Why Not a Memoir?

It all started when I was examining my skin in the mirror one night, as women of a certain age are wont to do, and I noticed the crepe-paper-like texture of my neck.

By dint of DNA (thank you, Nannie), I tend to look younger than I am. I do not mean to brag, but it is true that people generally peg me anywhere from five to ten years younger than my actual age.

I don’t really dwell on it because, to me, most working adults, at a glance, could be anywhere from 30 to 55. It’s only when you talk to them and learn their cultural touchstones that you figure out where they stand in the generational landscape. Do they make references to Van Halen and Diff’rent Strokes?  Or is it Nirvana and My So Called Life?  Or, God help us, The Backstreet Boys and Felicity?  What you talkin’ about, Willis?

Anyway, so everyone “of a certain age” pretty much looks the same to me . . . except, I have recently discovered to my chagrin, the necks. 

Necks don’t lie. With all the bending and stretching, especially in our smartphone age in which we are all looking down all the time, they cannot lie. They tell people you’ve been looking down and around for a long time.

And mine is a brutally honest neck. My neck, an over-50-year-old neck, tells you it has very much been looking down and around for more than a half-century, thank you very much.

So when I was examining my neck the other night before bed, contemplating buying neck cream (which I did do, but have not yet opened because I have a generally slovenly skin care regime — more on that later, in a to-be-written essay) . . . . When I was looking at my crepey neck, I remembered a book by Nora Ephron called I Feel Bad About My Neck: And Other Thoughts on Being a Woman.

I remember when it came out in 2006 and, I confess, I didn’t really get it.  The When-Harry- Met-Sally-Silkwood-Sleepless-in-Seattle lady wrote a book about her neck. Weird. I didn’t read it. 

I didn’t read it because my neck and I were only 35 years old at the time and, while not quite swan-like, my neck certainly was no turkey-waddle either. It was an early-middle-aged neck, and it and I were unconcerned with fine wrinkles and horizontal creases at that moment in our history. 

Flash forward 17 years and here we were, contemplating neck cream. I finally understood the title of that book. 

So I bought it on Audible. And I started listening. Not only did I relate to Nora Ephron’s essay about her feeling bad about her neck. I related to a great many of her essays on what it’s like to be an aging woman.

I related so much to her essays that I started telling my slightly more middle-aged husband about Nora Ephron’s essays and how funny and relatable they are. I even related to the essay in which she talks about not being able to read maps and phone books anymore — even though we do not have maps and phone books anymore —  because I related to needing readers. (And . . . the essay made me nostalgic for maps and phone books. Remember Mapsco?)

So anyway, one hot Texas summer afternoon, after I’d shared with my husband Nora’s love for John LeCarre (whom we both also love), he sent me a text, a writing prompt of sorts. It went like this:

Meredyth writes the next Ephron memoir: 

"After 15 years of marriage, there seems no point to renewing any vows. Marriage vows have always seemed to me unnecessarily prolix and frankly unnecessarily vague. The terms of our marriage, I tell my husband, reduce to one fundamental rule: Our lives must never be so penurious that we’re forced to buy store-brand salad dressing. We must be sufficiently comfortable that I can guiltlessly buy Newman’s Own."

I sent this true gem to my two best work friends with this comment:

I feel like, perhaps, no actual memoir is needed, for he has perfectly summarized my views on our future retirement. I do not ask for much. Only that we are wealthy enough to afford non-store brand salad dressing in our dotage.

Then I added, “Perhaps, though, a memoir would be appropriate, after all, to explain how I arrived at this modest life goal. Hmmm.”

And then I dismissed that idea as nonsense. Who would read my essays?  I did not marry Carl Bernstein, nor have I written many famous movies and books. I mean, I would like to do that. I would love to write novels. I would love to write engaging novels that people can’t put down. And I’ve tried. I get writers block. But I find my own stories trite, tired, derivative. I bore myself. The characters are wooden. I grow to hate them and do not want to spend any more time with them, let alone create them and their stupid lives. You get the idea:  While I may have that one great novel in me, as the old saw goes, I am not sure that I have the capacity to get it out of me. 

And yet, I write essays. I write them nearly effortlessly. The words just come. I’m just talking to you, see?, telling you my opinions, my prejudices, my observations and frustrations. I’ve been doing it for years in a blog only a handful of people read. But the handful seem to enjoy my essays. So why not a memoir in essay form?  Maybe more than a handful would read it. Maybe?  Worth a shot?

Hmmm. 

Never Have I Ever . . . Thought I'd Write a Blog Post About Mindy Kaling

And Velma.

Mindy Kaling is the driving force behind a new "adult" cartoon take on the Scooby Doo characters, minus Scooby, called Velma and centering on a character called Velma Dinkley, beloved nerdy member of the Mystery, Inc. gang.

Mostly, people hate.  I've watched a few episodes and I am not a fan.

SOME of the criticism comes from dude-bros who decry it for being too "woke":  Velma's Indian, Daphne is Asian (with two moms), and Norville (not called Shaggy in this show) is mixed race (black mom, white dad).

I could give a fig about their races.  I'm cool with these originally white characters being a different race.  They come from an era where white was the default and any other race was exotic, at best, and a comic relief caricature, at worst.  It's high time that we have people of other races and cultures in our stories as just regular people.  Regular people aren't always white.

My beef with the show is deeper than the epidermis.  The characterization of Velma, Daphne, Fred (who remains white), and Norville bear no resemblance to the original characters in the countless iterations of Scooby Doo over the past fortyish years. The Velma in this show is not a confident nerd who employs her intellect to foil the villains, but an insecure, unpopular, obsessive, and, honestly, kind of mean girl. She's not even the smartest of the bunch anymore, asking "Norville" for help with math at one point.  The others are equally out of character.  This is not so much a "fresh look" on the old characters as a gutting and remodeling, like a 1920s bungalow in a gentrifying neighborhood.  Outside, looks similar to the original.  Inside, unrecognizable.

But this Buzzfeed article attempts to cast Velma as the next iteration of Mindy Kaling's self-loathing portrayals as an Indian-American female.  The writer says that Mindy Kaling has "a long career of writing and performing a specific kind of Indian woman:  dorky, self-absorbed, insecure, obsessed with attaining the romantic validation of caustic white guys, and eager to fling cultures under the bus to get it."  The Buzzfeed writer says, "More damning than her characters' obsession with white guy is their casually racist self-hatred" and notes the "collapse" of Kaling's characters into her actual self, or vice versa.  Essentially, the author is saying that all of Kaling's characters are about Kaling's own self-loathing as an Indian woman in America. Quite a casual and distant psychological analysis.  Quite an indictment of her work too.

