They're Too Close

In the scope of my life, we have been isolated for a very small portion of the time.   The imperative to keep personal distance between other humans, not in the immediate circle of your family or those you're co-mingling with during isolation, has become almost ingrained.   It's everywhere.

Conversations between adults invariably have some facet of the discussion on one aspect or another related to COVID-19.   Social media communication is related to Coronavirus or some aspect of life affected by it.  I can't get away from it even here.  It's changed our lives in the short term.   For some people, it will change their lives forever.

At some point, we'll get back to normal.   Today, though, I am stuck in "protect and keep others safe" mode still.   It reminds me of something that happened relatively frequently to me when I was a child. When I was a child.

Perhaps not a child so much as a youth.   I loved swinging in a hammock in the back yard where I grew up.   The hammock was strung up between two trees that were slightly too close together.   If your goal was to lounge in the hammock it didn't work well because the hammock would droop too far down, and you felt like you were in a V formation.

It worked to my advantage, though, because I sat sideways in the hammock at the centermost point.   I could get a nice swing angle going and pump with my upper body while my legs would be crossed in front of me.

I could get up pretty high in that hammock.   I would wear out the S hooks, and it would crash to ground if I didn't replace the hooks every so often.    It is perhaps because of the crashing to the ground that I would think of safety when I got into the hammock.   I would sit down, put on some music on my Sony Walkman cassette player and then remember to put my seatbelt on before beginning to swing—only there was no seat belt.   It was a thing you did to keep safe, though, and I thought it more times than I can count.

Today I was changing the desktop background on my Mac.   I picked a picture from our family reunion.  Thirty-ish people all standing close together on stairs so we could all fit into the picture.   As I selected the image, I thought to myself, "what were we thinking, we're all way too close to each other?"

The Big Boy Update:  My son lost screens at lunch today for behavior.   I missed the incident, but I heard about the consequence.   I had an idea, though, and told my son we could do something if he would be interested.   But we had to not tell his sister, on account of some things she does not like to share, and this would undoubtedly be one of them.  If he would like to ride around the neighborhood for at least two miles, he could wear her Apple Watch to track the distance.   And, perhaps he could redeem himself and get screens back early if he did.   It worked.  He biked all around the neighborhood and found out how much distance different areas of the neighborhood are.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  My daughter continues to collect snails for her terrarium.   We put one slug in, but after reading more about slugs she decided she did not want it in with the snails.   The problem was, the one slug was the size of a grain of rice and the second one was an eraser head size.   We looked and found the larger one and removed him.   She brought an earthworm a few minutes ago and accidentally tore him in half as she showed me.   She was very upset (she is always gentle.).  In this case, I told her, it would be find.   She would now have two earthworms.