Social distancing? Ah, not looking like it.

Both more normality and more craziness came to this world, like we couldn’t have a bowl of ice cream without a side order of murder hornets.

Last week, the kids all went back to school, and while I won’t rant about the epic failure of administrations to get needed supplies to classrooms, to manage how students showed up, to inform parents (or teachers) what was going to happen, or provide a safe environment, I will say the teachers did a fantastic job.

I mean, they were like the rebels fighting Darth Vader in the opening of Star Wars (New Hope). They geared up, likely bought their own equipment, and certainly would have loved to be someplace else, but they showed up and got slaughtered.

My goodness. Mad respect for the teachers.

So, thank you to all the teachers who worked last week.

In the rest of the world, a lot of countries are seeing an uptick in cases, which is not good news, while overhere, Dr. Henry seems to be becoming increasingly worried about the record number of new cases and many people’s ‘ah, who cares?’ attitude.

Antarctica, however, remains Covid free. I may be moving there, soon.

But elsewhere, the world continues to get really weird. In LA, they’ve banned trick or treating (which I find odd since everyone pretty much wears a mask on that night), and it seems that peace is breaking out in the Middle East. I mean, talk about crazy. It’s like cats and dogs deciding to love each other and make babies called dats.

But wait, there’s more. Currently, BC has the air quality of Delhi (due to the wildfires down in the US), and a plague of moths that swarm around anything that creates light.

It’s like the universe is telling us to stay inside and binge watch Netflix shows. Personally, I suspect Netflix has secretly unleashed all these things to force us to watch Coffee and Kareem.

Locally, both our boys went back to school, and The-Prettiest-Girl-in-the-World went back to work.

For The-Youngest, we weren’t really given a lot of choices, either he went back to school, or he’d lose his place there (and since the schools are over capacity, who knows where we’d have to send him if we took him out.)

So he’s got school from 9-2, two classes a day, 5 days a week. He’s basically doing a year’s worth of learning in 10 weeks. It’s focused learning, and likely as fun as drinking a bottle of concentrated organic beet juice, but it is what it is.

For The-Oldest, most of his college classes are online, and he’s ok with that. The only in-person classes are concert band and improv band, which kind of makes sense since doing band by Zoom would be like having a shower in your clothes. Without water.

However, he LOVES his teachers so far since they share his obsession with music, music history, music theory, music composition, and musically music-ness. After his first day of school, he literally ran around the house so excited to be with HIS people. It would be like me living with hobbits.

For The-Prettiest-Girl-in-the-World, the reopening of libraries was less of a sh*tshow than the schools, but there were still a lot of things that needed ironing out. Most people, however, were delighted to have the libraries open, and several became a little emotional that they could take out books again.

Better safe than sorry.

Despite all the challenges, some things got back to normal – little kids were excited about getting library cards, grumpy old guys complained about insignificant things, and no patrons understood where to find biographies (Gordon Ramsey might be in cooking, Churchill in the war section, and no one has yet to figure out where the hell Maya Angelou’s books are.)

Fun times.

How is everyone else coping?