Air quality

Seattle is having bad air quality due to wildfires in Eastern Washington - bad enough that we stay inside with all the windows closed. Fortunately, it's not super hot here, so although we miss tennis, we are fine. 

My department chair is an atmospheric chemist, and anytime there is wildfire smoke, he goes into super data collection mode. He wanted to measure conditions at a variety of locations and asked if our family would help out. It was super cool! He gave us a handheld particle counter.

Each run is one minute: it sucks in air through the silver tube on top, measures the size of particles in the air with laser scattering, and delivers a count of different-size particles, ranging from over 10 microns to less than 0.3 microns. We learned that 10-micron particles are stopped in the nose, 2.5-micron particles are stopped in the throat, and 0.3-micron particles go all the way into the alveoli in the lungs, making them the most impactful to people's health. We were asked to do a series of five one-minute runs indoors, and another series of five one-minute runs outdoors, to help answer the question of how much difference it actually makes to stay inside. Here's Aaron doing the outdoor run.

This is our data sheet. Fascinating! Obviously indoors is way better.

When we delivered this data to the scientists, they were impressed at how clean our indoor air is and asked if we had been running a filter. We have! It's fun to know it makes a difference.

Pandemic camping

We have had quite a few camping trips this summer. In normal years these can be hard to fit in because the kids have so many obligations, but not this year! There are some risks involved for sure, especially the public bathrooms. We wear masks and don't linger. 

Our first trip was to Lake Quinault, just the four of us. The campground was COVID-ready, alternating full with empty campsites.

The most memorable part of that trip, though, was the rain. We were there from Friday to Sunday; it started raining late Friday night and rained continually through Sunday morning. (To be fair, it is the rainforest.) Jordan and Dale built an elaborate tarp shelter, and we spent almost all of Saturday just hanging out in that tiny little outdoor living room, playing cards and eating and reading books. Limited as it was, it was at least different from being at home! We did find a dry hour or two for a walk in the beautiful woods, returning covered with mud. And here we are at some non-raining hour, apparently burning some wet wood.

The other trips we went on have been with friends. We went back to La Wis Wis with much the same crowd and had a very pleasant time. We had to have a zoom meeting in advance to discuss the protocols: no sharing food, masked most of the time, no communal tent for the kids (the kids were all at one campsite but only siblings shared tent space). It works. We've also been back to Middle Fork, one of our favorite spots, but have not been able to camp there: apparently bears have moved in. 

We camped again with friends at a place near Middlle Fork, Tinkham campground, which has a surprising view of I-90 but was better than nothing. Here's a socially distanced group photo from Tinkham... we did a panorama, and did some fancy footwork to get everyone in. See how Aaron is on both sides? 

The only water at Tinkham was from this astonishing hand pump.

We also find time for the occasional day trip. Here we are at Deception Pass early in the summer; we drove up, hiked for an hour or so, had a picnic lunch, and left just as things started to get crowded.

Jordan and Dale have also been on two camping trips without Aaron and me, arranged especially for (and by) the 16-year-olds and their dads. That's fine... Aaron and I are content to stay home and eat sushi.

Oregon coast

Early this summer, Jessica adopted our kids for a few days and took them to the Oregon coast, where she had rented a little beach house for a getaway. They were in each other's bubble for just those few days, and they were soooooooo happy to spend time with friends. This was the view from the house:

Pretty fantastic. The boys spent many hours a day on the beach, mostly digging. As you can see there is plenty of room for social distancing.

In addition to the beautiful sunset, this picture has Aaron and Adam in the foreground, and if you zoom in you can just make out Jordan and Ian's heads peeking up out of their hole down by the water.

We are grateful that our kids had such an idyllic getaway.

Virtual Camp Kesher

We are sad to have no Jewish family camp this year! For a minute there it looked like of all things, the annual talent show was going to be online, which was somewhere between hilarious and torturous to me (the "talent" is highly debatable). Fortunately (?) no one submitted anything. But! People did submit haikus and some of them are pretty darned funny. Over the years, I have become the keeper of the Kesher haiku tradition, so I video-recorded myself presenting my favorites, and posted it all to the camp's Facebook page. It was fun! The backgrounds are scenes from camp.

