The elephant in the room

 I've mostly talked about personal stuff here, but politics these days is fucking horrifying.Of course, they aren't totally separate. If you haven't voted already, please do so, and I'll be more specific and say vote Biden.

It would have been a cool prophetic dream if it had been the night before

Remember this, when I said work was unremarkable? Ha ha ha, shouldn't have opened my big fat mouth. On Thursday I was told that four of my six teammates were getting fired. Throughout the contract, there's going to be a 25 percent reduction in force and apparently us technical writers are less essential than some people. The team leader is among those four. I'll essentially be inheriting the team. Our responsibilities aren't changing, just the people working on them. 

Obviously my situation is better than the four who got fired, but it still doesn't feel that great. 

It's funny, I've thought of my current job as unusually secure. I was unaffected by the 2018 shutdown because this department is funded by user fees. But I should have thought a bit harder because those user fees are affected by the pandemic.

Like dreaming about a test I haven't studied for, but more personal

Last night I dreamed I was at the Campus Times again. It was production night. For a while I thought I was the news editor, but it turned out to be someone else, some woman I didn't know. The front page was blank and I had been assigned two or three stories for it I hadn't started writing yet.

Part three

We got a car. We've been talking about it for a while. The pandemic gave us the push. We get stir-crazy, and even though we haven't used it to get out of town for a while, it's nice to have the option. As a more practical concern, we used to go grocery shopping several times a week. Ever since the pandemic, we're no longer commuting, and going into a store is stressful. A car lets us make bigger and therefore fewer trips. 

Part two

Work is remarkably unremarkable (on the days when there isn't a kid around). I'm settling into a sorta-kinda-maybe management role. I don't like it. I miss writing. I'm still doing a little of that but I'm doing more speaking for the team and assigning tasks to others. On the other hand, my job has less writing these days than it used to, even for the regular technical writers, and more SharePoint management and paperwork. On the other, other hand, I'm really, really glad to have a stable, familiar, secure job these days, even if it has changed a bit.

Working from home full-time is still rough. Even after all this time we haven't set up dedicated office space. When the pod isn't here, T. and I set up our laptops on the dining room table. When it is, we set them up in the back bedroom. The back bedroom is too small to comfortably serve as an office full-time for the both of us. Even leaving it like that for one of us full-time would be pushing it. We each have carried our laptops to other rooms if we had meetings at the same time.

In other news, part one

This has been an eventful month or two, even aside from the sick kid.

T. was away for about two and a half weeks, from mid-September to early October. She spent about 10 days in California with her parents, helping her aunt move into a nursing home, and then after flying home, she quarantined in a friend's condo until she got a covid test. I single-parented for all that time. She was gone when this happened. Other than that, it went about as well as could be expected. The kid and I missed her but we spoke on the phone almost daily, often by video chat. There weren't any really horrible behavior issues. Even more playdates with the kids' friends than usual. Dinners were simpler.

A vignette: that stomach bug on Oct. 2 was particularly painful, although she never actually threw up. I kept her home from school, but had a slow day scheduled at work except for one time-sensitive document review in the afternoon, so took a chance and didn't call in sick. The kid also reported pain walking. Nausea without actually vomiting and pain when moving were details I specifically remembered from when I had appendicitis. It got particularly bad during that document review, so I had to call my team leader and ask him to finish. 

I called a Lyft, threw together the essentials of an overnight bag including her favorite stuffed animal, and took her to the emergency room. That's never fun. There was waiting, she didn't like the snacks I had brought, there were people with hygiene issues in the emergency room, and by the time we actually saw a doctor her symptoms seemed to be clearing up a bit. The doctor was confident it wasn't appendicitis. There was also a covid test. The kid fought it. It was painful. 

As we were waiting for a cab to take us home, she noticed the stuffed animal in the bag. I explained why I brought it. I think it helped a little bit to impress the seriousness on her. Later that night I was wondering what I should have done differently that day. For a while I couldn't come up with anything. I was able to work and help her with school through most of the morning. Then, in the afternoon, she was painfully sick whether we went to the hospital or not. Once things are bad enough to go to the emergency room, especially these days, you're in the doctors' hands.  A line from Star Trek came to mind: "It is possible to commit no mistakes and still lose," or in this case, have a bad day. "That is not weakness. That is life."

Then, as I was actually putting her to bed, I thought of one thing I wished I had done differently. I wished I had given her the favorite stuffed animal during the covid test!

