May. 21st, 2020

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Over two months of sheltering in place and things are both aggressively normal and very strange. I am missing all the usual markers of time passing, the various school events and volunteer committments and planned vacations and all -- so that the last two months with everyone home all the time feel something like an extremely extended spring break. Yet also not, as there is all the distance learning to manage, and the inability to pile the children into the car and go to the beach or a playground or anywhere else.

My children are finished with school the first week of June, and I am not certain what will happen then -- our county is being very cautious with the re-opening, as well they should be, and even if in-person summer camps become available I am not sure how I would feel about them. But I do worry for my children, going so long without seeing any of their peers, learning by osmosis to be frightened of contact with anyone outside of their family.

I feel like I ought to have more free time with the vanishing of all my previous external committments, but as it turns out, managing my children's learning takes a great deal of energy, plus the usual things of meals and chores and managing the household -- keeping up with the pantry/refrigerator and making appropriate shopping lists is suddenly much more work than it once was, and ditto such things as keeping everyone in toothpaste and reasonably well-fitting clothes & shoes. I am extremely lucky in that none of it is impossible, merely time consuming, but it does consume the time and with what is left I find myself more often playing iPad games than reading or drawing or (more to the point) writing all of the things I want to be writing.

Which is not to say I haven't read a thing; I read the marvelously trope-tastic Gideon the Ninth in April, and adored it utterly and had a book hangover for days because all I wanted was more of that, rather than anything new. More recently I have been reading a great deal of letters; I finished Julia Child's with Avis DeVoto and am very close to (at long last!) finishing the two enormous collections of Mitford letters that I started a few years back. Once done with those I may read some Mitford biographies, if I am still in the mood -- luckily the library has plenty to choose from.

How are all of you in this month of May?

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