EDLM Day Diary May 12, 2020
- With no appointments or other time-sensitive work items to do, I’ve developed a habit of reading the news from my iPad in the mornings before getting out of bed. Why wait until later in the day to be upset?
- I make matters worse by watching a video of Trump storming out of a press conference. Why did I choose to bring him into the bedroom. Ugh.
- I’m in my second day of teaching two online summer courses. I’ve done this before, but with some modifications this time around.
- After getting up and showered (around 8-8:30), I head to the computer to see how the students are doing. The morning is spent joining the collaborative text annotation discussions the students are doing in both classes.
- My kids are doing their e-learning from their school iPads. They are old enough to be pretty self-contained with this, so everyone is doing their own things this morning.
- My wife and older daughter leave for an in-person orthodontics appointment, the first in several months because of the pandemic. She comes back with news that she’s almost finished. That’s good!
- I take the dog out to play a bit, and while she does that I find that yesterday’s garden arrangement needed some tweaking. Now that we’ve got an enclosed backyard area, we can let the dog run loose, which means I’m spending more time in the backyard, arranging and rearranging things. I think it’s a kind of drawing with natural elements, a little aesthetic exercise. I like it.
- Back to work online. I record a screencast with voiceover to explain an assignment. Ok.
- I work on course assessment documents. Not very exciting!
- After 12:00 I have lunch with my wife and daughter.
- I get distracted by an ad online for some very terrible Hawaiian shirts. But are they? My wife “double-dog dares me” to buy one. So, I have to do it.
- Having had enough of screen work, I head outside to move some daylilies and do some gardening. I’m finding, in pandemic quarantine, a renewed focus on small things right around the house. I’m looking at nature more, finding quiet moments, and appreciating them. If not for the horrific reasons why I’m home, this would be beautiful. As it is, it’s tinged with complex emotions.
- My older daughter and I go for a walk/run. By some miracle, she’s agreed to keep doing this with me. I’m trying to get back to running after some health issues in recent years. So far, so good.
- The rest of the afternoon is spent working on my online courses.
- I watch videos in the background about guitar pedals.
- My wife tells me how to prepare the ingredients for dinner, a Dutch baby with mushrooms. That’s a recipe called that. We are NOT eating an actual baby human from the Netherlands, FYI. I am pro-Netherlands.
- Almost a week has gone by between this last sentence and the last one. Finishing this slipped my mind. Now, I can’t with any great accuracy remember what I did that evening. It probably was spent like most evenings these days. I might watch a show with the family, I might not. They enjoy television more than I do. I crave quiet and time alone, two things in short supply these days in my small quarantined house. No complaints, of course, compared to what many people are having to do or go through, but this is a diary of my life and this is what it’s like. I spend a lot of evenings in my home office, playing guitar, reading from the internet, listening to music or drawing on my iPad. That’s likely how the evening was spent. Usually the family head up to bed around 9:30. I enjoy a few more moments of quiet time. I’ll slip into bed and read for a bit and then lights out.