Taking stock

 Reviewing things, 5 of the past 6 posts have been about the kid getting sick. It's a fairly strong pattern. 

Three unrelated illnesses. None serious in hindsight. Although this one was painful enough for her, and resembled appendicitis more than the average stomach bug, that I took her to the emergency room later that day. And this week's illness resulted in two doctor's visits. One visit Monday because she complained about her ear hurting and in September we had ignored an ear infection for too long so this time we overcompensated, one yesterday for the test. In normal times we might have only taken her to the doctor for the ear infection in September. That's over roughly 2 months. Not great for a kid with no known chronic conditions, but it happens. As far as I remember we were perfectly healthy for months preceding that, but no one keeps track of when things go well. 

The best day of home schooling while working is still not great

The kid has been home with us all week instead of at the pod due to illness. Just a cough and runny nose. We have no reason to suspect anything serious. If these were normal times, we probably would have kept her home Monday, maybe even Tuesday, taken half-days, and sent her to school later in the week. I might have felt a bit bad about that because she still has some symptoms, but time off isn't infinite, right? And she's as perky and energetic as ever, just sniffling and coughing a bit.

Since these aren't normal times, we didn't take any time off this week, we just juggled work and distance learning. It was only really a problem when we both had meetings and she had class at the same time. We also took her to the doctor's yesterday and got her a covid test. I held her down with the help of one nurse while a second nurse stuck the swab up her nose. I saw a little blood on the swab. At 5, she's big enough to really put up a fight when she tries, but not emotionally mature enough to listen when we tell her that this really is needed and the fighting makes it much worse. Or maybe I should be better at explaining things to her, somehow? Or maybe I should respect her wishes and not make her get the test, and explain to her the tradeoffs that would go with it? Or maybe this is just how things work these days.

But speaking of tradeoffs, we also took her to playgrounds several times this week even though we technically had a kid with possible covid. We kept to ourselves as much as possible and had masks on whenever we couldn't but I realize we shouldn't have gone out even that much. But we'd all go stir-crazy otherwise.

What's a sick day? What's sickness? What's a day?

I've been a bit vague on how to handle sick leave for years, since my job has the expectation of teleworking one day a week anyway and some flexibility about what day that would be. But still, in the Before Time, if I felt too ill to be too productive at work, I'd let my boss know, dress cozily, and spend the day at home relaxing. No errands outside the home if at all possible. Maybe I'd log in and work for a few hours but that would feel optional. Illness would be a valid reason to miss meetings and put off (all but the most important) deadlines. 

But now? Who the fuck knows? There's a pandemic going around which can have no symptoms for one person and kill the next person, so obviously we shouldn't leave the house if we have even the mildest sniffle. But these days we try to minimize that anyway. Is it actually a reason to skip work if work was going to be at home anyway? If I cancel all my meetings and no one was expecting any meetings with me that day, am I actually taking a sick day?

And what if I'm not actually the sick person? This post is inspired by my daughter. Today she'd be too sick to go to school in the Before Time. She's just spending all day in bed, and my schedule today isn't too busy, so I didn't take any leave. I still may regret that, though!

All sides suck

"Both sides suck" is said by people who want to sound smart and can't be bothered to earn it. It's so vague it's meaningless. It's trolling that works unusually well offline.

"Both sides suck" because they're led by politicians, which requires an acceptance of compromise and being co-opted by the system.

"Both sides suck" because they're both basically OK with America's system of government and the late-stage-capitalism international order and just want minor tweaks to them, even though they've definitely got worse in recent years and had room for improvement to begin with.

"Both sides suck" because they're made up of people and no one's perfect in this fallen world of ours. 

But if you're willing to consider any details or nuance at all, it becomes really obvious that there are many ways in which both sides do not, in fact, in any meaningful sense, suck.

One and a half days of peace and quiet

The fever passed. We hosted the pod week 2 instead of week 1. It went as well as could be expected. It was loud. Managing the five kids for just half an hour while the pod leader had her lunch break was crazy. Our house isn't well set up for five kids at once, especially not with social distancing, so we had to move some furniture around so they'd have a workspace and improvise ways they could play outside. The office Teresa and I set up for ourselves in the guest bedroom is very cramped. The pod leader does a little cleaning before and after but obviously it's mostly our problem. 

