Home Schooling Begins
Today was our first “proper” day at home as a family – or rather, we thought it was going to be. My other half got called into work, but really just to put plans in place – she works at an infant school. Schools are running on skeleton staff to cater for “key occupations” – looking after the children of healthcare and service staff. From tomorrow onwards she will visit once a week, and work from home on a reduced schedule.
I continued working from home as I have in recent weeks, but was joined by Miss 14 and 16 – who were governed by Miss 19. They did several hours of school work, interspersed with creative, and fitness activities throughout the day.
We were held up for a time by our youngest choosing not to tell us her school uses Office 365 – so while I struggled to download an attachment from her teacher and get it into Google Docs, she could have just opened it in Word Online. That game will change tomorrow anyway – her computer was so painfully slow running Windows, I wiped it this evening and installed Manjaro Linux on it. She's been using it all evening, and seems pleased.
Half-way through the morning the local dance teacher visited to borrow a webcam from us – as with many others, she is pivoting towards delivery of classes over the internet. It says something about the outright greed and idiocy going on that the same webcam we paid PS25 for a few months ago now costs 10 times as much. I hope the government wades in and starts fining profiteers to destruction.
We're slowly lining up delivery services at home – late tonight a delivery of milk and bread will arrive – tomorrow will hopefully see flour and rice. None of it is coming from the big supermarkets, because they have already directed their delivery services to those in most need. We're going to try and only brave a visit to them every two weeks or so if we can help it – you never know – if we source enough things from elsewhere we might not need to.
At the moment it's just about “getting on with it”. We're all going to catch the virus sooner or later – it's about making sure we are fit and well in the meantime.
When things calm down and routines fall into place, I'll hopefully get a chance to catch up with a few friends via the internet. In the meantime I'm going to have an early night.
p.s. I've started making my way through the un-read books mountain.