I'm being a little dramatic on the "lock down" part of my headline here, but we have been under "stay-at-home" orders since the middle of March due to a terrible coronavirus that burst onto the scene (aren't I making it sound like a cool new K-Pop band?) back in the late fall over in Asia and made it's way to Europe and the United States earlier this year.
As much as I love to travel, and as much as I seem to really enjoy people... I'm actually an extroverted introvert. So the idea of being stuck in my house for months was actually VERY appealing to me. What? I get to stay at home and watch TV and don't have to bother with other human beings? Yes, please.
That is... of course... if I could actually be stuck in MY OWN house with MY OWN stuff. Instead, I've been stuck in various AirBnB apartments around the Boston metro area living out of 11 suitcases. So this has really been less than ideal for us. And let me be clear- we are lucky! We are healthy and employed. Well... I am now RE-employed, so let me start with that part of the story.
As news broke that we had our first outbreak of COVID-19 in Massachusetts in early March from a conference that (ironically) the biotechnology firm Biogen held in late February, the panic sort of set in. And it hasn't really let up. I took this picture back on March 11 and all hell broke loose the next day.
I took this picture the very next day at Shaw's in Ashland. Time to panic-purchase all of the bananas!
Massachusetts folk are known to panic-purchase bananas because I took this picture at Roche Brothers in Natick back in 2011 right before Hurricane Irene hit.
But this time, the panic purchasing wasn't limited to produce. It extended clear across the store to the frozen vegetables. And this is pretty much how Shaw's has looked ever since.
Good news though... St. Patrick's Day and spring cookies are still plentiful.
I've never seen lines like this - not even during times of natural disasters or 9/11.
I took this picture on Friday the 13th at Stop and Shop in Natick. The bread aisle was bare and this guy has slim pickings.
I'm gonna digress here, but I'm super mad I didn't take that Purell and my can of Lysol from my desk at Concord Middle School. See, I worked there for about 2.5 weeks. I have been waiting patiently for CDM Smith to hire me (as they keep saying they're going to) but in the interest of self preservation, I needed to find a job in the meantime. So when Concord Middle School announced that they needed a temporary secretary at their 6th grade building for about 5-6 weeks and that they used Aspen for their student management system, I jumped at the opportunity! I won't say what they were going to pay me... but it IS Concord Public Schools, and it WAS 3 times what I made at Vilseck High to do the exact same job, essentially. So, yes please! So I worked there for three days before February break happened (no need to work if there are no students there, so I didn't.) Then I went back to work for a whopping two weeks, when COVID 19 self isolation started. On Thursday, the 12th, the principal made an announcement for all students to clean out their lockers and take everything home JUST IN CASE we didn't have school. The anxiety level of the kids was VERY high. They left school that day not knowing they wouldn't come back to the 6th grade. The principal asked me to come in on Friday so there would be a face there to greet students and parents who wanted to get stuff out of their lockers, but most of the day I sat there and didn't do much. I don't have any books with me... because they're on a boat of course. THIS is what I spent my time doing. Shaw's Monopoly game. Which makes me pretty much the lamest person on the planet.
Anyway to say I never went back to Concord Middle School is probably already pretty obvious.
Well, hopefully this will last me through the self isolation period. Eh, who are we kidding. This might last me 2 weeks.
The first breakfast of self isolation was yummy!
The first week of this mess was kind of like spring break. There was little input from Holliston Public Schools because they were all still trying to figure it out themselves. They hastily put together a little "do these things for some structure" program, but the kids were super annoyed that this wasn't a vacation. I made Todd run out and get some resistance bands and I made the kids do some stretching. Their faces pretty much show exactly how they felt about it.
I'm sort of glad I saw this coming, because I had ordered some workbooks for Grant off of Amazon including a spelling book, a timed multiplication table book, and an all-around 4th grade workbook for all subjects. He also did a little work that the school sent that first week. Over time, the schools were more organized and provided more challenging work, but it was pretty much left to the parents to teach all of it.
These were the country's statistics on March 16. If you're reading this, you know they went much higher.
At the very least, when we lived in Holliston, we had little bursts of happiness when Seamus would come outside and we could go play with him. At first, he would bark at us a lot. But eventually, that sort of stopped. He really was the cutest dog!
Do you want to know what we really did in our self isolation? We went on a LOT of walks. And we ate a lot, to counter that. This was our first ever walk in the 2020 self isolation period.
In March, signs of spring started to emerge.
For St. Patrick's Day, we had some Guinness and watched Death Cab for Cutie's Ben Gibbard sing us some songs.