Trigonometry

Through a free program called Running Start, 11th graders in Seattle public schools have the option to take classes at community college, earning both high school and college credit. It’s a terrific program. Jordan will do half-time at North Seattle College (science and math), and take the other half of his classes at his high school. (The logistics are significantly easier with everything online… if it weren’t for the pandemic, he’d need transportation.)

Back in June, we made our way through the byzantine application, including a math placement test. Jordan was both delighted and tantalized by his results: He almost qualified to go straight into calculus in the fall (effectively skipping a year). But not quite! He asked if he could do the remaining material over the summer, and of course my answer was HECK YES. Are you kidding me? With every other organized summer activity cancelled? We signed him up that minute. 

The missing material is trigonometry. It is a fully online, asynchronous course, and keeping up takes him an hour or two of work most days. It’s going great! He enjoys it, and I love that he has something worthwhile to do every day. 

After the first couple weeks he recognized that there’s no use trying to work alone in his room: he gets distracted and nothing gets done. So now he works at the dining room table, at a time when I’m also free, and asks for my backup. I love this so much. First of all, when your sixteen-year-old son invites you to do essentially anything with him, the answer is YES YES YES. And I’m the only one in the house who’s fluent in trig, so it has to be me. (Dale learned trig once but doesn’t use it.) But also, it’s fun! With me there, Jordan talks through what he’s doing, has me check his answers, enjoys my semi-socratic prompts, and generally wolfs down his new understanding like a happy dog. Some of the benefit is just my presence: the fact that I am there and I care what he's doing keeps him on task. Some of it is me helping him parse the odd grammar of math problems (“From a point on the ground 47 feet from the foot of a tree, the angle of elevation of the top of the tree is 35º. Find the height of the tree to the nearest foot”) and trace errors in copying numbers from one place to another/into the calculator (191 turns to 919, etc.); this is dyslexia/dysgraphia support. And some of it is the two of us enjoying the material together, him learning and me reflecting or re-learning. It’s been a delightful part of the summer. I'm so glad I have the flexibility to do this with him.

Here is a picture of us at work, in front of a large pile of kale that Dale brought in from the garden. I know he doesn’t look happy, but I promise, that’s just about having his picture taken.

Pandemic boychoir

Heartbreakingly, one of the most unsafe activities these days is singing together with other people. Yet somehow the choirs go on! Boychoir has been particularly successful, at least from Aaron's point of view; their twice-weekly zoom rehearsals are consistently fun, rewarding, and invigorating for him. The director meets with 5-7 of them at a time and they do a lot of one-on-one work: sight reading, ear training, and vocal work. They have regular recording homework, too; the director assembles their recordings into beautiful "virtual choir" videos. These get a lot of attention on social media and for good reason. Here are three: 

Jordan also meets weekly with Vocalpoint and has occasional recording sessions, but they record in small ensembles, and he has not appeared in one yet.

Pandemic music

All three of Dale’s bands are finding ways to continue to make music, at least a little bit, even though performance opportunities are, er, limited. The swing band plays every other week or so in the backyard, or in the carport.

The rock band has played in the yard just once: they are all older and appropriately very cautious, but our yard is pretty darn good for socially distant music making, since everyone can be 10 or more feet apart. The street band has twice now gotten together and played in a local park. Social distancing is terrible for tips, but they have fun.

And sometimes the kids just pull out the guitar and ukulele.

Pandemic birthdays

Birthday parties cannot be the way they once were, so, we have to try new things. For Aaron’s birthday, we invited a small number of friends to hang out outdoors, masked; we figured they could play badminton and just hang out. No birthday cake would be shared... can you believe we used to blow on cake and then pass it around? will we ever do that again? Sigh. Aaron doesn't care for cupcakes, but loves donuts, so we had individually-packaged donuts for everyone, and sparkling water. It felt extremely strange to have such spartan offerings. But here we are.

Then we learned that it would rain. Ugh. So we cleared out the carport and decorated it with colored lights and balloons. It could be worse?

