Steven Harper Piziks

A year ago, the coronavirus (as we called it back then) appeared in Michigan with two recorded cases.

No one was wearing masks in public much.  We were avoiding handshakes and doing elbow bumps instead.  But no one seemed overly worried.

I was terrified.  I remember watching it show up in China and spread quickly.  Cruise ships filled up with plague victims and were refused docking.  Still, everyone, including Donald Trump, was saying it wasn't a big deal, and I was saying, "This is horrifying." Diseases like this spread like crazy, especially in a world of quick, cheap international travel.  It only takes a single case in an airport to send a virus all around the world.

The latest (and ultimately false) information we had back then was that the virus spread on surfaces, like the flu does, so I set my students to work.  Twice a day, every day, I sprayed my classroom tables down with bleach cleaner and had my students wipe them dry with paper towels.  They grumbled and complained that it was stupid, that there was nothing to worry about.  I ignored them.

On Wednesday, I brought in a giant bottle of hand sanitizer and told my students that everyone who entered the room needed to use it, even if they said they'd just washed their hands.  This excited some commentary, especially from "Moe," a nasty-minded student from a right-wing family.  Moe was a big kid with a loud mouth who had clearly been raised to believe that if a big person just shouts at people, they'll be cowed into submission.  He was a bully and weasel both, who tried to get me into trouble by peddling false stories about me to the principal. These stories ended in showdowns in the office, and Mick upped his attempts to get me into trouble.

So after a bathroom break, Moe strode into the class and bypassed the sanitizer.  I stopped him and told him to use it.  He made a huge, vocal deal about it. "This thing is a fake! It's nothing! This is stupid."  I ordered him out of the classroom and told him not to come back until I'd heard from the principal.  He stormed out, vowing never to return.  As it turned out, he never did.

The following day--Thursday--Moe wasn't in class.  I marked him absent and taught as usual.

Meanwhile, I remember a palpable feeling in the air, similar to when a blizzard is on the way.  The numbers were shooting up in Michigan, and we'd had a case in our school district.  Fewer of my students were scoffing at the virus now, and the big discussion was whether or not it qualified as a pandemic.  The CDC was hesitant to call it one because they were afraid of panic.  This struck me as an idiotic policy, and was the first among hundreds of bad calls, missteps, and utter incompetence on behalf of the CDC in handling COVID-19.  This was The Big One, the event they'd been preparing for over decades. And when it finally arrived, they screwed it up from beginning to end and side to side.

"Do you think they'll close the schools?" students and teachers often asked.

"I think they will," I always said.  "We won't finish the school year."

"Nah!" scoffed my colleagues.  "It's a flu. We might miss a day or three, but that's it."

Also on Thursday, Darwin got the news that his brother had died down in Arizona.  I made sub arrangements for Friday so I could be home for him.

That evening, Governor Gretchen Whitmer called an emergency news conference.  She announced that she was closing places of congregation, including bars, restaurants, and all schools for the next two weeks.

This set off a flurry of work.  Darwin was dealing with long-distance arrangements surrounding his brother's death (no one else in the family seemed willing to get involved, strangely) and I was dealing with work.  Wherever Schools announced that on Monday, we teachers could come in and get stuff from our classrooms that would allow us to set up virtual teaching at home.  After that, we were forbidden to return.

I didn't get a final class with my students because I was out on Friday.  I noticed the sub had marked Moe absent.  I wondered grimly what he was thinking of hand sanitizer now.

On Monday, I rushed into my room, snatched up my school laptop and other portable technology, along with copies of textbooks, and drove home.  The district gave us one day--ONE DAY--to figure out how to use Google Classroom and put lessons up for our students.  Everyone was floundering, even panicking.  The big concern was how to use Zoom.  I didn't want to touch it, and never did that year.  Other teachers tried it, and got Zoom bombed.  One teacher got porn bombed--a Zoom bomber shared a video of hardcore porn with the class.  We were told to put up assignments and home-recorded videos for the students, but assignments couldn't actually count or be graded.

I worked for hours and hours and hours, recording and editing videos of myself, converting materials to Google Classroom.  Darwin was still working in Albion at the time, and I ended up spending half the week down there.  It was the strangest thing, teaching in Wherever from 50 miles away.

The end of the two-week closure coincided with the beginning of spring break.  Everyone was saying that three weeks of closing down would give the epidemic (as the dumb-ass CDC was still calling it then) time to ebb, and we could go back to normal.

