I’m trying to get back to a Monday schedule for putting these observations together. So only five days have elapsed between when the last one was put out.
This past weekend was the best yet. Warm and sunny all weekend — it felt like the first real weekend all spring. I mowed our grass and the neighbors grass, the girls played outside, Davis came over (it was his birthday on Saturday), and all in all it was just a lovely time. It was a welcome change of pace from the seasonably cold and wet days we have been having.
Mentally that put me in a much better mood going into today, Monwednesday. I didn’t get to see anyone that I knew in person, but I did go for two long walks with a very long 1.5 hour one on Saturday all the way in and around Thayer street to take pictures of the construction. ArtInRuins progress on the redesign has gotten me excited to take more pictures and document change again. I’ll have somewhere nice to put them all eventually.
While walking it was a little disappointing to see so few people with masks on. Granted, I had headphones, a hat, my glasses, and then a mask, so I felt pretty conspicuous as well as a bit overheated, but just because it is a nice day doesn’t mean that social distancing and masks are not required. College kids that are still here are playing beer pong on the sidewalk or in the driveways of their houses. Maybe they do all live together and are quarantining together, but they sure seemed like big groups of kids who think they are indestructible. Don’t I sound like a killjoy?
Work is work but it is satisfying. Home life is mostly pretty good. Again, the great weekend has lifted everyone’s spirits. Today, though, it was back to the grind for Vivian as well, and she was having a really hard time with her Spanish work. She was given a “Quizlet” which is an online quiz tool, where a Spanish word was being spoken (by a robot voice like Google Translate) and she needed to listen and then type out how it would be spelled. Well, she is quite a reader and has a great vocabulary but is still not great at spelling English words, never mind Spanish ones, especially those being spoken by a robotic voice with an accent. I would have been frustrated as well. She was distraught and crying and even hyperventilating a little bit.
My aunt Jocelyn mailed us a bottle of wine on Friday with the promise that more was coming for an entire dinner. Well, it came today, a big package from Omaha Steaks. Quite nice of her for sure and quite a surprise. So you can still send love through the mail.
Had long check in with my mom and dad over a Google Duo video call. It’s something. Difficult to get the girls to interact with it without being self conscious or mugging for the camera (they use it like a mirror with very little sense that someone else is watching from the other side).
Been working on ArtInRuins, as I have said. That’s been satisfying. I would rather work on that for a solid week if I could. I’m learning and applying a lot of new Jekyll/Liquid methods as well as a little Javascript and a bunch of newer CSS things like vars and more Grid properties. That part has been fun, but revisiting and updating my content has been nice as well. While it is labor intensive, adding a little more research, being more consistent with tagging properties and then re-cropping photos has also been very satisfying.
Dare I say the past few days have made me feel like this is all just normal?
My statistic round up:
- Over 30 million Americans have filed for unemployment (up about 6-8 million from last week)
- 3.58M cases globally with 251k deaths and 1.16M recoveries (mortality rate of 7.01%, up from 6.96%)
- 1.21M cases in the U.S. with 69,530 deaths and 160k recoveries (mortality rate of 5.74%, up from 5.67%)
- 9,289 confirmed cases in RI with 296 deaths (mortality rate of 3.18%, up from 3.02%)