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.