I have had all the material to write this post for several days now, and I keep putting it off hoping I will exit this funk that I am simmering in. It’s a missing family visits funk, a look at all the sick people and overcrowded hospitals funk, a canceled plans funk. Maybe looking at cute and happy photos will turn it around.

Maya, almost but not quite 8.

We were wondering how school photos would be managed this year, especially for the kids who were virtual learners. It turns out that several time slots opened in the evenings immediately after school. We could make none of them. We had started to hunt around for a traveling photographer who would maybe take decent photos in the front yard when the school opened up some Saturday morning slots. In a year full of weirdness, our kids had weird school photos as well. They wore masks on site, stayed in our car till it was their turn to see the photographer (we weren’t allowed to get out with them), and only removed their masks when the photographer told them it was time to take their photo. Masks were reinstalled and back to the car they came.

Ian, age 5

None of us has had a haircut in a really long time, and Maya’s smiling and eye-contact are often kind of a hit-or-miss thing, but honestly I think the photos turned out great. I also think that it’s hilarious that our kids went out of their way to match their masks to their outfits. The big irony here is that matching clothing is rarely a priority for either of them.

We struggled with how to make Maya’s birthday memorable. We spoil the kids rotten and give them a party every year, but this year that’s just not an option. By now they’re used to the coronavirus protocols and don’t really even act surprised when we deliver more bad news. And that’s how we wound up with a bunch of How to Train Your Dragon decorations in our kitchen, possibly too many presents, and a Zoom session full of grandparents.

Birthday girl and her dragon duck cake!

Maya helped me decorate her cake this year. We decided to convert her rubber duck cake into a rubber duck dragon instead. We bought fondant to use as eyes, spikes, scales and tongue, with Maya actually doing most of the shaping and installing. I had noticed that the cake baked a bit lop-sided, and I tried like mad to keep it upright, but in the end, after being fully iced, the poor thing dumped over anyway. No worries – we propped it up with aluminum foil and enjoyed our dragon duck cake anyway. In deference to Maya’s fire aversion, the number 8 candle was never actually lit.

We had just a couple more days of working and virtual learning to make it through after Maya’s birthday party before the Really Big Thing happened. Our bubble family friends had rented a beach house at South Padre Island for the week of Thanksgiving, and had invited us to come vacation along with them. We only stayed from Saturday to Wednesday, but that time was the most relaxed I have felt since this whole stupid pandemic business started.

The playground, every day while on vacation.

This was our schedule – kids meandered out of bed, quietly playing with their devices till everyone was awake. This was followed by a leisurely breakfast. And then the kids would play in the property’s heated pool and hot tub until lunchtime. Some set of grownups would lounge around the pool in the perfect weather, sipping coffee or wine or beer. Lunch would then occur and kids would chill out for a while to rest up. Then in the afternoon, some set of us would find a relatively unpopulated portion of the beach and play in the sand or the waves.

Beach girl beaching

Maya and Ruby seemed to be impervious to the cold water, spending as long as we’d let them in the water, waves crashing into them. I went out once with Maya, but I can’t ever quite relax with her playing in the ocean. Usually, it was the two dads, Sean and Chris, out in that cold water, keeping the girls from drowning. Ian and Herbie, the boys, seemed to have an ambivalent relationship with the beach. Neither of them has an ounce of body fat, so I’m sure that cold water chilled them through quickly. Mostly they wanted to play in the nice heated pool back at the house.

Ian in the nice warm pool.

Maya apparently has a weird talent for finding hermit crabs. She at one point came staggering out of the waves clutching what she believed to be merely a “cool shell.” On closer inspection, we discovered that it was occupied. We made a little saltwater pool out of a sand toy and placed the shell into it. It wasn’t long at all before translucent legs spidered out of the shell and the little crab started scuttling around looking for its exit. Figuring it was a fluke, we enjoyed the crab for a little while before releasing it back into the sea.

Beachcombers

The next day was even more amazing. At one point, she had our makeshift observation pool loaded up with five hermit crabs and I don’t know how many of these weird little mollusks with flappy protrusions that seemed to both cling them to rocks and wavily propel them through the sand. (Hermit crab video: 20201124-IMG_1663.) When asked how she found them, she exclaimed, “Look with your hands, not your eyes!” Sounds like our future marine biologist is going to need good medical insurance. We also found several jellyfish and pretty blue Portuguese man-of-wars (men-of-war??) in the water and on the beach. We even had a brief sighting of a tiny blue dragon with its impossibly blue frilly body before a wave swept it away.