Around Wednesday, Lexie began complaining about her ear hurting. We dismissed this as being caused by excessive headphone use, since she was using them a lot for the online classes, and got out a more comfortable pair. But by Friday evening we couldn't dismiss it any more, she clearly had an ear infection. A secondary infection from the bug last week, I guess. It was insidious how the pain came and went. Friday night she woke us up screaming in the middle of the night, even with painkillers; during the day, most of the time, she was fine. Saturday we thought about getting to her doctor's but didn't get around to it before noon, which is when they close on Saturdays. Saturday night she was just screaming nonstop. Sunday we took her to the urgent care doctor's office not far away. Amoxicillin. No surprise. 

Sunday night and Monday morning she was still a wreck, so we kept her home from the pod. She did the bare minimum of distance learning. I did the essentials of my job and took a few hours off, both to spend time with her and to relax after several rough notes. 

Monday night she only woke up once, briefly, so Tuesday morning we brought her to the pod. We sent her with Tylenol just in case, but weren't too worried, and it turned out fine. Teresa and I set up our laptops and worked across from each other at the dining room table. We had elbow room, literally and metaphorically. 

This morning was the same. We walked together to drop her off. On the way home we ran some quick errands. And then, around 11, we got word that she had got off the waitlist at our preferred school in the area. For hours, my only reaction was "We've finally got a routine that works! We can't change anything!" I eventually was persuaded otherwise by literally everyone, but still.

Fine for modern values of "fine"

 Just to reassure people in case the last post would be scary - Tuesday afternoon or so, A. had a virtual doctor's appointment via Zoom. On Wednesday she had a coronavirus test. The results came back negative Friday. And even if they hadn't, T. and I felt healthy and the three of us have no risk factors. We weren't in mortal danger. We were just stuck in the house for a week with a 5-year-old who had a runny nose and doesn't like distance learning technology.

Of course it happened this way, why would we expect anything else?

We offered to host the pod for the first week. A. is the only girl, and she is new to this school whereas most (if not all?) of the other four aren't, so we thought a little familiarity might help get things started. Also, we figured that any mistakes we made as hosts would be indistinguishable with general problems getting the pod system started. The first day of school was yesterday.

Right around 12:10 AM yesterday, A. woke up with a fever of around 101. She went back to bed relatively quickly, but then woke up again around 2 AM. There's also a runny nose and a cough. We gave her acetaminophen and we don't think this is anything serious, but, of course, we couldn't host a pod of 4 more kids when ours has symptoms vaguely resembling coronavirus. You can't be too careful these days. So around 7 AM, with only about an hour to spare and short on sleep, we got a different family to host, dropped off some supplies with them, and prepared for home schooling while working from home. Yayyyyyyy...

The school is still figuring out how distance learning works. Yesterday there was online classes in the morning. For some reason A. is very shy in most video chat settings but we basically kept her on track. The minimal requirements are very forgiving. In the afternoon she took a nap, and fatigue is a symptom of several different illnesses, of course. 

Pod people

When we thought schools might open physically, we had a tough choice to make. Then they said they weren't opening physically until November at the earliest, so the choice was made for us. We've decided that the best way to handle distance learning, for a 5-year-old, while we're working from home, is by joining a "pod". 

Us and four other families have hired a pod leader from a company that used to specialize in special ed stuff. All the kids are enrolled in the same school, although not all in the same class. It'll be like school was last year, except it'll be at our house for the first week, and other families' houses for each of the following weeks in turn. When it's our week, we'll have to clean the house thoroughly daily after each visit, because of contagion in addition to the usual messes made by kids. When we'll be working, there will be 5 kids ages 5 and 6 in our house. Hopefully they'll be well-behaved. (Hoping they'll be quiet is unreasonable.) We have to take over and watch the kids for half an hour a day when the pod leader has lunch. When it's not our week, we'll take the kid to another family's house. We'll have to pack a lunch for her, which wasn't required at school. A tiny problem, all things considered, but it'll affect our shopping and stuff. We don't have definite plans for when someone has to cancel on short notice due to coronavirus or other infection. And it's only from 8:30 to 3:30 or so, I'd have to check, which is shorter than a workday, so we'll have to fumble around pickup and dropoff. 

This is the best option. It easily beats the following.

