Milo and I have been competing in Ticket to Ride for a couple years now.  Today he beat me, despite my best efforts, with a record high score of 480. As you can see, he’s chuffed.

Milo is an interesting creature right now.  He can be very responsible and capable, even quite pleasant company.  Still, he’s egocentric as all get-out.  He expounds upon the egregiousness of everyone else’s actions without a hint of realization that they might well feel aggrieved in their own right by his behavior.  Tonight he had a long tearful moan about the unfairness of his mates and declared that he wants to move to Mars.  I laughed and told him he should look under the playground slide for a Mars Portal, then gave him a hug and read him Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good Very Bad Day.  He took it in good humor.  A little affection and empathy seems to go a long way with him, but he seems incapable of extending the same to others.  Hopefully it’s all part of the growing up process.  Whether or not he’s learning much academically at school (they seem to have taken it very easy the first week back), school is an academy for social skills.

Oh, and speaking of learning social skills, the kids have both been enamored of the earthier side of humor lately, expelling giant farts with relish and magnifying their burps with wide open mouths.  As parents, we are less than amused.  Naomi had a new friend over this afternoon, a perky little girl who is the middle child of 5, and Milo tried out his silly act with her.  Apparently it went over well, because he reported “Amelia has a sense of humor that doesn’t occur in our house…..she laughs when I smack my butt!”  Fantastic.

With the kids back at school this week, I’m back to work at my usual hours.  Work pretty feels pretty close like normal now, after I run the temperature scan gauntlet.

Everyone must submit to the laser thermometer pointed at one’s forehead on the way in the door.  I still cringe at this.  I don’t like lasers pointed at my head because it looks like a gun.  Plus I remain thoroughly American in my sense of privacy; the site manager is a tall man, and my internal body temperature feels a bit too….personal.  I comfort myself with the fact that the thermometer only reads the outside, because while the average human body temperature is 36.5-37.5C, I’ve never heard anyone with a reading higher than 36.5C.  Tomorrow I’ll wear a hat and crank the car heater to see if I can get up to 37, which is the “send home” trigger.  Yeah…. because if I try to game the system I don’t feel quite so much like a pawn.

We still try to give our work makes some extra space and don’t pass through doorways simultaneously, but it doesn’t feel extreme…..except when it comes to tea and lunch breaks.

Socially distanced lunches feel so….antisocial. It sucks. The little light chit chat enlivens lunch breaks but one person per table isn’t conducive to banter.

Oh, and I guess the other odd thing that remains at work is that the door knobs are perpetually damp from the thrice daily sterilizing.  But I don’t really mind this.

“It takes so long to get dressed!” Milo exclaimed this morning as he stalked into the kitchen.  “For two months I’ve been wearing nothing.”

It does take a second or two to put on a tee-shirt, perhaps.  He has been basically living in undies and a bathrobe since March.

“Back to school….worse day of the whole year.”  Clearly he was channeling his inner Eeyore this morning, and he was not thrilled at the prospect of school.

I understand that.  I wasn’t thrilled at the prospect of going to work either.

Yet this afternoon when I asked how the school day went, he answered “Good! Better than I thought it would be!”
Fantastic. Optimism triumphed.

No, that’s not my career trajectory, unfortunately.  It’s something much less important, but it gets my vote for Delight of the Day.

All around the edges of the garden, mostly hidden by the shrubbery, are these usually non-descript members of the lily family. They must have flowers, clearly, because they now have these awesome berries….but I can’t remember what the flowers looked like. Obviously not very impressive. But look at them now–WOW! “Voluptious” or “flamboyant” are two descriptors that come to my mind.

They are also fun to draw.

Today is the 49th day of Social Isolation.  When we awake tomorrow, it’ll be the 50th day since we started the covid19 lockdown, and we will be in alert Level 2, with a lot more businesses starting back up, and a lot less isolation.  We didn’t know how long the lock down would last when it started, otherwise it would have made a nice symmetrical advent calendar.

This is an epic curve that has been flattened.  Only time will tell if it’s been flat long enough to have gotten rid of the virus in NZ.

Molly’s emotional curve has been, shall we say, a bit more curvaceous. And I still have a job, so does Jeremiah, none of our family is currently ill….I can only imagine the roller coaster being ridden by many other people.

And now, for the delight of the day.  This was one of Milo’s school activities this week, and I found it so alluring. Naomi’s fairy is on the left, then Milo’s horned beetle in the middle, then my bumble bee. It’s like concentrating the detailed beauties of a garden and reforming them into something else beautiful. Like paper collage, if you start with something pretty it seems so much more likely to end up with a pleasing arrangement.  Ironically, my favorite flower, a brilliant magenta primrose with a yellow centre, didn’t fit into my bumble bee.  Next time I might need to do a butterfly.

I asked the kids to show me their school work when got home from work today and sitting next to Milo I kept noticing a peculiar smell.  I’m due for a shower, I know, but a quick snuffle under my arm and I was in the clear.  I began to sniff further afield.

I pressed my nose to Milo’s arm pit–there it was, the distinct smell of unwashed underarms.  I checked the other side. Nope, it wasn’t an anomaly.  He smelled on both sides!  My little 9-year-old squirt must be growing up!  “Smell me, smell me!”  Naomi never wants to be left out of the action.  But no, she was still sweet little kid, despite romping around and neglecting her school work all day.  She pouted.  “But I’m growing too, Mom!”

