Tag: school (Page 3 of 13)

School Daze

August 18, 2020 / DB

Three days into everyone being back in school. I wouldn’t say it’s been a smooth transition, as both schools continue to adjust on the fly as conditions warrant.

At CHS, they have had to make multiple changes to students’ schedules. We heard that the first change was because they had a higher students-per-class ratio than the county health department wanted. So over the weekend 62 sections – I’m assuming that means groups of similar classes – had to be revamped to hit that threshold. M got an email Sunday saying to check her schedule again Monday morning. Sure enough, most of her classes had changed.

When I picked her up after school she said her schedule had changed again during the day. So she had math before lunch…then again after lunch instead of chemistry. She said her math teacher looked at her and asked her why she was back. I’m sure she wasn’t the only kid that happened to.

Tuesday was apparently a little more stable, although one of her classes did change location. She said some of the restrictions inside the school are “super annoying.” Most halls are one-way, which means she sometimes has to make a big circle to get to her next class instead of just popping around the corner. We’ve adjusted our pickup routine because kids are not allowed to roam the campus while waiting for rides, more because of construction than Covid concerns. But then they can’t socialize in the room they wait in. So I now do first pick up at St. P’s and run over and get M shortly after CHS lets out.

She also says all of her teachers are annoying. She loved her teachers last year so that was kind of inevitable.

At St. P’s things are also a little weird. C’s class does not have a dedicated home room teacher, so other teachers are bouncing in all day to monitor them. We’ve heard of at least a couple times when no one has been in the room with them. Which A) is bound to happen and B) probably should be something that is corrected quickly rather than allowed to continue.

I’ve heard a ton of complaints from parents with kids who have had to quarantine about the difficulties of eLearning. They claim the connections are not great, it is difficult for kids at home to ask questions, and sometimes materials that are supposed to be visible to the kids are home are not available to them.

Kinks are to be expected. We had a couple friends who pulled their kids and put them in public schools because they were worried that St. P’s did not have a good plan to manage either hybrid or total eLearning if it came to that again this year. Although we’ve not had to keep a kid home yet, the fact others are having so many issues is concerning. I would say disappointing, too, but it’s hard enough to teach a class of middle schoolers face-to-face. Having to also teach a handful of kids who are Zoomed into class while keeping both groups engaged, interested, and making sure they all are getting questions answered seems like a nearly impossible task.

Beyond the actual education part, C and L have both complained that their classrooms are freezing. C said hers was 60 all day Tuesday. A new HVAC system came online the day before classes began and it appears to be very, very good at cooling. I’m assuming/hoping tweaks will be made.

Kickball season starts Wednesday. C’s team will be missing two girls who are self-quarantining. Fortunately we have 17 girls on the squad, so missing a few actually makes it easier on us when we’re making the lineup and defensive rotation. L’s team only has 10 girls, which is how many play in the field. They scrimmaged another team last night and the coaches were (kind of) jokingly telling the girls they can’t get sick or injured for the next three weeks.

Because CYO sports schedules are dumb, L already had her basketball tryouts for the fall last Saturday. She should find out what team she is on by the end of the week. She decided to pass on club soccer this year so that she could have the best chance to make the A basketball team. I hope it works out. We signed her up for rec soccer but that has already been cancelled for the fall.

Finally, C decided not to run cross country this year. She told us she didn’t like it that much last year even before she got her stress fracture that ended her season. The joy she used to find in distance running didn’t come back over the summer. I’ll miss Saturday meets and hanging out with the other parents. Cross country meets seem like the one safe spectator sport.

First Day Back, Part One

August 12, 2020 / DB

After five months at home, C and L finally went back to school today. We shall, of course, see how long this lasts. The entire 7th/8th grade football team is currently quarantining at home after at least one kid tested positive last week. There will be more positive kids that pop up soon and all we can do is hope those numbers stay low enough to keep the school open and that our girls don’t get sick.

Both girls were awake when I got up at 6:30 this morning. We were out the door ten minutes earlier than planned and they were some of the first kids to try out the new entry process.[1] They have to be masked up all day, although they can remove them with their teachers’ permission while behind their desk screens. They are not moving classes during the day, rather the teachers will rotate through the rooms for different subjects. They will eat lunch at their desks. Classes will try to move outside when possible. All pretty standard stuff I imagine your kids are also learning as part of their new routines.