• Home-schooling while working from home. We tried that last spring like everyone and it was a nightmare.
• A smaller pod or one-on-one assistance - i.e. nanny, au pair, etc. - would cost more and/or have her in the house even more. 
• Moving to live with our parents and having them help out, like we did over the summer. We can imagine lots of variations on this but none of them would be viable all year long and none of them would let the kid spend much time with people her own age. 

And of course, our least bad option is better than a lot of peoples', since we're working from home and can afford the pod leader. 

Nature's Bounty

 I didn't expect this when I planned the trip to Vermont, but I found myself indulging nostalgia by berry-picking a lot. Blackberries and raspberries grow wild where I grew up. I remember making a meal of them, some summer days. Every day during this stay I'd pick at least a few. Several old patches I remember are gone, taken by a mower as the use of land changed or by changes in the terrain caused by the flood a few years back or simply by time. But there are still lots of little patches all over the place.

Am I working right now?

In the before time, when I mostly worked in the office, I put in about 8 hours plus 15-20 minutes to be safe, called it a full day, and didn't worry about it beyond that. If one day it took me 10 minutes to get lunch and the next day it took me 20 minutes, or if I read an article in between meetings instead of finding something work-related to do, who cares? I've seen my boss's boss's boss do similar things. It would be crazy to worry about that in a job like this. 

But now, who the fuck knows?

Being logged on for 12 hours a day could mean 12 hours of work or 2. If I'm sitting alone and focusing on a document or phone call and the kid is in another room entertaining herself or playing with someone else, then I'm definitely working. If I'm sitting next to the kid and trying to focus on a document or email and she's watching TV, I'm basically working. If I'm playing with her but checking my email every 10 minutes, or trying to focus on work but she's interrupting me every 10 minutes, or I plan to get up for a snack for just 5 minutes but stumble on 3 more things I have to do before I sit down again, then I'm...

If this were optional, it would be awesome

I'm working in a camper. I can see lush greenery on all four sides. When windows are open, I hear crickets and birds. 

My parents say that Vermont has been in a drought, but there have been a couple big storms since we've been here, and "drought" seems to mean something different here than it did in California. Everything is green, except for the berries and flowers. In the shade, even the rocks are green. 

At the moment, my dad has taken the kid up the hill, where I think she's playing with her cousin and their dogs. Or maybe my dad is taking her on a hike up the hill. Or maybe she's taking him on a hike. Yesterday I found the time for that and we went pretty far into the woods. When I was her age glacial boulders were my jungle gyms and I took her to one of them. 

The kid isn't getting absolutely everything I've hoped for out of this (before worrying too much about that I should examine how realistic it was), but she's getting a lot. She's closer to nature than she's ever been and I'm trying to sneak in science lessons here and there. She's getting to play up close and personal with her cousin. They're a little more than two years apart, which is a big difference at this age, but it's still the first time she hasn't had to worry about social distancing since March. She's had many playdates but they were all outside and most were at six feet and masked. Here, though, my sister's family has socially distanced very effectively, so no one is worried about it. 

I'm surrounded by memories of my childhood and early 20s. Yesterday T. and I went on an hour's drive and I could point out factoids about a dozen different homes or places. I wasn't happy when I last lived here, but that's because of where I was in my life, not the place itself. 

I have four bars of wi-fi connectivity, thanks to a signal booster my parents set up when we arrived. Right now the camper is quiet except for the crickets. If it were hotter, I might want the air conditioner on, and that's loud. But it's rarely been so hot that I can't handle turning the AC off for the duration of a phone call. T. has had some technical difficulties both with her work computer and her personal phone, but everything has worked pretty smoothly for me so far.

Why do I feel horrible? On second thought, don't answer that

I can sleep in. (Although I didn't get to today, so that explains today's mood adequately.) Today my parents are providing free childcare and I can look forward to that for most of the next two and a half weeks. Not as much as we got before the pandemic, of course, but a hell of a lot more than I had when not visiting family, with the added benefit that it's with family. I continue to have a job that I like well enough and can be done remotely. I'm healthy. 

In many ways my daily life resembles a vacation. And yet, I'm grumpy and stressed way too much. How baffling, there must be something wrong with me, right?

Calvin and Hobbes

I was looking forward to the kid getting old enough to read Calvin and Hobbes with me. I didn't anticipate she'd want to imitate Hobbes' habit of sneaking up on Calvin and scratching him.

I assumed bedtimes would be easier by the time the kid was 5

The kid has never liked bedtime. I gather that's normal. But it gets weird sometimes.

