Things I've Learned on Quarantine

1. My Son's Breakfast Game is Amazing

In these weeks that I haven't been needing to drive to work, I've been able to be up early with my boy and make him breakfast before taking him to daycare/school. It operates out of a home with less than a dozen kids and provides both him and us our only social interaction, at drop off and pick up.

With little incentive to rush out the door, besides trying to have a modicum of regularity in my own work schedule, I'm usually game to let him eat what he wants for breakfast. Many mornings go  like this:

1. Bowl of Cheerios
2. Second bowl of Cheerios
3. Waffle from our homemade batter
4. Second waffle
5. Fried egg
6. Second fried egg
7. Third fried egg

By the second fried egg I'm usually like, "You want another egg? Well, hell yeah!" The third is foregone conclusion.

My son turns four next month, and I expected it to take another dozen years before I was exhausted just watching him eat.

2. The Origins of Friday the 13th as a Negative Idiom

I was caught up in some twenty-five minute documentary on Curiosity Stream, a very worthy quarantine subscription purchase (twelve bucks for the year?!?), about Parisian secrets, and it was the Knights Templar episode. I wasn't interested in many of the other episodes, but I didn't know so much about the Knights Templar, and the time commitment was low, so I hit play.

So...a group of, eh, mercenaries tried to protect Christian pilgrims on their way to the Holy Land. That area was home to lots of non-Christians, so it was a serious gig. Eventually the Knights were given a temple as a headquarters (maybe I'd had too many gin and tonics by this point?), which led to their name.

Anyway, by 1100 they were hired by the French king to be a special protective force and given some land right outside of Ile de la Cite, the island in the Seine where Notre Dame sits today. Historically some scholars think the origin of Paris itself, starting around 200 CE, was on this island. 

In the centuries that followed, the Knights started buying the surrounding land, amassed a ton of wealth, and started lending money. They even used their power and fame to help travelers, becoming the first recognized international backer of currency: if you lived in Paris and wanted to visit Genoa, you could drop off money at the Knights Templar's headquarters and they would write you a note promising to back the equivalent amount of Genoan currency. This was a major breakthrough in traveling, as now people could travel without carrying their own money and be susceptible to bandits.

By 1303, the French king had grown weary of the wealthy and powerful Knights, how they'd purchased enormous swaths of Paris, and mostly about how they had a little too much independence. In the middle of the night, on Friday the 13th of October, the king had his men kick down the doors to the unsuspecting Knights and swept them all away to jail, thereby seizing their assets. Within a decade nearly all were burned at the stake.

There remains, on the tip of the Ile de la Cite, in the proverbial shadows of Notre Dame, a marker of the last knights burned at the stake rests.

3. There are Asteroids Orbiting the Sun Between Venus and Mars

I remember hearing about how Japanese astronauts were planning on landing a spacecraft onto an asteroid a number of years back. On a different Curiosity Stream short documentary, this close encounter was highlighted. The target was Ryugu, an asteroid a few kilometres across:

I was wondering how far away they had to travel, but the number of millions of kilometres seemed pretty small, for being in the millions.

Then they showed it's solar orbit: it was in between Earth and Mars. 

WAIT, WHAT? was how my brain processed that information. I've heard many times about the NEO, the Near Earth Objects, but I guess I'd never realized that they formed a group of heady-sized asteroids orbiting the sun in between Venus and Mars. Doesn't something else orbit the sun between Venus and Mars?

4. My Video Game Skills Suck

Norm sent out an SNES mini he wasn't using. I've been showcasing games for Cass and trying to get him to try them out, maybe improve his hand-eye coordination, but it is a little early in his life (it is physically, for sure), but I realized something about myself: I'm not a video game guy.

Sure I like some video games, having beat a very few number of games. But...this mini console brings out the frustration and anger.

I wanted to have an entire post dedicated to my detailed frustrations, and I think I will do just that. But I'm going to need to start taking notes...

5. My Daughter is a Pinkie Like Her Old Man

Corrie has some Cherokee in her background, and we believe it's for this reason that she tans beautifully instead of lobstering like me. Cass has been lucky enough to get this gene. He's been called "the whitest baby I've ever seen" more than once, and yet he's never really gotten a sunburn. We put lotion on very seldom, which is our bad, since burns or no, the sun is damaging.

But Camille doesn't seem to have gotten the gene. Our beaches were finally opened, and we spent some time there this past Saturday:

Cass had a great time. It was awesome to get him some activity off his bike and off the sidewalk around our building, since he's been using the toilet exclusively, and we like to be close.

We thought we'd be able to use an open public bathroom in the event it was necessary, but they were all closed. Cass did eventually use a Port-A-Potty that someone had broken the lock off of.

No masks for a few minutes

 Camille slept most of the time, but after we got home, and relaxed, and the sun started to show off of our skin, it became clear: she may be a lobster like her old man.

I'm not sure this picture shows it off well enough, but the left side of her face and her arms (and backs of legs) all got pretty pink:

She's a trooper, though, and doesn't complain about it.

Also, it seems like Long Beach's west-side marina didn't get the memo that all this quarantining has been great for the environment: