This week finds me working 10 hours each day for four days. Friday is a national holiday but as a contractor working for a large tech company, paid time off and sick days are not a luxury we get to enjoy. I fell short of the 960 hours needed for one paid day as I had taken several days and hours off back in February and early March for something I now wished I would never have done. At least I know that in two days’ time I will get to log off and do something other than work on maps.

Though I would prefer to spend that day doing something fun with the kids, I know that most of the time will be spent trying to prepare for the movers who arrive early Sunday morning. This entire experience has been nothing as I imagined my summer days with the kids this year but neither has the year thus far.

As the day closes on the first six months of the year, I pause to reflect on all that has transpired. Not everything has been bad but has certainly not been anything we had hoped. I am certain that most of us believed that the year 2020 was going to be ‘the best year yet’, as we often hope when a new year comes about, but the Coronavirus pandemic has disrupted that belief.

With Coronavirus, we have had to drastically change our daily lives. Many people lost jobs and found it difficult to cope with both the lack of pay and the habits of preparing for work in the morning and sending the kids off to school. Unemployment benefits might have mitigated some of those concerns for those able to qualify, especially people in other parts of the world who have been supported by their government’s social welfare programs. If only the United States would follow suit and take care of their people as other countries have done we would have had the peace of mind to wait out this time at home instead of worrying how to pay our bills.

On the other hand, those of us who have continued to work have been able to get the paycheck but have had other issues to worry about when it came to balancing care for the family at home, with children learning remotely, whilst trying to work from home. Though I am very grateful for the opportunity to work from home, this sudden move from one apartment to the other has been more than I expected.

As I have not yet been able to move furniture, I have been working with the computer on the floor and my sitting on a blanket on the wooden floor of the living room whilst balancing the keyboard and mouse on a small cutting board which sits on a pillow. Not ergonomic in any sense but I know that this situation, as many we experience, will not last forever.

With all the bad that came with the pandemic, there are others which have also come about. Certainly spending more time with family and sometimes on our own has given us a lot to think about. Oftentimes I think that had I not acted quickly in March, I would be stuck with a situation which would have brought both me and my children a great deal of unhappiness.

Life is too short to be with someone who brings you down on a daily basis. I hope that at least my children learn from my mistakes and do not go down the same path as I did. The lessons I finally learned this year are that people rarely change unless they make a sincere effort and that an alcoholic will always cherish and choose the drink whilst covering up that fact with endless lies.

In this current situation, where we have been left with more time on our hands at home, many of us have taken to reading endless books, learning a new language or instrument, or binge watching shows and movies on our televisions or computers. With the unrest of the move lingering now for close to a month, I have not read any books. The children introduced me to the cartoon show Bob’s Burgers recently, which I have watched several episodes with them at the end of the day a few times this past week. On Friday, I purchased them a small guitar, which arrived this afternoon, and a violin made in Romania which has been placed on backorder the day after I ordered it.

My older daughter preferred the large box that the guitar came in, choosing to use it as a sort of fort where she placed her blanket and pillow inside and continued watching her shows on her phone. Cinnamon took to learning how to tune the guitar and to learning ‘Twinkle Twinkle Little Star’. Sage will take his turn tomorrow and play with the guitar as he waits for the violin to arrive.