Today is the start of week 5 of working and teaching remotely. I’m now at the point that I actually can’t imagine going back to in person teaching…the idea frightens me right now. I suppose it is because I worry about spreading germs, but I suspect that whenever it is that things go back to normal, we are all going to be pretty weird for awhile.

Let’s focus on the positive today though. Okay, we had a lovely Easter. My parents, siblings, and niece and nephew have all being doing a weekly video chat on Zoom (my niece calls it “roll-call”) and we had a nice time catching up and being silly with Zoom backgrounds. My sister Carrie has hurt her knee in the sort of way that if she weren’t in New York City during a pandemic she would have already been into the doctor about it but instead had a video conference with a  friend’s dad who happens to be a doctor and is waiting a few day to see how it goes. I know I said I’d focus on the positive (the positive is I’m sure she’ll be fine either soon or eventually, and she has lots of friends to help out) but this is the sort of trickle down effect from all of this, and still we have politicians pretending things are just fine. People are avoiding going to the doctor for other injuries because they don’t want to get sick and because they don’t want to be a burden on the system.

Other positive. Louie and I finished doing some planting in the garden. I forgot to take a picture (my hands were dirty and I didn’t have my phone with me at the time) but I’ll take one later. We made a small plot and planted a few things. We are planning to make at least one more plot over the next few weekends. I honestly have no idea how big the plots are…6 by 3 foot? That’s a total guess and might be way off. But since I’ve had all my weekends free and will likely continue to do so for some time, a garden seemed like fun. We planted swiss chard, beets, and some sort of green beans. We will see what happens…it seems crazy that you could plant little seeds into the ground and they would grow into vegetables!

We finished watching Ozark and have started something called “The Stranger” on Netflix. Netflix gave me a 98 percent match on it, and so far it’s quite good. I’ve also been reading some Jenn McKinlay mysteries on my kindle (thank goodness for the library during these times!).

I baked a carrot banana bread but might have made too many substitutions and it ended up being more of a bread pudding. I also likely should have baked it longer but it was starting to get too dark on top and I didn’t think of tenting it in foil until later. Nonetheless it was tasty with a bit of ice cream on top.

We ended up just doing the Seder with the two of us. Louie’s mom cooked and picked up things for him and he went by and chatted (from a responsible distance) and then we attempted it on our own. I had only been to his mom’s once for a Seder but Louie has been attending for years of course, so we did our best. I apologize for the white wine, but we’ve determined that red wine is a migraine trigger for me so I can’t drink it anymore.

We’ve been mostly doing a lot of cooking, but we have a quarantine tradition of Friday night takeout. This Friday it was the 58hundred which is a nearby restaurant, and we got fish fry takeout, so some fried cod and fried shrimp tacos. I’m not sure if those things are actually Passover-friendly, so we are mixing up our religions…neither of us are remotely Catholic, but we just like fish and wanted to support a nearby restaurant since we are tired of cooking.

I mention this because Muriel loves bags. Sometimes I worry that Muriel is being neglected or feeling neglected because Miles is taking up a lot of space and attention. But they seem to get along pretty well and hang out near each other on the cat tree. And she always loves getting into bags or boxes.

I made little plate of pickles with dinner last night. The pickled beets are my new favorite thing, though the little dill pickles from Trader Joe’s on the plate were pretty tasty. Those are left from Christmas, and needed to be finished up to make room in the fridge for…more pickles, probably.

Well, those are my random thoughts for the day. I hope you have a decent week. Are you holding up okay?