Ross Catrow.

Actual Day 120 was a couple of days ago! I'm going to put a pause on these daily updates, both because literally everything is the same every day and because looking at the ever-increasing number of coronadays is bumming me out (autocorrect suggestion: numbing me out). I've got a "vacation"—staying inside a different house for a week next to some water—coming up and might reboot these afterwards. Until then!

My mostly-weekly, fully-remote game of Dungeons & Dragons continues to be the highlight of my week and one of my favorite parts of these coronatimes.

I have a bad feeling about the conversation we’re all about to get into over schools reopening. People are—rightfully—ultra stressed and we’re lacking meaningful leadership at the state level. How can you fault folks for having incredibly strong opinions about their kids’ health and safety or their own health and safety? I just don’t feel like we’re set up for success.

Someone yelled at me to “get the fuck out of the street” while I was riding my bike today. Nature is healing.

Top five books I’d put on a bookcase behind me during a Very Important Zoom Call:

1. House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski
2. The Dragonlance Chronicles—Dragons of Autumn Twilight, Dragons of Winter Night, Dragons of Spring Dawning—by Margaret Weiss and Tracy Hickman
3. A Prayer for Owen Meaney by John Irving
4. Leviathan Wakes by James S.A. Corey
5. Severance by Ling Ma

We got dinner from Peter Chang tonight, and, my god, remember real, excellent food? I mean, maybe you don’t, but I’m hear to tell you it’s something else. Like, full of both flavors and textures. I mean, wow.

I rode the absolute mess out of my bike with my dad the other day. I was totally blitzed by the time we got home. He looked at his Strava and said “Hmm, about 200 calories short of where I like to be.” 😒

I love the sound of fireworks. It reminds me of summertime and watching The Sandlot.

I'm really enjoying my garden this year. I think part of that is due to the pandemic giving me more time to spend watering, pulling weeds, and just generally futzing around out there. It's wild how you can just grow food right out of the ground! I think I'm going to invest in a nice sprinkler so I can automate the watering part of the process and focus more on the futzing part.

I worked from an actual desk today and felt way less like a half-human schlub! It took 100 days, but setting up a Work From Home Zone was a good idea!

Since the coronavirus isn't going anywhere, and we're not going anywhere, Val and I thought it'd be nice to finally create a space for me to Work From Home. Up until now I've been Working From Bed a lot, which I know is not great (see this particularly helpful video from CGP Grey). Now we've put a second desk in the spare room / her office and plan to block off Val-only time, Ross-only time, and shared time. We've shared an office before, but, as she put it, “we've both matured a lot since then.” 😬

Bourbon and ginger beer is sooo much better than bourbon and ginger ale—like, way more better than the amount ginger beer is better than ginger ale. If anything, coronatime has encouraged me to drink alcohols other than Miller Highlife and Evan Williams Green. There's an an entire rainbow of booze to explore!

I started reading Philip Roth's The Plot Against America for some reason (who recommended this to me??), and it frequently blows my mind. This description of living in a world where an anti-semitic Charles Lindbergh beat FDR and kept America out of WWII hits way too close to home in the current Trump/pandemic/racism moment:

And as Lindbergh's election couldn't have made clearer to me, the unfolding of the unforeseen was everything. Turned wrong way round, the relentless unforeseen was what we schoolchildren studied as “History,” harmless history, where everything unexpected in its own time is chronicled on the page as inevitable. The terror of the unforeseen is what the science of history hides, turning disaster into an epic.

The terror, and the trauma, of the unforeseen is such a perfect way to describe what we've all been living through the last several months.