One of the smaller problems with the pandemic is that the she can sleep as late as hse wants, there therefore stays up later and later. At the same time (since early April, let's say?) but unrelated as far as we know, she has refused to go to sleep in her own bed. We'd read books to her in her room, we'd say good night around 8:30 or so, maybe she'd play with dolls or look through a book for a few minutes, and when she had truly tired herself out she would go down the hall to our room and go to sleep on our bed. When we came upstairs around 11 we'd carry her to her bed and try to air her sweat out of our bed before we got in it. (Those were the good nights. On bad nights, when we came upstairs we'd find her in our bed wide awake and grinning to us.) Around early June we figured out that the problem might be her outgrowing her bed. It was just a crib with multiple modes. We bought her a new one. It was a big project. We got it assembled about three days before we went to California. She slept in it happily those three nights.

We've been back from California for almost two weeks. I expected bedtime problems for the first few days due to jet lag. I didn't expect her to start sleeping in our bed again, but that's what she did last night and maybe the night before.

And then, this morning, I got up at 7 to log in at work. I found the light on in the living room before I got downstairs. She was asleep on the couch. I stealthily took my computer from the living room to the dining room and worked for a good hour and a half before she woke up.

Given that she woke up early, I'm glad she handled it the way she did. And of course this is the least of the problems these days. But it's weird.

"The Gernsback Continuum" is as old now as the stories it deconstructed were when it was new

We flew across the country due to the pandemic, but not to avoid the virus.

T. has fairly good time off by American standards, and mine is probably around average, but "fairly good" and "average" is nowhere near enough to do our jobs indefinitely while parenting. So we stayed with T.'s parents, who could take care of the kid while we worked. We incurred the expense of plane tickets and ran the risk of going in airports and on planes and flying through hotspots - four of them, because direct flights were cancelled on relatively short notice - and endangered the family we were visiting because it seemed preferable to quitting our jobs or parenting and working at the same time.

(There were other options, and maybe we should have considered them harder. We could have looked into some kind of nanny and we still are looking into that going forward. We could be more generous to ourselves with taking time off. We'd max out what we have long before COVID-19 conditions improve, but a day here and there is great. Using it as we need it vs. saving it until we really, really need it is famine logic applied to time.)

We were able to do this and didn't need to take any vacation time. Our jobs both were office jobs until March and working totally remotely had little or no impact on our productivity. The time zone change was a minor problem.

We're considering our options for the coming school year. One of them is going back to California. It may still turn out to be the right option but it's hard for me. It's an alien environment. The hills are brown, rolling but treeless. A neon sign on the way to the airport proclaims "Shasta: A Nationwide Beverage Company". I've never heard of it. A 1962 Impala convertible passed us. In DC I rarely see convertibles, I assume because drivers can't enjoy the open top on city streets. In Vermont you never see old cars because the roads are hard on them.

Its round lights and smooth lines looked like the Jetsons, the 1950s vision of the future. We're living in the future now, when flying across the country during a pandemic to save paid time off seems reasonable.

I thought I was safe

Yesterday Andrew called. Since he's moved up, his senior tech writer position is free. Apparently they're thinking about reorganizing things from the original structure a bit (already?), so there would be a "deputy team lead" position or something. I'm first in line for that position at this point. So far the disadvantages are concrete and the advantages are nebulous. I don't want to be in this job for the next 10 years (why, exactly? Hmmm. Not sure. Might be worth a post of its own), but I'm not sure this is a step in the right direction.

No, I shouldn't

Today around noon we got a request for someone to take notes at a meeting from 2:30 to 4 PM EST today. In addition to being a long meeting on short notice the afternoon before a holiday weekend, we've never had to take notes at random meetings before to begin with.

Andrew's first job as team lead was to take the minutes himself. I never wanted a management job and this is a good example of why.

Should I be mad about this?

Four months ago, I was the senior tech writer out of two. I had been in the office about four years, my coworker, let's call him Andrew, about 1.5. In April new management came in and several more tech writers were hired. When I saw the new org chart later that month or early in May, I was surprised that Andrew had "senior" by his title and I didn't.

I was a tiny bit worried about any reduction in job security, especially with everything else going on these days, but "senior" didn't seem to mean too much, and I could imagine legitimate reasons for it. More importantly, I was glad to not take on new responsibilities, especially with everything else going on these days. Home schooling while working from home and social distancing was hard enough with a familiar job. So I didn't raise it with anyone. I figured I could do so at a periodic performance review if necessary.