"No," I said.  "We won't go back.  This thing is just getting started."

I hated being right.

In the middle of spring break, the governor announced that schools would continue to be closed, first for the month of April, then into May, then until the end of the year.  Graduation for everyone, including Max, was canceled.  This was the single most upsetting part of the pandemic for me up to that point.  After all the hard work, the arguments, the fighting, the coaching, the shepherding, the watching, the twice-yearly IEP meetings, I wasn't going to see Max walk down the aisle to get his diploma.  It still upsets me.

We teachers were hailed as heroes due to our attempts to create workable lessons for at-home students, but we were too busy putting in twelve-hour days to notice.  (Later, when schools were still closed for the fall, we were suddenly denigrated as lazy and incompetent because the teachers refused to risk their lives for their jobs.)

I never did see Moe again.  I was too busy to care.

In June, my uncle Indul died from COVID-19. 

Mask mandates were finally introduced, and became a political flashpoint because Trump stated he wouldn't be wearing one.  The Republican party stood behind Trump and resolutely blocked methods that would slow or halt the spread of the disease. 

A few months later, my uncle David and his step-daughter died from COVID. 

Here we are, now.  I've gotten both doses of the vaccine, and Darwin's had his first.  Numbers are finally going down.  We may be back to some version of normal by July.  And it's never been more clear than ever that the Republican party wants nothing but power. They don't care about lives, they don't care about their constituents.  They don't care.  They must never, ever be allowed control of the government again.

And now we need to move forward.

We're supposed to start face-to-face instruction next week.  I won't be there--that's a separate entry--but I did have to set up my room.

This was an unexpected challenge.

I've been teaching from home over the Internet since last March and haven't been to my classroom for more than a few minutes since the building closed.  There's a lot to do, and new ways in which to do it.  I had to get in there to set everything up.

This week is exams, and yesterday after the first set of finals ended, I got together all the stuff I'd brought home for teaching-- textbooks, regular books, various bits of computer equipment--and drove down to Nameless High School.

The place was empty and ghostly.  The halls echoed in weird ways.  In my classroom, I found all the tables and chairs stacked in neat piles--the custodial staff at work like magic elves.  The last time I was here, I'd put all my teaching stuff into the room's cabinets as I did every year, though usually I do it before summer break, not before spring vacation.  Getting it all out and setting it all up and arranging all the furniture is a huge annual chore, one I dislike very much under normal circumstances.  This year, it was worse.

See, I had to figure out how to set the tables and chairs up so that my students could keep their distance from each other.  This is easier in an elementary school, where the kids are tiny.  In a high school, the students are full-sized, and they take up a lot of room.  I also have large classes.  As of this writing, my largest class has 34 students in it.

But wait--there's more.

The district is having students with last names A-K coming in on the first day while students who are L-Z will remote in from home. The next day, they switch.  Theoretically, this means the class count is halved on any given day.  But that ignores little anomalies, like the fact that my 34-kid class has 20 A-L students and 14 L-Z students.  So I actually have to figure out how to accommodate and keep distant 20 students instead of 17.

I spent considerable time measuring out floor space and table size and finally was forced to conclude that it's impossible.  In the end, I set up 20 tables and spaced them as far apart as possible.  I put a chair at each one, measured, and found the best I could manage was between four and five feet distance.  Nowhere was it six.

To keep myself as safe as I can, I'll be keeping empty the seats closest to my desk if at all possible. I'm hoping my classes get balanced out so I have fewer students, but I'm not holding my breath--unbalanced class loads is a perennial problem at Wherever Schools, even when there =isn't= a pandemic.  I also plan to keep the window cracked and the door open to ventilate the space as much as possible.  Students will have to wear layers.

The district has also provided these odd tri-fold barriers. The borders are made of a weird corrugated plastic material, and the windows are a pale, translucent blue.  They unfold and stand upright on a table to make a little enclosure.  This is a good idea, of course, but I can't for the life of me figure out why they windows are BLUE.  You can't really see through them.  The students won't be able to see me at the front of the room, and I can't see them.  What idiot made these?  And why did the district buy them?

Once I got all that set up, I started in on the technology.  I have to keep a web cam set up so the students at home can see what's going on in class.  I also have to be able to toggle between the web cam and the Smart Board so the home kids can see what I'm writing.  This is going to be awkward and difficult, I can see already, and I have to adjust my expectations about how much material I can get through in a class--a fair amount of time will be taken up adjusting technology.

