Even in quarantine, Friday nights are a relief. Even if we don’t have lots of fun stuff planned for the weekend, we have very little un-fun stuff we have to do. I can dramatically reduce the amount of nagging and arguing I do with my children. We can sleep in without guilt.

It’s been a particularly intense and exhausting week, but I am feeling surprisingly good. Some highlights:

  • I finished two excellent books. Zoe and I read Will Grayson Will Grayson by John Green and David Leviathan and had a book club about it. She read her paper copy and I read it on my phone through the Libby app that enables you to check out ebooks and audiobooks through the library system. I don’t usually like reading books on my phone, but doing so gives me the opportunity to read in the dark when other people are trying to sleep. I am a big John Green fan so I was not surprised that I loved this book so much but it was still a pleasure to read. I also finished listening to Writers & Lovers by Lily King. I was enthralled by King’s book Euphoria and loved this one just as much, especially because it was vastly different in subject matter from Euphoria, but with equally compelling characters. And the narrator, Stacey Glemboski, did a beautiful job reading. Both Will Grayson Will Grayson and Writers & Lovers left me feeling like I wanted to know some of those characters for a long time, which is my favorite after effect of a book.
  • In today’s mail I received a t-shirt I had ordered after seeing it advertised on Facebook and after three of my friends also sent me copies of the ad and pointed out how perfect the shirt was for me. (In case you can’t read the shirt in my awkwardly posed selfie, it says YOU AXOLOTL QUESTIONS and features an adorable axolotl, an amphibian also known as the Mexican walking fish.

I played some games online with fun people. As part of candidating week at UUCA, I was in charge of game night with our candidate, so I had to figure out how that might work. Our family has played Jackbox Games at home on the Xbox and the computer but I had never played over a zoom call. Turns out it’s pretty easy to do, even if I was a little clumsy in the execution. So if you want to arrange a virtual game night with us, let me know. Randy and Zoe also played (from separate rooms) and were awesome. Randy dominated with cleverness in our first game and changed his username in the second game to avoid drawing attention from the games paparazzi.

The sun came out today and so I sprayed down the table on our patio, which gets super gross from pollen and pollution, and wiped down a chair so I could sit outside and enjoy my hastily assembled dinner of celery with peanut butter, pretzels and hummus, leftover cold mac and cheese with peas, and a chocolate yogurt, accompanied by a cranberry lime seltzer. This is the kind of dinner you have when you clean out the fridge right before sitting down to two and a half straight hours of zoom calls.

One last bright spot–this morning I spent a while sitting with Zeke at the dining room table working our way through a puzzle book. Zeke received a subscription to Puzzlemania for his birthday (thanks Grandma Cyndy!) and the first issue arrived yesterday. This magazine, from Highlights, is the next step up from the Puzzle Buzz magazine he has enjoyed for years (also thanks to Grandma Cyndy!). Puzzlemania is perfect for him now. He unscrambled words (with a few clues from me) and we did a logic puzzle (I love logic puzzles!) and some other word puzzles. I was so happy because we were doing a learning thing without Zeke getting annoyed about having to do a learning thing, and I didn’t have to come up with the activities, and we both had fun doing them!

Many of the things are still hard and sad and complicated, but I am choosing not to think about them right now. Instead I’m going to have a snack with my family before bedtime and be grateful that tomorrow is another day.