Three weeks and counting…

since we have interacted with other humans – except for a couple trips to drop things off at the in-laws (and talking to them from a safe distance) and seeing/talking to the friend that is still grocery shopping and has dropped some things off for us (and talking to her from a safe distance).

Going from commuting on a packed train and walking through Times Square every day, to this – is a big difference. I have to say, I don’t miss the commute, and I don’t much miss interacting with all the other people I did in my work – because I still see many of them every day on video calls (which is how I interacted with most of them before this anyway). I do very much like spending more time with DiaryMistress, that is a huge plus to a bad time.

The extra hours in my day have given me the opportunity to:

• fix some things around the house that were lacking, with more to come
• brush up my SQL skills again, and learn to write some new queries
• read some things I hadn’t gotten to yet
• start fixing some things in the yard that needed work
• clean up my home office some, but there’s still a lot to go on that front 🙂

Trying not to watch too much news – not that it’s not important, but I’m finding this similar to 9/11 in that you could glue yourself to the news all day and you wouldn’t learn remarkably more than you would learn in a half hour.

We have Netflix, Disney+, Amazon, Britbox – lots of streaming opportunities. What we ended up watching last night? Little House on the Prairie. Which meant I had to do some Wikipedia reading, because among other things I wanted to know what the real age difference was between Almonso and Laura (six years in the books, but ten years in real life and on TV).

One thing I learned that I didn’t know – at the end of the show, in the farewell made-for-TV movie, they blew up all of the sets that were the town of Walnut Grove. SHEESH. Guess they really, really didn’t want to revisit that show again.

Quick googling turned up the below video, which is set to the best of all the Beastie Boys’ songs:

The soundtrack makes this video 100x better. Actually, having now watched it all the way through – it’s a compilation of all the violent happenings on Little House, not just blowing up the town. Believe me, if you want to read more about Little House (like anything else) there is plenty to find on the internet.

Speaking of reading (which I was above) I’m currently on this:

(and NO I’m not posting some kind of affiliate link that makes me money if you buy that book – I just wanted to see how Open Diary would display an Amazon link if I posted one)

It’s a very good book so far – if you like historical non-fiction as I do – all about the Dutch colony in Manhattan, before the British took over. I’ve always been fascinated with NYC history, and this one being about the Dutch is even better – in my ancestry that I have great-grandparents who were Van Cortlandts, and owned much of the land in New York City and Westchester back in the day. Not that they left any to me! But funny story, a couple centuries later, I was born in a hospital that stands on the ground that was at one time part of Van Cortlandt’s manor and farms.

If you had asked me a month ago if I was quarantined for several weeks I would have said that would give me time to:

• learn Italian
• work on my programming skills and learn a new Javascript framework
• try my hand at drawing
• build the P-51 Mustang kit model that’s been sitting on a shelf for two years
• call my friends and family and talk to them more
• take our dogs for long walks (okay there’s been a couple of those)
• teach myself accordion and re-learn guitar

So far, not so much 😄

Hope you are all staying safe and healthy!