Isolation Report, Week #5

[You could also read last week’s report, or even start at the beginning.]



This week didn’t get a whole lot better.  But primarily I blame that on the return of the rain.

You may recall me whining about the rain before.  On March 10th, which was a Tuesday (if this is week 5, that would have been week 1 ... the week that I actually made it to the office one day), it started to rain.  It was supposed to rain for 8 days; it did rain, off and on (but more on than off) straight through to the end of week 2 (so closer to 13 days, although maybe there were one or two days in there when it only drizzled or something).  Again, it may seem to some of you that I whine over trivialities: were I back in DC, for instance, it would have nothing unusual in the least to see rain for the better part of 2 weeks.  But I don’t live in DC.  I live in southern California.  You know why I moved to southern California?  To get away from the damned rain.  (Okay, there were many other reasons too, but let’s not ignore that one.)

Week 3 was dry, but still overcast and unseasonably cold.  Week 4 it started to warm up, and we actually got some decent swim time in.  I actually did some laps in the pool, which makes me feel a tiny bit better about laying around the house all week.  Then on Sunday it started raining again (as I noted last week), and it racked up another 6 days: it was still coming down pretty hard Friday night when I went to bed.  Yesterday and today have been a bit brighter, granted, but I just don’t feel inclined to trust the weather at this point.

Tendency toward depression is only compounded by dreary days when you can’t really go outside, even moreso than usual these days.  There’s a lot of sleeping odd hours in my house these days, and I’m starting to worry about people, myself not least of all.  I’m mostly staying focussed on work ... mostly.  The Mother declared it to be “spring break,” so no homeschooling this week.  This gave her time to concentrate on the fact that her baby sister was having her own baby (her first, even) in the midst of all this (life goes on, as they say), and the younger two kids have mostly spent the time digging out old videogames (and entire game systems—the PS/3 has been hooked up again, the Wii was out, and I won’t be surprised to see the Gamecube next) and rediscovering old classics.  My putative sister-in-law did deliver her girl, by the way: over 24 hours’ labor and over 9 pounds, but completely healthy and not seeming to notice that she has entered the world at a somewhat ... challenging time.

Grocery shopping is not getting any better; after a surprising uptick in week 2, it’s been constantly devolving into a queasy soup of restrictions and paranoia.  The first couple of weeks there was a bit of a feeling of camaraderie with your fellow shoppers ... a touch of “hey, we’re all in this together.”  There seemed to be precious little of that left when The Mother and I went out on Wednesday.  We specifically set out to get 2 weeks’ worth of groceries so that we can skip it altogether in week 6.  The Mother may have to do one more Costco run, and I’m sure she’s not looking forward to that, but the online delivery service reports that it’s already all booked up for the week.  So I fear we may be stuck with it.  Maybe they’ll have toilet paper.

Sorry.  Bad joke.

The one bright spot for me—not so much for The Mother, granted, but she has a new neice to long-distance-dote on—was another installment of the Family Campaign.  So far, we’ve done “flashbackstories” for everyone, and we had the initial “you all meet in a tavern” session (I put as much of a twist on that as I could, but it’s a standard trope for a reason), but this is the first actual “let’s travel together and start to get to know one another” type session.  It was a lot of fun, and I didn’t get nearly as far as I’d hoped, so we’re going to do another one next week (and then we’ll go back to doing some other campaigns to give me time to gen up some exciting bits for the next leg of their quest).  This was a nicely balanced session, I thought: some shopping, some fireside chats, some revealing character moments, some traveling-can-be-uncomfortable moments, and finally a good old-fashioned ambushed-by-bandits encounter (only this one was on a river barge, adding the extra danger of possibly falling off the boat into the strong current).  It was fun, but there’s more to be done before they get on the ship for the month-long journey that will take them to their final destination.  So I’m looking forward to next week, and hopefully the 3 of them are as well.


Enh, that’s enough for this week.  This was supposed to be the worst week of the crisis, so it’s all downhill from here, I guess?  We shall see.



[Update: It’s now Sunday night and it’s started raining again.  Shit.]