Day 43 and look at Sean's hair!

Sean's been thinking about getting his haircut for awhile. He has been nervous about what would happen if he went short and didn't like it. He decided now is a good time to cut it because if he doesn't like it no one will see it and it will grow back before school starts.

All the hair cutting places are closed so Alika had to come over and open up her Alika's bathroom cuts salon.

That's a lot of hair.

He is really happy with it.

There was a teenager under all that hair.

Zoom Birthday parties

Khloe and Vally both had birthday's this month. Vally on the 20th and Khloe the 27th. They had to have their parties via Zoom. I baked cakes both days so we could celebrate with them. It's wonderful that we have technology.

Sean's school is doing all sorts of lame things trying to stay engaged. I'm sure the little kids loved the teacher notes on the door. Sean just rolled his eyes.

Day 37

Not much new going on. It's kind of like groundhogs day but even then the days are flying by.

Kylie and Brie spent two nights and for a reason that escapes me they decided to sleep in the car. I asked if it was comfortable and they said "not really" but proceeded to do it again the next nigh.

They had Don run an extension cord to the car, they put up a light strip and had a fan and television.

This is the morning after. They came inside and fell asleep in the living room. Sean fell asleep with is body on the couch and his head on the floor. Strange children. Sean's teachers have decided to start doing a Zoom meeting everyday. Sean's pretty bummed about that it interferes with his gaming.

Day 35

I've resorted to Facetime with Polly.  Khloe is trying her best to make the silly filters work on the dogs with limited success.

We took a morning hike up Parrish Canyon to the pictographs. Beautiful day.

Going gray day by day.

Day 34: Reading Sean's writing assignments keeps me amused

Another funny post by Sean for a school assignment. I read his paper first without knowing what the assignment was. Wow robbing a bank would not have been my first thought for a paper about adages but Sean made it work. I guess successfully robbing a band would follow under "nothing ventured nothing gained." How do you know if you will be a successful bank robber if you don't try.

Assignment: Good morning! Please go to McGraw Hill today and work through the three To-do items about adages, reading comprehension, and vocabulary. For your writing assignment, come back to Teams, open a Word document and type a eight to 10 sentence paragraph about the following: In one of your mini lessons today you learned about adages. “Nothing ventured, nothing gained” is an adage. It means that a person can’t succeed at something if they don’t attempt it or try. Tell about a book you’ve read or a play or a show you’ve watched, where a character demonstrated the adage “nothing ventured, nothing gained.” This means the character would have attempted something that was difficult or carried some risk but they were ultimately successful.

Adages

The show I'm watching on Netflix is about robbing a bank and they made a group to rob one of the biggest banks with 1 billion dollars in it they get in successfully. They keep the hostages with the same masks as the robbers so they could trick the police so that the police couldn’t shoot, and the police accidentally shot a hostage because they thought it was one of the robbers. So, the robbers pulled the hostage downstairs so then the police sent in a surgeon to help the hostage while that was happening there were some police that were trying to get in with the same jumpsuits and masks as the hostages and the robbers. But just when the police were about to get in the professor told them that the police are climbing in the vent’s, so the robbers and hostages switched masks. Also, the professor is the mastermind to the heist. And the professor is also the outside person and is basically the spy and the mastermind of the heist. While he was outside the investigator fell in love with the professor, but the investigator didn’t even know that he was the professor. Also, while all of this is happening the investigator's partner in the heist thing and found out who was the professor but then the partner crashed his car, so the information didn’t out and put him in a coma. In the end they make the hostages dig a fake whole while they were digging the real hole to get out. So, they got out fine with something billion dollars and now they are on vacation

Day 32 and excerpt from Sean's school assignment

Sean had a writing assignment. " open a Word document and write a paragraph about how you can improve someone’s day. Describe what you’re going to do. Make a plan and write about it. Then, submit your document on Teams and work on carrying out your plan to brighten someone’s day."