Today, we got the news that our team leader was being transferred and Andrew would replace him. That title is more meaningful.

Was I just passed over for a promotion because I'm a parent?

I feel like I'm taking crazy pills

Through my teens and early twenties, I wasn't happy with my social life. I was introverted but also lonely. The early blog posts here would probably be revealing. My instinctive answer to any suggested social outing was "no," either because I wouldn't like it, or I might like it but I feared awkwardness and that was more powerful.

So I became more social. It wasn't easy. I'm still not sure I'd say I enjoy a party full of strangers, but I'm a lot more comfortable and confident in it than I would have been at 25 or earlier. I can make small talk. My instinctive answer to any suggested social outing was "no," but I almost always said, "on second thought, sure!"

But now there's a pandemic which has a good chance of killing you or your parents if you do that. Invitations and suggested outings are still coming, because people have different circumstances and risk tolerances and practical errands distressingly often have a social aspect. My instinctive answer to any suggested social outing is "no," my second thought is to say "sure!", but after one more second, I'll whipsaw to "I guess maybe if it's entirely outside, but really, what the hell is wrong with you for suggesting it?" It's disorienting.

Priorities

Going to stay with the in-laws in California was the best option for our productivity at work and the kid's well-being. Going to stay with the in-laws in California was the best option for our productivity at work and the kid's well-being. Going to stay with the in-laws in California was the best option for our productivity at work and the kid's well-being.

The kid is able to play or do educational stuff with her grandparents or great-great-aunt while T. and I are working, which is great after about three months of working from home while parenting. It's pretty bad for social distancing, though. Or at least, it's not nearly as good as I hoped.

I figured that they're in a rural area, so the family can shop weekly or less and we can stretch our legs in the orchard or at least the big backyard. What's actually happening is that T.'s dad is going to the grocery store every morning to get donuts, a usual treat when there's company that he didn't consider suspending, and I think he usually doesn't wear a mask. T., her aunt, and her mother have got manicures. Saturday and Sunday we brought a bunch of stuff from the shop and storage unit to a community garage sale and spent ~6 hours a day in a semi-enclosed space, intermittently  handling money. Yesterday we hosted a birthday party for the kid. About eight or so guests, only one or two of whom wore masks most of the time.

I really wish I had discussed ground rules before we came or immediately after arriving. At this point, fuck it, the horse has left the stable. To be totally clear, I'm not worried about about my physical safety or my wife's or daughter's. We have no risk factors. I'm worried about the in-laws' safety, though, even though they apparently aren't. I'm worried that we won't be able to get back home in time (if we test positive, we obviously shouldn't get on a plane for a while). I'm worried that we won't be able to see my family and new nephew as currently planned.

We're doomed

We just got word that the one of the two summer day camps we were hoping to put A. in going fully online. Considering how much she loves clowning around on video chats, it might as well be closed. And of course, there's a good chance school will be entirely online in the fall. We're still planning to visit family this summer and that should help, but any time we're around the house for the next 4 months (eight months? 14 months?), we'll be both working from home full-time and trying to parent.

Cautious Optimism

The past couple days have been better than the last week or so. Work wasn't too busy. No tantrums or battles of will with the kid worth mentioning. There was one amusing interruption of a conference call, but she was well behaved except at that exact minute and no one on the call seemed to mind.

I don't know why things went better. That halfhearted attempt at vaguely scheduling "family time"? We wore the kid down? The weather?

We're doing fine except for our sanity

Talking to my parents today, someone suggested moving up to their house in Bethel, Vt. due to the coronavirus. It was just a random thought, but I can't stop thinking about it.

I much prefer living in DC to living in Bethel. I like not needing a car. I like having dozens of options for dinner within walking distance, even these days (they're open for delivery or takeout). Food aside, there's more choices in bars, movie theaters, events, etc. in any city. I like my daughter growing up surrounded by diversity. She's accustomed to races, religions, and gender expressions I didn't encounter until after I graduated from high school. And of course, there's the world-famous tourist attractions we encounter on the way to work or an afternoon family outing. When the kid expresses interest in a historical figure, we can show her the portrait in the Smithsonian.

But T. is worried that DC won't reopen this summer, or even this fall. I don't like that.