While we were waiting for friends to come, I was feeling pretty low. Aaron was supposed to have a beautiful bar mitzvah celebration, and instead he's stuck in the carport in the rain. Aaron felt it too, for sure: he started out saying this was "the most ghetto birthday ever," and I cannot disagree. However! Once some friends showed up, it was worth it. They enjoyed each other's company, they gorged on donuts, and the sun even came out for a while.

For a family celebration, Aaron asked for the classics: waffles for breakfast, his favorite sushi for dinner, and a traditional birthday cake. Done.

Jordan did not prefer to have any form of birthday party. He asked for sourdough waffles for breakfast, Indian food for dinner, and happily agreed for me to make him a salty pretzel peanut ice cream cake for dessert. Here he is photographing it to show his friends. It was delish.



While I had the sourdough awake I made my first-ever sourdough bread. Pretty darn good!

And finally, there were birthday haircuts. Haircuts are a rarity in these times, but we have someone who can come and do me and the boys quickly and outdoors. We are grateful!

Distant happy birthday

An adult friend of ours would have had a big bash for a milestone birthday this year, but no. So we passed by her house and celebrated her from the curb. You can’t say we didn’t put our heart into it! And we have the best instruments.

Sock puppet covenant renewal

Another zoomified ceremony from the spring was the Temple Beth Am 10th grade covenant renewal, normally a huge deal in which each 10th grader makes a statement about what being Jewish means to them. This typically follows the class trip to New York, an extremely formative experience of Jewish America; but that trip would have been in early April, and perhaps you remember what New York was like in April 2020, so, no. May it be next year. Meanwhile, the Temple reimagined the covenant renewal service with recorded contributions. Jordan and Ian put together this sock puppet skit, starring "I-ock" and "Joppet." Jordan said, "The script by itself would have been boring, but the sock puppets really elevate it," and I couldn't agree more. 

That's the trimmed version, which we sent to the temple for sharing. Below is the "uncut" version, which has my favorite part -- they are talking beforehand just as themselves ("From the top?"), but Ian is still talking through the sock puppet! Love it so much.

Bohemian Rhapsody

Aaron continues to have piano lessons and is now perfectly used to having them on zoom. I assume it’s pesky for his teacher not to be able to see his fingers or work with him physically, but it still seems very productive. For his spring recital, Aaron learned all of Bohemian Rhapsody. It’s pretty incredible.

The recital was of course a YouTube production; we sat together as a family and watched all of the students’ recorded videos. Even though it was weird not to be in person, it was fun being completely free to make comments!

Unemployment fraud

Back in May, I got a letter from the Washington State Employment Security Department suggesting that I had filed for unemployment, but I had not done so. Uh oh! Sadly, I was part of a very widespread fraud problem, in which the criminals used SSNs obtained in earlier data breaches and exploited the government’s efforts to pay claims quickly in the pandemic. We now know that by the last week of April, the Washington State ESD was averaging 2,000 fraudulent claims a day. Eventually it added up to over 80,000 claims; $576 million was paid out to crooks. Really shameful.

Fortunately, there was no direct harm to me, other than spending a couple hours reporting and locking things down. I reported the fraud to the Employment Security Department, the police, and my employer. I froze my credit and activated a credit fraud alert. I set up an account with the IRS (so that no one else would be able to do that), locked my SSN, and reported to identitytheft.gov. It was all very educational and thank goodness, nothing else was wrong: my bank accounts were as they should be, my credit was clean (no fraudulent accounts were created), and the IRS website knew me as my real self and showed no fraudulent activity. That was a big relief.

I kept careful records of everything I did and diligently filed every acknowledgement I received. Nothing else has happened. I have been assured that if I need to apply for unemployment benefits, I still can… but let’s hope that need does not arise.

