Tag: #Pandemic

  • 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.

  • What is Up with Texas?

    What is Up with Texas?

    I used to get that question often when I first moved to NYC. I grew up in Texas, and when people would eventually find out I was from the Lone Star state, I would get asked, “Hey, what is up with Texas?” This was in 2006, the waning days of George W. Bush, and my adopted home state had an amazing reputation of crazy and gun crazy on top of that. (Luckily, Florida has seemed to taken on the mantel away from Texas in the last several years.)

    Today, The New York Times ran this story, “Red vs, Red in Texas, With Republicans Battle One Another After Mask Order,” and the title pretty much encapsulates what in now going on there. It even caused me to ask, what is up with Texas? It reminded me of this story The New Yorker put out a week ago, “How Texas Republicans Politized the Coronavirus Pandemic,” which goes into detail on how state Republicans were fighting each other to have a convention in Houston in the middle of an outbreak of Covid-19.

    My 77-year-old father, and  my brothers with their families are still in Texas, and I can only imagine that the anxiety and worry I have for them is the same thing they all had for us in March in New York. The difference is that at least the City and state of New York were committed to fighting Covid. Not that they did a perfect job, but at least everyone was aiming for the same goal. In Texas, it just seems like the state leaders are running around in a hurricane of chaos they have created under the guise of personal freedom.

    When people used to ask me that questions about Texas way back in the good old days of ‘Merica, I would tell them that growing up in Texas, there was a strong through line of independence balanced with respect. It seems to me that Texas conservatives have perverted this idea, and now it’s costing people their lives.

  • Coronavirus in NYC: Kids, Self-Quarantine, and Work

    We had planned on having to shelter at home as early as Friday, and we started making preparations. We shopped for a week and half’s worth of food. Knowing that the odds were that NYC schools would be closed on Monday, we went to our storage unit, which has been holding all of our things from the California move, and pulled out some of our books, DVDs, and all of the kid’s stuff. We don’t want to be the people who watch tv non-stop for a month.

    And we thought we had it all under control.

    But Monday did catch us off guard, a little. Such as, we talked about a plan, but we didn’t write it down. The City didn’t suspend alt-side parking, so the wife, kid, and dog had to go move the car and find a new parking space, which took time. (I don’t know why parking wasn’t suspended, but that really is a New Yorker complaint.) I was out doing laundry, and I did all of our laundry to be safe, and that also took longer than I thought. By lunchtime, we were running behind schedule.

    By early afternoon, I had my first day of work, and I am very thankful that I was able to do my four hours of training through video conferencing. I know that I am very lucky to be hired during a pandemic, and I am even more lucky that I am working for a company that is letting me start this job by remoting in. But that did mean that I was working at the desk, and couldn’t help with the kid, so my wife was solo parenting for half the day.

    After we put our daughter to bed, we sat down and planned out today. We made sure we both worked in time for the other to be alone for a bit, (writing for me, yoga for her) but most importantly, we planned out activities for our daughter; to keep learning, being creative, and having some limited outdoor time. I know that we will get through this, all of us, but we have to figure out a way to just get through the day.

  • Who Can Afford That?

    I can admit that two weeks ago, I didn’t think the coronavirus would be something that we in the United States would have to worry about. The world had done a very good job at containing Ebola, and with the outbreak in China, a nation not known for caring about the rights of its citizens, it would be quarantined just like they had done with SARS.

    So, I was wrong.

    At least in the sense that we here in the US need to prepared for the possibility of an outbreak of the disease within our boarders. I don’t see that as a fearful reacting, but more a matter of being logical.

    The one thing that has jumped out at me from the NYC and NY state press conferences (I won’t even get into the ridiculousness of Trump’s press conference) is that both the mayor and governor were telling people that if an outbreak happens, “just stay home, and don’t go to school.”

    Clearly, we should all do that.

    And…

    Clearly, half of us out that can’t afford to do that.

    Half of the people out there is this city and state live paycheck to paycheck, and if they miss a day of work they fall behind. Are landlords going to let people pay their rent late? Are banks going to let mortgage and credit card payments be late? How about internet and cable companies? (I know ConEd doesn’t care, coz they don’t shut off power to anyone.) Are all those bills going to wait until the threat is over?

    There is a domino effect here when large groups of people don’t go to work and don’t get paid. I see the how the world economy is grinding to a halt just by the way the stock markets are beginning to fall off a cliff.

    Again, who is thinking about the people that are just hanging on to the edges of this economy?