It was supposed to rain all day today. It was also supposed to be a day off school today, which would have made the rain seem particularly dreary as we would probably have gone out and done something on this early spring day. Since this is the sixth day without school, it just felt like the new normal.

In the morning, while my wife was reading with our son (who fought with bouts of “I don’t want to read!” — even an English teacher’s kid can be like that at times!), I spent some time working on a couple of web sites I’m creating, one for a friend’s about-to-be-launched home organization company and the other an online guide for the church we usually attend (the parish built a new church just a few years ago). The virus, though, has put a damper on both projects: no one would start a business right now, and the church is closed.

Once I completed what I wanted to accomplish on the sites for the day, it was nearing lunch. And it was also about time that I help hang our daughter’s pegboard that she got from Ikea two months ago. I don’t like to rush into anything. And I didn’t have the appropriate drywall anchors. And I kept forgetting to get them in Home Depot.

Of course, there had to be some playtime. Our son and I worked with Legos: he built a car; I built a suspension bridge. When she saw it, my wife laughed that I should have been an architect. (Forget for a moment that it’s actually civil engineers who design bridges — I knew what she meant.)

“Actually, I did. For several years.” I took drafting in high school to that end. “But then I realized I didn’t want to do that for the rest of my life. And besides, if I’d gone that route, who knows if I would have ended up in Lipnica?” Which is to say, who knows if we would have met? A change in career choice determined who I married? Perhaps. Perhaps not. It’s impossible to say.

It’s that kind of dumb luck (or lack thereof) that has me a little worried now. Our family is isolating itself, but someone has to go to the store occasionally, as I did this morning. (Only one dozen eggs per customer, I learned at checkout.) How many asymptomatic people are walking around? We take all precautions, but in the end, there’s very little we can do to be 100% sure about avoiding exposure. It’s always that way with illnesses, though — we just never think about it. For now, we can just follow the CDC guidelines and wash our hands. A lot. (We’re going through soap like nobody’s business!)

Finally, in the afternoon, it stopped raining for a while. The kids and I went out to walk the dog. In the evening, it seemed like it had stopped again, but by the time we’d gotten ready and headed outside, it had started misting again. And then stopped. And in crawled our daughter, rollerblades still on, to tell us, “Come on! It’s stopped! Let’s go!”