January Blues

Have I mentioned that I hate January? It's my least favorite month of the year; February is a close second and only gets the edge because it has fewer days. I hate the snow, I hate the cold, I hate the gray skies. As I type this in my living room, I'm wearing a scarf, am wrapped in a blanket and have a space heater pointed at me.

Maybe if I cranked up the thermostat to 80 then I'd be comfortable, but not at the current 69 degrees. Then again, when the temperature outside is in the teens or 20s -- or in the single digits as it's supposed to be later this week -- I think it's a lost cause. And there was more snow on Sunday and then again on Monday. I'm fondly remembering that winter a few years back when we never had to get out the snow shovel.

Other than the weather, things are proceeding normally. The kids' school has remained open as scheduled since the one cancelled day earlier in the month. I have some almost monthly freelancing work lined up for the rest of the year, so that's exciting! Oh, and Edith and I are taking self-paced piano lessons through an app on our tablets -- more about that in a future post. But mostly I'm looking forward to the day when I can sit on the front porch, watch the leaves wave in the breeze and enjoy some warmth and sunshine.

The Season's First Real Snow

A long weekend off, and it's not even COVID-related. Monday was the MLK holiday, of course, and the kids have today and tomorrow off for teacher work-days. As luck would have it, the break coincided with the first significant snowfall of the season.

The snow started Sunday evening, and it was deep enough by Monday morning to shovel the driveway. As unluck would have it, I scheduled Edith's annual check-up on Monday morning, and we had to leave by 9:45. But she was soon playing outside in the snow, and our front yard has quite the little hill that they and Paul worked hard on this afternoon. (I, as usual, stayed inside where it was toasty warm.)

No doubt they'll be out again today, and hopefully the roads will be a bit better since we have to drive to an appointment with the dentist! I wonder if yesterday would have been a snow day had it been a regular school day. Either way, hot chocolate was had by all.

Preparing for Remote School

Back to the real world this month, but I wonder for how long.

We had a lovely two-week vacation for the holidays -- even Paul took quite a few of those days off of work. We visited my family the weekend before Christmas, had Paul's sister and her family over on Christmas Day, and mostly hung out at home each day in between and since. No big New Year's Eve bash, of course, but the kids were excited to stay up til midnight to watch the ball drop, no matter how many times we told them how anticlimactic it is!

But COVID continues to spread, and a number of Columbus City schools were cancelled for one or more days during the week after New Year's. Ours wasn't among them ... until last Friday. Earlier in the week, students at many schools were learning remotely, but on Friday classes were cancelled full-stop for everyone.  I'm preparing myself for a last-minute call that could keep the kids home for days or weeks, and I check my phone for messages before I even get out of bed each morning.

Rapid tests are difficult to find -- I managed to snag two when I went to the library at opening last week, but they were out by early afternoon. Par for the course around here.

Sigh. So it is in the age of a pandemic. Who would have thought two years ago that we'd be right here today?

(My apologies! There was a different version of this post that I meant to publish last Tuesday, but I accidentally scheduled it for the wrong day!)