22 weeks

Today is 22 weeks since the kids were sent home from school. Things are much the same as they were at 10 weeks: we are still basically fine, our daily schedule is much the same, all of the kids' organized summer activities remained cancelled as expected. And just like at 10 weeks, I feel I ought to be recording more of this historic time in our family. I kind of don't want to...but I will anyway. I have a few days off this week and this is part of what I will do. Because there are things! There have been pandemic birthdays, pandemic haircuts, and pandemic camping trips. We have found ways to make music, learn math, and manage a tiny bit of careful travel. So here we go.

Chores

Early on, we used the extra time at home to get some big jobs done, and used this as an opportunity to get the kids off the screens for a while. For example, they moved a lot of dirt. The kids like a tangible task and are cheerful participants. At this point we've kind of run out of projects, but it was fun while it lasted, and maybe I'll think of more.

They have learned how to clean a bathroom, which is a crucial life skill even though they bathe so little these days.

I also had them clean the fridge down to a shine, which was a huge job, both educational and rewarding.

Samson

We are pretty sure that Samson loves the pandemic: since we are home all the time, we can open the windows for him. He is an indoor cat and all the windows have screens, but he loves the fresh air, and the open windows allow him to at least mentally hunt the bunnies and scare off the other cats. We certainly love having him with us: he is great company and very entertaining. I especially love to take pictures of his fuzzy belly.

Pandemic cooking

Cooking is soothing and rewarding for me: the process of preparing food is a pleasure, the meals I cook give pleasure to my family, and it gives me control over something. I have been a seriously excellent provider of meals if I do say so myself. One of the pandemic-specific cooking efforts I have made is to make simple yet luxurious lunches. I am especially great at dips, which add punches of flavor to substance to platters of raw veggies: some are bursting with herbs, some pop with pickled peppers, today’s is a hot buffalo chicken dip. I also make lovely dinners, of course. Lately I’m trying to do more vegetarian dishes: last week was a whole week of vegetarian meals, and no one even really noticed, because we all just enjoyed what we were eating. Finally, I have been trying new things from scratch. At Passover we made matzo -- not kosher because it had olive oil in it, but so much more delicious than the stuff in a box.

And I regularly make yogurt now. The Instant Pot makes it a little easier, and we are working out our system for draining it.

The kids also cook willingly and with pleasure and pride. I love what they are learning and when they do it, I remember to take pictures. :) Jordan got it into his head one day to make gnocchi; we used sweet potatoes, and it was fantastic.

We make our own pizza, including the dough; why not, we've got all day, and it's easy enough. I have not yet run out of flour or yeast.

One day Jordan asked to make an elaborate dessert, so I had him make and frost a layer cake. I figure, if he can go off to college ready to make a fun birthday cake for a friend, he is an asset to any dorm.

Another day, he and Aaron made a rhubarb upside-down cake. Desserts are motivating for sure... I've been making a lot of them myself, and we grow the rhubarb.

On Wednesdays, Aaron's school has "expeditionary education" days, where they are asked to choose from a variety of educational activities that are beyond the confines of regular school: wash the dog, camp in the yard, make dinner. Aaron pretty much always chooses to make dinner. Here he is making broccoli melts, which came out absolutely delicious.

Family TV

TV time is a fun and relaxing way to be together in the evenings. Before pandemic time, we were watching Parks & Rec, which was fun for everyone and entertained us for many evenings. One day on the drive to school (ah, driving to school...) Aaron said the show was getting him interested in government, and I thought... if you're going to get access to government through a TV show, I know which one it should be! We started watching The West Wing, and wow, is it good. It is every bit as good as it was 20 years ago (!), and many of the issues are eerily unchanged... like gun control. The only area where it seems happily dated is LGBTQ rights. Some things get better. And there are many, many seasons, so we can watch it a lot.

We have also diverted into other shows here and there: we watched the last season of The Good Place (terrific), introduced the kids to Seinfeld (definitely counts as Jewish education in my book), and watched all the Harry Potter movies in order. Right now we're watching Apollo 13, and I have Breaking Away and 20 Feet From Stardom on deck. But it's good to know we have The West Wing to go back to whenever we want.

Home offices

We each have a private desk for work, each in our own room. This is a luxury!

Sometimes I have an officemate.