I connected, booted up, and fiddled.  By now I was getting hungry.  I had left home at 1:00 and it was closing on 4:00 now.  Fortunately, I'd thought to bring food with me, so I took a break.

Another teacher dropped by and we chatted from a distance.  She has teenaged daughters, and she warned me that in the local teen scene, mask restrictions are widely ignored.  "They visit at each other's houses and hang out all the time without masking," she said.  "No one's making them wear one."

Jesus.

Once the tech was what I hoped was running order, I started in on the teaching stuff in the cabinet.  But after a while, I noticed something.  I was getting out my set of in- and out trays for papers to grade, my staplers, hole punch, tape dispenser, pens, pencils, white board markers, and so on.  Except, wait--all this stuff is for dealing with PAPER, and we're still using Google Classroom for our materials. I won't be handing out paper, nor collecting any.  My classroom has gone truly paperless.  I didn't actually NEED any of this stuff.

So I put it back.

Education types have been predicting a paperless classroom for more than fifteen years now, but it never quite happened.  Partly it's because of momentum--paper is deeply entrenched in school culture--and partly it's because there hasn't been equitable access to technology.  Now we've been forced into a paperless classroom, at least for this year.  I'm wondering if it'll continue even after the pandemic.

I got home well after 7:00.

As I said earlier, my family opted out of face-to-face gatherings for the holidays this year.  Everything was very low-key.

Yuletide was a solitary affair for me, as it often is these days.  (I'm not part of a Pagan group, Darwin doesn't practice, and the boys have drifted away from it.)  But the God was welcomed back as the light grows stronger anyway.  Christmas Day, we set up a Zoom call with Kala, Aran, and Sasha and we opened presents together. (The present were delivered before-hand.)  We did more Zoom meetings with other family later in the day.  It was convenient--no long drives--but it wasn't the same as a regular visit, either.

New Year's Eve was also low-key.  I made chili and home-made donuts and we watched the first Wonder Woman movie.  Toward midnight, we turned on CNN to watch Times Square.  The scene was weird.  A handful of revelers were scattered about the gaudy billboards.  The camera kept coming back to whole pile of people in Planet Fitness gear with those eerie blow-up people, also in Planet Fitness gear, in the background, all standing in front of Planet Fitness. I got the idea the event was sponsored by Planet Fitness.  They also ran an interminably long, dull interview with Mariah Carey.  She talked about her new book (clearly the reason for the interview) and tried to sound sage and wise, but came across as blithering and scattered.  I got the impression someone else had unexpectedly canceled, and they asked her to lengthen her interview or something, because she sounded like she'd run out of stuff to say about two minutes in.

And then the countdown started up.  Instead of a dropping ball, the camera focused on a giant electronic clock that also projected a Kia commercial on its face.  I suppose someone has to pay for everything, but this struck me as gauche, even by American standards.

When the countdown hit zero, Darwin and I embraced, and I surprised myself by getting teary-eyed.  Between the horrors of the pandemic and the awfulness of the presidency, this year has been so awful, and it dragged out so long.  It was a huge relief that it ended.  I went outside onto the balcony.  Fireworks popped all around the lake, and a few a threw sparkles into the air. 

I hope 2021 goes better.

Here in Michigan, the pandemic is clamping down hard. Hospitals are filling up and predicting they'll be unable to take more patients in just a few days.  Governor Whitmer announced yesterday that we're going back to the restrictions we had last spring. Everyone who can work from home, MUST work from home.  Secondary school buildings are closed.  Elementary school buildings are open if the individual district decides to keep it open.  Restaurants are closed to on-site dining--takeout and curb-side only.  Movie theaters and other gathering places are closed. No public gatherings of more than 10 people.  Private gatherings should be limited to members of two households.  This includes Thanksgiving.

The Wherever School District had already taken its secondary schools to virtual learning only. Elementary schools were closed until last week, when they had in-person instruction for the first time.  But they said if a certain percentage of students or staff tested positive for COVID-19, the individual school would go back to virtual learning.  Three days into in-person learning, TWO elementary schools had to close.  A day later, a third had to close. That's three schools closing in three days.  The board moved up its bi-monthly meeting to tomorrow in order to discuss closing the rest of the elementary schools.  I have the feeling they're going to do it.

