Ps And Q

On Wednesday, the kids were in the backyard apparently engaged in some kind of Jedi and/or stage combat training. The weapons of choice were a plastic pole from Asta's agility set, and a bubble wand. I believe this was in part inspired by Amelia's recent viewing of She-Ra and the Princesses of Power on Netflix. I was a big He-Man and later She-Ra fan as a kid, and had heard really good things about this new series. It won a number of awards and I heard it had lots of great diversity and strong female characters. What I have seen has lived up to the hype and it definitely falls into the category of shows my kids watch that I can like, too. But back to the backyard dojo, watching the kids out there made me think of a scene from the movie, The Mask of Zorro, where the elder Zorro was introducing the training for the new guy, Alejandro. In that scene, the older Zorro explained that the place where Alejandro stood was called the training circle, or Master’s Wheel. He ...

You know, life is kind of like a game of UNO. Fates change quickly. Sometimes a Reverse card gets thrown down and everything goes backwards. Other times you're holding that one last card and poised to win when the person before you slaps down a Draw Four. Other times you get a hand that's all the right colors with ample Wild cards and wam-bam, you win without even inflicting card-drawing harm on fellow players. I suppose in Uno terms, the whole COVID-19 thing was like all of us getting slapped with a Draw Four-Hundred card. Any game plan we may have had up to that card has changed a wee bit since. But hey, we keep taking each hand one day at a time and taking joy in every time we get to sneak in a color change because the card on deck is a red 6 and it so happens you have a green 6. And with that, I've officially pushed the whole UNO analogy as far (and likely farther) than it can possibly go. Now that I've beaten that into the dust, I'll now pivot to a pok...

A few days ago, Amelia was talking to me about how much she missed her grandparents. She said a few things about each set of them, and when talking about Grandma and Grandpa Schneider back in Wisconsin, she listed off some toys she likes to play with at their house. These included an old pedal tractor, a toy stove and toy phone. I told her that I played with some of those toys when I was little. "Boy, those toys must be really old," she said, with pure earnestness only Amelia can conjure. It is true, I am no spring chicken. In fact, my use of the term "no spring chicken" itself an indictment of my advancing age.  It isn't something I think of all that often, frankly. Yup, my beard grows in pretty white, but it's been doing that for a while so I'm at peace with it. Yes, chasing after a puppy and two little kids makes me a lot more winded than the 25-year-old version of myself would have been, but like an aging quarterback, I feel like I try to...

Sunday morning began with two very pleasant surprises. First of all, the kids broke from their usual early morning routine of whining and dragging us downstairs and instead actually went downstairs, entertained each other for a while, and allowed their parents to sleep. This is rare and nearly made me want to weep with gratitude all by itself. Secondly, while I was lazing in bed and enjoying the extravagance of restful quiet, I checked my email and found a rare bit of completely unexpected good news. It reminded me of that feeling you get when you actually pick a good card from the Community Chest in Monopoly.   For a bit of backstory, way back in the ancient past that was January, I started dabbling in screenwriting again. This is a form I’ve always loved and used to play around with a lot, but it had probably been about 15 years since I’d attempted it. Before the world turned upside down. I wrote a little 10-page short and submitted it to a contest seeking stories relate...

Saturday was a pretty packed day. Well, packed in quarantine terms, anyway. For starters, I had to make my weekly supply run and headed over to Trader Joe’s. As always, they had bright, upbeat messages for those of us waiting in line. I was able to resist some of the hoarding urges I wrote about previously and came back with a fairly reasonable haul. There is even a little daylight in our refrigerator and freezer.  A little. But that all went well, and the disinfecting process has been going more quickly and smoothly. Now that we were stocked up for the week, it was on to more enjoyable ventures in the afternoon. The new basketball hoop has been getting lots of use, and it was a beautiful day. Erin was out shooting some baskets with the kids and the continuous roar of laughter from the kids seemed to indicate they were enjoying themselves. A little later, we had two Zoom parties with friends. First was a birthday party for our cousins’ little guy, Finn, ...

When I started this blog, we were still in the heady days of thinking maybe this whole shut down/shelter at home/kids stay home from school thing would last a few weeks or maybe a month. I remember it began with Amelia’s school extending its spring break from one week to two. Writing “Day 40” in the headline feels kind of surreal. Back in those early days, I don’t know that I would have believed this would have gone on for 40 days. And considering that part of my starting this was to try to build a habit of daily writing, I’m not sure I would have believed that I would have made it to 40 consecutive days. So that part I feel pretty good about. Of course, I wish it was under much better circumstances. I’d say that day 40 was much like the 39 that preceded it. There was no pomp or heraldry. Just another day, really. Kids did their thing and played some basketball, Erin and me got some work done and everything went as usual. In the morning, I decided to go for a quick jog. While I w...