It’s been an interesting summer for St. P’s. The administration has been attempting to come up with plans to re-start school while navigating different mandates handed down from the state, county/city, and archdiocese. There was a big infrastructure project – replacing the 40+ year old HVAC system – that was just completed last night. Hopefully they did it right and the AC is blowing cool air through the classrooms today. Because guidelines on how classes should be composed have changed a couple times, we’ve had three different class lists for middle school. This caused consternation by both students and parents. C was thrilled with her class, then devastated, then thrilled again. I told her not to get too comfortable; shit is going to change a lot over the next eight months.

For now school sports are on. The girls have both had kickball practices and got their game schedules last night. C is following her big sister’s lead and cheering as an 8th grader. She had her first practice yesterday. L has basketball tryouts this weekend. Again, we’ll see how long this all lasts; L’s rec league soccer season has already been cancelled. I think the general view from parents is that we really need to get through the first month or two of school without having to shut down so kids can at least get one sport in. We all need the escape and release that comes from yelling at your kid to run faster, calling the official a blind idiot, and saying nasty things about the opposing parents. I kid, I kid!

M starts classes on Friday. She was supposed to start tomorrow but CHS decided to split the school in half for the first two days, with sophomores joining online tomorrow and live Friday. Monday they announced that since the first days are mostly busywork, virtual students don’t have to check in this week. She’s happy about the extra day to sleep in. The school is supposed to return to a normal schedule next Monday, but we anticipate that changing given the county has not yet granted a waiver to go to full enrollment on campus. We figure it will be some sort of one day live, one day virtual system similar to what the other Catholic schools in the county are doing.

But finally, even if temporarily, our kids are moving towards a more normal life and schedule.

Different groups of grades pass through different sets of doors, there is a temperature check before entry, and they go straight to class instead of congregating in the gym and waiting for the first bell. ↩

Covid Chronicles, 5/19

May 19, 2020 / DB

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!

Covid Chronicles, 5/13

May 13, 2020 / DB

I’ve felt a lack of enthusiasm and motivation the past few days. School is winding down. M is done Friday. C and L are done next week. Assignments have already dried up and they’re just running out the clock. A few teachers seem to have checked out, too, which makes it tough to motivate the girls.

The news has devolved further, making me less and less interested in paying attention to what’s going on, and making my blood pressure rise when I do check in. I’ve starting to clear out my Twitter feed of some accounts that I very much enjoy and inform me simply because the stories they share are so infuriating.

The weather doesn’t help. This has been a wacky spring, full of swings back-and-forth. Which is what Midwest springs are supposed to be. But they’ve seemed especially wild this year simply because the nice days feel like moments of bliss and relief while the nasty days you can feel the walls creeping in on you.

Fortunately some of that may be changing. After today, we appear set for a long stretch of days near 80. It will likely rain several of those days, but at least it will be warm.

The crew was just here to open the pool. I’m guessing the girls will be jumping in the moment the heater has run long enough to make the water tolerable. It was 57 degrees last time I checked, so it may take awhile to get there.

L had a quick get together with her class Monday at a park. The motivation was so they could present their teacher with her year-end gifts and get a chance to see each other. Despite the cold, damp, raw day, we spent nearly 90 minutes there, mostly because all the parents were talking. The parents did pretty well with the social distancing. I’m not sure the kids did.

I think I mentioned this last week but every moment like that comes with very strong, mixed feelings. And then after the fact you wonder if it was worth it. It seems like being outside is the best way to safely interact with others, so I’m not super worried about it. This does seem to be how things are going to be for the foreseeable future, though: trying to balance safe and sane, hoping for the best in the process.

Normally S does not watch a lot of TV. Her evenings, in the past, were generally filled with hours of charting. She would come home, eat dinner, crack open the laptop, do one to four hours’ worth of charting, then go to bed. She has one show she watches, Outlander, and she’ll run through those seasons pretty quickly after they drop then re-watch them. There’s the occasional movie but otherwise she is not in front of a screen for fun very often.

