We have a six-year-old boy who I have been trying to do the online schooling with. Thankfully, he's been pretty receptive to it. But you can tell it's just lacking, not by anybody's fault, I feel like as much as it shouldn't have this pandemic took us all by surprise. So I really genuinely feel like we're all just doing the best that we can with what we have. This teacher's been a real Lifesaver. She gives really detailed lesson plans, and has really open and free with her communication. I've never had a hard time trying to get to her. I've been home with my son since March 13th. I have only left three times to go grocery shopping. But other than that, it's just been us in these four walls. I did find out that I am pregnant, and I had my first doctor's appointment yesterday where I found out it's twins.  So I will now be due in November instead of December and all I'm thinking about is when the second wave happens. I don't know if my husband will be allowed in the hospital with me. I don't know if I'll have to be by myself, but I figure that's just stuff I can worry about later.

I live in Saginaw. I am three blocks from the Tittabawassee River what happened this week with the Floods with the Dam's breaking and then heading down through Midland and then into Saginaw have been horrific the devastation and the damage around here is unbelievable. We were very lucky that like I said, we were three blocks from the river and it did not flow our way. So we were incredibly lucky. I have friends in Sanford that we're lucky did not have house damage, they were right on the lake.  But unfortunately, she said she watched a lot of her neighbors houses float away and that was hard. I have many co-workers here that are in the area that have had to evacuate move their families, but everybody's safe. One of the good things is there was no deaths and no injuries from these floods but a lot of damage a lot.

It's May 16, my 62nd birthday today. Today I want to talk about one of the side benefits of the — well, maybe not side benefits. But one of the benefits of this pandemic is that it's brought life down to its core, to a simpler life. I want to talk about the simpler life. First of all, I want to talk about entertaining. So last night for my birthday and two of my friends who had a birthday this week. I had them over. And we entertained by having a fire in our backyard and a little portable fire pit. We have had this fire pit for a couple of years and we've used it more this year than we ever have before. Before, it never seemed good enough to have people over just to sit around that fire. It seemed like I'd have to have an event I'd have to orchestrate more, but it was so simple and so good last night these two couples came over. They brought their own chairs, they brought their own beer. We sat around six feet apart around that fire and we just had good conversation and watched the fire and then the sun went down and they went home and it was just a lovely evening.

I'm an Episcopal priest in East Lansing Michigan. And one of the things that I did last week was do a social distancing wedding. The couple, I had been counseling and planning to do like a normal wedding for them back in coming up in June. Um, they just decided they couldn't wait and you know to think about waiting as long as a year felt like it was too long for them and they asked why don’t I just do it. Well, I'm not allowed in my church building right now by my Bishops so we stood in the front porch or the back porch of the church and the Sun was shining and we found a little patch of flowers and the bride and her kids and the groom stood in front of the church and their Witnesses were socially distanced and I was socially distanced and they made their promises. And we set up a Zoom link for their friends and family. So the friends and family were able to observe the ceremony and then they were married. They're buying a house this week, are getting ready to set up their life together. And the joke was back in the beginning when they were planning their reception. They said “Oh, let's just let's just do it with Arby's, we'll just bring in Arby's” Well, they went through the drive-through and got Arby's for their wedding supper. So I talked to them yesterday and they're doing well and feeling a little a little weird but getting ready to pack their stuff up and buy their new house and start their new life even in the midst of this very strange time with so much fear and death. There was a joy and a new commitment to a New Life.

With Elementary and Middle School, it's like so many students like over 400 students that I see over the course of a week and I get to know students and I know their names and I know them collectively as classes, as groups, and the silver lining for the remote learning for me has been the kind of individualized connections I'm making with students where they share their — you know, I will post a lesson. I'm not doing synchronous. Everything is asynchronous at the moment. I'll post a lesson at the beginning of the week and they'll share a photo or a video of their work with me or they'll record their voice and then I can record my voice and give a comment back and  sort of tailoring it to individual students and their families and seeing kids in their homes where they are just kind of their different parts of their personality have come out. So I've really enjoyed that. But I am becoming a bit fatigued as the weather is getting nicer and I mean everything is like a little bit of reinventing what I teach, what my lessons look like, what makes the most sense. I want it to be accessible. I want students who don't have the best technology access to be able to accomplish this. I want the screen only to be used as a prompt to get students away from the screen and be highly creative that way. I want it not to be super stressful on families. So I've been trying to do lessons where the whole family can participate it could be a son and a mother doing the theater activity together. A child doing it by him or herself siblings a group of four siblings being able to do the activity together and. Yeah, it's been it's been interesting. I have enjoyed some parts and other things, I'm it's just it's having to recreate our jobs. So that's that's tricky and just when you get used to one thing and feel good about it, like the learning platform one of them that we're using at our school. I love it, and it sounds like we might be moving away from that for next year. So having to relearn technology, but that's okay. We're adaptable we will figure it out.

