On an average day, my daughter’s question-to-declarative sentence ratio clocks in at a healthy 5:1. In this section of the blog, I explore what happens when instead of just saying “I don’t know,” I try saying “Let’s find out!”
We are on Day 14 of The Howells All Being Home At Once. I hope you and your family are still doing as well as can be expected. Here, we’ve been reading stories about tech companies donating thousands and in some cases millions of N95 masks, and found ourselves wondering … Why do Silicon Valley companies have such large stockpiles of N95 masks anyway?
We are on Day 8 of The Howells All Being Home At Once, and Day 4 of Santa Clara County Residents All Huddled Up Together in Their Separate Spaces. Today’s installment includes a warning about a new financial scam, a follow-up to a previous pandemic project, and other notes from our attempt to shelter in place. Stay safe out there, y’all.
We are on Day Seven of The Howells All Being Home At Once, and Day Three of Santa Clara County Residents All Huddled Up Together in Their Separate Spaces. Today’s installment includes what I’ve learned about accessing veterinary care for our cat, our current pandemic project, and other notes from our attempt to shelter in place.
We are on Day Six of The Howells All Being Home At Once, and Day Two of Santa Clara County Residents All Huddled Up Together in Their Separate Spaces. Today’s installment includes our revised education plan, Tuesday’s pandemic project, and other tidbits from our attempt to shelter in place.
We are on Day Five of The Howells All Being Home At Once, and things are going about as well as can be expected, to borrow one of my husband’s more useful phrases. Today’s installment includes lessons in homeschooling by the under-equipped and other tidbits from our attempt to shelter in place.
The San Francisco Chronicle is reporting that as of midnight tonight, a shelter-in-place order will be in effect for six Bay Area counties, including San Francisco, Santa Clara (where we are), San Mateo, Marin, Contra Costa and Alameda. Why the new restrictions, and what’s it like to live with them so far?
I’ve spent a lot of time over the past few days on the phone with various parents trying to figure out what a reasonable plan for my daughter’s education during our area’s COVID-19 outbreak might look like. I’ve also spent several hours scanning the web to see what our online options are. Here’s what I think we might do.
In which I talk about some of the things I’ve been doing instead of posting on Caterpickles.
A few years ago, my husband began making biscuits on Saturday mornings. Although not all of his efforts have been equally delicious, we love starch in nearly all of its forms, so we happily ate the not-so-great batches to make room on the table for the even better batches to come. With one exception. The one and only batch of biscuits so horrible no amount of bacon could save them tasted like fluffy metal. How did that happen?
Recently I’ve realized that the only thing worse for my mental health than Political Twitter is Coronavirus Twitter. To cheer myself up, I’ve started reading post-apocalyptic dystopian novels. I haven’t read that many yet, but I have read enough to notice that the just-in-time food supply rarely survives the first few chapters. That made me wonder… what if my best strategy for surviving an apocalypse is not merely to stockpile food, but to learn how to grow it?