Until the past two months. She has been extraordinarily busy at times, some days filled with 12 hours of conference calls and associated work. But she also has almost no charting and, after those first 2–3 weeks, the calls slowed down and actually left her with free time. (Worth mentioning that the calls are picking back up as her system tries to figure out the reopening process. This may be more stressful than the shutting down process as management is pushing for changes that no one seems happy about.)

That’s a long lead in to sharing how I think she’s watched more TV than any of us during this break. She’s plowed through a bunch of shows and movies. Most nights, and some afternoons, you can find her with her laptop and my headphones, laughing at whatever is currently amusing her. Often she’ll try to go to bed but can’t shut her brain off. I’ll come up an hour or so later to find her in bed, watching a show on her phone in the dark.

This break has sucked for all of us, but she’s had the most stress and responsibility throughout. I’m glad she’s found an outlet that allows her to check-out for a bit and actually have some fun.

Amazon delivery seems to be approaching normal again. There are still regular items that seem to be taking more like a week to show up, but more and more things show a delivery window within a couple days.

I’ve started gaming the system a little. Whenever I have a chance, I’ve been taking the second tier of free delivery that pushes arrival back a bit, but offers a credit for digital services in exchange. If I’m going to be buying more Kindle books than normal, I might as well collect some coupons to reduce that cost!

Indianapolis/Marion County just announced phase one of their reopening process. Restrictions begin lifting Friday. Restaurants can reopen to outside seating only next Friday. Man, I have no interest in being inside a restaurant any time soon. Not sure I even want to sit outside of one. I feel a little bad about that. The restaurant business is a tough one in good times. I’d like support locally owned places and their staffs by getting food and drink from them, tipping the wait staff, etc. I am not keen to be in any enclosed space with a bunch of strangers, though. I think we will be sticking to carryout for quite some time.

Covid Chronicles, 4/22

April 22, 2020 / DB

This is more of a random tidbits post. Nothing real earth-shattering in it. More mundane details of life in April 2020.

I think we’ve reached the point in our house where we are all a little pissy with each other. Last week did not help. Damp, dreary, cool. We were stuck inside all last week due to the chilly, wet weather. My mind kept reaching for something that would get us out of the house: a practice or game, a birthday party, a sleepover, a dinner with friends.

I’ve certainly been a little shorter with the girls the past few days. Their moods seem darker, too.

Fortunately the sun is back out this week. Tuesday was unseasonably cool despite the sun, but Monday was warm and nice. C and L asked me to put our tent up in the backyard and they actually spent a good chunk of the day outside. If we can just keep the temperatures in the 60s and have a few dry hours each day, that will go a long way toward improving everyone’s moods.

I put off calling our pool company a week too long. I finally called yesterday in hopes of opening the pool up in 10–14 days. The best they could do was May 13. Which isn’t terrible, especially given how we are going to have cool nights for awhile and opening the pool now means the heater would be running constantly.

My big accomplishment of the week was doing some work in our bedroom closet. It began with some normal, seasonal movements. Taking most of my cold-weather clothes to the basement, tossing some items I don’t wear anymore into the Goodwill pile, putting the warm-weather clothes in a more convenient spot. Standard April stuff.

I really got nutty, though, and completely changed how I deal with my everyday shorts. For years I’ve been hanging them up. I did this with the idea that this keeps them from getting wrinkled plus you can see each pair rather than having to dig through a pile to find the ones you’re looking for. But I tossed them over a standard hanger, which means they would get kind of bunched up and hang awkwardly. I was not interested in buying a bunch of expense hangers with clips to let them fall off rather than over the hanger.

So I texted a couple college friends and asked how they store their shorts. Neither of them hang theirs. One stacked his on a shelf, the other in a drawer. I did some moving of items around to create space on a closet shelf and now my summer shorts are all stacked in two neat piles.

One of my friends suggested this was the most important issue the three of us had ever texted about. I’m inclined to agree.

Some academic changes. M will have no finals and now finishes classes a week earlier than planned, May 15. St. P’s will adjust their grading scale for Q4 and have a 3–1 scale, three being highest, one being lowest. They will not have GPAs or an honor roll this quarter, and for the year the grades from Q’s 1–3 and four will be separated. What a nightmare to be a school administrator right now, between trying to figure out how to handle e-learning and grading while also making contingencies for how to begin the 2020–21 academic year. I do not envy those folks at all and keep reminding our girls, when they get frustrated, how hard that job is at the moment.

