Quarantine Life

It’s been a strange past month with the shelter-at-home orders here in North Carolina thanks to the spread of COVID-19. We are a fortunate household to have one adult who has been able to transition to working from home completely, and another (me) who works as a contract employee for a magazine, and I’ve also been able to keep generating income through my clients. We are blessed, because we know others who have had to temporarily close their family businesses.

I feel for my kids. They miss their friends, their IRL contact, driving back and forth together to school, and randomly stopping by Dunkin’ Donuts for iced coffees and donut holes. We miss simply being able to hop in the car and eat at our favorite Mexican restaurant, but we are trying to order food from local restaurants at least once a week to keep supporting them where we can. We are fortunate to have Wi-Fi and four separate computers so we can all work and attend classes and Zoom meetings without having to share devices.

We are also sad to have missed a fun spring break trip we had planned to New Orleans, where my son was excited to see the Pelicans in person and witness Zion Williamson’s ball-handling skills. I simply wanted to hear some jazz music and eat a beignet at Café Du Monde.

During this time, we are also lucky the weather has been so beautiful, and that we have access to a greenway right in our neighborhood. While we’ve all gained a few pounds from all the snacking we’ve been doing, we are also exercising outdoors more than we ever did before. We’ve also had more family move nights during this time, and today we even got out and explored a nearby botanical garden together.

I’ve also tried to stay busy by finally reading books that have been on my shelves for some time, taking online webinars and workshops on the craft of marketing and writing (I took a great one from Jenna Kutcher on list building) and continuing to work on my passion project, a true crime podcast I plan to launch in early May.

I don’t want to take this extra time for granted, because there were a few times in the past few months where I wished for time to slow down because I was rapidly approaching burnout. I do hope we can all safely return to a sense of normalcy sooner than later, but I’ll trust the experts to let us know when that time is.