I'm no expert on Mindy Kaling's career.  I’ve only ever actually seen her in the American version of The Office, and wasn’t taken by or offended by her character.  But I didn’t watch much of the show either because I found it sub-par to the British version. And I never watched The Mindy Project or Sex Lives of College Girls because everything I read about them suggested to me that they weren't my style.

I have watched Never Have I Ever, every single episode.  Mindy Kaling doesn't actually appear in it, but is the show's creator and executive producer.  It's a show about a teenaged Indian girl named Devi Vishwakumar, growing up in suburban Los Angeles.  She's dealing with the death of her father at a young age and generally growing up and being a teenager.  It's hilariously narrated by John McEnroe (and occasionally other people).  Devi has some rage issues, partly stemming from the death of her father and partly stemming from teen angst.  So the choice of McEnroe to be the one to tell her story is inspired. I love the show.

I feel that Never Have I Ever is NOT just a show about an Indian-American teenaged girl.  It's about an American teenaged girl, who is culturally Indian.  Distinction without a difference?  Maybe, but Devi Vishwakumar IS an archetype.  She's not an archetypal Indian teenager, but an archetypal American teenager, who is culturally Indian.  Devi’s repeated lapses in judgment and in the same general direction are infuriating sometimes.  WHY does she keep being so stupid?  But that’s a teenager thing, continually making the same or similar dumb mistakes and then, finally, FINALLY learning from them.

I saw Devi not as an archetypal ABCD (American Born Confused Desi) teenager, but as a confused teenager who happens to be Indian. She often rebels against her culture, and other times embraces it. I completely relate to that, even though I am definitely not an ABCD.

However, I was a smart teenaged girl once.  I could relate to Devi's desire to fit in, her being proud and feeling weird about being smart, her competitiveness competing with her laziness.  I even related to Devi alternately rebelling against and relating to her culture, only my culture was Southern-American-Cowboy, not South Asian.

Anyway, the idea of a smart teenaged girl, struggling to fit in and trying to distinguish herself from her cultural heritage is a universal theme everyone can embrace.  I do not see Devi Vishwakumar as a manifestation of one Indian-American woman's self-loathing, but a smart take on what it's like to be a teenaged girl in America.  As I said earlier in this post, it's high time that we have people of other races and cultures in our stories as just regular people.  Devi is a regular teenager who happens to be Indian.  We need to normalize the idea that not being white is normal. Never Have I Ever does that brilliantly.

Because I haven't seen the entirety of Kaling's oeuvre, I can’t speak to the larger point the Buzzfeed writer makes of Velma fitting neatly into Kaling’s own self-loathing.  But I can say this, I do not think that Devi Viswakumar is a manifestation of Kaling's self-loathing.  So I am not sure that Kaling even hates herself in the way the writer thinks she does.

But back to Velma . . . .

Because I'm not onboard with the idea that Kaling in some Freudian way repeatedly creates characters manifesting her own self-hatred, I can't say the Velma fits into that mold.  But I can say that the only resemblance the Velma TV show shares with Scooby Doo are the character names and character wardrobe.  There’s not a hint of the classic characters’ personalities.  They’re all loathsome and self-absorbed, except for “Norville,” who is now apparently the smart one.

Also, the idea that this cartoon was apparently made for grown ups is ridiculous.  It's filled with sexual innuendo, unfunny political jabs, and references to drugs, sex and violence. It’s the very essence of what children think adulthood is all about.  What makes Velma bad is not Mindy Kaling’s alleged self-loathing, which I take issue with, but that it thinks that puerile jokes about sex etc. is what amounts to adult humor.  It's not smart.  It's not funny.  And it's not even fun nostalgia because it makes these beloved characters unrecognizable.

Also, there’s no dog. 

On Second Acts and Second Chances

Recently -- this past August -- I changed jobs.

God, I was so optimistic.  This was the thing that would take me to the next phase of my career.  The next level.  It was going to be great.

It was going to be My Second Act.

Except that it wasn't.  It didn't work for me or for my family.  The people at the new job were nice, but it just didn't fit for me, for my family.  Maybe I didn't fit.

I knew pretty quickly that I had made a mistake.

We all, my family, were miserable.

You might say, "Surely, you should have given it more time, Working Mom."

Some might say that, yes.

But I will tell you something about being fifty-two years old:

Somewhere around age 50, you receive the gift of clarity.  (Well, I did anyway.)  More time would have been more misery . . . and, indeed, it was more misery, months more while I figured things out and allowed processes to do their thing.

But I was literally depressed as I watched things fall apart.

My Second Act was not so much an act, but an intermission.

Still, I knew that this was a terrible mistake.

Giving it more time would not have made it better.

So I called my old boss, and I told him that I'd made a mistake.

Actually, no, first I called two of my old co-workers, friends, and I told them that I'd made a mistake.  And I sobbed and sobbed.  Real regret.  I asked them if they thought that my old boss would take me back.  They said, "Yes," and encouraged me to call.

And THEN I called . . . and I got good news.  After jumping through a lot of hoops, I could come back.

My Second Chance.

I still beat myself up about having, as I thought at the time, done this thing to my family and my co-workers at my old (soon to be new) job . . . and at the new job, soon to be old, too.

But . . . .

One of my work friends, from the job I left and have now returned to, told me that I shouldn't feel foolish because I had learned something from this and that is valuable.  She's right.

When I told my sister-in-law what my work friend had said, she added, "She's not wrong.  Even at this age, if we aren't failing at things, it means we've stopped learning."

Another of my work friends said not to feel foolish because it's not like I'd left my son and husband to join a biker gang.  I told her that, while that was true, I sometimes felt like I had done the professional equivalent of that.

Not that the firm I joined, ever so briefly, was anything like a biker gang, not even close. There were a lot of really nice people there.  But the disruption that it caused in my family and my professional life felt like a similar sort of existential violence.

I did feel foolish, despite the words of my wonderful friends and sister (in law).

But I have come to see that, they're all right.

Growing, learning, and not having done the WORST thing to my family and my career . . . it's been a valuable lesson . . . a series of valuable lessons.

As midlife crises go, this one was pretty gentle, really.  (Because I will live to be 104, obvs.)

And ultimately, I have emerged with gratitude and a better appreciation for what I need versus what I want.  And so . . . .

My Second Chance, as it turns out, is My Second Act.

