How I Spent My Spring Social Distancing

We all have those things we plan on doing if we only had the time. Well, now due to social distancing, many of us have that time. Some of the ones on my list have something to do with blindness; some of them don’t. I’m sharing the lists below to help you make more productive use of all that free time you now have due to social distancing.

What I Planned on Doing

Below is a list of some of the things I always thought I’d do when I had the time. In other words, this is my pre-corona list.

* Read War and Peace. The version produced by Audible takes only about seventy-six hours to listen to so I figured this would be about three months of bedtime reading.
* Learn to bake French pastries. Since the only appliance I can use in the kitchen is the microwave, I thought this would keep me busy for a year or two.
* Learn to do computer coding in Braille. There is a special system for doing this that is different than conventional Braille, and I always thought it would be cool to master this.
* Learn to do basic computer coding so that I’ll have something to use the special cool Braille coding on.
* Learn to play the piano. All blind people are naturally musically-gifted, but I can’t play chopsticks. I’m an embarrassment to my group.                       * Teach my guide dog to pick up his toys and put them away.
* Learn to speak Spanish.
* Convert all my personal papers into print. For reasons of security and convenience, all of those documents are in Braille. This works great as long as I’m alive to read them. However, I’m pretty sure that it will cause my executor to curse my name when I’m dead.

What I’ve Actually Done

My good intentions haven’t actually worked out very well once social distancing has given me lots of free time. Here’s the list of things I’m really doing.

* Watch endless hours of reruns of the Jerry Springer show.
* Listen to my wife’s stories at dinner about all the truly weird stuff she’s read on Facebook.
* Talk by phone with my family more than I ever have in my life. There’s something about having the Y chromosome that prevents men from picking up the phone or using FaceTime to do this.                                                            * Take afternoon naps.
* Watch reruns of football games that were played in 1985 on ESPN Classic. * Eat popcorn and drink Coke-a-Cola for lunch every day.
* Learn how to use Zoom so I can communicate with everyone else who is stuck in their home.                                                                                                       * Worry about where we’re going to get toilet paper.
Stay safe.