Our Coronavirus Social Distancing “Lockdown” Begins
No school. Mandatory work-from-home. No extracurricular activities. Not even church.
Monday, March 16, 2020
- Health Status: No symptoms
- Family Relationship Status: Good
- Fun Events now Canceled:
- I was going to take my daughter to see Wicked on 4/2. We had front row seats. Luckily we can get a refund and I guess we’ll catch it next time.
- My husband was supposed to run a 50K trail race in Indiana this coming weekend. The race is canceled. We are hoping the cabin he rented for the weekend will refund him.
My husband and I are two of the lucky ones who are able to work full time from home. I can’t imagine having to worry about losing my job, even temporarily, and I am definitely thankful I don’t have to try to find child care as child care centers start to shut down.
My daughter K is 11 and in 5th grade. Her school will be sending daily assignments to be done on paper/in workbooks or on Google Classroom. They have a 30-minute live chat session every day with the teacher and other students in the class. So, for now, she’s covered too.
I think it really hit me yesterday how much impact this social-distancing isolation really is going to have. My daughter K was going stir crazy in the house already and wanted to ride her bike. She asked if she could pop over to her friends’ house around the corner to see if they could go riding together. I almost automatically said yes, and then it hit me that wait…play dates and hanging out with friends isn’t allowed. Boy, was she bummed out. In the end, I suited up (aka put on some jogging clothes) and went out with her. We circled our neighborhood a few times, spent about a half hour getting fresh air, bike riding, and me walk/jogging along. It was fun, and likely will have to be repeated many times over the next few weeks to keep us all sane.
Get fit, or get fat?
Being trapped inside/at home for weeks on end with nothing to do except work/schoolwork makes for an interesting situation, health-wise. I suspect that many people (myself included) will have to make a genuine effort to not gain 20 pounds because we’re sitting around all day long and eating all our hoarded food.
I’m a perfect example, actually. I’m not fit; I need to lose about 40 pounds. At least when I go to the office everyday I am walking to and fro, going to conference rooms, to talk to people, or other bits of movement. Working at home? I am apt to sit at this desk in my office and leave it only to refill my coffee cup.
So, I am making the conscious choice to not gain weight during our lockdown, but to use this to my advantage. Maybe during my lunch period, something I normally don’t bother taking at the office at all, I can go for a quick jog. Maybe now that I won’t be dragging home at 7pm after a 10+ hour day, I can take a break at 5pm and take K for a bike ride/jog.
We have a cruise scheduled for the last week of May (fingers crossed that it won’t get canceled). I’m going to go with the “Get Fit” plan.
Save money, or spend a lot more money?
Something else occurred to me last night as I was browsing online for things I don’t need. Now that we’re supposed to stay away from stores as much as possible, will we start spending more money online than we would’ve previously?
Many things would cause this:
Boredom
- Ooh look, a 48-pack of sparkly gel pens is on sale! We have nothing to color, but those should always come in handy, right?
- Maybe the kitty needs a new bed.
Misguided sense of necessity
- A 48-pack of toothpaste for only $40!
- Socks! Socks on sale! We always need socks!
Overestimating family bonding during isolation
- Look at all these board games! We should totally start having a family game night every night while we’re stuck at home.
- 1001 Crafts for All Ages! What a great idea!
Bottom line: Watch the online spending!
In conclusion, good luck to us all. May your isolation be as stress-free as possible, and may your family closeness stay in the green and not progress to the “kill each other faster than a virus ever could” state.
Adventures with the State Lottery
How can you really resist getting caught up in the fervor over the Powerball hitting $440 million dollars? It becomes a state-wide quest – everyone just hoping that they’ll be the one to win those millions and never have to work again. After all, someone has to win, right? Why not them? Why not me?
A year or so ago, I popped into the local convenience store to drop $20 on Powerball tickets and honestly felt so conspicuous and silly, I never did it again. I just knew the cashier was snickering secretly inside as she handed me my auto-generated tickets. (I didn’t even want to be there long enough to choose my own numbers).
This year, I discovered I could buy these tickets online. Online! I couldn’t resist. $440 million, guys, seriously! I went online and created a profile, then bought 10 tickets for the bargain price of $20. One night, one drawing only. I decided to auto-pick 9 tickets, but for the fun of it, I selected the numbers on my 10th.
Have you ever ever suffered from “but what if I change that number and it was the winning number!?!” syndrome? Wow – it’s hard to change those default numbers. What if that was the winning ticket I just messed with? What if $440 million just slipped through my fingers because I changed that 43 to a 19?!?
I purposely did not memorize what the numbers used to be, for the sake of my sanity, and went about selecting my own.
Tomorrow night is the big drawing!
So here’s the fun part. After my online purchase, the Lottery was so thrilled to have me as a captive potential online gambler, that they gave me a $10 balance to play with. That’s right, folks…free money! So I went to the online games screen, which is basically the equivalent of all the scratch-off tickets you want cross-bred with Candy Crush and Solitaire. Basically…addictive online Flash games. For money. To make it more suck-you-in-able, there’s this nifty little feed on the right-hand side updating you that “James just won $5,000 playing Crush that Football!”, “Cindy just won $3,400 playing Queens are Great”, or “JELK3327 just won $10,000 playing Merry Christmas Scratch-a-Sled!”
How can you not give those a try?
So, I happily played away my free $10 – sometimes I won $1.50 here and there, mostly I lost. I played the lowest priced tickets to stretch my balance as long as possible, but no five-figure wins for me. Oh well – it was a fun 15 minutes.
But wow…I can see how that could get addictive.
