And so our summer has officially drawn to a close with the return to work (me) and school (my sons). It has been a very peculiar summer, of course. I am sure most people reading this have had a very different summer from the one they anticipated and planned for. We, for example, were supposed to fly back to the UK for a few weeks to spend time with our families and attend my youngest brother’s wedding. Instead, my brother contracted Covid 19, his wedding was postponed and we obviously did not travel to Britain. We have tried to make the most of our family time, being stuck together pretty much 24/7, but – again, I am sure in common with everyone else – it has been fatiguing and dispiriting. I think, however, that the transition back to work and (distance learning) school is going to be far tougher than anything we have experienced so far.
We decided to have one last family adventure of the Summer. Having spent six months avoiding being anywhere peopley, we thought we would brave going somewhere a bit busier but which would still afford us the opportunity to social distance and be safe. After considering at least a dozen options and discarding them as not having robust enough safety measures, we hit upon the idea of Longwood Gardens. Not too far from home, largely outdoors, and lots of procedures to mitigate the risk factors. Mr Pict and I had visited Longwood two years ago but a) I was suffering with some post-op complications and b) the kids had never visited. We spent a lovely few hours there, felt completely safe throughout our visit, and were glad we went.
In case you were wondering, one of my sons decided when we went into lockdown that he would not cut his hair for that whole period; now he has decided he won’t cut it for the duration of the pandemic. I suspect his hair is going to get very long. And my oldest son is not dressed appropriately for the climate because he prefers to wear a “uniform”. It is slightly crazy making but, as the parent of two autistic children, I have to choose which battles I am going to go full Viking on and which I am just going to wave the white flag at.
We continued to return to trails we had not visited in years. Some of these walks were more successful than others. For instance, we made the poor decision to revisit French Creek State Park in the aftermath of a very nasty storm. The ground was hard going, sticky and slick, which combined with the steep terrain at points made it very exhausting to walk and I found I was having to concentrate so much on my footing that I was not remotely enjoying my surroundings. It was also disgustingly humid. I felt like I was breathing in water. I just felt muddy and gross and mosquitoes the size of zeppelins were devouring me and making me swell up. I completed the walk, about 5 miles because we abandoned our intended trail for a shortcut, looking like a parboiled lobster cosplaying as Rambo. So gross. We did encounter a lot of frogs on our trek though.
We have also been playing a lot of board games. I really like board games but my husband is really fanatical about board games and has amassed quite a massive collection over the years so we always have lots to choose from. One of the games we have been playing is Pandemic, thematically apt, a co-operative game we don’t often win. We, however, had a stonking win one afternoon and defeated all of the diseases. Let’s hope that is a portent of things to come in real life.
One of my big summer projects was to tame the chaos of our converted garage space and turn it into an organized storage space, including a space for my teaching materials and a larder for all the things I tend to buy in bulk. I should have thought to take a before photo because it really was a mess. Things had been hurriedly and thoughtlessly dumped in that room first when we had our basement flood and then when we had to reorganize household spaces with everyone learning and working from home. Since shelves had become inaccessible during that period, things that actually permanently belonged in that room had not been put in their correct place. Necessary changes at work due to pandemic mitigation mean I also have to store all of my teaching resources at home and, of course, the only place I had to store them was also the garage. You will just have to take my word from it that it was an overwhelming mess. I have spent this summer working on it bit by bit because it was a time consuming project. It does not look like much and certainly is not going to win any awards for being aesthetically pleasing but the chaos is no more, everything now has a place, and everything is so organized that I can put my hands on any item in that room in an instant. The shelving unit of square cubbies contain my lesson plans, teaching materials, toys, and books. It still needs a fair bit of finessing with better storage solutions for some items but it is a functional and much more efficient system.
On the subject of work, I have also been spending time going into my classroom and getting it ready for a new batch of students and, of course, a new way of operating. I have had to strip out so much fun stuff from my classroom and my lesson planning because of teaching in the context of a pandemic so it is a bit deflating and dispiriting but I am excited to meet my new students and create fun learning experiences for them.
I continued to bake my way through the stress of this situation. I will never be an applicant for a baking show but I have definitely improved my skill level and confidence when it comes to baking. I have had the odd failure – such as a sunken chocolate cherry cake – but my successes have outnumbered the failures and even the failures were tasty enough. Like Pavlov’s dogs, however, my boys have become way too accustomed to having a sweet treat available on an almost daily basis. Since I will not have time for daily baking when I am back at work, it is going to be an adjustment for them and may involve some sugar withdrawal. Incidentally, that cake in the photo is supposed to have a crack in it as it is an orange Madeira cake.
All of these summer blog posts have ended with portraits of the cats so here are some portraits of Peanut (ginger) and Satchi (grey) doing their feline thing.
And here is one of our “bonus” pets. When our basement window wells flood, frogs move in. Here is a photo of one who brought his packed lunch slug with him.
A Pict in PA 