The hardest part of the coronavirus for me is the parenting. I feel a bit guilty about this, but of course it's fucking difficult to parent and home-school while working from home. For the first month of social distancing I only worked about 25-30 hours a week, but I've been putting in something more like a full day for the second month due to a change at work. I've been telling myself I only had to juggle everything until summer camp/daycare started. If that doesn't start? If school is still distance learning in the fall? What'll we do?

Going to Vermont might be as simple as getting a car and packing suitcases. There MIGHT be problems with our jobs, but maybe not. Mail can be forwarded. T. or I could drive down here every 2-4 weeks to make sure the house is intact. My parents have at least three indoor pets and T. has allergies, but she's dealt with that before.

We'd be giving up a lot, but A. would get a better education and we'd get some peace and quiet.

Outings

All three of us went to the grocery store yesterday. We're trying to rely on deliveries more - signed up for a CSA, expecting a Costco shipment soon - but we were low on or out of some things that are hard to get delivered. Today, all three of us went to A.'s school to take advantage of their lunch and get a distance learning packet, and in the afternoon A. and I went to a drugstore to get a Mother's Day card and little present for T.

Important business meetings in pajamas

After weeks of working from home and attending online meetings and conference calls, today I had to lead one for the first time. It sucked. Just setting it up was a huge mess. I Googled instructions and found several different ones but none of them applied to the version I was using and it took me way too long to figure that out. Took me literally an hour of troubleshooting and phone calls with a co-worker. Once everyone was finally on the same page, I thought the content of the meeting went well enough, although I'm slightly worried I made myself look like an idiot. Not any specific problems, just in general.

Outings

Today we went to the farmer's market (the open layout of the past has been replaced by one entrance with a handwashing station, one exit, and numerous reminders to wear masks and give people space) and the bodega for some basic shopping. In the afternoon we went on a bike trip. Afterwards I took A. straight home and T. went to a beer store. Then there's a biweekly neighborhood gathering - half a dozen families gather, but, again, try to maintain a distance.

Monday or Tuesday we went out to the bodega for some similar essentials. I think there was nothing in between, not counting walks or playing outside or getting delivery.

The highlight of the neighborhood gatherings is the music. There's a DJ among us. "Don't Stand So Close to Me", "It's the End of the World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine)", "Can't Touch This," and so on.

I hate quizzes like this

What does your choice of mask say about you? A nice neighbor made cloth masks for all three of us and some other people around here too. The elastic on one of them broke quickly, and another has colorful beads on it for A, so I like to leave the one good grown-up one for T. Instead, I usually use a bandanna. Sometimes A. uses a sort of hair wrap of T.'s as a mask. When out and about I see a lot of surgical paper masks and N95 masks, and a few masks like I'd see for athletics in the winter.

Something to be positive about

I haven't rushed anywhere since this started. I've rushed A. through bedtime, because she'd stay up until we went to bed if we let her, but other than that? I don't need to be at work or get A. to school at any particular time. The bus schedule doesn't matter too much if I'm just going grocery shopping, and of course, we try to minimize that. There are no more classes, dates, or events.

I used to get annoyed at A. when she'd take her time like a four-year-old does, walking on walls or experimenting with prickly shrubs, when we had somewhere to be, but now, we have nowhere to be. It used to be difficult to find time for things. Now it's a struggle to fill time. Before, I'd try to channel A.'s free time into edifying activities, or at least games I understood. Now, fuck it, whatever keeps her busy, as long as it's not actively harmful.

I feel like I should enjoy the free time, but I don't. I'd prefer that kind of stress to this kind.

Competitive Introversion

I'm not socially distancing enough and I feel bad about it. On April 15 I went grocery shopping and got as much as I could carry. On April 21 I went out twice (the post office, for tax stuff and to send out paperwork for a refund for a trip that didn't happen, and the liquor store for liquor and some simple groceries) and T. went out to pick up takeout. We just had a farmer's market delivery. If our stocks hold up, we won't have to go out again until April 28 or 29. Four outings in two weeks, doesn't seem too bad considering where and how we live. Meanwhile, we've been on bike trips and walks for fun and exercise, but nothing that would put us within 6 feet of another person.

But then I talk to friends and they've managed to rely on grocery deliveries for a full month! How? What are we doing wrong? We sort of took the kid on a walk with one of her friends and the other mother was more vigilant than we were about keeping the kids apart and not touching the same things, why don't we love our daughter enough?