The COVID-Telework Diary: Day 36, Beginning of Week 6, in which I contemplate a thing that I did.

I put a color conditioner through my hair this weekend, which dyed the lighter parts of my hair a lovely, pale blue.

I truly, honestly love it.  I may just always have blue streaks, now that I've done it.  I plan to run the rinse through my hair again tonight to try to darken up the streaks a little bit.  Because why not?

I am, of course, not the only person doing things to their hair during this COVID-19 social distancing period.  Enough people are doing it that others are writing article about it.  And this quote from an article in Allure struck me:

"Hyperfocusing on the physical can be an attempt to escape the emotional; and in the midst of a global pandemic, everyone is experiencing new, sometimes scary emotions (fear, sadness, existential dread) in new, sometimes scary ways (home, alone, with no diversions)."

Even though I do sincerely like how my hair looks with the blue streaks, I think a little bit of escape is going on here for me too.  I think that putting a blue rinse through my hair and getting instant blue highlights is also helping me work through my anxiety.

I've had anxiety all my adult life -- probably all of my life, really. I've mostly dealt with it without medications, though there was a period early-ish in my career in which I had a couple of prescriptions to help me get through the day. Changing jobs eventually made the medications unnecessary, but there were many days early in my career when I would need to place a half a Xanax under my tongue just to calm down enough to be able to work.

Anxiety steals your focus and confuses your thinking.  It makes monsters and creates invisible enemies. It turns your psychological distress into a perceived physical threat.  You really do feel fight-or-flight, but it's your own thoughts that you need to fight or flee, so you feel trapped, causing you more distress. It's an ugly condition. And it's not simply enough to tell yourself to calm down when you're in the midst of an anxiety attack. You have to figure out how to break the cycle. Xanax can do that chemically.  But when you're not taking medication, you need other ways.

For me, anxiety is a lot about control, or the lack of it. The less in control I feel, the more anxious I can become, and the faster I can slip into a cycle of anxious dread and full on anxiety attacks.

For the past more-than-a-decade, since I changed my career focus (if not subject matter), I've dealt with my anxiety with lifestyle type stuff:  exercise, rigorous scheduling and planning, lists, meditation, the dog, magnesium, Disneyland (for real), wine, chocolate, mint tea, making sure I get enough sleep, setting and enforcing clear boundaries between work and home and self . . . .

That last one, the boundaries, has really been difficult to do during this quarantine time.  It's important to do, but with work and home and recreation all being in the same place, the lines are difficult to draw and maintain.

So I think that, this weekend, I drew them in my hair.

The blue:  It makes me feel lighter.  It makes me happy.  I like the way I look.  Importantly:  This is a thing I can control absolutely.  And feeling that certainty, feeling the control, is calming.  In a world where there is so little I can control right now, and in which there is so much to fear, having a little bit of control, however frivolous, is important.

And so, it's not just that blue is traditionally a color associated with calm and so my blue hair calms me. This blue is part fashion and part meditation. It is my certainty and my control. And, being that, it delivers to me inner peace.

Have a good week, friends.

The COVID-Telework Diary: Day 29, Beginning of Week 5, Utterly Unimportant Numbers

I'm doing better than last Monday.

In fact, all last week, I did better than I was doing last Monday.  Nadir Monday.  I think . . . .

The thing about this historical event we are all living through is that it will change us.  It has to change us.  We have to change in response to it.  And change is hard.  And forced change made rapidly out of fear and necessity is harder.  Psychologically, we aren't built for that.  It's bound to take it toll.

I've been thinking a lot about what's not so important and what is.  In the "not" column are a lot of numbers:  weight on the scale, size of my clothing, number of York Peppermint Patties I consume in a day, number of screen minutes my kid gets in a day after he's finished all his schoolwork, number of projects actually completed.  These are utterly unimportant to whether we live healthily and happily.

What is important sometimes does sometimes involve numbers too.  Regarding health, for instance, I'm just not worrying about weight and size numbers anymore, but I am going to continue to worry about numbers related bloodwork, blood pressure and cardiovascular health.  Those numbers bear no real relation to the size of my clothing and the force of gravity on my body on this early.  At best, the relationship between the two is marginal.  (How do I know:  I've been "overweight" a large portion of my adult life and I can assure you that my bloodwork and blood pressure have been good-to-excellent for decades.) But bloodwork, blood pressure and whether I can walk a mile or more with relative ease are measures of health that seem to matter with regard to how I feel and how I function.  So those are what I will pay attention to henceforth.

The number of hugs given and gotten is a happy number.  The number of laughs with your family . . . the number of times your child's eyes light up . . . the number of chin licks from the dog . . . the number of York Peppermint Patties to give you joy of them . . . .  These are also good numbers.

But number of blog posts about a scary event . . . not so much.

I noticed last week that when I stopped writing so much about this event, I stopped thinking so much about it.  When I'm not physically writing, I'm still writing.  I put together ideas, words and phrases, sentences, even whole paragraphs, in my head before I even put fingers to keyboard.  Because I have a good memory, I can do that and then come back to the keyboard and unload it all.  Then I edit.  It's how my work-writing works too.  Letting ideas form and reform, marinating in my brain, before I ever commit them to paper or the digital screen just works for me.  But it also means that my brain is marinating in whatever it is I am writing or intending to write.  It's why sometimes my work is so exhausting . . . because I don't just quit at quitting time, when I'm writing something.  I can't.  That's not how my writing brain works.  It keeps working.  So any brief I've written for work, for instance, has been written over many days and many moments of so-called free time.

Last week, after my Monday post, I decided not to write any further posts that week.  Shutting off that self-imposed task allowed me shut off my brain about the pandemic.  I mean, I still thought about it. But I didn't ruminate, marinate, write and rewrite in my head.  And that was good for me, very, very good for me.

So I've decided to cut back writing this disjointed history for my own well-being.  I'll check in once a week, maybe.  Check in, as well, if I have a good story to tell, like The Frog.  But I am taking the pressure off myself to write and, really, to perform here in this blog.

I do think, sometimes, in hubris, that maybe this blog would be a useful document in 50 or 100 years to study the effects of the pandemic on regular folks.  Maybe it will.  And maybe it won't.  But if it will, a few fewer blog posts to save my sanity will not hobble any future historian's work.  (Hello there, future historian. Creepy, huh?) Mine will be but one drop in a sea of personal narratives about the novel coronavirus/COVID-19 pandemic of 2020.  I'm sure that their dissertation or historical extract will not suffer from my writing less, and less often.  In fact, maybe the fact of it will be just the anecdote they need for their chapter on mental health.  (You're welcome, future historian.)