The boys also spend a lot of time at the dining room table, especially when they are playing together. Posture is an issue for all of us.

Weekday schedule

7:00-7:30 Dale, Aaron, and I all get up. The three of us have breakfast together.

8:30-4:30 Aaron is in school off and on. The first live class meeting is always at 8:30am. After that, he has a mix of synchronous meetings (usually two per day) and independent work (typically about one hour). He takes care of this completely on his own and is keeping up just fine. He also has choir twice a week. They can’t sing together, but are building their musicianship in other ways like ear training, sight reading, and singing alone, working towards creating recordings like [this one]. When Aaron isn’t doing school he plays Minecraft, either alone or with Jordan.

9:00 Dale and I start our workdays. We both have 2-3 live zoom meetings per day, plus independent work time.

10:30-11:30 Jordan gets up. Sometimes he has breakfast, sometimes he waits to eat until lunch. (It’s practically lunchtime when he gets up, and he prefers lunchy kinds of things for breakfast, anyway.)

12:00-1:00 We have lunch together if we can. The boys make themselves nachos unless I’ve made something else. I often put out a platter of veggies with delicious dip. If they make their own lunch, it means they pause the video games for about half an hour; if I make lunch for them, they eat it in front of the screens, unless I make them not do that.

1:30-3:30 Somewhere in this time period we go out to the park for sports time. We usually go to Magnuson. For a while we played pickleball; we have now leveled up to tennis, because it is more wind-resistant. This is the only time the boys get out of the house. It is such a wonderful thing to get outside in the middle of the day! We all need it. I play a little tennis but also use the time to make phone calls (walking).

4:30-6:30 In the late afternoon I make dinner. I also usually realize what jobs have not yet been done for the day and make the kids do them: piano, folding laundry, etc. We have dinner together at 6ish.

7:00-9:00 Family TV.

9:00 Aaron strictly goes to bed at this time. He is clear that this is better for him and takes the initiative to make sure the TV stops in time. I appreciate this; I like for quiet time to start around 9pm. Jordan, meanwhile, begins his night life of video games with friends at this time, in his room. Dale and I clean up the kitchen (mostly Dale) and talk about the news.

10:00-11:00 Everyone is in bed.

Weekends are basically the same, but without school.

Screen time

Early on we co-constructed a loose daily plan for the kids. That lasted a week or so; then the boys wanted more screen time. We said yes but still asked that they spend some time each day away from the screen, doing something else. I know it can be hard to think of what else to do other than stare at a screen (we all have that problem), so I erased the chalkboard where we used to write our weekly calendar (no need for that anymore) and wrote a bunch of prompts for other things to do. Some responsibilities, some things that they find fun when they do them but don’t do spontaneously.

They cheerfully agreed that this was a good system and then entirely ignored it. Every so often I prompted them to check the chalkboard, but the lure of the screen is sooooo strong. Eventually I erased it… it mocked me.

Now they play video games all day except when they are doing something else, which basically means, unless we are doing one of our daily family time things or I otherwise stand over them to do something else. They are reasonably willing to do other things if we stand over them. But I don’t do this most of the time, because I have my own work to do.

Bar mitzvah postponed again

I can hardly express how sad this makes all of us: We have to reimagine Aaron’s bar mitzvah again. When we moved it from March 14 to July 25, it seemed like plenty of time; surely we would have this pandemic figured out in four months? But no. Things are still so uncertain, and so limited. And even though it is remotely possible that state law would allow gatherings of our size by that time (and I briefly daydreamed about a drive-in service), what it boils down to is that we absolutely do not want our beloved elders to get on a plane. It’s not going to be safe yet and we will not put them in that position.

We had multiple conversations to decide what to do next -- with our partner family, with our rabbi, and with Aaron. All of these conversations were beautiful examples of respectful candor, where everyone got to say where they were coming from. They were also heart-wrenching and exhausting. Our rabbi was wonderful: she was a good listener, helped organize what she was hearing into a clear set of options, and gave her own input, which I was really grateful for.

We needed to decide between three options:

(A) Go ahead this July (2020), knowing that guests could attend only by zoom. There is a chance we might be able to be in the sanctuary ourselves, though masked.

