Month: August 2020

  • Scheduling Writing Time in a Pandemic

    There might be a lot to unpack in this statement, but I have the feeling that kids will not physically go to school in New York for the first few months of the school year. My guess is that there will at least be two months of remote learning, and that’s if a safe and effective vaccine can be developed. (But this is a topic for another blog.) With that said, I don’t think I will have a few hours to write every day, as I will need to be the kid’s teacher for the foreseeable future.

    So, I need to look for the time in our schedule to make writing happen.

    Right now, I’m getting about two hours in on a perfect, everything breaks my way, kind of day. I can get about 30 to 45 minutes to journal in the morning, when me and the kid have some park time. The kid used to take a daily nap, but that has morphed into “Quiet Playtime” in the kid’s room, and depending on how much I have to clean the kitchen up after lunch, I can fit 30 minutes of blog time. Finally, the kid has an hour of free tv time, which I sit with her and monitor, and that is when I can fit in an hour to work on other things. I used to try and write in the evening, but that’s the only time me and the wife get to have some time together, and that’s pretty important to us. Since rarely does anything break my way, I’m lucky if I can get about 45 minutes to an hour day.

    What complicates this even more is that my wife is working from home, so the family desk is now her’s, and I haven’t found a good landing place to work in the apartment.

    So, as I look to the next month and Fall in general, I am trying to figure out what our schedule will be so everyone can get what they need, and I can still fit in a little more than 2 hours a day to write.

  • New Blog Direction?

    So… I’m unemployed, and I have had some time to think over things, and choices, and mistakes I have made in my life. Sometimes obsess over them, but that only happens late at night when I try to fall asleep. What I have been rolling over in my head is if I want to change the direction of this blog.

    Right now, this blog is an exercise for me to work on telling stories in 250 words. It is also a place for me to write about other things that come into my head.

    With being unemployed, I started to think about trying to monetize my writing. For my three fans who aren’t relatives, then you know that I have made a grand total of $5 from my writing over the past 20 years. I don’t have a stellar track record, and with the fact that I have a WordPress.com site shows that I am most aggressive blogger.

    This would lead me to conclude that if I want to earn money from blogging, then I would need to put in more time and energy in the make of the blog, and that I will need to start writing about a specific subject. I have run enough art organizations that I know that what I am selling is a product, and for anyone to be interested in this product, you either have to be the best at it, or original in some way that no one can copy. It is a business after all.

    I am sitting on this, wondering if, or how I should move forward.

    I also know that in a business, you have to have a goal for it. That I can answer now. We need a new Mac Mini for our home to function as a server. That ballparks to $870. With the $5 I already earned; I just need to bring in another $865. That seams do-able.

  • Parenting: Going to the Doctor

    As we are trying to get ready for the school year, whatever it might be, we are attempting to behave as normal as possible, and that would be the annual pediatrician checkup before the Fall. Normally, this has never been an issue for the kid. To a degree, she sort of liked going to see the doctor. Both of the kid’s grandmas were nurses, and on my wife’s side of the family, there is a long history of working in the medical field. For that reason, the kid has grown up around lots of nurses and doctors.

    I made the appointment to the pediatrician, and let the kid know that it was something we would be doing, but she got very concerned.

    “Will I get a shot?” she asked me.

    I told her it was possible, and did the routine of “It will only hurt of a second,” and “I’ll be with you the whole time.”

    That didn’t work.

    For over a week I fielded questions about shots, medicine, and sharpe instruments that the doctor might use.

    I could feel the kid’s anxiety growing, and no matter how hard I tried, there didn’t seem to be anything I could say or do to make her feel better. It made me feel powerless, and insufficient as her father.

    All I can do is be with her, and encourage her to be strong.