Stay safe, friends.

The COVID-Telework Diary: Day 22, Beginning of Week 4, Anonymous 49.6 Year Old Female

I've been having a hard time.

I'm scared.  I feel safe in my house and I feel like my family is safe.  We have developed systems here that I think are the best we can do to keep ourselves safe in our house.  It has been more than three weeks since we have really had to go out into public at all.  I haven't been anywhere beyond my neighborhood (other than a recreation drive in the car) since we started shelter-in-place, and the only place my husband has been is the drive-up window at the pharmacy to pick up our son's and his mom's medicine.  Anything and everything else we need we have delivered.

But we can't be here forever.  We won't be here forever.  Eventually, we will have to go back out into the world.  And there will not be a vaccine to protect us.  Our systems won't protect us out there.  We will have to develop protocols to come back into our house.  My husband can dress fairly casually to work.  I will be in a suit most days.  How does one sanitize a suit?

I made two face masks this weekend.  It was hard.  The fabric is thick, which is a good thing, and I'm terrible at pleats.  (Plus, the tension on my thread got screwed up on the second one, which slowed me down, but I fixed it.)  I need to make more, though.  I need to make at least enough to last each member of my family for a week.  That's a lot of masks -- 21 masks.  It's going to take a long time to make those masks.  And, yes, I know that two-ply cotton masks (even if they are made from high-thread-count Laura Ashley sheets) are not tremendously effective at stopping the virus, but they're better than just relying on our nose hairs to do the filtering before the air gets to our lungs.

I have a very public-facing job.  I am literally in court nearly every week, sometimes multiple times a week.  And those courtrooms are filled with people.  Sure, the Court is going to video court soon and my office is going to telephonic meetings of creditors.  But, again, that can't last forever.  Can it last until there is a vaccine?

Will there ever be a vaccine?

I input my information into the COVID-19 Survival Calculator.  Here are my results (which were somewhat amusingly entitled "anonymous 49.6 year old female"):

The 52.9% infection risk scared the shit out of me.  Basically, I, who have been sheltering in place with all the precautions I can think of -- we wash the dog's feet after every walk, FFS! -- have a 53% chance of getting this disease.  But the mortality risk and survival probability were heartening.  From what I have read of first hand accounts like this one, though, having this disease is awful, even if you're not hospitalized.

I had the flu in March of 2017 and there were a couple of days when I really could not move without great effort and I had fleeting thoughts of "so this is how this bug could kill someone." And compared to what I have read about COVID-19, that really bad case of the flu I had for merely a week was a walk in the park.  I don't want to get this disease.  I don't want my husband or my child or my parents or my in-laws or my brother's family or my friends or my work colleagues or even those other lawyers that I may not like very much to get this disease.

Nevertheless, I'm bending my mind to the idea, attempting to accept the idea, coming to terms with the idea that one of us will probably get it.  Maybe more than one of us.  And the best I can hope for is . . . we suffer a miserable two to four week illness at home, not requiring hospitalization, and that we do not spread it further?

So, I've been having a hard time.  I've been depressed.  I've felt a little hopeless . . . a lot hopeless.

I cried when I walked the dog this morning.  Not single-tear-down-the-cheek crying . . . audibly sobbing, that was me, as I walked the dog.  Not loudly, but audibly.  Like, if there'd been someone on the other side of the street walking their dog, they'd have heard me and looked in my direction.  Mournful.

I guess I am in mourning.  But for what?  For my old life, my pre-novel-coronavirus life?  The halcyon days when I could scratch my eyes, pick my nose, and do facepalms with impunity?  Maybe I'm prematurely mourning the loss of the safety I feel in my home now, the loss that will come in a month . . . or maybe two . . . when we have to go back into out there.

I even told the people at work on our MS Teams chat (which is now and, I think, shall ever be, an omnipresent distraction on my desktop) that I was not doing very well this morning.  It's not like me to own stuff like that very often.  I'm as stiff-upper-lipped as a girl from East Texas can be, I suppose.  I push a lot of stuff down.  Probably not healthy, but I do it.  But I couldn't keep it down this morning.  I couldn't keep it down as I walked the dog and tried to image going back out into the world where, to me, the novel coronavirus is everywhere.  I couldn't keep it down when I logged onto work and it was all just too much.

Almost immediately, one of my lovely colleagues sent me a private message commiserating and trying to buck me up.  Another two with whom I regularly text, took it to private texts and urged me to take care of my mental health.  All three of them were just what I needed.  I felt better.  We are all suffering.  We have our ebbs and flows.  Today, I ebbed and these three wonderful ladies flowed toward me.  One day, it will be my turn to flow toward them.  We all, every one of us, need each other now in ways we never have.  Now, is the time to lean in, but not in the way Sheryl Sandberg meant several years ago.  Now, is the time to lean into and on each other.  I think it's the only way we get through this.

The COVID-Telework: Day 18, I'm so tired.

By Wednesday, I am tired.  It is hard to get out of bed.  It is hard to walk the dog.  It is hard to do my job.  It is hard to be a substitute teacher for at-home school.  It is hard to stay focused on anything.  It is hard not to lose my patience with people or things or animals.  This thing we are doing is hard.

Things that make it easier:

• Hugs and cuddles.
• Coffee.
• Chocolate.
• Ice cream.
• More hugs and cuddles.
• Fun books to read.
• Star Wars, anything.
• Specifically, Star Wars: The Clone Wars, Season 7.
• Cheese.
• Tortilla chips with salsa.
• Ranch dressing.
• Dried pineapple.
• Walks with the dog.
• Watching the Boy play.
• Reading the Boy's writing, which is surprisingly good.
• Text messaging silliness with my friends at work about work and about not-work. 

And one more thing:  checking on others to make sure they are okay.  That makes it better, makes it easier.  Try reaching out to someone else and check on them.  Make sure they're okay.  It will lift your spirits.

Have a good weekend, friends.  Hang in there.  Stay safe.

The COVID-Telework Diary: Day 16, Let's Talk about Video Conference Calls

My immediate superior in my organization, it should be said at the outset, has always been a fan of Skype for Business.

I have not.

I don't like feeling like I'm in a fishbowl. I don't like that I feel rude if I have to (or want to) look at something that's not within the field of view of the other people on the call.  I don't like that if you want to roll your eyes or pull some other face, you can't because everyone will see you.

I don't like how I look on the screen.  Is that what I look like?