This isn't my photo, but as if this month wasn't already batshit crazy... Tom Brady left the Patriots... FOR THE TAMPA BAY BUCCANEERS!!!! I can't tell if my Dad had something to do with this from the Great Beyond, but perhaps! Or as my friend James in Germany says, "That's SUSPECT!"
This year has been so absolutely weird that Todd and I have a silly theory that on our flight back from Germany, we actually crashed and died - and we went to The Medium Place. If you don't get that joke, you HAVE to watch The Good Place on NBC. We certainly aren't in The Bad Place because no one is tearing off our skin, but things are just weird here. With this pandemic, people are dying and everyone is in self isolation and we have been living out of suitcases for months and Tom Brady left the Pats... but not only did he leave the Pats, he went to the Bucs! My hometown team! This is just a "new realm of mediocre existence." A real purgatory.
We watched a lot of movies, including Wonder Woman.
Do you know what else we did on this day? We signed the purchase and sale agreement on our new house in Ashland! But when do we close? In more than two months. So we get to live out of suitcases for TWO MORE MONTHS. Purgatory.
Grant played with Seamus a lot. He always seems scared of Seamus, which is super funny because he's the sweetest dog. But he's big, so I think that worried Grant. It's probably why he loves little dogs, like pugs.
Mike and Erica paid the kiddos to clean leaves out from their flower beds, while Seamus got paid in dog treats to supervise.
And in true Massachusetts fashion, it had to snow in late March (and it wouldn't be the last time!)
Nobody left the house, except for walks, but Todd had to go out once a week to do some grocery shopping. JUST once a week. We definitely could have gotten away with going less if we lived in our own home, with a big deep freezer in the basement. But we didn't have that here, so Todd had to go once a week. When he gets home, we wipe down all of the groceries with Clorox wipes, just to be sure. We probably don't need to do that, but we do it anyway. Grant has asthma, so we aren't taking any chances.
In late March, I got some bad news, and I took it kind of hard. My family literally rallied around me and I love them very much. I wouldn't want to be stuck inside with anyone else!
Finally, the Holliston public schools released their Remote Learning Program, and the kids went back to work. Here is Grant on his first ever Zoom meeting with Mrs. Spino's 4th grade class. Please note the pajama pants he still has on! This whole thing was kind of hard on Grant because he didn't really make super close friendships with the kids in his class as he had in Germany. Natalie made immediate friends because of a bond over Korean pop music - kids that months later, she was still talking to, despite not having been in an actual classroom with them. That's absolutely the difference between my kids. Natalie is me, Grant is Todd.
One good thing that came out of this was that Natalie learned how to wash dishes! We paid her, but she actually did a really good job every night after dinner, doing everyone's dishes because we didn't have a dishwasher here in Holliston.
We went on a LOT of walks during our self isolation, but nice days were few and far between in March, as they usually are in Massachusetts. Here we are on the Holliston rail trail, heading north toward Sherborn and Grant challenged Todd to a sprint.
Sherborn, COME ON! You're literally one of the wealthiest towns in Massachusetts and THIS is how we found the rail trail in your town?? So disappointing.
Mike and Erica had a really nice house. When we came back from walks on the rail trail, we would walk up their long driveway.
Seamus was also there to greet us at our back door. Hey guys? Anyone wanna come out and throw a ball around?
I got to Zoom with some of my Auburn besties - in this shot, we just have Ayala, Lisa and Stacie, but Kelly and Hope were also on the call (I could only see 4 faces at once!) We did a virtual happy hour- something many people have been doing to help their sanity during these crazy times. I also started doing a Tuesday evening FaceTime with Kristin and Jen (you know... from London and Amsterdam fame on this blog) which would make me pee my pants with laughter if I hadn't had surgery to correct that!
I also started doing a daily post on Facebook that told everyone what we did that day. Largely, it's not exciting at all, but it's a nice reminder for when those Facebook memories pop up many years down the road, assuming Facebook lives that long. On this day, I saw a cardinal that I named Charlie - one for my Dad, because cardinals are representative of someone who has passed away, and Charlie was also the name of the mascot from Ball State, where my dad went to college. Plus, my friend Charlie Sill, who I worked with at The Weather Channel was battling cancer, and hospice had just begun their work at his home.
Additionally, Grant made this great work of art. He said it was a "fox getting a giant wild raspberry." I say it's a superhero fox getting a giant pink gumball!
I must say, if there has to be a "one good thing" about being in self isolation, it's that people have a LOT of time on their hands to make memes! The memes have been killing me - so funny!
And we're on to April!
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