I feel I should point out that several school districts around Wherever have been doing in-person learning or hybrid learning (half the students come to school on a given day and spend the other days with distance learning).  A passel of parents bitched and moaned that Wherever had elected virtual learning for all its schools when they opened this fall, and these parents enrolled their children in West Bloomfield and Huron Valley and Novi.  Now it turns out those schools will have to go virtual as well, which means that the parents now have to deal with virtual learning AND the fact that their kids are enrolled in a distant district.  Huh. Who knew?

Already online I'm seeing people who claim that the governor is a despot, that they're going to have Thanksgiving no matter what, that they'll do everything in their power to ignore this.  My normal thought is, "Well, let them get the disease, then," but of course, these people will also spread it to everyone around them, including people who are following the rules.

Weeks ago, my family discussed Thanksgiving and Christmas.  We decided to cancel both.  We can live without them for one year so that we can attend them in the future.  We don't want to say next year, "And we miss our dead loved ones so much" during the Thanksgiving prayer.

The pandemic is getting worse because people aren't taking basic precautions.  It WILL affect you and your family eventually if we don't all act.  Please follow the precautions.

Unpacking took a full week.  The kitchen stressed me out the most.  We had a whole bunch of pandemic-shopping food and I didn't see how it would fit into the little pantry.  But in the end, I managed it.  Then it was the bedroom/office and the bathrooms and . . . and . . . and . . .

The condo was built in the early 70s, but was incredibly forward-thinking.  The main area is a great room--living room and dining room that open onto a balcony.  The most striking feature of the kitchen is the bar that separates it from the dining room, so there's even more open space, and you can look from the kitchen across the bar through the sliding glass doors onto the lake.  A pair of French doors in the dining room open into the main bedroom, which is so huge, Darwin and I decided to make it into our office as well.  This was mostly my insistence--the smaller bedrooms look over the parking lot, and I told him I wasn't going to spend most of my workday in a lakeside condo and not be able to see the lake.

The main bedroom has no closets, however. Instead, another door opens into a large dressing room with Jack and Jill sinks (or, in our case, Jack and John sinks).  The dressing room has a great deal of floor space, and it took me some time to work out that the big empty area in one corner was meant for a lady's vanity table.  Off this room is a walk-in closet big enough to be a bedroom of its own--a good thing to have in a condo without a garage or basement.  The dressing room also has a bath tub and toilet room, which is nice because one person can be using the toilet while someone else is at one of the sinks.  However, that room has ONLY a tub.  No shower.  We're planning to fix that later.

Yet another door from the dressing room opens into a hallway, off which are the other two bedrooms (one of them for Max, the other for my harp and the exercise equipment) and the main bathroom.  Follow that hallway down, and you arrive at the front door on your left.  On your right is a shorter hallway with a long closet along one wall. This takes you into the great room--a full circle!

We discovered that if you open all the windows and the sliding door to the balcony, you get a constant breeze from the lake.  You can also hear redwing blackbirds chirruping and bullfrogs chugging in the reeds.  The lake is lovely to look at, and so far, we haven't had a problem with loud people or loud boats.

We spent a great deal of time working out what would go where.  What do we do with these bookshelves?  What do we do with all the DVDs?  Should this table go in this room or that one?  This sparked some more arguments, with apologies afterward.

On Monday, Darwin went back to Albion and Max had to work.  This left the rest of the unpacking to me.  I was working literally from sunrise to sunset. It was tiring--constant decision-making and stressing out over where to put everything. 

By Wednesday afternoon, though, there was only one chore left, and it's always the last one whenever people move: hanging the paintings and pictures.  It's always so tempting to put that off.  They aren't NECESSARY, after all, and we're always so sick of doing stuff.  And I was supposed to go to the house in Albion for a couple days.  But . . . no!  I wasn't going to stop.  I put all the pictures and paintings on the floor under their spots on the new walls and went around with hammer, nails, and measuring tape to hang them.  It took forever, but when it was done, I was DONE!

I wandered around the circle of the condo, admiring how everything was in its place and all the walls were decorated and relishing in the fact that it was FINISHED.

Saturday evening, Darwin and I were out for a brisk COVID 19 walk when my phone buzzed me an alert: Max's graduation was starting in an hour.

I'd put that alert on my phone last autumn, when Max started his senior year.  Today, instead of being a reminder of his upcoming milestone, it served as a reminder of how much we've changed, how much we've lost.

