Life in the Age of Corona

A Daily Diary

Tuesday, December 15th, 2020

Melt Down

The second day of quarantine. WE have settled into our quarantine home. EM has comandeered the kitchen/ dining aera for her school work, while I have moved to the lounge, enabling us to close the door between our spaces. In the evening I go over to the main house to watch TV while EM is in class.

As expected, we spend the entire day in the house beavering away at work and school. EM is working hard on her various internal assessments and university application. The main IA due is her English oral on Thursday and today saw numerous melt downs as there is absolutely no clarity on how she needs to structure her oral presentation or waht is required. In the evening she played a video of someone else’s oral and as a result I think I understood what needs to be done. I just wish I had understood this sooner; like when she asked me to review her prompts before submitting them before we left DC. Had I known what I know now I would have been able to coach her through the oral presentation over a series of days rather than a few hours. To get to this point there were tears of frustrations and various emotional outbreaks on her side. She is just so stressed. I think, now that I understand what she needs to do I managed to calm her down and provide her with some structure.

Fortunately EM's father has been able to top uop her phone SIM with 100GB data so we should both be able to work over the next few days.

The highlight of the day was lunch. My mum had made a crab salad for us and send some sliced boiled potatoes along, so I made fried potatoes with a fried egg and crab salad on the side.

The virus keeps spreading, not only in the USA but also across Europe. At least measures taken to date have significantly slowed the spread, but not enough the German government finds so it will impose more severe restrictions starting on Thursday until the day we are scheduled to depart. All shops except for essential businesses will remain closed.

So much for my plan to buy new shoes.