"You can make someone's day better by not giving them corona. You can also try to make them feel better by telling that it's not that bad give them something I really don’t know. You could stay home from getting corona virus and watch some Netflix or Hulu or something like that. Maybe call them like facetime them or something. You need to do social distancing so try talking to someone on the phone so YOU don’t get corona and so you guys can still talk. And you could just be nice to someone really that’s all you have to do."

Here's a second writing assignment.


"One of the challenges in my live was the pandemic that is currently going on. Corona virus is keeping people from going to stores and pretty much anywhere. So, Netflix and Hulu are our saver. Couquering it is basically impossible but all you have to do is stay calm and just do your part by staying home from spreading the disease."


There you have it!

We were bad at social distancing today and went over to Catherine's to celebrate her birthday.

Jameson "you know you want to take my picture."

31 Days and schools out for the summer

Sean started something with his rearranging furniture. I rearranged the living room furniture. That took about 20 minutes and didn't change much. It was a fun activity.

Easter was so quiet. No dyed eggs, no hunt, no sugar eggs. I was planning on an Easter egg hunt on the beach. Oh well, a lot of people were planning a lot of things. We had a nice Easter dinner with just us, Mao Yu and Carter.

I walked past Sean's school and it's so quiet. There were people driving through to pick up a school lunch. I'm kind of amazed how many people are driving out for that. Sean has no desire to eat school lunch at home. They announced yesterday that the kids won't be going back to school until fall. It's home schooling for the rest of the year. No end of elementary school activities for Sean it's just on to Jr High. Mao Yu bought her ticket to go home June 1st. I'm not sure if she goes home I'm not sure she will get back 

Mao Yu made these fancy steamed buns.

I was facetiming with the girls when we happened upon a horse. The horse wanted to kiss Khloe through my phone. Khloe named the horse Brownie and Vally promptly changed the name to Double Brownie.

Day 26

On a positive note gas is $1.85 a gallon. But, hey no one is going anywhere! I didn't buy plane tickets to Fla this week when they were dirt cheap and they went up $100. That really bummed me out. Sent me into a complete funk last night. It's really not that big a deal but I am annoyed at myself for not buying them when they were low.

Spring is here. It's beautiful outside.

Sean leaving the house for a rare minute outside.

The Government decided we should be wearing mask in public after saying we shouldn't for a month. Well duh! A respiratory illness is spread through the air. Droplet's are tough to avoid if they are suspended in air. I've been going to the grocery store twice a week. I texted Clayton (Sean's old friend who moved away Jacob's dad). Clayton is in poor health, diabetic, deaf and fairly home bound so I asked if he needed groceries. He texted me a list so Don and I went to Walmart to pick up his groceries and left them on his porch. That was our excitement for the day.

Sean was bored and wanted to rearrange his game room.

We moved the piano in the dining room so has more room in the game room.

He is pretty pleased with himself.

The calendar on my phone for February

The calendar on my phone for March.

And here's April. The birthday's still happen. I'm sure the HOA meeting will be cancelled but I haven't received an official notification yet.

Not sure how this picture got captured. I had this great idea to catch tadpoles in the pond. Sean and I drove over to the pond and we had the girls on facetime with us. I ended up in that nasty pond full of beaver poop. Sean said you're going to get Corona. I told him I wasn't worried about Corona I was worried about Giardia. When we got home I got right in the shower! Afterwards I checked the tadpole we caught and discovered it was a little fish. Oh well, I tried. I now know how cold and mushy that pond is. You sink to your knees in the shallow edge. You sink and you get stuck and have a heck of time pulling your flip flopped feet out of the muck!

Day 21

I walked 170.62 miles in the past 30 days which burned 71,990 calories. That's something I can still do.

This is such an incredibly strange time in life. I know we are better off than 90% of the world. We have a home, electricity, food, water, a neighborhood we can walk around in. We are still employed and for the most part able to work at home. My business is doing better right now then it would be if I was in the classroom. We have a lot to be grateful for during this time we are staying home. For many of my years I've been an ER nurse and if I was working in the hospital I would be having an entirely different type of stress right now. We are all healthy. So many people are sick at home or in the hospital

That said I want to record all the changes in our lives right now.