This is really not normal

In late 2016 and early 2017, "this is not normal" was a mantra among my friends and neighbors. It was inoculation against gaslighting, a reminder that other people had the same concerns as us about the direction of our government.

We need no such reminder now. It's obviously not normal to wear a mask when grocery shopping, or to wear one pair of socks per week, or to work evenings and weekends (obviously, it is for some people, but hasn't been normal for me in a very long time), or finish my World of Warcraft weekly chores in four days, to have a swing in the door frame between the kitchen and dining room. 

The job

Since 2016, I have been a technical writer as a contractor in an IT office of a government agency. I would work on regular reports to the customer, manage the wiki, and turn ad hoc notes by engineers into SOPs or similar documents. Around the end of 2019, my job's contract was awarded to a different company, and they made me a job offer. My transition date was scheduled for mid-April. Here's how things were supposed to go. I would get paychecks from a new company and there would be a transition period as things were reorganized, but the actual job would change very little. An orientation at corporate HQ, maybe a few days working there or at home as access was sorted out, a new manager, new links to bookmark and acronyms to memorize, then back to normal.

Here's how things actually went. My new company sent me a laptop, which was an unexpected concession to the new reality. Yay. However, I cannot use it to access the government agency's network. So far it's only good for HR stuff, the corporate email which is separate from the .gov email, and certain apps like Teams. I still have to use my personal computer for everything else. If I want to do everything else while using these things, I have to set up these computers side by side. This is

FUCKING INSANE

Also, while setting up my corporate laptop, I needed my employee ID to log in. After 20-30 minutes on the phone with Corporate IT Person 1, I found that my supervisor sent me someone else's employee ID by mistake. The following day, on the phone with Corporate IT Person 2, I found that Corporate IT Person 1 had given me the wrong kind of RSA key to log on. Then I found that I needed a one-time password, which could only be emailed to my manager. But that's not my supervisor, that's someone else who was tangentially involved with hiring me. They couldn't tell me who. I managed to guess the right name after scrolling through two months of emails. It was a VP of something or other. (Hey, I report to someone up high. Cool.) I eventually got into my corporate laptop. It was only after then that I figured out I couldn't get into the government agency's network.

I'm rapidly losing my patience for the transition process.

Daddy! Look at me! Daddy! Look at me! Daddy! Look at me! Daddy! Look at me! Daddy! Look at me!

Why does a four-year-old need our constant attention? I don't mean that she needs it to keep her safe and out of trouble, I mean, why does she want constant attention? Her pre-K teacher has not mentioned her being unusually demanding. By all indications she's developmentally normal. But it seems like a real struggle for her to go 10 minutes without T. or me paying attention to her. We have jobs and our own social lives, it's a shame our four-year-old can't type, navigate apps, and buy a device capable of wi-fi connectivity on her own.

Quarantine, Day 37

Some numbers: we've invested in a princess pavilion kid-sized tent for A. to play in ($119), the deluxe version of the app her teacher uses for coordination with the class because she has fun changing certain settings ($8 per month, we'll probably use it for 3 months or so), an indoor exercise kit with a swing and a few other things we could mount in a door frame ($250), and rented Trolls World Tour ($19). Also, when the kid was bored and unattended she locked a couple doors we didn't have keys to and we had to hire a locksmith to for them ($135). We've used marginally more dishwasher soap due to lunches at home.

Savings are harder to quantify but in theory I could do it if I tried. Hard to say how much commuting used to cost, considering I usually bike and T. sometimes walks, but it now costs nothing. Making lunch at home is cheaper than buying it near work. Costs of dishwasher soap were probably balanced out by savings on laundry detergent. Plus, of course, reduced chance of getting COVID-19.

I focus on numbers because they're easy and simple. I couldn't even put a number on the stress that's driving T. to take her own temperature daily, or the rift between A. and her friends because four-year-olds don't really know how to handle social distancing, or the delays in her education (realistically, she'll be fine, but some of her classmates won't), or the minor technical difficulties to my job.

Realistically, we'll be fine. T. and I both have jobs that can be done from home, we have none of those preexisting conditions that apparently make COVID-19 lethal, and our friends and family have a sane approach to this stuff. But reading the news, talking to friends, or venturing more than a mile from home, it really looks like the end of the world sometimes.