I should have been, at that moment, finding a seat at the Convocation Center at Eastern Michigan with the rest of our family.  I should have been straining to find Max in the crowd of seniors who filed in to the main floor.  I should have been listening to speeches.  And I should have gotten teary-eyed as Max crossed the stage to get his diploma.

Instead, I was walking outside on a chilly spring evening, noting a reminder on my phone I'd made at a happier time.

How did Max and I occupy ourselves while people were viewing our house? We looked at other people's houses, of course!

Jim hooked us up with Michael, one of his agents, and I sent him the list of houses we wanted to see. He agreed to meet us at the first one during the time when lots of people would be tramping through our house.

Darwin had to be in Albion for work, so he couldn't come with us. He said he trusted my judgement and would accept any decision I made. I didn't like this. It was a terrible pressure because I would have to accept a house based on my PERCEPTION of his judgement AND somehow stay under $XX. It added to the stress I was already under--the ticking clock, finding a house that =I= could live with, and the constant, crushing presence of COVID 19.

The current requirements say you can view houses for sale BUT: 1) no open houses; 2) everyone must be masked; 3) no more than four people in the house at a time; 4) showings may last no more than 15 minutes. Additionally, we knew we should sanitize after every house.  More stress. What if we forgot to do something? What if we picked up the virus somewhere?  But we forged ahead.

This was also the first time Max had been involved in house-hunting. I was a little surprised that he wanted to be. When we were looking for our current house, Max was adamant that he wanted nothing to do with it. When we announced that we were selling this house, Max shrugged and said, "Whatever." So it was a bit of a start that he wanted to hunt with me.

We met Michael at the first house on the list. He turned out to be slim and very young (younger than Sasha, who is 27), with a penchant for exclaiming, "Perfect!" to nearly everything. Max and I chose to find it endearing.

The first house Max and I saw was on a lake, but was in scary-rotten shape. Bad floors, bad walls, scary-ass bathroom.  It was a terrible pity, because the lake was fantastic. Really, the place was a tear-down. Next.

The second house looked promising. It didn't have a basement, but it did have a sun room where the treadmill could go. But it was very small, a converted vacation cottage with an odd layout. We put it in the maybe pile.

Max and I toured more houses with Michael. Some we rejected outright, others we put in the same maybe pile. Max pointed out flaws I'd overlooked in some and pluses in others.  None of them made us sit up and bark.  Hmm . . .

That evening, I talked to Darwin and laid it out for him. We couldn't find a suitable house for $XX. Not within half an hour of my job. We needed to increase to at least $XX+YY, or we'd be homeless.  Reluctantly, Darwin agreed.

With this expanded parameter, I searched again. This time, I came across several houses that looked much more suitable, including an historical farmhouse within walking distance of my job, a teeny-but-nice condo 15 minutes away from Wherever, a condo on a lake, and a half a dozen houses. I sent the list to Michael, who said we could start touring them Saturday afternoon. This time, Darwin would be there, too.

To my disappointment, Darwin didn't like the farmhouse at all. We got into . . . not quite a fight, but a protracted discussion about it. We both liked the teeny-but-nice condo (three bedrooms and an arrestingly large basement), though it would be too small to have people over and there seemed to be a lengthy application process. We saw a bunch of houses that were, frankly, disgusting or even scary. ("Need some TLC," says the listing. TRANSLATION: "You'll have to gut the place, and it'll take months.")  One unoccupied house had a bathroom that looked like something you'd find in a condemned gas station.

When we got to the condo on the lake, Michael said, "I don't want to show you this one."  When we asked why not, he explained, "It's a second-story unit and it has no basement. Based on what you've been telling me, it sounds like it won't meet your needs."

Darwin wanted to see it anyway, and I thought it was worth having at least a quick look, since it was close to the last two houses we were going to see.  So we went.

The condo was . . . pretty awesome! Yeah, it's second-floor, but one entire wall of both the living room and master bedroom look out on the lake.  Big, open floor plan.  (I know open floor plans have their critics, but Darwin and I like them very much.)  Balcony overlooking the lake for my writing porch. An oddly-built bathroom with an empty space opposite the sinks literally big enough for my treadmill.  A walk-in closet the size of a bedroom. A ginormous master bedroom big enough to accommodate our desks so we can have a lake view while we're working and keep the third bedroom as a guest room. Big enough to have people over.  Monthly dues under $300.  And within our budget.