S does telemedicine visits each morning. She had a call last week that made us both laugh. A lot of times her patients get on the phone with their parents, especially older kids that can explain exactly what they’re experiencing. The younger kids just like to get on and talk to Dr. S. After one of those visits with a three-year-old, the kid asked if he could have a sucker like when he visits her office. We thought that was great.

L has taken over the house office for her school work. S does most of her calls and computer work from the living room couch. Me? I spend most of my days in our sunroom. I have all my electronics in here. Several books, magazines, and my Kindle stacked on the coffee table. There’s a deck of Uno cards that L and I have used a few times. My old Strat-o-matic baseball game that I keep meaning to actually open up and play. A couple golf clubs leaning against a chair. It’s pretty random, it is (hopefully) relatively temporary, but still feels pretty comfortable. Especially on the days I can open the windows.

Covid Chronicles, 3/30

March 30, 2020 / DB

Happy spring break, everyone! So excited to leave dreary, cold Indiana behind for a week in sunny, warm…

Well shit. We weren’t even supposed to go someplace warm, but it is still crappy to remain stuck at home rather than on day two of skiing in Colorado. Who knows, maybe staying home means one of us didn’t break a leg or blow out an ACL on the slopes. Regardless of what is going on here, we are glad the resorts shut down as the Keystone-Vail corridor is apparently a hotspot thanks to at least one person who traveled from Italy to that area in early March.

The past week has been very boring. The stress and excitement of the first week of being stuck at home wore off. The girls got into a routine, but that routine was not ideal. If she didn’t have an early class meeting, M was sleeping until 10 or so before she woke to get started on her assignments for the day. She was generally busy all day, each day. C and L again got most of their work done early in the week and spent the rest of the week on screens large and small. L got outside quite a bit, as the weather was decent most of the week. We played a lot of HORSE and took a few bike rides.

I did have to re-teach myself some fifth grade math – dividing fractions – as L got a little stuck and her online resources weren’t clear in what she was supposed to be doing. I had to break down and call a friend who used to be a math teacher to make sure I was on the right track. Math is my biggest worry for the two younger girls. I hate for them to get behind or I teach them something wrong and it affects how they perform in the future. I imagine teachers all over the country are trying to figure out how to avoid this, and lesson plans next fall will be adjusted to make sure kids aren’t too far behind.

We’ve been pretty hands off with their eLearning, though. We let them know we are available to help, remind them to check in with their teachers if they run into issues, and make sure assignments are being completed. They all seem to be getting everything turned in and getting full credit, so we will continue to let them operate independently when they jump back in next week.

Last Wednesday was an absolutely glorious day. It was in the upper 60s, the skies were clear, the winds were calm. Our street was a constant stream of dog walkers, runners, and bikers. We adjusted our meal plan for the week to throw some burgers on the grill, as it was the perfect grilling day. While we were outside we could smell other people’s grills and hear folks playing music outside. In the evening there were fireworks scattered about. It was an impromptu celebration of the beautiful weather and an opportunity it get outside after just over a week of most of the world staying inside.[1]

In these strange times people are doing strange things. For example, over the weekend the Indy radio station that plays Christmas music between Thanksgiving and Christmas pulled out all those tunes from Friday evening through last night. Even I, the “Christmas Music Must Only Be Played During the Holidays” zealot tuned in for a bit. I felt weird doing it, not because it was out of season, but because I didn’t know how it made me feel. Was this a momentary adjustment to bring some joy to a grim time? Or was it a sign that the end of the world was nigh and we might as well enjoy things we may never get a chance to enjoy again?

It felt especially weird to listen to the station Saturday. We had the windows open to enjoy the near–80 degree weather, there were thunderstorm watches and warnings, and late in the evening we had a torrential downpour that flooded our yard. It didn’t exactly look a lot like Christmas.