Last week, my immediate supervisor started trying to test out Skype for Business.  She'd place random calls through the device -- voice-only calls and video calls.  And with no or little warning.  I know that the efforts were (probably) sincere, but they felt like bed checks, especially since I was also trying to help my son with his school iPad and trying to keep him on task while I also did my non-impromptu-testing-of-Skype work.

All that testing revealed that Skype for Business took an enormous amount to bandwidth.  Our weekly attorney meeting last week was via video on Skype, but all the sound was via our office conference call line.  That's the only way we could do it which is to say it was unworkable.  And especially unworkable when we know that the courts are considering moving to video court.  We need the flexibility to be able to appear in court via video.

(Video court will also mean, of course, that we will have to get dressed in suits in our houses, at least from the waist up.  And that feels silly . . . silly, but necessary, though.)

So by the end of last week, our agency suddenly switched to MS Teams.  I say "suddenly" because nothing happens quickly in government, but in exigent circumstances, even the wheels of government can turn quickly, I suppose.

We impromptu-tested MS Teams yesterday. (I was troubleshooting my son's iPad again, naturally, when the unannounced and unanticipated call came through.)  It did actually work better.  (But my hair looked a fright.)

Today, we had our first real meeting with MS Teams.  I took the trouble to fix my hair (hair dryer and a round brush) and put on a little make up for the first time in over a week -- even lipstick.  I should note that I did this for me to make me feel better about looking at myself on the screen.  Also, I put a pair of R2-D2 earrings on and a gray cardigan over my Yoda t-shirt.  (It says, "Always in motion the future is.")

The meeting went okay, I guess.  I think that we could just as easily have done this by not-video conference call.  I don't know why we have to look at each other while we talk about stuff.  Again, my inability to pull faces during these meetings hurts me.  Actually, though,  I do pull faces, but now I know that I do it -- unlike in face-to-face meetings when I'm not looking at a tiny image of myself at the bottom of the screen making faces.  So, really, it just adds to my, "What are people thinking of me" unnecessary stress.  But anyway . . . .  They're happening.  They will continue to happen for the foreseeable future, so I and my overly expressive face had better get used to it.

Nighty-night, friends.

The COVID-Telework Diary: Day 15, Beginning of the Third Week

Well, Week 3.  How are we all doing?  What can we say?  I hope you're doing okay.

We've had technical difficulties on all three fronts:  my work, husband's work, kid's school.  Some of them are being worked out, some of them are ongoing.  We will muddle through.  We have to.

The good news for us is that, after 14+ days in isolation, none of us are displaying symptoms.  Well, not consistently, anyway.  On the weekend, for instance, I had a dry cough and I didn't feel quite right.  The pollen count was through the roof over the weekend.  Still, I checked my temperature a couple of times.  "Is 98.8 the sort of low grade fever they're talking about?"  Fortunately, I did not continue to register even a minuscule fever.  And, after taking three different types of OTC allergy medication (Allegra, Zyrtec, and Flonase), I felt much better.

We have several friends on the front line of this war against an invisible enemy:  doctors, nurses, other medical professionals.  I worry about them all, and their families.

We have a friend who works in the oil and gas industry who still has to go to work so that there's still fuel for the country.  I worry about him and his family too.

My fellow bankruptcy lawyers are bracing for the flood of both individual and business bankruptcies that will inevitably follow this crisis.  It will be sad and it will be hard . . . like after 9/11, but more cases across the country.

Also, how many desserts is it okay to have after lunch and/or dinner?  Three?  Is three the right number?  I think it is.  I think any number is the right number when you're under extreme and prolonged stressed.  Go get another cookie.

This afternoon, I had a telephonic hearing and, despite there being a sign on the door not to enter,

The Boy came running in with a Lego problem.  Thank goodness that the phone was on mute.  Signs, apparently, are ineffective in the face of an issue with your Lego man's arm.

Hang in there, friends, I think we've got several more weeks of this ride to go.

The COVID-Telework Diary: Day 14, The Dog's Diary

It's been like eleventy-hundred days since I have been to doggy daycare.  I'm not sure why my people decided not to send me there anymore, but they did and now I can't play chasey-chase with other dogs anymore.

Also, Alpha, Beta, and Gamma don't go anywhere anymore.  When I used to go to doggy daycare, they would go to their own daycares, I guess, and then either Alpha or Beta -- usually Beta -- would pick me up at the end of the day of playing chasey-chase, which, did I mention, I don't get to do anymore because there are no other dogs in our house.

On the plus side, I have been able to guard our den perimeter pretty successfully and have managed to keep many other packs from invading our turf.

Also, Alpha and I walk probably 30,000 miles a day now around our neighborhood on what I like to call wide patrol.  I do see other dogs when we are on wide patrol, but I have to tell those dogs to get outta here because this is my territory, unless it's the cute cavachon that lives on the cul de sac down the way (she's a pretty alright girl) or my best friend, G, who is often also out on wide patrol with one or more of her people.  Frankly, I don't know what this neighborhood would do without G and me protecting it from invasion.

Also, I get to sit with Alpha on the sofa a lot, and I get good head scratches from Beta.  So having the people around isn't all bad . . . but still, no chasey-chase with other dogs is a high price to pay.

Gamma plays a lot with his plastic blocks and little plastic men with claws for hands.  When I was a puppy, I chewed on one of those little men and swallowed a claw (not the rest of the man, just his claw).  Alpha found the claw the next day in my poop.  She's a good Den Leader.  I know that she's the Den Leader because she calls herself that and sometimes refers to us as Bears and not dogs (or people or whatever).

Also, though, she's the Den Leader because she's Alpha.

At the end of every wide patrol, Alpha and/or Beta washes my paws and sings a song for each paw.  This is a weird procedure, and not one we used to employ when I used to get to go play chasey-chase at doggy daycare, but it's better than this stinky stuff that Beta called "hand sanitizer," which they put on my paws for a couple of days after walks and THAT I HATED.  Alpha said hand sanitizer is not good for dogs and Beta agreed . . . because she's Alpha, and also she had a website to back up her claim.

Today, though, at the end of our last wide patrol of the day, Alpha didn't just wash my paws, but MY WHOLE BODY.  But I got her because I shook the water off all over her.  She said that I had started to smell "like a dog," to which I replied, "Well, duh, Alpha."  Alpha is smart, but she's still just a human.

Okay, well, I need to start getting ready to demand some part of the dinner that Alpha, Beta, and Gamma are going to eat.  They feed me my Royal Canin Small Adult Dog Food every night, but I like it topped with something tasty like green beans or broccoli or the soupy stuff from black beans.  I need to make sure that they do that, you know, by yipping at them and/or whining, and that takes mental preparation.