Oh captain, my captain

Sean managed the cocktail program, at least for our portion of the vacation. In several small bottles, he batched up the goods for four different Tiki drinks for the grownups. That, a bottle of rum, and a little juice and soda water turned into several lovely drinks to cap off our evenings. He even brought or bought the stuff to make mocktails for the kids, which Maya or Ian (I can’t remember which) explained didn’t have quite as much alcohol as the grown-up drinks. [None was the amount of alcohol the kids’ drinks had, just so we’re all clear.]

Gamerzzzz

It was nice getting to spend time with friends in such a relaxed setting. We could have random conversations without needing to schedule a zoom meeting. Ruby and Ian traded cat stories and followed each other around trying to solve some mystery only they understood. Maya and Herbie could bond over Plants vs Zombies 2 (PvZ2 to the hip kids). The characters / defensive weapons / whatever in PvZ2 are hilarious – Maya has recently introduced me to the wonders of Bloomerang and Bonk Choy.

Probably a month or more ago, I had the idea that if we weren’t going to get to see Santa in person this year, we’d buy a life sized cutout of Santa and take him around for photos. To that end, we have an weirdly astonished Santa Claus hanging out at the pool with us. He came out for an obligatory tourist shot as well. It’s possible he’ll make a few more appearances in the coming weeks – we’ll just have to see how much we feel like getting out and about.

Flat Santa and the kids

Our bubble family friends, who we have known for many years now, had planned a trip to Moab, UT over Christmas break. Again, they invited us along. We were wary of the long drive with our kids, but we were all really looking forward to the trip. The intention was to chill out at a nice vacation house away from people and go hiking in Arches National Park and Canyonlands National Park during the day. As the pandemic has worsened and the caseloads have climbed and hospitals have filled, it has become increasingly clear that we would be borderline irresponsible to make such a trip right now. What if someone got hurt and needed access to a hospital? What if someone got sick while a 2-day drive from home?

The COVID-19 cases have been insane the past few weeks, and everyone is holding their breath to see if Thanksgiving gatherings will further drive the numbers up. The kids’ school has moved back to all virtual learning for at least the first week following Thanksgiving break in hopes that anyone who was exposed to the virus will have a chance to show symptoms and not accidentally expose fellow students and staff. Here are the numbers – it’s been a shorter interval than usual since my last post. Travis County – 11/8 33,168 cases and 457 deaths – 11/29 38,045 cases and 483 deaths. Texas – 11/8 990,930 cases and 19,184 deaths – 11/29 1,225,118 cases and 21,843 deaths. United States – 11/8 9,962,900 cases and 237,567 deaths – 11/29 13,385,494 cases and 266,887 deaths. The World – 11/8 50,327,258 cases and 1,255,490 deaths – 11/29 62,829,641 cases and 1,461,049 deaths.

 

I was so excited when the weather finally cooled off. I had been steadily working to improve our back yard, even throughout the heat of the summer (though admittedly, in smaller doses). But once the cooler weather in September arrived, I was ready to get some things accomplished. As mentioned in the last post, I planted a bunch of grass plugs in this shady, difficult part of the yard. I had also purchased several waves of shade-tolerant plants to fill in some bare spots and maybe even recondition one of the remaining planting areas. And, I scheduled our tree guy to come see what needed taking care of.

Fine 2020, take our tree yet too.

It turns out, there was a lot to take care of. I had him look at this big ash tree in the back yard whose bark was showing signs of stress. He took a look at it, thonking it with his mallet, checking it from all angles. He started making phone calls, looking increasingly agitated. Eventually he carefully explained to me that the collapse of the tree was imminent, that we really needed to have it removed as soon as possible, and that he was scheduled out for something like ten weeks. This tree, which we all loved, had lots of big, sprawling branches that drooped gracefully toward the house, shading us from the worst of the summer sun, which meant that there was only one direction it was going to fall once it did finally come down.

He redirected us to another person right away and made sure they knew what was going on. I busied myself UN-planting a bunch of the stuff I had planted throughout the year, in hopes of it *not* getting crushed by felled tree limbs. I hurried at this task, thinking the tree was going to be removed in the near term. It wound up taking more than a month to finally, finally get the House Crusher removed from the back yard. Because it wasn’t safe to climb up in the tree, they wound up using a man lift to cut down the upper part of the tree. All told, things are much brighter in our back yard now. At the moment, I’m enjoying it; it seems less dreary. We’ll see how we all feel come next May.

I think it took all of Maya’s effort not to hug Anna.

Thanks to the current pandemic, we haven’t really seen people socially in person in a very long time. After so many months of this dragging on, I think it’s clear that COVID-19 isn’t going anywhere anytime soon, and so we have been working to mentally shift from the lockdown-as-much-as-possible-all-the-time mentality to one that has us developing strategies for living with the virus instead. To that end, we’ve done a couple of things differently lately. First, in honor of our now long-standing tradition, we asked Anna if she’d be willing to come over to draw the kids’ halloween pumpkins for them, and she said she would! We all wore masks and hung out on the front porch and had a really nice in-person visit for a change. She drew a dragon for Maya (of course) and a silly jack-o’-lantern face for Ian.