I made a grocery run early Sunday. It was designed to be a small, quick trip so I went to the grocery store around the corner. I had been there two weeks earlier and found it was very much picked over. Things seem to have stabilized, though, as I was able to get just about everything on my list plus a number of additions I made on the fly.

It is a sign of the times that you leave a grocery store with an immense feeling of relief if you get 90% of what you needed.

Normally we run our pantry and fridge/freezer pretty tight. I will shop early each week and plan on 3–4 dinner ideas, knowing we’ll squeeze in a leftover night, likely a dinner out, maybe a “cereal for dinner” night, and then figure out a plan for the weekend when Friday rolls around.

Now I keep a very detailed list of how many dinner options we have. Where we are normally good for a few nights, and I often have to run out to grab a few things multiple times during the week, I currently have us set up to get through at least a week, likely closer to two. Our freezer is jam-packed and I’m making plans to have some electrical work done to add a freezer to the basement once this is over. I’m constantly checking the list to assure myself that I don’t need to venture out to a store again for a few days.

It is these little obsessions that give you an anchor in these uncertain times.

Test note ↩

Covid Chronicles, 3/21

March 21, 2020 / DB

Our first week of home schooling/working is in the books. The girls all did about as well as we could have hoped. They’re bored, bummed they are not seeing their friends, and it can be a struggle to get them out of their rooms. But so far, so good, for the most part.

M was scheduled to have her first in-car driving lesson today. We were a little surprised the company didn’t cancel appointments, so we went ahead and cancelled it on our own. They sent a message saying they were taking extra care to sanitize cars between appointments. But that doesn’t guarantee her instructor would not be carrying the coronavirus or that he got everything cleaned from the previous student. I was also worried about the chance that once S begins taking the occasional shift in her office, she could encounter someone who is a carrier and transfer that to us, which M could in turn pass along to her instructor. Like most things, it was just better to keep M at home. We’ll get driver’s ed knocked out at some point.

Yesterday L and I went outside before the weather changed. We threw a football and baseball for a bit in the glorious, warm spring morning. Then, seeing the low part of our yard was flooded from the mid-week rains, she decided she wanted to build a boat and see if it floated. After a couple of attempts she fashioned a pretty sturdy craft out of foil, paper, packing tape, and twigs. She christened it the SS Corona and we spent 20 minutes experimenting with the current and winds to see how well it did.

While we were outside our neighbor came out to say hello. He is pushing 70 and had just moved his 92-year-old mother home to get her away from her assisted living center. With that in mind, we chatted across the narrow side street that separates our homes, never getting within six feet of each other.

Our homes face a main street that is normally very busy. As we spoke a car drove down the main street and just laid on its horn the entire time it passed. We didn’t see anyone in front of them, pulling into their path, etc. Neither of us recognized the car. We looked at each other and shrugged. We weren’t sure if they were just being jerks or if they were honking at us because we were conversing across 8 feet of asphalt.

I made a grocery run Thursday morning. I got most of what I needed, although it took stops at two stores. I was unable to get any ground beef or fresh chicken breasts. Fortunately I had some beef in the freezer and grabbed one of the last packages of frozen chicken. I guess it’s just a matter of when you hit the store in relation to their re-stock times. My first trip down the bread aisle found the racks totally empty. Ten minutes later restocking was in progress and I was able to grab a loaf. I’m debating whether to give Costco a try next week. I’ve heard they are limiting how many customers can be in the building at once and want to go on a dry day so I’m not in line in the rain if I can’t get inside right away.

Two more local pieces of news. Thursday afternoon they announced that all Indiana schools would remain closed through at least May 1. In his announcement the governor admitted it would take a minor miracle for schools to open again this academic year. I think we all know that but I approve of the incremental closings. Better to leave some glimmer of hope. Hey, who would have thought kids would be begging to go back to school?!

Earlier today CYO officially cancelled all spring sports. That bummed C and L out, as they held out hope that kickball and track would still happen, even if under compressed time tables. That also means I am officially done as kickball coordinator. I have promised my successor that I will guide her through the fall season since she did not get a chance to shadow me through the spring season.

Finally, I have chilled on the news a little bit, and feel better for it. I’ve taken more to checking the Washington Post and Guardian’s daily live blogs than read through every story. I’ve found this gives me a good overview of what is happening, direct links to the stories that require closer reading, and are easier to disengage from once I’m caught up. I recommend them both.

