down or anything like that. I’m coping, for sure, but this whole mess is traumatic, and I want to make sure to acknowledge that, since I assume many many other people are in the same boat.
In the past month, I haven’t been in my car once. I’ve gone on walks on my road most days, seeing four or five cars during those walks. I’ve done plenty of things with my family, and I’ve done a slew of things online, but my entire life has blended together into one very long day.
I was on pretty stable ground before all of this happened, financially, emotionally, mentally, and physically. I’m still doing well on most points, but areas of particular concern all add up:
Financially, Denisa and I still are both as fully employed as we were before all of this started. Denisa is teaching all of her classes through to completion. I’m managing the library from home. However, there’s some uncertainty for the future. The university is under a ton of financial strain at the moment, and it’s hard not to think about all the “What ifs.” What if Denisa’s classes don’t carry in the fall? What if there are layoffs? What if classes are still remote in September?Socially, I’ve discovered I rely much more on personal face-to-face interactions than I realized.I used to be a person with a pretty long fuse. Yes, I’d lose my temper now and then, but it was a very rare thing. It’s not like I’ve turned into a monster now, but my fuse is much, much shorter. Small things irritate me far more than they have any right to. I’ll go from feeling fine to being really angry over some random thing someone asks me to do or some additional requirement I come across.I’m definitely finding it harder to toe the line from a health perspective. I’m still exercising, but avoiding sugar kind of went out the window. (Easter didn’t help . . .) I’ve still managed to keep my weight from going up too much, but it’s something I need to focus on.Even writing has been difficult, as I struggle to stay motivated and on track. I’ve worried about MURDER CASTLE getting pushed back or canceled (Hey! Remember I have a book coming out next year?), and sitting down to try and get the words to flow is much harder on some days than other. I’ve stuck to my 1,000 words/day schedule, but it takes more effort.I worry for my kids and the experiences they are or are not happening. Social lives. Education. Future planning.
Overall, I just feel like my life has been paused for the past month, and I have no idea when it will resume, or what it will look like when it does. I’ve heard dates thrown around from May through 2021 or even 2022. That amount of uncertainty doesn’t help at all. I understand the desire to go back to “normal,” but until there’s a vaccine, I’m thinking more and more that there isn’t a “normal” to go back to.
I read an article this morning about how Singapore, the very model of everything America wants to do when it comes to going back to normal, just put the country on lockdown. Despite all its efforts to contain and control the virus, they weren’t able to do it. What efforts? Screening and quarantining all travelers from outside the country. Extensive contact tracing. Criminal charges for anyone who violates quarantine. Much more than I imagine Americans going along with willingly. (Some in Michigan are protesting loudly because people who aren’t part of a single household can’t gather, they can’t travel to second homes, stores are limiting the number of shoppers, prohibiting buying non-essential things like carpet and paint, and they can’t use motor boats or jet skis. Maybe it was the jet skis that pushed them over.)
Consider for a moment the fact that here we are looking at more than 2,000 deaths in our country per day, more than a month after Trump declared a national emergency. Most states of social distancing measures of one extent or another. It takes up to two weeks to show symptoms from the disease, and then it can take 3-6 weeks for the disease to run its course in severe cases. So if everyone who got it took two weeks to get it and then 6 weeks to get over it, then all of this should really subside in 8 weeks, yes? Though of course, some people come down with symptoms more quickly and have an outcome faster as well. Either way, we’re about 5 weeks into the time when it seemed like America was finally taking this seriously. I would have thought that by now we’d be seeing the number of deaths subside somewhat, but we’ve had record numbers the past two days. Here’s hoping the next two or three weeks really bring those numbers down.
But if they do, what do we do then? Your guess is as good as mine. I suppose it will turn into a long game of “how many people are we okay dying for us to go back to normal?” That’s not a game I’m in any hurry to play, though it appears many Republicans are looking for dice already.
I get that it’s complicated. I get that people are also dealing with terrible realities of unemployment, depression, abuse, malnutrition, exhaustion, and more. (Remember all the complaints I made to start this article off?) But as long as we keep sniping at each other and looking for people to blame, none of this is going to get any better. When the Titanic was sinking, what did it matter where the iceberg came from? And honestly, what did it matter what terrible decisions had been made about the life boats and the design of the ship? There will (hopefully) be plenty of time once the crisis is over for us to figure it all out. (And it ain’t gonna be that hard pointing to who made blunders . . .) For now, let’s just deal with what’s in front of us and figure out how to get through that as best we can.
And that’s all the time I have to discuss this today.
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