Ordinarily at this time of year, I'd be just finishing up the ski season and we'd be getting our second home packed up and road-ready (it's a motorhome), while getting our regular house (the one I'm sitting in now) packed up and ready for house-sitters. Instead, they shut down the ski area a month ago, and of course traveling for 6 months or so - like we usually do - is out of the question. So we stopped packing, helped our house-sitters find alternative housing, and set about hunkering down.
My wife plays drums. She is active on a drum website (drumeo.com), and I've been a lot more active here on this one. We've both been spending a good part of every day working on our music. So far we've each been focusing on our own things (her website has also been running "Challenges", for example). She broke her arm in January. She's been doing a lot of one-hand work and is just beginning to be able to use her left arm for hitting the drums again, so at some point pretty soon we'll get some collaborations going on again. I've been doing Griff's challenges, learning new songs, practicing old ones, working on courses, and trying to figure out how to sing from somewhere down in my chest rather than out my nose. At least, I think that's what I'm doing. Time will tell. I do feel like I'm learning a lot. I've never really bothered to spend this much time focused on learning to play. (I almost said I never had the opportunity, but that's not actually true - I've had plenty of time, I just never took it all before.) Anyway, the challenges and my attempts at recording myself have been forcing me to go a couple of steps beyond where I'd usually stop; I'm blown away by how much more I'm learning as I try to bring whatever I'm working on from a point where I think I can play it to a "performance-ready" state.
I live in a ski town in Vermont's Mad River Valley. We normally get a lot of visitors, but our year-round community is small and we're serious about staying ahead of the virus. Folks wear masks when they go out, we all limit our trips to the store and they limit the number of people who go inside at the same time. We take walks around the area for exercise, chat (across the road, from a safe distance) with friends and neighbors we meet on our walks, and do the occasional Zoom conference to catch up with friends farther away. There are some in our area who have the virus (a scant handful in a community of around 5,000 - a small percentage but certainly enough to be concerned about - and very few of us have been tested). If it starts to spread here, we're hosed. The nearest hospital is 30 miles away, and it's not very large.
Sue and I read the news online every morning. We try to keep aware of what's going on across the political spectrum by following NYT and WaPo, as well as WSJ and National Review. I can't look at FoxNews (we don't have television, just the internet, that's one reason...) and I've mostly stopped looking at facebook, which has surprisingly made me much calmer and happier.
Huge thanks to
@Griff and you all, my fellow forum denizens, for this website and all that goes on here. Music is keeping us busy, sane, and happy. I don't know what I'd be doing without it!
or picking up prescriptions. I do have a couple of N95 masks I wear when I go out. I am using on-line ordering and store pick up and drive thru's whenever possible.