Covid Chronicles, 3/17

March 17, 2020 / DB

The strangeness continues.

My last trip to the gym was last Wednesday. Thursday and Friday I was too busy being glued to the TV to run across the street to get a workout in. By Saturday I thought it best to avoid the gym. You can see my gym’s parking lot from our house, and over the past five days I’ve watched the crowds there get smaller each day. I have a friend who is a workout fiend and I still saw her car over there yesterday.

Doesn’t matter anymore, as all gyms have closed down as of this morning. We have a bench, some weights, and a treadmill in the basement, so I can still do some modified workouts. I can’t run much anymore, though, so I fear not having access to the elliptical machines will mean some of the 10 pounds I’ve lost since Christmas will return.

I do most of my podcast listening at the gym, so I’ve fallen behind. It’s been very odd to listen to podcasts that were recorded last Monday and Tuesday, when the market was beginning to crater and everything else was still hypothetical. They are a reminder of how quickly events spiraled and how long a week can feel.

I’ve been listening to the new bulletins on the BBC World Service a lot. I enjoy their more neutral, relaxed approach to the news. The BBC is also good for getting a broader perspective, as they often place developments in Europe ahead of the latest US news.

Last night I was listening to a bulletin and L walked through the room, heard voices coming out of my iPad but saw a black screen, and gave me a strange look. When the news summary ended she asked, “How does that work?” I explained that it was a radio broadcast that I was streaming. “Oh, I thought the news was just on TV.”

My mind was blown.

As I shared yesterday, C had an ortho appointment. We drove up to the office, walked in, she went to the computer to check in and the ladies at the desk asked if they could help us. Which they never do. “Uh oh,” I thought.

I told them C had an appointment and they apologized and said they had cancelled all visits, I should have received a call. I didn’t remember my phone ringing but as we re-booked I checked. Nope, no call, no voice mails.

As we left we tried to pull up the Panera menu to place a carry-out order, but the site refused to load. In fact no website was working and my email wasn’t loading. I powered my phone off, let it sit for a moment, and powered back on. Once it came online up popped a voice mail the ortho office left an hour earlier. Crap.

It looks like all the Colorado resorts shut down for the season today, which should make it easier to get refunds for everything we reserved. In the grand scheme of things, that’s not all that important. But it is one less thing to stress about.

I think the girls are already bored. L knocked out almost all of her assignments for the week today. M is whining about not being able to see her friends. It has been hard not to share every new development with them. We try to be honest and help them to understand what is happening. But I am feeling bad when each day brings some new disappointment to share. Today I’m struggling with how to share the possibility that this may go on much longer than people are currently expecting. Wiping out spring break was disappointing enough. We have a very big trip scheduled for late July, and based on some charts I’m seeing, I’m starting to believe it is in real jeopardy. I don’t even want to mention that to the girls yet, but at some point we may have to share that possibility.

Corona Chronicles

March 13, 2020 / DB

And then life got even crazier…

I suppose this is the second in what will be an on-going series sharing my thoughts and observations on the most insane era of my lifetime.

I’ll work a little out of order to get caught up.

First, my girls are all out of school. Cathedral was scheduled to be off today for the St. Patrick’s Day parade.[1] The parade was cancelled so it’s just a day off for high schoolers. They were told at the end of the day yesterday that school was closing and all activities would be cancelled until at least April 14. They will begin an eLearning schedule on Monday and will be expected to be online to “meet” with their classes during normal school hours. M was sad that she won’t get a chance to play tennis, but was sadder for all the seniors who are missing out on their final seasons of spring sports. She said there were a lot of tears from seniors and their coaches as campus shut down.

A few hours later all Marion County public schools were ordered closed beginning today. The archdioceses quickly followed and St. P’s has suspended classes until April 6 at the earliest. I took C and L into school this morning to get all their books, check out C’s iPad, and grad a few assignments from their teachers. They also begin eLearning Monday.

As with everything else that has happened over the past three days, this was not a surprise. But for it to actually happen is absolutely surreal. As we walked through school today parents were all giving each other looks like “Can you believe this is happening?”

