Up here at George's house in North White Plains/Valhalla/Greenburgh, NY (the municipality sitch is, in typical NE fashion, confusing). Omicron is everywhere around us, but we are trying to hide out and go into as few buildings as possible, which is made complicated only by our need for a little bit of food cheer and diversification and imperfect meal planning on the part of the extended household -- so we don't have all the ingredients we need for Xmas feasting. We hope that the diligent and disciplined use of KN94 masks and general minimization of exposure should protect us and, more importantly, the more medically-fragile members of our assembly.
We have historically been at the bigger house in Larchmont which is, sadly, no longer in the family. Sadly in general, but felicitously for Rob, who did all the work of taking care of the old house back in the day -- and it evolved into a ton of work just to make it mold-free and habitable and then ready for sale.
Our current house is quasi-open plan with cheap hollow-core doors, which makes for poor sound-baffling, which is certainly sub-optimal for things like Rob doing big Zoom calls for work (which makes it hard for the rest of us to think) or, it turns out, for us to watch 30 Rock reruns around bedtime. Apparently I in particular guffaw rather loudly, which disturbs Rob's wind down process. I've been trying to keep it down.
In general I have to feel for Rob. He has many particularities, but his life is clearly run by very well-established routines (juggling the soccer ball in the morning, watching CNBC with lunch, calling Mary Lee with George around 5:30) and then we just show up and sit around in the middle of it. Larchmont was much better designed for this than this house is. More well-defined, discrete spaces to retreat to.
Normally it would be easier to sneak out and, say, go to a movie. This year not so much. With collective discipline and more than a little luck, we hope to get through this.
No comments:
Post a Comment