The PVP Diaries #36

And here goes another week. 36 entries. Have I been doing this for 7 weeks now? Lord hammercy.

Whatever that means. Seems to me that as the numbers stay lower, the weird explanations for why we shouldn’t be comforted get more creative. Governor Inslee told us on Friday that we’re going to have 6 more weeks of wint – sorry, wrong unreliable authority – he said that we’re in lockdown until at least May 31 now, with this “phased approach to reopening” beginning then:

We’re essentially in phase 1 already, so not much help there. Whatever. It’s a (laughably small) step in the right direction.

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The grocery stores are now requiring masks to be worn while shopping. Grocery stores have been the lightning rod from the beginning, being as essential as anything else out there, and the most voluntarily visited indoor place where many people are likely to be. When people want to virtue signal now, it usually involves a reference to their last trip to the store:

“There were only, like, 40% of the shoppers wearing masks, and the seafood guy wasn’t wearing one, either. What don’t people understand about the SCIENCE? They won’t be happy until they’ve killed everyone.”

Oh, my. Your handwringing is audible everywhere in a 3 mile radius. Or there’s this stalwart fellow…

“I went to the store without a mask on yesterday. You should have seen all the weak, obedient little sheep that were terrified to walk past me! Just to mess with them I went the wrong way down the one-way aisles!”

Oh, my. The exhaust on your pickup is audible everywhere in a 3 mile radius.

Yay for both of you.

Still, an axiom that I’ve always lived by:

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You may accurately deduce that the boy and I watched The Princess Bride over the weekend. First half Friday night, second half Saturday (with mom!). The movie is perfect in so many ways, especially one that I had no way to recognize the first dozen or so times I watched it. All those moments when Fred Savage gets annoyed at Peter Falk and interrupts him because the story gets too mushy are exactly right. The Boy could sense the mushiness coming and would already be hiding his face to avoid having to see Westley and Buttercup kiss. He loved that the kid in the movie felt the same way. Man, the kids hate that stuff. And in classic kid form, he squirmed a bit and even complained a little while we watched, but oh boy was he pissed off when I told him we had to turn it off and go to bed on Friday night.

I did story writing with him on Thursday last week. They get the big gray sheets of paper with blue lines – two solid with a dashed line in the middle for practicing the handwriting – to write their stories on. It’s usually something topical: What did you do over the weekend, where will you go this summer, what did you do for the holiday (that’s pretty much the topic after/before every holiday in the year). Favorite pet or pet you’d like to have, etc. When school was in session I volunteered in his classroom on story writing days, helping them spell and trying to keep their stories from being too disjointed and wild. Since the homeschooling began he has resisted it somewhat, and last week one of us (I can’t remember who) had the idea that maybe I should sit next to him and write one, too. So I did. I grabbed one of those pieces of paper and wrote a story in what I hope is a sort of grade school-ish language. It turns out that keeping it simple makes for easy and enjoyable reading (take that, Joyce). We decided to write about how we’ve been spending our weekends. I even drew a picture like they always do when they’re finished:

I’m going to turn it in with the Boy’s work when I go make the bag swap this morning. I hope they like it.

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Lots of little doing over the weekend – I’ll throw up a supplemental post with pictures here pretty soon. Otherwise, little else to report.

— Be a giant, Comrade Citizen! —