The only problem with it was the seller's information stated there had been "settling or flooding." Couldn't be flooding, so it had be settling.  We did notice some uneven flooring in the entryway, and a settling crack in the ceiling. When we asked about this (through appropriate channels), we were told that there was indeed settling in the main structure of the building, but the condo association had re-buttressed the foundations and stopped it.  We were cautiously reassured, though of course, it needs to be inspected.

We looked at the next house. It needed TLC.  The final house canceled on us.

So we put an offer in on the lake condo.

This touched off, of course, a lot of phone conversations and emails and electronic document signing. And now we're waiting for a response.

Monday evening, Max and I set about cleaning, straightening, and stuffing.  We scoured the bathrooms, cleansed every counter, dusted every bit of wood. We put away or straightened every possession for maximum show-worthy quality.  And we cleared off every surface that could be cleared. If we didn't need it--or even if we did--we stuffed it into a drawer or into a box in the garage.  I even dismantled my indoor altar and disguised it as an end table.

This process went on through Tuesday. I reminded Max that his room would have to stay in show condition every minute, since we could get a request to see the house at any time. And I cleared out every bit of remaining evidence that cats had occupied the house--stray bits of litter in the basement, little crumbs of carpet snagged by their claws, the darker spots on the corners Dora always cheeks.

Jim was asking for photos.  I took lots of them, every room from every angle. As a buyer, I always get suspicious when a listing has a paucity of pictures. What are they hiding? What aren't they showing? I know I'm not alone in this, so I took lots and lots of photos. The weather cooperated, giving me a beautiful sunny day to get the outdoor photos and light-drenched indoor photos.  I saved them to Dropbox and sent Jim the link.  He said he would get the listing up and running that evening.

This was Tuesday, and unknown to us, the storm was brewing.

I love my house. I don't want to move. But . . .

Really, this house is too big. Darwin is only here part-time. Hell, =I'm= only here part-time. The basement is literally an entire 1,300-foot second house, complete with kitchen and full bathroom, but we only use it to house my treadmill.  We sent one of the dining sets to Albion for Darwin to use, so the dining room is an empty, echoing space. It's silly to spend so much money on a house this large for this few people.

We were planning to sell the house next year, partly because Max is graduating soon, and it would be easier to wait until his life has settled (whether or not he was living with us would have an impact on what kind of house we'd buy), and partly because of the pandemic.  Under Michigan's emergency declaration, real estate transactions were suspended. We COULDN'T sell.

But then two things happened.

First, the governor lifted her restriction on real estate. My thought was, "But who the heck would want to buy a house now?"  Turns out I was asking the wrong question. I should have been asking, "Who the heck would want to SELL a house now?" Because a fair number of people want to buy houses, while very few people were putting their houses up for sale. Who wants potentially plague-ridden people to tromp through your house, right?

So we have a market where people do need to buy a house, but few are selling. The lopsided market means houses sell within hours--or even minutes--of hitting the market, according to Darwin's ex-but-still-friends Jim Powell. who runs a real estate agency.

Additionally, we can see financial troubles on the horizon. The legislators who oversee Michigan's budget are talking about a 20-25% reduction to school funding. This would certainly mean a gut-punch reduction of my salary and benefits. We soon may not be able to afford this house. If we didn't have to maintain a residence for Darwin in Albion, we'd be fine. But we do, so we aren't.

We decided it was better to sell the house now rather than lose it later.  So we decided to list the house. This was on Friday.  Little did we know what was coming . . .

This feels like the world's worst summer break.  Lemme explain.

Because I'm home all day, it feels like I'm on summer break. I wear what I want, eat when I please, exercise when I wish. I can play music or videos any time. BUT . . . I'm NOT on summer break.  I have teaching duties, and lordy, there are a lot of them. I'm still putting in more time in the virtual classroom than I did in the actual classroom. I'm working, working, working.

Except that I'm NOT working in the classroom.  And normally I don't bring classwork home.  If I have papers to grade or lesson plans to make or whatever, I do it at work after the students leave for the day.  I'd rather stay at work a couple hours late than take take anything home.  On those rare occasions I =do= bring work home, I get grumbly and pissy about it. I'm HOME. Why I am doing school work here?

Now my classroom is at home.  But 20-odd years of doing work at school has imprinted on my brain that at home, my job is an . . . intrusion. When I'm home for the day, I don't do school work! And when I'm home for days on end, I'm home for the summer and don't do school work!

But of course, I have to, and I do.  I'm home, and I'm doing work.  It feels like the world's worst summer break!