Thursday morning started with a good rush of productivity on the work front, and prep for moderating another webinar in a series I've been doing with colleagues around the country. This series began with a bit of a technical train wreck (noted many, many blogs ago) where the speaker got kicked out of the GoToMeeting and couldn't get back in. Since then I've always been a little nervous before doing one of these, but fortunately this one, and the others, have all gone really smoothly and have been well attended. So there's a feather in my cap. Not that I have been wearing caps. Maybe I'll start after another month without a haircut. Don't know if I'll put any feathers in it, though. It’s a bit foppish. Beyond that, the main highlight of the day came when I heard a giant thud at our front door. Amelia and I were downstairs when it happened and went immediately to investigate. It was a rather large box and immediately I was regretting bringing Amelia to t...

Like many days in the isolation of social distancing, Wednesday was bittersweet. OK, it was more bitter than sweet. It feels like we really need to revise that word for the time of COVID-19. Maybe like “BitterBitterBitterSweet” or something like that? Lots of bitter with a dash of sweet? I’m allowing that trace of “sweet” in the descriptor because, as Erin and I were talking about, there are a few bits of silver lining in our current experience. But more on that later. First let’s talk bitter. We’ve known for a while, even going back to the days BQ (Before Quarantine) that some good friends of ours in the neighborhood were moving. Their oldest is in the same class as Amelia, and our families met in the early days of kindergarten last year. Like me, they are from Wisconsin, and it turned out we had all kinds of coincidental connections back home between friends and family. They even share the exact same wedding anniversary as Erin and me. Same date, year, and everything. And they ...

Thankfully, last week's snow is now a distant memory and after a period of being drowned in drifts and then swamped out with water, the backyard is finally nice enough for consistent play for the kids. As I'm writing this, I had to stop and think, "was that last week that it snowed?" It felt like so much longer ago. Time has no meaning anymore. But anyway, it was a nice day and the kids were actually in a generally cheerful, playful mood. Amelia asked if they could eat lunch together outside, which they did. At one point, Amelia stepped away to look at a bird and within a second, Asta had jumped up on her chair and nimbly snatched half of Amelia's sandwich. Guess she likes PB&J too. Oh well. I made a make-up sandwich and lunch continued. Erin and I went crazy and ordered lunch from Chipotle. It had probably been weeks since we had something from anywhere other than our pantry, fridge or freezer, so that felt like a big treat. That's another ma...

The weather has finally been perking up, so I've been trying to get out "running" more often. I put the word in quotes, because at my current post-winter, life-in-quarantine fitness level, what I'm doing out there is probably somewhere in between jogging and collapsing on the sidewalk. But hey, any movement is good and I'm trying to get at least some exercise in where I can. I like to job around this little pond near our house, and this time I was really struck by the amount of traffic on the very busy, 4-lane street by our place. There was none. Usually, I have to do a total Frogger dance to get across this street to the side where the pond path is. But this time I could stand there and take the picture above with no vehicles in sight. Looks like the stay at home orders are really making an impact on peoples' movement. It was peaceful, but also a little eerie. Work was pretty par for the course, and as usual it was a balancing act jumping bet...

The day the kids had long awaited finally arrived. Asta's birthday! Preparations have been being made for weeks. There were decorations, a party hat and even a cool little doggie cookie for the birthday girl. Of course, other than chowing down on that cookie, I don't think Asta has much of a concept of the whole birthday thing. But as I've mentioned in previous posts, finding any way to break up the day to day monotony (in positive ways) is gold, so this was a good way to do it. We planned to do a little birthday celebration with human cake and everything that afternoon. In the morning, Erin and I spent some time doing things around the house and getting things done. We started the day with a delicious brunch. Erin had the great suggestion of trying a quiche with a sweet potato crust, so I went to work on that. The filling had sautéed shallots, garlic, cremini mushrooms, brussels sprouts and goat cheese. Not to brag, but I was quite pleased with how it came out. ...

Entertaining ourselves in quarantine can sometimes be challenging. Thank goodness we have two creative and ofttimes wacky kids top keep the show rolling. At dinner time, Amelia decided to treat us to some magic. She began with some drawing magic, where she changed a circle into a few bananas using the amazing powers of dry erase markers. From drawn bananas, she moved up to the real thing, telling us she would change one banana into many! This seems like a very handy power to have, particularly in our house where bananas are a hot commodity and we’re trying to limit visits to the grocery store. So she waved her magic wand (the aforementioned dry erase marker) and presto! Sometimes the best tricks are the simplest ones, really. When you think about it, what she said she’d do is turn one banana into many, and she did in fact accomplish that. She never promised a puff of smoke, a bolt of lighting or mystic cosmic powers or anything. Other than that, just another day in the ...