More Physical Media

 In the spirit of my post from last week, I'm thinking about this article, suggesting that we print our blogs before they disappear into the technical ether. 

Thinking really hard about making this happen...

Comet Neowise

 I want to share some of my favorite pictures of this past year. Right before we went up to Camp Van Vac this year, news broke about a comet that would be visible to the northwest, after sunset. I knew that this would line up perfectly with our nightly sunset watch and it did. We dutifully went out several nights and saw it. I got to play with the nighttime settings on my camera and I got this dandy. 

Thanksgiving

 I don't know if I've done a "things I'm thankful for" in a long time - or ever. Today seems like a good day to change that. I'm thankful for:

• My family, of course. I'm thankful for my children who are (often) wonderful. And my lovely wife. This past year has been a taxing one, with all of us stuck at home together. But I've come to appreciate them more than I think I would have if this was a typical year. (I'm also thankful for headphones, both theirs and mine.)
• The family I don't live with. I'm thankful for my brother and sister, who are both wonderful people. I'm thankful for my mom, who is also wonderful. I don't get to see them nearly as often as I'd like to and this year drove that home. The same is true of my aunts and uncles and cousins and so on.
• My friends, who I'm still attached to thanks to social media. Places like Facebook have their downsides but being able to quickly talk to so many people I hadn't seen in years is great. And I get to do this every day if I want.
• My health. In this year, with rampant disease, we healthy people should all be thankful for what we have. And I am! (Thankful that my family has been healthy as well!)
• Our modern world. There are so many modern things that have made staying at home easier than it would have been. Thirty years ago we wouldn't have been connected with each other or to easy entertainment. Food delivery was a thing but nearly as robustly as it is now. Same with other deliveries. 

It's been hard but not unbearable and I'm thankful for that.

Time Passes

 One of the strangest things about being stuck in the pandemic is how completely unhooked from the normal passing of time I've become. Before the plague struck, the routine was largely:

• M-F, everyone leaves in the morning and comes home in the afternoon. We spend the evening together (over a shared meal or otherwise) and then go to bed with some thought to the next day.
• Sat/Sun, usually an outing. Possibly out for breakfast or brunch. Watch a sporting event one of the afternoons, possibly both. Sunday night has a feel of getting ready for the next week of work or school.

This is no longer true. The FP Gal and the kids still have school and work but it's different. No one leaves home so it doesn't feel like they've broken away to a different thing. They simply go down to their various rooms and do their thing. The kids filter up at various times every morning and I try to keep the boys quiet. I see the ladies at lunch and again later in the afternoon when they're done with school for the day.

In the evening we may or may not eat together. (My kids are now all expert in getting their own meals ready.) During screen time the kids disappear, giving me the much needed mental break of not trying to keep them quiet. Then bedtimes happen and their day is done.

Sometimes I feel like the lotus eaters from the Odyssey. I don't have quite enough time to launch big projects of my own so I nibble at smaller things. A few times this year I've gotten hooked by a large book but those times have been rare. Usually I simply can't concentrate for the long times needed to really enjoy it.

The seasonal thing has been harder. The pandemic hit in March and promptly canceled one of the big events in the sports calendar: the NCAA Men's basketball tournament. All of the other sports shut down too, including that annual harbinger of spring, baseball. By the time my White Sox came back it was July and it felt very off. Don't get me wrong, they were a lot of fun to watch this year, but the empty stands made it feel something like a huge succession of practice games.

More recently, we had a huge snowfall in October, the largest in recorded history for our area. We had significant snow on the ground and it felt like winter was starting six weeks early. The snow did melt as we had a very warm early November. In fact, here we are on the day before Thanksgiving and the ground is still clear of the white stuff. Which is fine with me, but it's still messing with my mental calendar.

Celebrations are all wrong, with only immediate family able to attend. We aren't driving to see family on any of the big family holidays. We aren't gathering together as a community to watch fireworks. There are no parades. All of the special things are . . . different. (I don't blame the planners, things are different. But that doesn't make it easier.) 

I'm sure when we look back and try to communicate this era to later people, this will be the hardest thing to explain to them. Yes, we were afraid to be sick. Yes, we were uncertain of what measures were needed. We were especially uncertain of how much of the measures were needed. But for me, the hardest part has been the passing of time. Internally, I don't know when it is. 

