Photo by CDC on Unsplash
Monday starts my family’s fifth week of staying home (and fourth week under a formal stay-at-home order). Other than daily walks and occasional (rare) trips to the store to pick up necessities, my whole world has been the Chicago apartment we’ve lived in for the last half-decade-plus.
And my life has been pretty devoid of blogging.
You’d think, with all this spare time, I would have plenty to say here. (At the very least, I owe a book review of First Nephi: A Brief Theological Introduction, which I finished reading weeks ago. Spoiler alert: it’s amazing, and you should get your hands on it for some quarantine reading. But I’ll do a fuller review in the near future.)
Except, it turns out, I don’t have the kind of spare time, let alone the motivation, to blog.
I still have to do my job. My wife has to do her job. And I’m lucky that I’m the kind of worker who can work from home, especially since every law school in the country is finishing the year with remote education. But I’m still preparing and delivering my classes. I’m (theoretically) researching and writing.
On top of that, I have three kids who are also learning from home. Now, I’m a big proponent of public schools, and for my own personal reasons, have never had a desire to homeschool. And I’m not homeschooling—my kids’ teachers are providing work and instruction. Still, I’m the frontline person here. My oldest two are fairly self-sufficient, but I have to monitor and actively help my youngest. And in recent days, I’ve helped teach my kids, among other things, experimental probability, molarity, and volume of liquids, in spite of the fact that I haven’t taken a math or science class since, um, high school.
And that’s not to say I’m not exercising self-care. I practice my various saxophones an hour a day or so. I was running until this week (when it turned cold—it snowed twice this week!). I’m reading to and playing games with and watching movies with my family. Like the rest of the world, I’m making sourdough everything. And I’m trying to keep my cats from destroying everything (like the two bowls they knocked off the counter yesterday afternoon).
I suspect that my cobloggers—and, frankly, a significant portion of the readers of this blog—are experiencing similar things, if not in detail, at least in concept. So stay well, stay safe, and let us know what you’re doing to ride out the COVID-19 pandemic!