Good evening my Corona friends. I thought I would check in with you all since today is Labor Day and an official end of summer. It has been a while since I last put pen to paper to pontificate of all my meanderings of my boring life during a pandemic that I try to believe is a bad dream and not our reality. OK you get the picture I may be going over a dark edge so let me try and right the ship before I get too scary.  Yes, it may be the end of summer, although not sure if anyone is thinking it, as long as the weather holds up since there are no school openings till later this month. Techie and I were fortunate to escape up to Maine and be with our grandkids and kids for five days, and happy to report on this trip we were upgraded to another family cottage that had a 21st-century coffee maker, that could dispense at least 10 decent cups at a time. Amazing what a decent cup of coffee can do for you when camping out with all your family who is up at the crack of dawn.  Don’t get me wrong I am most often up at that hour but it is generally me and my beloved cable news and coffee, not diaper changes and cereal wars at that hour, but happily will do it for the short week. Happy to report that I went off the cable news for the week, after all, I was in Maine and our cottage did not have the requisite satellite dish, or if it did there was no telly. OMG, we had to settle for the sound of nature and the relevant silence interrupted by dueling two-year-old cousins staking out their territory. Charlie is six and he had to be the referee of these two and I must say he was just the best of doling out his wisdom. I heard him say to his two-year-old sister you are not the boss of Tilda, his cousin also two, brought me back to when my kids were young. “You are not the boss of me” and “you are not invited to my party” were the fighting words.  Now it is where is your mask and please don’t stand so close to me, and not by the Police. I can’t imagine what I would be like if I was a parent in this day and age, and thankfully I don’t have to find out. I can be sure that I would never be as patient as my kids are today with their kids. Imagine coming into a Pandemic when all of a sudden you have to school your kids remotely and also work from home at the same time. Now imagine even worse that you were one of those parents that were pretty adamant of limiting screen time and never used the TV as a babysitter?  Seriously I am pretty sure a lot of this has gone out the window and if it hasn’t how are you all coping?  The screen time that you fought so hard against is now the primary source of your child’s learning and who knows when they are going off-script to video games during class time?  I know I am going to date myself but way back when we worried about the “new math” and how were we supposed to help them with homework when I didn’t know shit about it in the first place. We had to send our son to a private school and pay a lot of money so he would get his homework done. Seriously we were ill-equipped to help him navigate learning with dyslexia and I feel for those that are trying to figure it out during this insane time in our history.

I say to techie what happened here we were supposed to be retired by now and here we are still working?   I suppose it is ok since we really can’t travel, which is what we love to do but now no one wants us, and borders are closed. Forget about the wall we don’t need one, as most people don’t want us as guests but hoping that changes soon. Basically, we haven’t been out of New England this summer, and our biggest worry on these road trips is where am I going to pee?  I am not going to lie in the beginning I was peeing on the side of the road rather than enter a highway restroom because who knew where Corona was lingering, but now I have given in to indoor plumbing. I have been looking at those Winnebago type of vehicles but have to admit what I really want is a Glamped up airstream. This is coming from a person who always thought Holiday Inn Express was the closest thing to camping that I ever wanted. Granted there were times in my early days when a pup tent on the side of the road was just fine but along with my youth that is long gone.  I always loved those road trips with my roommate because he could always handle anything that came up and fix anything on the spot, hence MacGyver. So I was thinking I could get my airstream and be ready to hit the open road this fall, once we have to wrap up the beloved boat. If we had this and we had to go into lockdown this fall or winter we would have another room to go to when this place shrinks.  During my research, I found that Walmart will let you park in their lots, as we certainly have no place to park it. I haven’t found any Walmarts in the city of Boston that are close by so may have to wait on this new venture.  We just have to be prepared for what may be coming as it is starting to get dark earlier and nights are getting cooler, in another month we will be getting up in the dark and coming home in the dark. Oh wait a minute we will still be working from home so won’t have to worry about commuting in the dark.  Things have been going pretty well here in the city and the state as a whole with the plague so let’s hope it can continue because I don’t want to go back to jail again.  I really can’t believe that I have 170 days in on this Corona thing and I honestly don’t want to give it another day, but I guess we will see what tomorrow brings. So please don’t leave home without your mask and keep your distance, now is the time you can avoid a lot of people you always wanted to and blame it on the Pandemic.

Just sayin