Your friend, The Dog 🐶

The COVID-Telework Diary: Day 13, Shopping and Sanitization

Saturday, March 28, 2020

Two things before we begin:  First, I lost count at 10 days.  I called my entry, "The Frog," Day 10, but it was really Day 11.  I . . . lost . . . count . . . after only 10 days.  Second, there is no entry for Day 12, which was Friday, March 27, 2020.  I was tired.  The boy was difficult to get to sleep.  I didn't write.  But, had I written yesterday, this is what I would have written about . . . .

Shopping.

Shopping is different, now, under the shelter-in-place order.  Only pharmacies, grocery stores, convenience stores, gas stations and liquor stores are open.  (Yes, liquor stores . . . because Texas.)  But we don't go to stores.  Going to the store exposes you to a lot more people, a lot more vectors for virus.

We shop online.

But even then, we take precautions to minimize the chance of the novel coronavirus entering our house and making one of us sick.  Here's what we do:

• We do not open the front door.  That's where packages are delivered and, therefore, that's the most vulnerable point in our space because that is where the most people who don't live in our house (e.g. possibly virus carriers/transmitters) appear.
• For nonperishable items:
• Once a day, my husband drives around to the front of the house and puts the packages in his truck bed.
• Each package is labeled with the date it arrived and a date three days out when it can be opened. (This is because the virus has been found to survive on surfaces for up to 72 hours . . . maybe a little longer.)
• We have three boxes in our garage for these items to keep Day A separated from Day B separated from Day C in order to avoid cross-contamination.
• Once 72 hours has elapsed, my husband opens the packages and wipes them down with a disinfectant (bleach wipes or Lysol or an isopropyl alcohol solution) and brings them inside.
• Once inside, I put the packages away.
• In the case of clothing (some summer clothes for The Boy arrived this past week), they go straight into the washer (which is our general protocol anyway).
• For perishable items:
• My husband wipes each item down immediately and I put them away.
• Vegetables and fruits are washed in the sink with soap and water and set out to dry or dried by hand before we put them into the refrigerator.

Yes, it's a production, but, as I've noted before on this blog, Dr. Fauci has said that if it seems like you're overreacting, you're probably doing the right thing.

This production of bringing items into our house, though, has made me re-evaluate my online shopping habit.  And it is a Habit.  Now, if I find that I am bored and I think about perusing the Talbots or ModCloth or HerUniverse websites, or even Amazon or Lego, I think about what would have to happen before the item I am considering can be incorporated into my closet or played with by The Boy.  Is it worth the effort?  Often, it is not.  I don't know if it's coincidence, but I seem to be getting more and more emails from my favorite retailers -- Kate Spade is especially pushy -- offering sales and deals.  I'm probably not the only person in the United States rethinking their online shopping habits.

Also, I've decided to buy fewer fresh fruits and veggies for the next several weeks and will rely, instead, on frozen or canned items.  It's easier than the sink-full of fruits and veggies.  Of course, we washed our food before we ate it pre-COVID19, but we did not necessarily do all the washing immediately upon bringing it into the house before it went into the fridge.  And we didn't always use soap and water.  I think, now, however, I will always use soap and water, just to be safe. 

This virus has taught me -- taught us -- that, as modern as we think we are, we are not invulnerable.  In fact, we had become complacent thinking that all the dread diseases of yore -- small pox, plague, measles, polio, diphtheria -- were mere sepia-toned memories of a brutal past, not something our technicolor world need worry about. We thought we didn't need to worry about wildly infectious diseases anymore, we who luxuriate in our First World Problems and abundance so great that online shopping is a habit.

Some of us had even become so arrogant about infectious disease that we refused to vaccinate our children against them.  The idea of a disease cutting down wide swathes of a population was so ancient a proposition as to be laughable to certain segments of our society.  In our modern hubris, we have become less careful about everything.  I hope that has changed.  My complacency about my own health and safety certainly has.  I hope it's changed for others too.

The COVID-Telework Diary: Day 11, The Frog

A frog lives in our backyard.  I didn't know this until Sunday, but he (or she) is back there.  (I'll get to how I found out on Sunday that The Frog was back there in a minute.)

This morning The Frog was sitting by the side of the pool at around 6:30 a.m. when I left through the backyard to take The Dog for a walk.  And I know this because, as I walked past the pool, I heard a plunk into the water.  I looked back into the pool in the general area of the plunk and saw this.

That's The Frog sitting on one of the steps to our pool waiting for me and The Dog to get the heck outta the backyard so he (or she) can get back out of the pool to eat some bugs or whatever he (or she) was doing when The Dog and I so rudely interrupted.  (This photo also shows how desperately we need to get our pool resurfaced, but you are going to ignore that, recognizing that we'd planned such maintenance for this spring but now that project, like all other non-essential maintenance project, is being deferred indefinitely.)

I think that The Frog is a Southern Leopard Frog.  Southern Leopard Frogs sound like THAT.

About a week ago, The Working Dad and I were awakened in the night by THAT sound, except that it sounded muffled and almost mechanical. We could not figure it out.  We thought maybe it was a wounded bird, maybe a baby opossum . . . a frog, we did not come up with.  It would go silent during the day.  "Nocturnal," we thought.  We settled on it being a baby opossum who had lost its mom.  We were sad for it.  We tried to, but could not find it.

Every night -- or really around 5:00 a.m. -- THAT sound would start up again.  Muffled and mechanical and, we thought, the sound of a dying baby opossum that we could not find.  It was tragic.

The Working Dad started leaving the back porch light on to maybe stop the creature making the sound (nocturnal creatures not being fond of the light, you see).  It seemed to work, but then . . . .

On Sunday afternoon, we heard THAT sound.  In the broad daylight!!!!

I went into the backyard and waited for the sound.  And it happened.  I moved to the area of the yard the sound seemed to be coming from and picked up a stick.  I gently prodded the bushes, hoping to cause the creature to make the sound again.  And it did make the sound again, but it was coming from behind me, where the pool was.

I turned.

I heard THAT sound again.  And, remember that I said it sounded almost mechanical?  The sound was coming from the pool drain.

I opened the drain.  It was full almost to the top with blossoms that had fallen from our pear tree in the backyard.

I waited.  And I heard the sound again.  It was definitely the pool drain, I decided.  Something was stuck in all of the detritus and it was making our pool drain make THAT sound.