In the spirit of the season, Sean sprung for some fun Halloween doughnuts from Krispy Kreme. Maya was in love. Ian still to this day mostly just picks the icing and sprinkles off whatever doughnut he eats. In deference to the coronavirus, we both went and voted early. Maya in particular was ON US to go vote – we’re assuming they were talking about it at school. I mean, honestly kid, we just wanted to get past the rush the first week. They’re old enough to pay attention to what’s going on these days, and I would liked to have take them along to vote this year. I just couldn’t justify the risk.

The biggest to-do that week, anyway.

At the kids’ school, they have an annual fundraiser called the Big To-Do. We haven’t ever gone in the past. We just donated money to the PTA and called it good. This year though, they were doing a little Hawaiian feast that you could purchase and that would be delivered to your door. In 2020, the year that just keeps on giving, we often find ourselves saying eff it, why not. And so, one weekend in late-October, we had delivered to our house a big container of Hawaiian chicken and rice, a couple tubs of macaroni salad, fixin’s for pineapple upside down cake, a couple cans of piña colada mixer, and some cute little leis and hair barrettes and fun little things to hold up for photos. Because it was Something Different for a Change, the kids were ecstatic.

Eyeball pong was a hit!

Then on Halloween, we did the most amazing thing. We went to our friends’ house and had a small two-family Halloween party! They have similar coronavirus protocols to us, and after some hemming and hawing (mostly from me), we decided to go for it. The kids were tha-rilled. No coronavirus masks? Nope. No 6-feet of distance? Nope. We haven’t experienced this much *normal* in ages. And while we helped a bit with supplies and set-up, most of the party planning was done by our friends. There was “Eyeball Pong” (think beer pong, but with plastic eyeballs to throw and no actual beer). The kids made slime. The bashed the hell out of a ghost-shaped piñata. There was also some Halloween cookie decorating, and a very fun glow-in-the-dark egg hunt. They ate too much candy, sure, but they also had skull-shaped calzones and meatballs fashioned to look like creepy eyeballs. At the end of the night, they rested and watched a movie.

Tent, Arthur Tent.

Because the kids had the day off school on November 3rd, and because we had already voted, we thought we’d test out camping with the kids. We acquired the giantest family tent I think I’ve ever been in, loaded the ol’ Prius to the gills, and headed out to Muleshoe Bend, which is all of an hour away, to camp along Lake Travis. As we were setting up the tent, Sean (I think it was Sean), decided its name was Tent, Arthur Tent in homage to Arther Dent of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy fame. Tent, Arthur Tent was going to be excellent for our clear, cool evening because its rainfly could be left off, and we could all lay cozily in the tent and stare up at all the lovely stars. It was beautiful.

Snug.

At least it was until the fog rolled in. Around two in the morning Sean nudged me awake (or alerted me to the fact that he was awake anyway, since I wasn’t really sleeping well) to let me know he was getting dripped in the head with water from the roof of the tent. It wasn’t raining, but sure enough, the slow and steady pat-pat-pat of water drops splatting the tent floor could be heard. A quick look outside made it clear that what was happening was that the fog from the lake was condensing on our tent (and our car, and the couple things we’d left out on the picnic table) and dripping on our faces. Luckily, we were able to install the rain fly and more or less get the inside of the tent dried enough to be sleep-worthy again. Incredibly, the kids slept through all of it: the drips, the rainfly installation, the lights of the car blinking when I relocked it, us crawling out of and into the tent.

Lake fog.

We cooked our breakfast and warmed up a bit and then went and hiked a couple miles. After lunch, we let the kids play down at the lake for a while before dismantling our tent and heading back into town in time to catch Ian’s guitar lesson. The biggest lesson we learned from this experience was that we should have unearthed our wool socks for the trip. Those half-damp cotton socks were the absolute pits around 2:30 in the morning after installing the rainfly and crawling back in our sleeping bags to try and warm back up from the 37-degree evening.

Our coronavirus cases since even the end of October have been climbing at an alarming rate. Here are the numbers from what I screen captured on Sunday evening vs. what I had recorded for our last post. Travis County – 10/4 29,799 cases and 429 deaths – 11/8 33,168 cases and 457 deaths. Texas – 10/4 790,194 cases and 16,320 deaths – 11/8 990,930 cases and 19,184 deaths. United States – 10/4 7,420,779 cases and 209,821 deaths – 11/8 9,962,900 cases and 237,567 deaths. The World – 10/4 35,078,236 cases and 1,036,104 deaths – 11/8 50,327,258 cases and 1,255,490 deaths.