“Yes, dear, of course you are growing, you’re growing a lot….. but Milo just has a head start on being stinky.  You’re not missing out on a good thing…..  But getting smelly underarms isn’t a bad thing either,” I hastened to say, hoping Milo wasn’t going to feel self conscious. “It’s just part of growing up.”  Wow, I might want to practice this conversation when I feel a bit more on my game.

Oh, and speaking of changes, New Zealand is moving to Covid19 alert level 2 on Thursday.  That means almost all sections of the economy can open back up, but there are still significant safety precautions like limitations on numbers in gatherings, and distancing rules for busy social places like restaurants.  Most significantly for us, it means the kids will be back to school starting on Monday.

It’s been a hard season at home, but in many ways it’s been good too.  I’ve actually missed the kids the last two days when I’ve been at work.  Hopefully we can savor these last couple days in the home bubble before the business of life begins again.

I went on a bike ride down the old TaiTapu Rd this afternoon and the weather started to close in on my way back with a light misty sprinkle.

Turning onto Sabys in the gloom I almost ran over a brilliant red maple leaf, startling on the grey shingle road.  There isn’t a maple tree in sight.  I don’t know where it came from.  Its red was intensified by the droplets of mist it had accumulated, and you could even see the slightly orange shadows where the leaf must have been tipped away from the sun when it grew.  I stared at it, soaking up its vibrancy.

I love red.  I always have.  It’s not a calm color; it’s INTENSE and I ADORE it.  It was so fun to run into this one, unexpectedly cheerful for no good reason at all.

“Ugh, what!?  This is impossible!”

Milo was struggling with 5 digit subtraction using the Maths Buddy program.  He started out confident; he had this topic nailed a couple weeks ago.  But he was muddling up the rules of borrowing, so he wasn’t getting the right answers and his frustration was mounting.

“Hang on, don’t go past that problem, let’s work it out so you can see what you’re doing wrong,” I advised.  Too late, he’d already skipped past the wrong answer to try again on the next problem.

“What!” he burst out. “This keyboard isn’t working!”  

“What do you mean, the keyboard isn’t working?”  ….but he’d already moved to the next problem.  “Write this one out on your paper so you can work it out,” I advised. 

“Is this right?”

“Well, let’s check it by adding your answer to the smaller number,” I suggested.  I’ve never been that quick at mental math.  “Nope, it’s not quite right.”

“Yes it IS!”  He typed in his answer and the red X appeared.  “Arg, this is stupid!  Mom, you gave me the wrong answer!”

“Milo, hun, I haven’t given you any answers.”

“The computer is wrong!”

I laughed out loud.  “Milo, if you don’t stop and learn why you’re getting the wrong answers, you’re never going to get them right.”

We repeated this conversation 5 more times.  No joke.  FIVE TIMES.  He clearly didn’t appreciate the humor in the situation.  Each round he might look at his paper and listen to an explanation for a few seconds before deciding that he knew it well enough and carrying on.  Fortunately, Maths Buddy doesn’t let him move on to the next level until he gets more than 85% of the problems right, so the natural consequence of his hard headedness was that he kept having to repeat the problem set, and he kept failing.  Eventually I moved into the kitchen and quietly ducked down behind the counter.  I saw him stand up in the chair and scan for me, then return to the computer, muttering and griping.

About five minutes later he announced success.  “FINALLY!” he groaned.  “Mom!  Mom?  Mom!  Where are you?”  After a round of the house he found me crouched behind the cupboard, reading.  “I’m done, let’s go to the skate park.”

The next day at work I stared at my computer screen.  Somehow the spray management software was saying that after we used Ascend on four different occasions, the inventory was higher than when we started out a month ago.  I scratched my head.  I pulled out the history to validate.  0.436 of a 5L unit was still greater than 0.352 of a 5L unit.  “Impossible!” I exclaimed.  “The computer is wrong!”  Then I thought of Milo and his Maths Buddy…..but this time I really did think the computer was wrong.  Could the calculator in the software have gone haywire?

Tonight I told Milo that something funny had happened at work.  My computer was doing three digit subtraction and it was getting it wrong.

“Well Mom, you should use your head, not a calculator!” he advised.

Touche, little man.

I went to work today without yesterweeks high expectations and decided to clear up the pile of media samples that had been accumulating behind my desk for the last few months.  It’s what I do when there’s nothing better going on.  It’s tedious because we don’t USE the results for decision making; the media is used the same day it’s made, so there’s no opportunity to catch a bad batch before using it.  The samples do serve to build up a story of what the normal pH and EC ranges are; the idea is that we have to know what’s normal to understand when something’s not normal.  But it’s also tedious because by the time I hit the doldrums enough to process soil samples, I have stacked collection of sample boxes built up like a proverbial brick wall.  Uninspiring.

But sometimes boredom breeds a more creative solution, and this time I decided I’d use the zillions of samples to come up with a simpler methodology of testing, one I could hand off to the nursery that makes the soil, so perhaps those samples could stop coming to me.

“Your childhood paid off, eh? Sitting around making mud pies?” My co-worker trundled by moving a trolley from here to there with plenty of time to observe what I was up to.

And he wasn’t the first to comment about the mud pies as I stood stirring water into the stubbornly dry media. Usually the comments are around cups of coffee because the pH measuring usually involves rows of white plastic cups, but this new method did away with the cups and filter papers, hence the mud pie analogies.

“Yup,” I advised my co-worker.  “Tell your kids to go into science so they never have to stop playing in the mud.”