It’s been about 8 years since I have had a typically-abled dog who needed to be walked outside, so I had forgotten about the whole situation where the dog needs to go out and it’s the middle of a torrential thunderstorm. Surprise! That’s exactly the situation right now, in fact, and I am starting this post as a way of procrastinating a trip out into the deluge with Harriet, who strongly dislikes rain (and baths) and will be too scared to go, anyway. When I run out of things to type about, I will take her.

Here’s a photo from a sunnier day because she is just too cute:

This is the last week of classes (“classes”) for spring semester; final exams are next week. I’m just hoping I have managed to bring my students through the end of the semester adequately. I have really tried.

I will appreciate the brief interlude between finals and the start of summer classes. It will be nice to have a week or so when I am not constantly having to tell the kids that I can’t talk to them/help them/answer their questions/be with them right now because I am doing a work task and I will have to help them later.  Lately, that’s the only difference between weekdays and weekends around here — on weekends, I get a brief break from pushing my children away.

Just the other day I had to confirm with their daycare that we wanted to keep our summer camp registration — I said yes, because although I do not think daycare will be able to open again by the end of May, I don’t want to lose our spots for fall. If daycare is able to open again for fall. I mean, it might not be. Or, on the other hand, it might legally be allowed to open again and we might not feel safe to send them? But if we are back to face-to-face classroom teaching for work, we will have to send them?

Well, I don’t want to spiral down that way of thinking right now. I am going to have to wait to worry about that, as Swistle would say. I will go take Harriet outside.

BUNNIES: Last week, it came to my attention that the kids believe that the Easter Bunny is real, but is not a real rabbit. Instead, according to them, it is a “mascot” — an adult in a giant bunny costume — who comes to people’s houses and brings treats. They refer to all humans in animal costumes as mascots. Can you imagine? An adult in a rabbit costume coming into your home at night? The children are not even terrified about this?

SOCKS: The other night, my husband and I were up late watching Ozark, eating chocolate eggs, and musing about socks. He was just boastfully relishing the new pairs of wool socks he’d bought for himself somewhat recently as I started to complain about how every time I buy fancy socks for myself they don’t last more than a season without getting holes in them. Of course he needed me to know about and try his preferred brand of nice socks and I needed to warn him about the surprisingly crappy “nice” socks that had burned me in the past. Reader, can you believe we were thinking of the same brand of socks? He swears by them; I cannot make a pair last without getting holes like a slice of Swiss cheese. Meanwhile, my cheap socks from Old Navy and Target are going strong after years of wear. To what do we attribute this difference, friends? “User error.” My husband thinks my problem with getting holes in my expensive socks is due to user error.

SLEEP: Speaking of staying up late, I rarely stayed up late in the Before Time, but now it is an absolute necessity. After being around my charming and delightful children all day and engaging in conversation with them for every waking moment, I need to use the post-bedtime hours to mentally rebalance my. brain with some quiet. I used to be ready to fall asleep by 9:30 or so, but now I need to be awake in the quiet until at least midnight. As a result, I also now require a nap. Basically, I sleep from 12 or 1 AM until 6, when L comes in to get us up. Then I nap from 1:30-2:30, during the time when the kids are either napping or “napping.” The other day, I had to be on a work Zoom during what has become my usual nap time and it was a challenge. Oh my god this is a boring blurb; I’m sorry.

MASKS: Finally, a question: if you had a family member who was a health care professional (RN) working directly with patients in a hospital emergency room, and that family member offered to send you some of their personal stockpile of N95 masks, you wouldn’t accept them, right? I turned down such an offer because a) I only need a mask to go grocery shopping and I already have a cloth one, b) I wouldn’t know if it was my size anyway, and most importantly, c) if I, a civilian, had any N95 masks, I feel like I would be ethically obligated to donate them to my local hospital. So that’s my take on it, anyway. What would you do?

I keep having the following brain malfunction on the weekends: the thought of doing some work starts to flit into my brain and I immediately push it out, the just-barely-conscious thought being, “I’ll get to that Monday when I have some time.”

A HA HA HA JOKE’S ON ME, MOTHERFUCKERS. I will never again “have some time.”

I have been mostly getting my job done in 5-10 minute increments, but occasionally I will find myself reading or typing the same sentence for what feels like half an hour while I answer 487 questions from the children or tend to a dozen urgent dog scenarios.

We just finally added a desk back into our guest bedroom so it can also function as a workspace with a locking door (our other “workspaces” are the couch, the bed, and the kitchen table). This morning, I had a conversation with my husband wherein I informed him that I would be using an hour a day in that room with the door locked in order to do my most urgent work tasks. The subtext was that I, in my extremely high self-evaluation, believe I can do my entire full-time academic job in seven hours a week. The subtext of his response was that he has to work all day every day and no matter how much time he spends working his work will never be done. We have very different attitudes and beliefs about work and our own efficiency as it pertains.

This morning I worked at the desk behind the locked door for about 30 minutes, during which time I had two separate conversations through the door with each of my two children (i.e. four conversations total) and three pieces of crayoned artwork were slid under the door for my inspection.

I got done everything I needed to do. Bitches get shit done.

Can I just tell you that now that we have adopted a puppy, all of my targeted social media ads have turned into ads for cute dog-related shit? I am here for it. Show me all the puppy ads.

