I haven’t made a blog post this year. So what’s been going on, you ask? Oh, not much. Just this pandemic. I’m in the midst of my fourth week working from my home office. The only times I’ve been outside the house, except for our semi-regular walks around the block, has been for a couple of early morning trips to the post office to drop off parcels. Both times I went before the post office was open, so I didn’t encounter more than a couple of people, and we all maintained a very respectful distance.
The grocery store we used to go to the most closed in February, before this mess got started, so we did our part and helped them liquidate stock. Turns out that was a wise decision, as we ended up stocking up on all the sorts of things we need these days. Lots of canned goods and pasta, etc.
Working from home has been fine. Turns out I could have been doing this all along, because I haven’t encountered a single thing that I can’t do here that I could only do at the office. Maybe I’ll try to convince the powers that be to let me do this more, once the world flips right-side-up again. My wife also works from home–has done for quite some time. We each have an office, so we aren’t disturbing each other when we have Zoom and Skype calls. For some reason, though, working from home during this crisis seems more intense. I get more done but I’m more thoroughly exhausted by the end of the week.
I’ve been maintaining the same schedule as before the pandemic. Up at 5, exercise while I watch an installment of something on TV. Writing work until about 7:30, shower, breakfast, then head back to the office at 8:30 for the day job. My wife and I have a ritual where she stands on the bottom step of the stairs for a kiss and a hug before I go to work. We’re keeping this tradition alive, even though I’m going upstairs instead of into the garage to drive to the office.
So, how many weeks to the gallon is your car getting? When’s the last time you paid cash for something? I gave my wife all my cash a few weeks ago for one of her excursions and I haven’t bothered to replenish my supply. Maybe we’ll be a cashless society after all this. I think we’re going to discover that we can do a lot of things differently in the aftermath.
We’ve been cooking lots of terrific meals during lockdown. We always did cook a lot at home, although we enjoyed evenings at local dining establishments, too. The only meal we ordered to have delivered was a pizza about three weeks ago. We wanted to support one of our favorite restaurants. However, I’ve been experimenting with pizza crust recipes using a formula provided by a friend of mine, and we’ve made some amazing pizzas. It takes two days to make the crust, because there’s a starter (sort of like you’d use for sourdough) made on one day and, 24 hours later, you make the dough and let it rest in the fridge for another day to let the gluten relax. On the third day, make the pizza. The crust is so crispy and flavorful. Yum. Counting the days until we have the next one!
We’ve also been drinking a lot of wine! My wife picked up two cases of one of our favorite red blends, along with many other bottles. Every day is wine-down Wednesday these days. It is a little hard to keep track of which day of the week it is, but does it really matter?
I don’t think we’ve been watching as much television as a lot of people are. A couple of episodes of this or that during the evening. We binged through Star Trek: Picard and followed that with Star Trek: Discovery (season 1), which I’d already seen but had forgotten a lot about it. I’ve been watching Season 3 of Wesworld (HBO) and ZeroZeroZero (Amazon) in the mornings. We saw the movie Just Mercy the other night, and went down a rabbit hole of consecutive episodes of What’s My Line? from 1961 one evening. One of the guest panelists on one episode was a very young Betty White!
Have not been reading very much. I have to take another pass through If It Bleeds to get my review ready (publication date has been moved forward to two weeks from today), and we’ve been reading a few chapters of The Splendid and the Vile by Erik Larson each evening. It’s about Churchill and his family during the blitz of World War II. We always have a jigsaw puzzle going and, as I said, go for the occasional walk, although it feels strange having to be ever-vigilant about maintaining a safe distance from anyone you meet on the path.
One fun thing I did was to read my short story “Game Seven” from Across the Universe for editor Randee Dawn’s “Stories for Shut-Ins” series. I found an appropriate background and put on my old Howe Hall hockey sweater for the reading, which you can find at that link, along with readings by several of my fellow contributors, with more to come in the next week or so. Or you can go straight to it on YouTube here.
Writing is a little strange these days. Whenever I watch something on TV, I find myself thinking–that’s not the way the world is now. Why are there so many people in that room? Why are they shaking hands? And hugging? It’s hard to figure out what the world is going to look like a few months from now–the world in which the fictions we’re creating now will be set. Sure, it would be easy to back up and set everything in 2019, but it’s interesting, too, to try to anticipate what it’s going to be like in late 2020. Challenging, too. Maybe it’s time to write Fantasy or Science Fiction, where you can not only make up the story but also the world!