I guess I would describe our current situation as one. Number one, there's a very serious medical thing that's happening and we're all trying to do our best to respond to it. I guess we're all is a not not necessarily the truth. People — a lot of people are coming up with these big things to do because it's very serious, we have to respond to it somehow. But because of maybe because of the way that the internet feeds all the information to us kind of on equal terms, there's this idea that even though the medical field is coming forward and saying “Wow, is this serious. And yeah, we definitely have to respond. And here's the here's the best way to respond,” at the same time, kind of regular people that I know have come forward or whatever have have said: “Well, I'm not sure that's really the case” or “How can we really be sure that that's helping?”  And I guess to me I think well, I suppose we can't be sure but I'm not sure that that's a reason to ignore what's being said or to say I certainly would not be somebody who would say oh, this is like a conspiracy or I'm doubting whether this is really necessary what the government is doing. I think the government is trying their best. Generally, the shutdown is a response to things. It may be imperfect there. Maybe have been moments where people said “This is helpful or not helpful” and then they had to come back and say, “you know that wasn't really accurate what we said, it is helpful where it's not helpful, even though we kind of set the opposite before.” But I'm I just don't have it in me. I don't have the type of personality that that spends a lot of time wondering whether the general message that I'm receiving is really accurate.

I was watching a TV show the other day and there was a woman, the main character. She was in an arcade trying to get this specific toy for her child. She thought her daughter would really like this specific pink plushie toy, so the scene is her trying to get this toy. And the camera pans to her peering into the glass looking all excited, concentrating, and then shows her hand touching the handle or the joystick or whatever — the stick you use to move the machine around. And my immediate thought was “oh she shouldn't touch that, it hasn’t been disinfected” and I realized that and I paused and it just struck me how this pandemic is affecting how I view people's actions in TV shows, like how crazy is it that my first thought is, “Wow this character, who doesn't exist, who lived in the world before this pandemic ever happened, should be focused on disinfecting this handle before she plays this game.”  So just a strange thing that happened.

Have you or anyone close to you had to change or cancel any big plans because of this? I'm going to say that's a real big Yes. I proposed to my then-girlfriend, now-fiancee last March and our wedding date we decided on was May 9th. So clearly some changes were in order there.When things first started to lock down around mid-March, we had a discussion at the time and we -- we rolled it over for a few days and talked about it. The idea of what we might do what we might need to postpone or change or cancel whether we wanted to to limit the number of people, or what might be the best way. And as things kept progressing and getting worse that we we came to the decision that rather than try to keep crunching down our plans smaller and smaller and end up with something that was really half-baked or or not even, you know, not not even worth doing at all.We just decided that we were going to do two things. The first of them was keep the same wedding date. All of the associated, you know, the friends the family the party all of that is all secondary to the actual purpose of the day, which is being married you know, joining ourselves together. We're going to have a a church wedding and and you know, if the priest is there and two people are there to sign the marriage license that's that's really the minimum. So rather than cancel. We are delaying our reception to next May. Hopefully knock on wood next May everything's able to happen.We were able to push everything back to next May. we're going to do up d the whole thing right. Right down to the party bus, you know, my my now fiance and and by then she'll be my wife will be in her wedding dress again. We're going to have all the bridesmaids and groomsmen we push back our our rentals for our tuxes and we'll all be in in the full shebang, the party bus to get pictures taken. We're going to try and get back to the church. Unless someone else is having a wedding that weekend. Try and get back into the church and do some pictures in our full with everyone there in the church that on campus and places like…