Maybe even more importantly, I don't know when I ever will again.

Status Updates

 It's been so long since I've written anything that I should probably say something about how we're all doing. 

Relia is now a teenager. She has a good, tight group of friends with which she is in constant contact. They're all good people and I'm very happy for her. She is artistic and capable and frustrated whenever she's told she can't do something Right Now. I'm impressed by how she will decide on a project and then jump right into it. At the moment she is leaning towards being a psychologist (psychiatrist? therapist?) and I'm sure she'd make a great one.

DF is ten and loves gaming. He plays video games whenever he has a chance and is thinking of going into the field someday. In many ways he is a copy of me. Physically he looks like my younger twin, except he started growing his hair long at a much earlier age than I did. I'm sometimes frustrated that he isn't reading the same books that I did at his age, but he is a reader. In third grade, he tackled all of the Harry Potter books. When we told him to stop after the third one, he checked the fourth one out of the school library and quietly advanced on his own. 

LL is eight and I think the Covid has been hard for him. Second and third grade are a prime time for making friends. It's about the time that kids can push past their normal selfishness and care about how other people feel. He's been spending that time at home with his family and that's made connections with others hard. 

Right now LL likes wearing dresses. We're fine with this (natch) and curious where he'll go from here. His personality has always been stubborn but he's starting to soften. He's incredibly artistic and beginning to love history. 

The FP Gal has been teaching from home ever since March. She's thrived while working via video in a way that I don't know many others have. She likes the medium and works very hard to present things to her students in a way that helps them. I keep telling her that this may point to an educational career outside of the traditional classroom. We'll see.

Me? I'm fine. No, really, I am. I'm something of a homebody so not going out has only been an occasional issue for me. Having everyone home with me all the time hasn't been great but I'm getting used to it. Before the pandemic hit I had trained to be an independent bookkeeper but about the time I was ready to find clients, the economic situation got very uncertain. I still plan to do that but my writing is higher up in my brain. I have the stories and I'm confident in my writing ability. It's just harder to get things down on paper when the house is full. 

And that, as of this moment, is how we are.

New Posts

 Yesterday featured something unusual for this blog: a new post. Over the weekend I realized that I wished that I'd been blogging through this whole pandemic. It would have made for a nice record of this time period. I'm not sure why I didn't. Several people suggested keeping a diary. The fact that I didn't is purely my own fault. When I told this to the FP Gal she simply told me that the best thing I could do would be to start writing now.

Which is what I'm doing. 

I don't want to make the classic mistake where I promise that I'll do this every day and then fail to write a single new blog post ever again. What I'm doing is quietly deciding to bring the blog back from the dead and . . . write some stuff. 

This used to be a habit of mine and I know that people used to check the blog daily to see if anything new was there. Maybe that will happen again, though no promises! In any case, it feels good to do this. 

See you tomorrow!

Physical Media

 This past summer, I read some articles on the importance of buying physical media. Music on CDs, movies on DVDs and books in hard copies. There are several reasons for this, the most pointed one being that we live in an age where various people of influence have started to decree that some of things of the past should be kept away from people of the present. If you don't agree with them and still want to watch 'Gone With the Wind', you cannot depend on it being made available to you. Buy your own copy and the decision is completely in your own hands.

Another good reason to actually own the goods, especially with movies and TV is that we don't know when things will drop off the face of the earth and become completely unavailable. Check out this article about one person's attempt to watch the movie 'Cocoon' earlier this year. It's unavailable to stream and long out of print. (The writer eventually buys a used DVD copy for $25.) 'Cocoon' was a popular movie when it came out. It was the 6th highest grossing film of 1985. There is no reason for it to disappear. 

After reading about 'Cocoon', which isn't a big movie for me, I decided that it was time to grab some movies that do hold special value for me. Older ones, sure, but more recent classics too. Just because something is a staple of cable TV for now, doesn't mean that I won't be hard pressed to find it 20 years from now. As a bonus, this is a good time to find cheap copies of DVDs and CDs, as other people have decided to leave physical media behind.

This is a long winded way of saying that my family got me some DVDs for my birthday, yesterday. Thanks to them, I can add to my home collection:

• Time Bandits
• Good Morning Vietnam
• The Birdcage
• The Social Network
• Interstellar

The last three of these are pretty widely available, often for free. But I don't know how long that will be the case. And now, I don't have to worry about it.