•    I can't see my grandkids. For that matter we can't see anybody. It could be 7 months without seeing them. This is just unbelievable. There were a couple times after January I thought about flying out for a week but I didn't. I figured I would be there for 2 weeks in May and I would just save money by waiting to go. I wasn't expecting a pandemic. St George Island is crazy right now. They are running out of state people out of town. I know we need to stay put but they are positively crazy. It seems like the kind of crazy that happened in Rawanda where over night people turned on their neighbors. I know it's just cyber talk but people are saying such hateful things and threatening violence.

I found an article explaining to correlation between empathy and fear. It was very insightful.

 Fear is our brain’s way of keeping us (and our species) alive. This emotion is regulated in a part of our brain called the amygdala. It is responsible for innate reactions that we have about the world around us – especially things that might harm us.

An overactive amygdala can shut down or limit access to empathy. It does this in order to respond to fear and our evolutionary focus on survival.

Empathy is the ability to understand and to imagine another person’s experience – the capacity to walk in another person’s shoes – including those who are different from us.

The good news is that according to Roman Krznaric, author of Empathy: A Handbook for Revolution, 98% of humans are hardwired for empathy.

However, when the amygdala is activated, it’s very difficult for humans to empathize because of the negative emotional “noise” created by the amygdala.

• No school for Sean. He isn't too bothered by it but I think it's sad. No competing in Lego Mindstorm at Lagoon. No end of year piano recital. No 6th grade dance or graduation. No hanging out with friends. They haven't cancelled school for the year but it's only a matter of time. Elementary school will just end with no ending and he will start Jr High.

  

  Good thing this kid likes to sit at the computer. He is spending a zillion hours playing Fornite. It keeps him entertained and happy. Spring break is over tomorrow and online school starts back. That was pretty much a spring break bust for the entire planet.

• Simple things like going to the grocery store is weird. I'm trying to only go twice a week to get milk and bread. The CDC has finally come out with the recommendation that people should be wearing mask when they are out. Duh, maybe stop people from coughing on everything. Stores are limiting the number of people who can go in at a time. They've been doing that at Costco for awhile but I have stayed clear of Costco. I've only gone to Walmart and Dicks. Now Walmart is limiting the number of people in the store at a time and making people all walk in the same direction in the aisles. I found toilet paper last week but now there are no napkins. I did buy paper towels.
• I went to the bank to deposit the "lost money" check from mom's Capital One account. I had to deposit it and get cashiers checks for my siblings at the drive through. The lobby is closed. I deposited our rent checks on my cell phone to save a trip.
• No swimming for Don, no library for me.

In February when I got my hair colored I told the stylist that I was thinking about going gray and we both laughed and said "but not today." I'm thinking now might be the time. I either need to dye it with a box or let it go. I'm thinking I'll just see how much it grows out before life get's back to normal.

• Carter turned 37. No candles on his cake because it's not a great time to be blowing on everyone's food. There is no dining in at restaurants. NONE, that's an adjustment.No lunch with my friends. We got take out from Texas Roadhouse so he was OK with it. No gym for Carter which totally bums him out.

• Tomorrow I'm going to go into the classroom for a couple of hours and help Linda get started with a lab. It's only 8 people. I kind of just want to see how it flows. It's weird to have over 100 students in the class online and know I won't even meet 90% of them. We've always had such a personal relationship with our students.  

• Don and Mao Yu did yard work yesterday. I feel bad that I'm not having Talitha clean the house right now. I know she needs the money but I'm home ALL the time so our house is really clean and I don't want to have someone else coming in that isn't necessary. 

• The Chinese interns can't get home. They had flights but they've all been cancelled. I don't know if Mao Yu is going to be able to get home for the summer. If she get's home for the summer we don't know if she will she make it back for when school starts in the fall. She doesn't have her visa for next year and if she goes home she will have to be quarantined in a hotel for 14 days and then she will have to quarantine again when she gets back.