I stuck my hand in, heedless of what might lie in wait for me, and started pulling handfuls of pear flowers out of the drain.  When I was halfway done, I saw it:  A frog's leg kicking away from the flowers, trying to escape the drain and the giant hand that had scooped and reached so near to it over and over and over again.  THAT sound wasn't the drain and it wasn't mechanical.  It was the muffled call of a trapped frog.

After a couple of tries, I managed to catch The Frog and set it on the pool deck.  The Frog sat for a moment, stunned, and then hopped off into the ground cover next to the pool.

As far as I can figure, The Frog had gotten stuck in the drain at some point on Thursday night last week.  It couldn't escape the drain, but because the drain was so full of flowers, it had a nice little island to sit on, rather than be sucked to the bottom and drown. I imagine that the odd bug made its way in there at one point or another, which served as sustenance.  So for four or five days -- which must be an eternity to a frog, it was stuck on an island of flowers eating bugs, catch as catch can.  I'd like to think that The Frog was happy to be free, however harrowing that escape might have been.  I was glad to have been of assistance.

I wasn't sure I'd ever see The Frog again, so this morning, I was delighted to find that, despite The Frog's not-so-fun several days in our pool drain, he (or she) had decided to hang around our house at least for now.  Welcome to the family, froggy friend.

The COVID-Telework Diary Day 10: Jelly Bellies

I just ate a handful of Jelly Bellies, but just my handful.  Maybe a quarter of a cup.  Too many . . . putting my pancreas to work . . . but not, like, the whole bag.  Anyway . . . .

The bubble gum flavored ones are vile, cloyingly vile.  But I ate them and kept eating them . . . because they were in my hand.

Also, chocolate and berry are surprisingly good together.  I didn't intend that combination.  I thought the chocolate was another berry.

Also good:  toasted marshmallow and buttered popcorn.  Another happy mistake.

I also like the black pepper flavored ones . . . and, of course, licorice.  (I didn't used to like licorice.  As a kid, I hated it and would always wonder why my dad would eat it.  Now I know why.  And the reason is because kid's don't know anything and that shit is delicious.)

The sour cherry one that I ate all by itself:  Devine.

There were no weird ones in my hand, thank God, like grass or booger or ear wax or vomit (damn you, Harry Potter).

I saved two watermelons for last.

The COVID-Telework Diary Day 9: The One with Photos of a Lovely, if Lonely, Afternoon in the Backyard

The COVID-Telework Diary: Day 8, A Shelter in Place Order and School is in Session

Day 8, March 23, 2020

Dallas County is under a shelter-in-place order that takes effect today at 11:59 p.m. and extends through, at least, April 3rd.  Don't count on it lifting on April 3rd, folks.  I think we are in for AT LEAST a month (more like six weeks).  County Commission Clay Jenkins (who, let's face it, is a badass making unpopular decisions in the face of a genuine public health crisis) shared a graphic when giving his announcement of the stay-at-home order that shows our hospitals being overwhelmed by approximately April 12th if there were no order to stay home.  Here it is.

Pretty terrifying, huh?  So, stay home, Dallas County Friends.  (Really, the rest of you should do that too. A regional shelter-in-place will be more effective than a patchwork county-by-county process.)

And in the face of this, The Boy started his distance learning today, or what I've been calling School at Home.  Because this really isn't homeschooling . . . homeschooling does not really have an independent school district pushing curriculum to the students and a teacher supervising remotely while the parents supervise at home.

Anyway, School at Home started and it was cute at first, him sitting next to me working on his iPad doing his daily check in with his teacher.

We were off to a good start, but . . . 

. . . soon there were technical difficulties.

Videos wouldn't load.  Documents wouldn't download.  It wasn't clear to us how assignments were to be turned in.  I emailed the teacher more times that I wish I needed to.  I wondered whether other parents were also having these issues, but I didn't actually text anyone to ask because I was doing my day job at the same time.  Holy crap, this was HARD.  He needs my help.  My work needs my attention.  Too much all at once.

My usual day-to-day is me focused on work followed by me focused on parenting.  Seriatim, a we lawyers like to say.  Now, I must do both at the same time.  Eodem tempore.

And lots of you must be doing both as well.  And, even if you're not, will you join me in a cleansing virtual yell?

YAAAAARRRRR!

Sigh.  That's better.  But, you know, you roll with it.  Technical difficulties happen.  They are stressful.  They are (usually) temporary.  I was locked out of my work computer for no discernible reason this morning.  We resolved it.  And we also resolved the boy's technical issues too, thanks to suggestions from his very helpful teacher.  Imagine her job today, fielding emails like mine from who knows how many parents.

Hang in there, folks.  We are going to make it while we flatten this curve.

The COVID-Telework Diary: Day 7, in which we went on a driving scavenge hunt

Stir crazy.

Even with frequent walks around the neighborhood with the pup, we are getting a little stir crazy.  Rainy days and social distance can take a toll on anybody.

I've seen a lot of in-house scavenger hunts and in-the-neighborhood scavenger hunts online, but it's a dreary day (again) so we went for a drive.  I made a prize bag for The Boy to choose from upon completion of the scavenger hunt.  (The prizes are left over party favors, mainly.  And I plan to use these for incentives for him to do other things during our forced isolation.)

This scavenger hunt allowed us to:

• Spend some fun time as a family.
• Get out of the house.
• Maintain our social distance.
• See things we haven't seen in a few days.
• Exercise our brains a little.
• Sing Le Freak to The Boy, to his immense horror, and have a little laugh.

I recommend this for a dreary or sunny day get-out-of-the-house activity. 

Here's the scavenger hunt I made up, if you'd like to use it for a driving scavenger hunt with your family.  Or make up your own scavenger hunt that suits your environs.  Have fun!

The COVID-Telework Diary: Days 6, The First Weekend

This isn't actually the first weekend.

It's the second weekend our family has been perfecting its isolation and disinfection.

I haven't been anywhere other than my immediate neighborhood since Friday, March 13, 2020, when I got word that The Boy's school was shutting down (and, therefore, I knew I'd be teleworking the next week).  If I can mark a date when our family decided to really hunker down, it's Friday the 13th.

We had been accumulating things during the week:

• hand sanitizers (the miniature variety from Bath & Body Works because that's all I could find at that point thanks to hoarding);
• paper towels (24 rolls of Viva from Amazon, which I thought at the time was a ridiculous amount and now wonder why I didn't get more);
• Lots of canned beans;
• Lots of microwave pouches of rice;
• Lots of pasta;
• Lots of frozen veggies;
• Lots of cartons of milk;
• Cereal;
• Lots of chicken breasts to make various things in the Instant Pot;
• Lysol wipes and Lysol spray (just a few items, fewer than it seems we will need, now);
• toiletries; and
• ice cream (because you gotta have some joy).

