Have you ever watched the show Burn Notice? It’s a USA show about a burned spy’s adventures. It featured a fantastic cast, great friendships, lots of C4, a slow burn romance, strong female characters, and a man who loves and respects his mom.
The Chaplain and I binged through Burn Notice a few years ago, and it’s remained the stick by which we measure all the shows we watch.
A prevailing theme in the show was that the protagonist would be presented with a job that sounded impossible. He would then come up with an elaborate and risky plan that would only work if everything went right.
As he ate a spoonful of blueberry yogurt from the ancient fridge in the converted warehouse he called home, he’d say, “It’s the only way.”
Black Girl Unlimited: The Remarkable Story of Teenage Wizard, by Echo Brown, is a book I found in my 13-year-old’s stash of library books from our last pre-lockdown trip to the library. She admitted she hadn’t read it.
I have been missing having a good book to come back to in between all the “work” reading I’ve been doing, and a YA book was just the ticket.
These days, I’m missing respite.
We live several hours from our nearest relatives and have a spotty social network in our area (life is busy, and it’s hard to make new friends post-college), so each time we added to our family, it was with the assumption we’d be doing the parenting by ourselves.
Mostly, we have. The Chaplain and I figured out how to ask each other for what we needed to keep our tanks from running empty, and we made it work. That was when I had out-of-the-house activities a couple of times a week, and so did the Chaplain. Those out-of-the-house options narrowed to one during the pandemic: The Long, Solitary Walk.
If it had to be just one thing, the Long Solitary Walk is the best. But there comes a time in an introvert’s life when she just wants to be home alone. And when everyone has to stay home all the time, that just isn’t happening.
Last week, the Chaplain came home, saw my face, and offered to take the kids to the pool and leave me home.
It may have been my first time home alone since lockdown started.
You have seen How to Be an Antiracist, by Ibram X. Kendi, recommended across social media and on every list of books about racism. In the weeks after George Floyd, it felt like reading Kendi’s book was the action point to start with.
Back in February, our family left for Tobago.
I brought my DSLR camera with me. The autofocus had become a little unreliable, but not bad enough for me to do anything about it.
The first day of our vacation, it stopped working completely. I was able to take a couple of photos, and then it refused to do anything further.