There’s that feeling of “If I just try one more time…” constantly, and your old pal PayPal (or whatever payment / deposit method you set up initially) is there to pop up immediately when your balance is gone to point out that with just one easy click you can add another $5, $20, $100 and keep playing until your name is scrolling over there to the right.
I stopped. That was last night.
Tonight, I got another email from the Lottery, welcoming me again as an online “player” and giving me 5 free games. That’s right – 5 free games! So I, their potential online gambling addict-in-training, logged in and started to play my free games. I can just picture the marketing team at the Lottery offices rubbing their evil hands together in glee. My gaming fun began. At one point I was up…UP!…$5.85. I was poised to strike it big, to be a right-hand-feed celebrity.
Three minutes later, it was gone, and PayPal was not-so-subtly prodding me to add more, to just try again, one more time. I restrained myself.
Then, it occurred to me that I had, on a whim, bought a $5 scratch-off a few weeks ago at the store…impulse buy. It was a loser, but I remembered seeing that you could try a second-chance by playing online. I fetched the card and found the spot on the site to plug in the codes and was able to play again! This time I was sure to win – positive! I … did win, but the very base prize, which, in second-chance-scratch-offs means I won 6 entries in the “drawing.”
Good grief…what is this now?
After looking around on the site, I finally found it. Each week there is a drawing from the pool of second-chance-scratch-off “losers”. 5 people are awarded $100 worth of … ? Scratch-off instant tickets!
My heavens…It’s a vicious cycle.
So, sometime in the next week, I will either a) win $440 million; b) win $100 worth of scratch-off lottery tickets; c) both of the above; or d) none of the above.
Anyone want to place a bet on which option the odds are best on? Stay tuned!
2018 New Year Resolutions
Time to dust off this website…and some other things that I used to enjoy spending time doing. The new year is dawning crisp and cold (3 degrees! Brrr!) and I feel ready to try to make life fun again.
I’m going to check in with myself every couple of months and see how I’m tracking with these so I don’t forget about them. That’s always the problem with resolutions – you make them and then promptly forget about them by February. I want to really stick to these this year.
So, without further ado, bring on 2018!
Today … I Turn Forty
Kitty Countdown Calendar: Why I Will Never Be Famous on Pinterest
Leave Me and my Phone Alone
Scene: A seafood restaurant
Observation: Mother tapping on iPhone while daughter excitedly points at and chatters about the various fish hanging on the wall.
Assumption: Mother ignoring daughter while checking Facebook and/or texting.
Reality: My daughter and I were looking up those fish online to see if we were right about what kind of fish they were. read more…
“Time” for a New Collection: Bracelet Watches!
“Time” for Something New
*I’ve had week or two with no posts due to some site redesign and tweaking I’ve been working on. I plan to get things back on track in the upcoming week. I appreciate the patience of all my followers!*
So, I needed a new obsession. My friend Jenna Karvunidis has gotten me suddenly ‘into’ pearls, but since I can’t afford to buy every pearl I fall in love with, I was trying to find something fun that I could collect a little faster while I dream my pearls into being.
Browsing around on Amazon’s “Today’s Deals“, the non-holiday equivalent of the Lightning Deals you all know I’m so fond of, I ran across this watch.
Is this not a really cute bracelet watch?
Casual and fun — and affordable!
I paid $8.59 for it and I see it’s down to $6.99 right now!
Book Review: The Heretic Wind: The Life of Mary Tudor, Queen of England
I was looking forward to this book. I’ve read scores of books on the Tudor (and extended) era and Mary obviously is a main character in a lot of them, even just as a background character. I was looking forward to reading her point of view during her reign as queen.
The format was told in first-person from Mary’s POV on her deathbed, with Mary telling a servant girl her story.
Two main disappointments:
1. The bulk of the book covered the time leading up to Mary taking the throne. Once she was Queen, the book felt really rushed and just glossed over her enforcement of Catholicism and marriage to Philip, almost like an afterthought.
2. While most other accounts pretty much support that Mary was self-righteous and crotchety, it did get tiresome being in her head, especially since we only got to spend a small time in her head as Queen, the biggest draw for me to this story.
There were some inconsistencies in spelling and terminology but overall not as bad as some of this type of book. It just felt rushed; too much time spent chatting in “present day” with servants and not enough time recounting actual events. Some pretty big events, like the execution of Jane Grey, were barely mentioned.
What was done well is portrayal of Mary’s sheer misery all throughout her life. You could feel her misery as hopes were pulled up and dashed down. She was miserable and I felt it.
3 stars for content and solid story-telling, but it almost lost 1/2 star for readability.
I may try other books by this author.
Book Review: The Haunting of Brandt Mansion
I gave this one 2.5-3 stars. It was a strong 3 until the last 30% of the book. The book was relatively slowly paced for the first 2/3, but suddenly became a more scene-by-scene action story. I think because the story was so slow to start, by the time to got to the last 1/3, I had no interest in solving the mystery. I’m not sure if it was the characters or just that the storyline ended up kind of blah.
Spoiler alert (highlight to read): A police cover up just doesn’t make a haunting story more exciting; if anything it really jars you out of the horror and fantastical and into everyday police corruption dullness.
Overall the story was well written. Some grammar and punctuation errors and some odd wording here and there. The biggest complaint is that there was SO much time spent on introspection. We’d have a scene followed by pages and pages of Susan trying to figure out what she believes, and what her husband believes, and whether she’ll be believed. It got really tedious.
However, it was a good enough read for me to finish it quickly and I think I’d try another book from this author.