We did not buy all of the toilet paper, I promise:  The fact is that we had already bought an inordinate amount of toilet paper over time thanks to a few months' worth of Amazon Subscribe & Save accidental over-buying. I've been pissed off at those boxes for a couple of months, but now I'm glad they're here.  Turns out that I am thankful for my repeated monthly failure to go into Subscribe & Save and skip that month's delivery.  Finally, my procrastination has served me well.

Since we don't go out into the world that much, our main focus in our home has been figuring out how to keep our space more sanitary.  It's an evolving process, but we are approaching a pattern that we are comfortable with.

It's unlikely that, at present, we would bring the virus into our house, isolated as we are.  But if the infection rate gets to 75% or higher, the odds that we might bring the virus into our house from simply going outside for a walk becomes much greater.  So we are practicing now for what we hope doesn't happen later.  (We hope that you all are also hunkering down too.  To those who haven't: stop treating this like a extended snow day -- going to the park with other people, hanging with friends in the evening, letting the kids hang out with each  -- the little vectors, making frequent trips to the store....  Social isolation means no socializing and you isolate yourself.  Call someone or do FaceTime if you miss voices and faces.  Click that link about to see a graphic of what happens if you don't.)

So, anyway, here is what we do, right now, recognizing that this is an evolving process: 

• After we have gone outside, before we step inside, we take our shoes off.  Then we wipe the bottoms of the shoes with Lysol before bringing them inside.
• We wash our hands after we come back into the house.
• We let 72 hours elapse before we open nonperishable packages that come to our door.
• We wipe down every package that comes into the house with disinfectant.
• We clean surfaces regularly.
• Today, we started using only one door to enter and exit the house, thus limiting the amount of disinfecting we need to do at doorways.
• Today, we started wiping the dog's paws with hand sanitizer when we bring him in.  (We were able to acquire a large bottle of it from a friend of my husband's who had bought quite a lot.)
• We do not wear the same clothes a second day.
• We do no wear clothes that we have worn outside the house to bed.
• We bathe every night before going to bed.

This may, and likely does, seem extreme to you, but it's informed by reading the news about the survival rate of the virus on surfaces, by the odds of spread as reported in the news (see above), and by conversations with a doctor friend, whose wife does intake at an ER and who has treated COVID-19 patients.  It's what we've come up with.  You don't have to copy us, but I thought I'd share what we do.  And, as Dr. Anthony Fauci, the Director of the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases said, "if it looks like you're overreacting, you're probably doing the right thing."  You only need look to Italy and the lines of army vehicle holding coffins to see where we might be headed.  Not to be morbid, but we don't want to be in one of those truck.

Stay safe, friends.

The COVID-Telework Diary: Day 5

The Working Mom's Guide to

Pandemic Teleworking

1.  Be patient with technology.

Say that your work cell phone keeps sending you to look at text messages when what you're trying to check is your voice mail.  Resist the urge to throw that piece of crap against the wall.  Do what any good 80s teen would do with technology:  Turn it off and turn it back on again.  Also, you may experience latency in your broadband.  With multiple people using it all the time, you are bound to have connectivity issues.  It's okay.  Everyone else is in this boat with you.  Well, metaphorically, in this boat with you . . . we're all socially distancing, so we are all in our separate little boats.

2.  Be gentle with your family.

I know your kid is driving you nuts -- asking you to play when you're trying to work on a document, watching cartoons when you're trying to do a conference call, refusing to do the homeschool work you've given him (even though, let's face it, it's not required of him . . . you just want him to do it).  I know your spouse might be doing some things you think are a little much -- bleaching the countertops A LOT, bringing home all the canned black beans, using lots of hand sanitizer even though you're just in your house.  But you are also doing things that are driving them nuts and that seem a little much.  Be gentle.

3.  Exercise at least once a day.  

Your brain and your body need the exercise.  You need the break.  I have been trying to walk my dog two to three times a day, weather permitting.  If you decide to go for a walk for exercise, here is my social distancing tip:  Sharing the sidewalk means more than just stepping aside and letting someone go past, now.  To properly maintain social distance, you need to cross the street and not be within 6 feet of that other person.  You're not being an a-hole; you're being prudent. Wave at your neighbor from that distance and call out a friendly "hello" to them.

4.  Don't "diet."

I'm actually not a big fan of "diets" anymore.  Unless you are going to be on that "diet" forever (and you might be, but most of us don't do that), every "diet" is virtually guaranteed to work only temporarily until you eventually give it up and go back to your old eating patterns.  (To me, "dieting" and the diet industry is designed to set you up for failure and all the negative feelings that such "failure" brings to the dieter who has "messed up." I could write a whole blog post about this -- and maybe I will one day -- but my point now is that the last thing you need right now is the additional pressure of a restrictive eating plan.)  Instead of "dieting," nurture yourself with the food you have.  And, honestly . . . bake the cookies, eat the ice cream, enjoy the chocolate. munch the chips, savor the cheese. Do not beat yourself up.  Do not uses negative words to describe these actions . . . you have not "failed," you have not "screwed up," you have not "been bad."  You have eaten something that you enjoy at time when you are under immense stress.  This is not failure, or screwing up, or being bad.  This is living.

5.  Each day, have a clear and definite stop time for work.

With your office and your home one-and-the-same now, it would be very easy to let work consume you and your day.  You need the break.  Have a hard stop.  Turn off the laptop.  Turn off the phone.  Don't pick it up again until the next day.  Give yourself downtime.  Sure, sure, there might be emergencies that force an exception to this rule.  But those emergencies don't happen every day.  Most of what we are working on can wait until tomorrow.  You need this time away from work for the same reason you need the exercise.

6.  Be kind to and patient with yourself.

Working from home with a kid (or kids) and a spouse (if you have one) there too is HARD.  There are distractions.  There is noise.  You will get frustrated.  You will fly off the handle.  Give yourself a break.  (And, apologize for losing your cool if you do.)  If you feel like you might erupt, see #3 above.  Exercise will help break that tension.  And when your work day is done -- because you will be done each day, right? -- do something fun for yourself, whatever that may be.  Give yourself the right to enjoy something during this rather unenjoyable time.  And have that cookie while you're doing it.

Have a good weekend, friends.