Thursdays are a meeting day for S, and she spent literally all of yesterday on the phone, bouncing from one conference call to the next as her health system raced to get policies and contingencies in place. It was a very stressful day for her.

She had been adamant as late as Wednesday that we were still going on spring break. But as the country shuts down that seems less realistic. Her employer is encouraging physicians to cancel plans so they don’t get exposed and put into quarantine in another state/country and not be able to see patients. They can get exposed/quarantined just as easily here but I guess they would prefer it happen closer to home. One of the girls cried when we told them spring break was in jeopardy.

With the girls home and S and I agreeing we should do our best to avoid eating out for awhile, I decided to rush out to the grocery store first thing this morning to make sure we could get through the weekend. I was not the only person with this idea. At 8:30 AM it was the busiest I’ve ever seen my grocery store outside the holiday rushes. The lady who rang me up said the place was a madhouse when they opened at 6:00. The store reflected that: there was almost no lunch meat or cheese, the fresh fruits and vegetables were well picked over. It was strange, though. For every section that was wiped out, there would be another section that had plenty to choose from. We normally drink 1% milk, and it was completely gone. The whole milk was getting scarce. But the skim section was completely full. Good luck finding a frozen pizza.

I saw a lot of people doing what I was doing, securing food for a few days and maybe throwing a little extra in. I grabbed a few extras on proteins that were on sale to freeze. But there were some folks who were panic shopping. One couple had two carts jammed full of food. And I did see one man with a cart that was full of toilet paper, which I found both humorous and sad.

It took me about 15 minutes to get through the line to pay. People were being polite and calm. It could have been a far worse experience.

There’s no evidence that the food supply chain is in any danger. You can never know for sure what is going to happen, but I’m confident while grocery trips may be a little more stressful for awhile, none of us should worry about losing access to food.

Onto sports.

Again, we knew it was coming, but when the NCAA tournament got scrapped I got a little emotional. Some of that was personal and stupid: I felt cheated that this KU team doesn’t get to see what their tournament fortunes held. This was going to be the third, maybe fourth time in my life that KU went into the tournament as the betting favorite.[2] Those teams all came up short. Would this team have been different? I feel worst for Udoka Azubuike, who stayed healthy all season and now doesn’t get to go out on his terms. I’m sad we will likely not see Devon Dotson play for KU again.

But there was also plenty of macro-level sadness. The NCAA tournament, for as often as it floors me, is my favorite event in all of sports. There is nothing like watching basketball all day with that hint of spring in the air. There is nothing like your favorite team making a run over three weeks. And now it’s all gone.

I hoped the NCAA could find a way to simply postpone the tournament and play it later, but I understand why that was an unrealistic hope. Forget all the logistics of gaining access to arenas, blocks of hotel rooms, etc. We don’t know when it will be safe to have large groups traveling across the country again. Even if we knew they could play the tournament in three weeks, how do teams get back in game shape without playing any games?

It’s for the best, even if I hate it. I had this fear that if they continued with empty arenas, important players would start getting sick and that would ruin the tournament, likely forcing a cancellation after games had begun. Or what if they made it to the Final Four and suddenly half of one team was symptomatic and locked down?

Every other sport shutting down is just an extra kick in the nads. I guess we’ll all be streaming a lot of TV for awhile. I made a run to the library today to grab an extra stack of books. Just as I was parking I got an email from the library saying all events it hosted were cancelled. It would not surprise me if most libraries either close or begin limiting their hours soon, thus my trip.

And so begins the strangest chapter in world history of our lives. I think we’ve jumped past 9/11. The entire world is shutting down. All the evidence is that this will pass in weeks, maybe months, and the massive majority of us will emerge unscathed. If it keeps our hospitals open, our healthcare workers functioning, and reduces infections and deaths, it will all be worth it.

I know, right? ↩
1. 2010, and maybe 1986. The 2016 team was the #1 overall seed but that was in a year when there was a big group of good teams at the top. They were just the top team that had lost the least recently to nab the #1 seed.

An Eventful Week

January 28, 2020 / DB

Last week was a little out-of-the ordinary around our house. As I mentioned a couple times, we were on nephew duty all week.

