I’m not sure if it is time to transition the title of these assorted notes posts back to how I labelled them before March. Not everything in these is about what is going on with Covid anymore. At the same time, our lives are going to continue to be pretty boring for some time and much of what I share here will be affected, at least indirectly, by the state of the world. So for now they will remain Covid-tagged.

Sunday was C’s 14th birthday, which gave us a chance for our first quarantine celebration. We had some friends and family drive by to honk, wave hello, and toss gifts to her. We were dodging rain all day but it worked out pretty well.

After that we had our old neighbors over for a dinner celebration. The girls all got into the pool. Pools are safe! Or at least that’s what the initial studies suggest. I might be cranking up the chlorine level a notch or two higher than normal just to make sure. If we could just keep everyone from getting too close from each other when they aren’t in the pool. Both M and L had a friend over to swim on Saturday, but there was plenty of other hanging out during those visits.

Again, we’re going to have months of stress about what the proper way to socialize is. I tend to think small groups are ok, but should we be masking everyone up while we’re together? When we were running M’s friend home Saturday we passed a backyard party where everyone was seated six feet apart. If only kids understood social distancing with friends as well as they do with strangers.

As I said, the pool is open. It took until Saturday for the water to get up around 90 degrees where we like it. But it was warm enough Friday evening that the girls all jumped in for awhile. Now if we could just get this stupid cut-off low to pass us so the nice weather of last week could return.

We had a bunch of lawn restoration work done last week, right before the rainy weather hit. I’m really hoping the deluge of the past seven days hasn’t rendered all the new grass seed unable to germinate.

I recorded Sunday’s charity golf match that featured Rory McIlroy, Dustin Johnson, Rickie Fowler, and Matthew Wolf. I was glad I recorded it because it allowed me to fast forward through the many slow spots. Even with the FF button in high use, it certainly had stretches where it was veeeeeerrrrry slow.

I was most excited to see Seminole Golf Club on TV. It has never hosted a televised event before, and the golf architecture geeks I follow think it’s an amazing course. One of those experts says it is a near ideal course because if you are a good-to-elite player it will really challenge you, while if you’re just a normal player you will have a good chance to shoot what you do on your home course. Not that I’ll ever have a chance to play it, but that was a comforting thought.

Sadly much of what makes people love the course doesn’t really translate to TV, and the broadcasting crew didn’t go out of their way to explain what is so cool about the course.

The golf was kind of crappy, too. You could tell the guys were rusty. DJ barely looked interested. And using the Skins format just doesn’t generate a lot of excitement. But Skins is easy to understand and made sure both teams earned some money for their charity of choice, so I understand the decision.

The broadcast was mixed. You have to grade on a scale, because this was done with a short lead-up, a limited production crew, on a course not designed to make TV easy. I think they could have used a few more cameras. I heard they had six. I think they could have put in some more that were fixed at tee boxes and greens that would have allowed them to miss fewer shots. Not having shot tracer for every tee shot was a big miss. And there were some issues with the announcers being in three different locations. The Bill Murray interview was flat bizarre and difficult to watch. I muted the entire time a certain politician called in. Jon Rahm was a pretty good interview, and I could have used more of him. That said, with so much dead time to kill as they players moved between shots, I think they could have spaced out these conversations better so they weren’t talking over the action.

Everyone involved gets credit for making the attempt, though. It was good to have some live sports on, even if flawed.

I finished The Last Dance last night. I think I’ll need to break my thoughts on it out from my monthly media list and share them here soon.

M wrapped up her freshman year last week. Unless something changes before final grades are posted, it looks like she carried a 4.21 GPA through all four quarters. Pretty good! I’m glad she’s tapped into her mom’s academic genes. I never got straight A’s in high school because of 1) math and 2) I was lazy. She was the only student in her English class to get an A on her research paper without having to re-write it, so maybe she got some of my skills, too.

She knows her sophomore year will be tougher. She’s adding three honors classes to her load, but they are all liberal arts rather than science courses, so I think she’ll do fine. She’s excited to be taking photography. I may be as excited about that as she is.

Now we just start hoping that her sophomore year is mostly normal. We are hearing rumors from other schools about mixed plans that may involve kids coming into school in rotations/waves, so only a certain percentage of the student population is in the school at the same time. I don’t see how that helps the teachers and staff, though, who will need to be at school daily. Perhaps they will be in masks and other protective measures will be take.

I kind of laughed that M said she was bored last week, when she still had a couple days of class left. I wanted to say, “Wait until next week when you have nothing to do at all!” Saturday she asked us, “What can we do today?” Normally that means where can we go to shop/eat. It was hard not to snap at her, “We literally can’t go anywhere!”

We found out last week that St. P’s will be making some adjustments in the fall. All we know is that instead of a 6th–8th middle school group, the 7th and 8th graders will now be considered middle schoolers while the 5th and 6th graders will be labeled as “intermediate” students and sharing teachers. We’re not sure what the mechanics of that will be, especially since those four grades, along with the fourth graders, all share a hallway. S guessed, based on what she’s heard from other schools, is that they may adjust how the classes change periods, have lunch, etc so fewer kids are in the hallway at one time. But we’ve received no details yet, so we’re not sure.

I know I do not envy school administrators right now. No plan seems like a good plan. I know private schools are facing pressure to have kids back in real class. We’ve heard several parents say “I’m not paying X-thousand dollars for an entire year of eLearning.” Which I totally understand. This pressure comes on top of knowing you’re probably going to lose some students because their families can’t afford private school tuition due to personal financial issues. It’s just a damn tough time.

L is not excited at all about the changes. There were a couple teacher changes that came with this reorganization and she may have to spend time with two teachers she doesn’t like very much while two she was hoping to get have moved away from her grade. She’s lived a charmed life with teachers, always getting the one she wanted and generally getting along well with them. She needs to toughen up and get over it!