Keeping Busy With Nothing to Do

That's right, it's Quarantine Time! Everybody is still stuck at home, going through all the things that we keep putting off because we don't have the time, only now we're running out of those things because we have nothing but time on our hands. So, what to do in these boring times when there's nothing new on TV, no new movies, and the only sport we have is watching the dogs go nuts when they can't go and sniff other dogs on their walks?

I mean, my wife is not a baker, but she has baked more stuff in the past month than in her entire life prior to this. Cookies of all shapes and sizes (and flavors), brownies, squares, even a full-blown lemon meringue pie, from scratch, including actual lemon rind in the middle! She was worried about the 'COVID-15,' the fifteen pounds she expects everyone to put on during this forced confinement with nothing to do but eat. I told her I wasn't going to be gaining fifteen pounds; I'm aiming for twenty-five.

What? She's a great cook to begin with, and now she's baking, too. I'm going to look like Michael Moore by the time this is done.

Apparently, the one industry that's loving the quarantine is the board game industry. You can't even find a game of Scrabble on the shelf at Wal-Mart anymore. Everyone's been buying all kinds of games, from Risk to Battleship to new stuff I've never even heard of before, all to keep from being bored out of their minds.

Crawl spaces are being cleared out; houses are being cleaned from top to bottom so thoroughly that their market value is jumping up; it's pandemonium, folks. And from the looks of things, it's not going to improve any time soon. I hope I'm wrong, of course, but I'm not feeling too optimistic about it.

Anyway, we're finding lots of things to do that we hadn't done in a long time. We've played cards, a lot. We pulled out the bouncy castle from underneath the house, and the kids have spent hours jumping between that and the trampoline. We've eaten a lot of home cooking, of course. We've watched movies, we've read stories, we've gone for walks...and yet, we're still restless.

Let's face it; we're all yearning to get back to a normal life, where we can go to work, come home to our families, and go out and meet friends. Especially that last part. We miss our friends. Even those of us that don't have any friends miss them. Because at least then, we could pretend that we might meet a new friend. Now, nothing.

It's tough, folks. Hopefully, it gets better before it gets worse. But, in the meantime, why not do some recreational reading? No preaching, no politics, no 'messages,' just plain fun stories of action, mystery, and adventure. What better way to pass the lonely hours than with a good book? I recommend The Chronicles of Meterra: Arrival, available now in e-book format, or in paperback. Hopefully, you'll recommend it to your friends, as well.

Good luck, folks!