One of my sisters-in-law was matched with another baby boy for adoption and had to go to Florida to pick him up. It was a last-minute deal, so while she hoped to only be down there a couple days, it took over a week to get all the paperwork in order so she could leave the state with her new son.[1]

That meant her first son, who is 3 ½, spent that time with us.

He was/is easy. He’s spent lots of time with us so is comfortable at our house. He LOVES being around our girls. He is potty trained, eats well, sleeps well (with some assistance), and only has a few high maintenance moments each day.

He remained on his normal schedule, so either S or I would drop him off at daycare and then pick him up each day. I enjoy his company but I’m not sure I could have kept him occupied all day, every day in January if he did not have daycare to go to.

The girls were amused by my lack of patience with him. I want to stress again, he’s a really good kid. But, man, I do NOT miss the three-year-old phase when they ask you 18,000 questions, most of which they already know the answers to.

The one that really made the girls laugh was this one, which we did at least once a day. He would ask, in the tone of a kid that genuinely does not know the answer: Uncle D, are you my uncle?

The first time he asked it I said of course I am. After that I would respond in a manner that was not entirely appropriate for a three-year-old.

N: Uncle D, are you my uncle?
Me: What did you just call me? (Blank stare in return.) Uncle D, right? That means I’m your uncle.

N: Uncle D, are you my uncle?
Me: Yes, bud, I’m your uncle. That’s why you called Uncle D, right?

And other variations on this.

Seriously, the girls would lose it every time we had this exchange. It wasn’t that it was annoying. It was that he had already asked me 50 questions while he was sitting at the counter, eating a snack as I made dinner.

He would also ask the girls if they were his cousins, which admittedly is a tougher one since he calls them by name, not Cousin M, C, and L. On nights when he wore me down I wanted to say, “Buddy, we’ve been through this five straight days. You know I’m your uncle and the girls are your cousins, right?”

Kids, man…

The other eye-opener from the week was the difference in how he, as a boy, behaves and how our girls acted at the same ages. He’s a pretty normal kid. But there is sooooo much running around, jumping on things, doing flips, racing up-and-down stairs, etc. The one that killed me was when we would put a movie on in the evening to begin the chill-out process. He would sit stationary for a few minutes. But eventually he would start jumping on the couch, or run around the room, or pick up things and toss them around. Our girls would be active when they watched movies. But it was more making a fort out of the couch cushions, or playing with their dolls while they watched than all this nonsense.

Again, I think I was meant to have girls. Even with all the teenage bullshit we go through every day.

S and I took turns putting him to bed each night. We put him in L’s room – she moved into our bed for the week – and since it was a strange house and strange bed, we would sleep with him all night. One day he didn’t get a nap, so he was wiped the fuck out well before bedtime. I was going to start winding him down early with some books in L’s bed. He jumped up, went head-first into the headboard, and started screaming. There was no blood, so I flipped the lights off, got under the sheets, and hugged him until he stopped crying. Next thing I knew it was 2:00 AM. I rolled over and went back to sleep until my alarm went off at 6:20. It’s been a long time since I’ve slept that long without being sick. It was kind of nice. It also reminded me of those years when I slept with L and would miss all kind of important stuff because I fell asleep with her at 8:00 PM.

But, all-in-all, it was a good week. He was very excited to meet his new brother on Friday night when his mom finally made it home with him. As were we.

The other fun thing that happened last week came on Wednesday. When I picked M up at school, she had a huge smile on her face and said, “Guess what?” I had no idea and said so.

She handed me a slip of paper and said, “I got drug tested today!”

I knew CHS did breathalyzers at school dances, but I didn’t know they randomly tested during the school day. We talked through what she had to do – it was just a urine test – and I asked if she had privacy when she peed in the cup or if they had someone in the room with her. She said she was allowed in a private stall, but asked why she wouldn’t have. So I gave her a lesson on people who buy clean urine to pass drug tests, and how they are often forced to pee in front of someone to prove it is their urine. I didn’t go into men who have fake penises loaded with the clean urine to try to get around that. That was a little too much detail to share with her.

Anyway, she was excited about it. I hope all of our girls are always excited to take a drug test!

She lucked out that the new baby was from Jacksonville, where her parents live. ↩