Today marks a year since we began quarantining to avoid COVID-19. It’s been a weird year. I started working from home immediately, while it took 6 weeks for actual distance learning to start for my daughter. My wife lost her job at an elective surgery center, but quickly got one in a hospital.
Our normal summer of camps and concerts was cancelled, replaced by virtual ones. Frustrated by the lack of live, loud music, I was inspired by the story of a socially distanced concert at a drive-in to start hosting concerts on our boat on our lake. I only did 3 shows, but I was happy that other folks around the lake hosted some as well while the weather was nice.
My daughter was ok with the virtual camps, but what saved her summer was forming a masked pod with 3 other neighbor girls. Every day she had a Zoom camp in the morning, then we had a friend come over and babysit the girls. The relationship between the girls has thankfully continued and they play together just about every day as my daughter prepares to return to school.
One nice thing about working in my home office by myself is being able to listen to things. After spending summers as a kid mowing lawns listening to loud music, I can’t use headphones for very long, so it was nice just to use speakers. After about a month, I started listening every day to a live show I’d been to close to that date, and posted them to Facebook (and later my blog). I also started listening to all the talk shows I watch (The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, Late Night with Seth Meyers, The Daily Show with Trevor Noah & Full Frontal with Samantha Bee) while I worked (later after school hours when I found out we didn’t have enough bandwidth to do that while my daughter was on Google Meet).
With no talk shows to watch in the evenings, I started catching up on TV I’d been meaning to get to (loved Watchmen, The Boys, The Mandalorian & Barry), then went wayback, watching all of Star Wars: The Clone Wars (some crucial backstory for The Mandalorian) and am now finishing off the Stargate franchise (I’d started before Nina was born, have finished Stargate SG-1 and now on Season 2 of Stargate Atlantis).
Not only TV shows, as I’d only seen 4 of the Marvel movies, and started watching them from the beginning. Time well spent, and nice to see how they all connect (favorite: Captain America: Civil War – better Avengers movie then Avengers: Age of Ultron). I moved on to the X-Men series next (almost done, Future Past is my favorite so far, followed closely by Deadpool), and then plan on working my way through the DC films.
As I mentioned in this post, I’ve been working my way through my unconverted miniDV tapes of concerts I recorded between 2000 to 2009. I’m now up to the summer of 2005, and you can see my progress at YouTube and the Live Music Archive.
My family loves to eat out, and we’ve only managed to eat out a handful of times. But we’ve been supporting restaurants by getting takeout every Friday (we rotate choices). We’ve also recently started having a family night on Saturday – the last 3 choices were jigsaw puzzle (wife), 2 episodes of Legend of Korra (daughter) and Pixar’s Soul (me). We had some vacations planned and those were cancelled; instead, we spent almost a week in Bethany Beach in August when the numbers were good, and spent 2 weeks at Christmas at home.
I love to cook, so not too much changed there, other than I took advantage of the sourdough boom to start making white bread for myself (being on a low sodium diet wasn’t giving me lots of options). My wife asked for an air fryer for her birthday, and for fans of fried food like us, that’s been a godsend.
My wife has been vaccinated, hopefully I will be soon, and as soon as one is available for my daughter, she will be too. We’re looking forward to normalcy as 2021 continues.
