Official restarting of the blog - Day 12 of quarantine

Hello, everyone!  Your humble narrator has decided to re-start this blog.  It is not lost on me that activity of this blog appears to correlate with some awful health-related disaster, either personal or global.  Case in point: we are back to counting days.  This time: we are at Day 12 of isolation.  Yes, this is a personal blog, so I am counting since Friday before last, the first day that Alla and I were both told to work from home.

So, Kaplan house this morning: the kids are doing academic things (for some pretty wide margins of “academic”) – Ben is reading, I hope, and Zev is programming visual effects of a dancing alien singing “Thunder” by Imagine Dragons.  I hear giggling, “pineapples”, “dabbing”, and “floss”. 

Last night, with the last of the free-ish movement, I borrowed a pressure washer (thank you, Smotkins!) and sometime today Alla will be doing something she predicts will be therapeutic.  The amount of actual therapy that Alla will get – or everyone else will need – as a result will be spelled out in subsequent posts.

The kids outside my door have switched to scheduled play time and are off to clear a dungeon in Munchkins: I hear of doors, warriors, and helping – they are learning, hopefully, that a small amount of cooperation makes for a better game.  I give it about 45 seconds.

My parents have been in self-imposed isolation for several weeks now.  Last night I was able to stop by.  I proceeded – responsibly, through the outside – straight to the back porch where I enjoyed a small pre-arranged scotch while at government-approved social isolation distance (do I sound 1984-ish enough yet, comrade?).  I rush to inform you, my reader, that my parents are fine, both physically (for present day values of “fine) and mentally.  In fact, they are so fine mentally, doing so well at the whole “stiff upper lip” thing, that it makes me wonder if they are somehow British.  On the other hand, the barrage of medical and near-medical instruction I receive from them provides a comforting reassurance of our Semitic origin. 

Alla’s parents are fine as well, active and loving as ever.  Their degree of social distancing has been a matter of some debate.  Our degree of influence on them has been about the same as on my parents – none whatsoever. 

With that, I am going to log off for now and do some work.  And, perhaps, prepare a math lesson for the boys.  The key here is to have two approaches ready: if the peace holds, compliment both and parley joint dungeon crawling into individual math lessons.  If the cooperation goes to heck, then use their desire for individual time for private math lessons, like it is their idea.  Wish me luck!