Covid-19, Day 12: Rainy Sunday

Sunday, March 22, 2020

Rain in Kansas City is weird. Sometimes (though rarely) it can be a downpour, coming fast and creating real harm in the form of flash floods. Though the flash flood rains typically occur in the spring, that's not what is happening right now. The rain today is so gentle that you really don't even hear it. If you're inside looking out, you have to squint to see it. Even then, you ask yourself, "is that rain or are my windows just really dirty?"

We are having a true Sunday. Ed is playing jazz on the Brennan, happy as a clam to be cooking in the kitchen. He is "cooking for the week" which is what two working parents with young kids have to do to survive the week. With nightly activities and homework, we are hard pressed to create a meal quickly. Though he knows in his head that we will all be home together this week, and there are no nightly activities, and that we can wander into the kitchen at 3pm to put something in the crockpot of even on the stove, he is still cooking today. Old habits, as they say.

Later in the day, Ed needed short nails for his beehive construction, so we took a walk to Sutherlands 2 blocks away. Here's some of what we encountered on our walk:

Covid-19 poster on telephone pole

Lewer's forsythia

In other boring news, I cleaned out the vintage desk I bought a few years back for Gill. He was using it for storage, not for work. Ed was adamant that we could not get rid of it right now because no one would take it. Turns out, there's a run on desks as well as toilet paper. Our neighbors, the Johnsons, were putting together a home office for their girls and gladly took it off our hands. They are the ones that told us that you cannot find desks in stores right now. (My Facebook prediction that "desk components are the new toilet paper"  has come true.) We wiped it down and helped deliver it. Here's a photo of Daniella, set up and ready to go.

Daniella at her "new" desk

Gill had a violin lesson today using Zoom. We had to tune the violin ourselves, which was a mini-lesson for me. The Zoom software often flattens sound, so the teacher is asking us to look for a way to "preserve original sound" which is an option on the mobile version, but we cannot find it on the desktop version. Gill really enjoys violin and I think he's rather good at it! (no bias, i'm sure)

After violin, we played Exploding Kittens which is a very funny, if somewhat perverse, card game. The boys love it.

Gill's hand in Exploding Kittens

In the news:

• 328,275 confirmed cases worldwide; 14,366 deaths (more than 1/3 of those in Italy)
• 55 confirmed cases in Kansas; 2 deaths
• 90 confirmed cases in Missouri; 3 deaths