(B) Wait until next summer (2021), in the hope that we could be in person for some part of either the service, the party, or both, with zoom attendance as the backup plan. (We don’t want to do it in the winter because then we’d have to be indoors, which greatly reduces the chance of being able to gather safely.)

(C) Wait until we can be fairly confident it will be safe for vulnerable people to travel to be with us, i.e., when there is a vaccine. This is not next summer, but maybe the summer after that (2022).

The only one of these that we felt able to rule out was (C). The boys would be turning 15 and a year through high school already; it just feels developmentally wrong at that time. Among the four adults, there was pretty much equal inclination for (A) and (B). One preferred (B) because there is a chance of gathering our community together, one preferred (A) because (to be really frank about it) loved ones could die in the coming year, and two felt equally divided. Is it better to wait until it can be more like we want, or does it suck to have it hanging over your head for another year? What if we wait until 2021 and then it turns out to be the same as it would have been in 2020? To be honest, there is no great option.

The initial tiebreaker was Adam, who does not want either (A) or (C). Aaron pretty much agreed. To him, the most important part is to be welcomed by your community, and he wants a chance at that. He understands the risks of waiting, and is concerned about those risks. But also, he says that these days he is very anxious generally, and maybe he would be less anxious by that time. (I will add that by then we are likely to have gotten better at Zoom ceremonies, and more used to the sight of masks.) So… our choice is (B), the new date is July 17. We will also acknowledge their bar mitzvah date this summer with an aliyah, to mark the occasion, and especially their in this decisionmaking.

I share Aaron’s values for community, and I am extremely proud of him. When we can all gather around him and celebrate his incredible journey to get to that point – what a day that will be! Meanwhile… we are so sad, we can hardly talk about it.

68 days

It has been 68 days since the kids were sent home from school. This is a historic time, and it would be really good of me to keep a better record of what our family is experiencing, but I keep finding that hard to do. It’s not that I’m too busy… it’s more like I don’t want to. Basically I wish it wasn’t happening and would rather just look the other way until it’s over. But it’s not going to be over for a long time. I’m even social-distancing in my dreams.

Overall we are fine. I work remotely and cook. Dale works remotely and gardens. Aaron keeps up with school and plays Minecraft. Jordan… plays Minecraft (school expects very little of him). The kids do household tasks; we go the park; we watch TV together. And then there is another day.

School will be with us in this sense for another month-ish, and then for the summer, the kids are likely to have nothing. Most of their beloved summer activities have already been canceled: sleepaway camp is gone, choir camp is extremely unlikely, ultimate frisbee camp is gone in June and only remotely possible in August. A long vista of strange time stretches before us. But for today, we have a wonderful home, we get along, we eat well, and the weather is beautiful.

Remote piano lesson

Last Saturday, we attended Aaron’s piano lesson in person and the teacher sat 6 feet away from him. Today, we did it remotely. In the photo the teacher is video-calling in from the iPad on the music stand. Aaron said it was good, but also very weird. I think it rattled him the way the grocery store rattled me.

Grocery shopping

Grocery shopping shook me up. Things are good there, everyone being extremely kind and responsible: it’s just the reality of it. A friendly staff member at the door doling out sanitizer. Another one busily disinfecting the carts. I was there at 8am on a Saturday, and it was not crowded; people kept a polite distance from each other as best they could, though some of the aisles are narrow, and many of the aisles were cluttered with boxes that staff were in the process of unpacking. They are working so hard… I am trying to think in terms of what is present on the shelves and celebrate what I find: Chicken! Cream! Garlic! But the absences are still notable: today it was whole wheat flour and dark chocolate. Well, next time. The staff member in the produce aisle asked me, “Are you finding everything you need?” and I answered “Yes, thank you” without thinking, and then tears welled up. May we all find everything we need.

There was a long well-spaced line for the cash register. If you brought your own bags, you had to bag your own groceries so the cashiers wouldn't have to touch your bags. When I left, there was a well-spaced line to enter the store (to reduce crowding).