In worse news, apparently our garbage disposal is broken and leaking and there’s water all under the sink and leaking through to the other side of the island and are we supposed to have someone in to fix it? Can we even have someone in to fix it? What if we can’t use our kitchen sink anymore? Worse, what if we (“we”) have to attempt some kind of DIY home repair??? I am feeling panicky just typing that out, so let’s move on.

Another thing that makes me feel …agitated right now is all the “I would never X” and “I can’t believe people are Y” that I’m seeing online. The advice keeps changing every day and everything is so conflicting. I’ve got people who can’t believe folks are getting carry out on the one hand and others who can’t believe folks aren’t getting carry out on the other hand. The germs! The local businesses! The virus isn’t food borne! The containers are germ vectors! Local restaurants are dying! And that’s just one of many issues. WHAT DO WE DO.

No, never mind. Don’t tell me.

I have been gathering some fun stuff for the kids’ Easter baskets and putting some key food and drink items in our grocery order. I’m not a person of faith and don’t celebrate Easter in a religious fashion, but I do like to celebrate spring, candy, cute animals, and Bloody Marys. So I mentioned to my spouse that I had been secreting away some Easter items and he started to launch into some commentary about how he doesn’t care about Easter and wasn’t even thinking about it, which I promptly interrupted with, “It will be something to do and I have stuff planned, so.”

My point: this is your biweekly reminder that if someone else cares about, enjoys, or is simply planning to participate in something that you don’t care about, don’t enjoy, or don’t plan to participate in, you can let that pass without comment.

Hi, so, yeah, we adopted a puppy. Technically we are still fostering her for a couple of weeks but we’re planning to make it official as soon as we can.

Her name is Harriet and we also call her Harry. We think she’s about 3-4 months old and she’s kind of on the large side, so she’ll probably be a big one. There’s likely to be some pit bull in her (almost all mixed breed dogs at the local shelters and rescues seem to be pit mixes?) and something with a short tail. Who knows.

She’s super sweet and comes right up for pets and hugs every time she gets out of her crate. She is eating meals and sleeping in the crate and will usually be happy in there for short stints during the day when we need her safely contained.

It only took us about 14 days of quarantine to bring a puppy into the mix, heh. It may seem sudden, but actually we’d been talking about adopting a dog for several months now, just sort of waiting for the time to be right. We thought maybe after our spring break trip, or maybe during the summer, or maybe after our summer road trip…but of course no one could have foreseen that we’d suddenly find ourselves working from home for several months. With everyone home, what better time to adopt a puppy, right? We don’t have to worry about coming home to walk her during the work day, or whether she will tolerate being crated while we are gone for hours at a time. We are simply never gone. We can walk her as many times a day as she needs it, and we can gently crate train her and can be here with her as she gets adjusted to our house and learns the rules. It’s gonna be great. Just a little bit of happiness during this weird, sad, and scary time.

It’s been so long since I have trained a puppy. I had sort of forgotten how some of the elements can be unexpectedly frustrating, like when you’re walking them outside and they just won’t go and then they promptly pee on the rug five minutes later. Just as an example and not to call anyone out, ahem. We’ve made some progress on nighttime crate training just by moving her crate into the bedroom at night. She seems comforted to know we are nearby and in the past two nights (that’s as long as she’s been in our room) she hasn’t whined at all. She’s also so eager to learn! We have been working on “sit” and “down” with some good success. As L is now fond of saying, “it’s going well.”

Good evening. It is Tuesday; my children are asleep in bed; I am done working for the day. By my count, it’s day eleven of social distancing for my household.

My husband and I came home from a spring break trip basically the very day this was widely advised. Things happened fast that week— when we left on the trip, we’d been advised simply not to travel internationally or to go on a cruise. By the time we were returning, things looked pretty different.

Classes at our university went online after spring break and at this point it’s been declared we will be “delivering instruction” remotely for at least the rest of the semester. I will let you guess what i think of that phrase. I assume this will continue through the summer, too, though no one’s said so on the record. The kids’ daycare was open last week, but a state mandate required them to close Friday. We were choosing not to send them in, anyway. We are still paying tuition, which means their teachers are still getting paid, thank goodness.

So. We’ve been redesigning our courses for online instruction, teaching and meeting online, and caring for two loud and demanding four-year-olds at home. What a time to be alive.

The kids are getting a lot of time to do artwork and “workbooks” (e.g. alphabet and counting practice), have been enjoying various story times via instagram live (@oliverjeffers is the best!) and have been spending a lot of time riding scooters in the cul-de-sac while we adults talk to our neighbors from a safe distance of at least six feet.

I’ve discovered the joys and pains of Walmart grocery curbside pickup: I can get a whole week’s worth of groceries without having to enter the store? But alas, the avocados and bananas were overripe and they will not sell you wine or beer unless you come inside.

I have no idea how I’m getting any work done. There are not enough hours in the day for grading papers or creating digital content. There are far too many hours in the day to keep two small people entertained and happy. Today I hired Elsa and Anna to babysit for one hour and forty-four minutes so I could grade midterm exams.

I’ve been enjoying seeing a lot of your faces more online recently— Instagram stories and Marco Polo, mainly (message me your number if you want to chat on there). And reading your words, too. Thanks for being here, friends.