The moment they announced the remainder of the school year would happen online, Marty began researching how to convert her instruction to a fully digital format. For as dynamic as she is in the classroom, she is admittedly un-dynamic on a computer. The fact is, technology is just not her medium. She knew what she wanted, but she didn't know how to get there. When Alex and I pool our experiences and abilities, it turns out we make a decently comprehensive support team. Given this, Marty was able to start publishing online versions of her lectures on day one.

After the first week of online lectures, a few students reached out to Marty. They thanked her for figuring out how to still present the material to them personally. Through conversing with them, Marty learned this was not the norm, and many teachers were just sending worksheets to do, videos to watch, and articles to read. I've seen a few of Marty's video lectures, and they are pretty top-flight given four days prior she had zero experience in the craft.

She mixes her speaking into the camera shots, with "action" shots using my tripod-mounted GoPro pointed down at the tabletop. An example of action shot might have Marty pointing out details of a worksheet or using sock puppets to demonstrate some biology tenet just as she would have done in the classroom. After Alex and I taught her how to do the various shooting techniques, she writes out her scripts and then shoots all the various pieces. Once everything has been recorded, she and Alex go through the footage selecting the best versions of each. Alex then stitches all the footage together via his editing software/skills so she can distribute the end video to her students. Once we got her workflow figured out, my support role became appearing at her side anytime I heard more than four obscenities strung together. Three consecutive swears is just Marty using a computer. Four in a row is Marty having problems with a computer.

TOMORROW: Part 4 - Zoom-Bomb Prevention

The next Corona-development for us was having all the schools go online. This held a double-impact in that we have three school-age kids and a parent that teaches high school. I fall into that lucky camp where my pre-Corona life looked quarantinesque already, so aside from a fuller and noisier home, my days saw little change.

My initial reaction to this news deemed it a non-issue. Fact is, I thought it would be nice to have Marty working in the room next to me. And I could also sleep longer or start work sooner since I didn't have to help get kids off to school in the morning. Then our first shared work morning took place. I had been at it for an hour and falling deeper into some code updates. Things were starting to hairy-up, and the world outside of my screen fell away. In the background, I heard Marty start her day by recording her first video lecture. After saying hello to her students and acknowledging the curious times, she described the day's lesson. A few sentences in, she warned that the vagina would be making an appearance at the 7:43 mark of the video, so anyone not wanting to see the vagina should prepare to look away a bit before then.

I assume my wife's vagina would not be the one winking hello at 7:43. But, Marty does few things half-genital. This is just to say I would not have bet twenty dollars on this fact. What I can tell you with twenty-dollar bet certainty is my coding productivity was not what it was three minutes earlier. Admittedly, this can in part be attributed to the fact that a vagina wasn't scheduled to be on my computer screen until early afternoon.

TOMORROW: Part 3 - Work/Study from home

Leading up to all this Corona-mayhem sat our annual family ski trip out west. We saw the dominos stacking up as our departure date approached. Three days prior, I touched base with our Utah hosts. They said everything was good, and we should bring appetites for Sunday dinner. Two days out, our ski resort affirmed they were open and had thousands of nature-filled acres for folks to spread out on. And, on the morning of, the resort sent more assurances that all was well and the snow was deep. So we saddled up and headed west.

The two and a half day drive was smooth and uneventful. By the time we arrived in Utah, all of their resorts had closed. So instead of spending the afternoon renting ski gear, we spent it around our friends' kitchen table. During this lunch, dinner, and dessert campaign, their youngest son returned from a week in Banff Canada. Then their middle son returned from a week at Moab. We all caught up and watched the news feeds roll through. Our first fallback plan was to take advantage of the many hiking trails in Salt Lake and Park City. We thought we'd spend a few days doing that and then head back. But when the talk of stopping interstate travel began, I got a touch nervous. I'm usually the first to ignore such alarmism, but per my accounting, every measure floated up to that point had come to fruition, so that travel lock-down spooked me a bit. Granted, there are worse states to get trapped in than Utah (including the one I live in). However, I did not want to be an imposition to our friends, even though I believe they would have been thrilled to have us (the few that didn't have to give up beds at least).

To be on the safe side, we opted to head back in the morning. For those keeping score, that would be a full day of driving on Friday and Saturday. The first half of Sunday was on the road, and the second half we visited our friends. Then back in the car first thing Monday morning, where we drove twenty straight hours to get home at 5:30 Tuesday morning. I wanted to be in our state before midnight—we crossed the line at 11:55. I reckon few people have made that sort of trek for what turned out to be dinner with friends.

For the rest of the week, our family experienced our first staycation. This is something that has been on everyone's wish list but never punched. To see how each person fell into their own easy routine, you'd think they had already done this a dozen times. It wasn't skiing, but it was memorable.

TOMORROW: Part 2 - Homebound

bella does a good amount of house and dog sitting. she has for years. just about anytime she sees someone walking a dog she approaches them, asks if she can pet it, and strikes up a conversation. most of those talks end with the following sentence -- "if you ever need someone to watch your dog and you hire bella's bright dog-sitting business, the future will be bright for you and your pets!"
<...

a new TROYSCRIPT was posted today. make marty happy

we were driving home from our michigan camping trip. marty had bella and anthony in the van and alex was with me in my car. alex and i had just eaten dinner and were about 60 miles west of indianapolis.

as we were driving and talking i noticed a car had pulled up on my left and was driving steady with me. after a few moments, i looked their way. there was a college-aged guy in the passen...

my uncle tim died in october. this was my mom's older brother and he died nine years to the month after my mom, his sister. i always described uncle tim as my favorite uncle. at his funeral lots of people described him as their favorite fill-in-the-blank. a contributing factor to this was my uncle tim was a prankster. never malicious. never hurtful. but also never off-duty. he seemed to always hav...

bella kept the first hat she ever knitted in her car. this was not for ornamental purposes like a graduation tassel but a functional part of her car's toolkit like an ice scraper or flashlight. being her first full project it had some pretty obvious flaws so she felt it didn't merit a routine rotation, nor was it worthy of proper donation. but it was perfect to help fight a morning chill until her ...

good friend bookpimp called me recently to tell me i was in a dream of his. he described it as such: the next day he called me to tell about my place in history. he said that when he read this in his dream, he chuckled. and the worker even asked him why he laughed. he played it off saying he knew something about one of the sites. i could totally see that playing out as there are few things sweeter in this world that a genuine bookpimip chortle.

dreaming my work is not only in the top 10 of pivotal sites to mankind, but third on the list, should definitely earn you top-billing on the super-fan list. vp at the least.

and i don't think we need to hire a fancy dream analyst to gauge bookpimp's mood on the current state of affairs.

we have a new ritual in our home. and to be clear, whenever i say "we have a new ritual" it means i am adding a new thing to my already lengthy list of routines. when the term "we" is involved it just means i am subjecting the rest of my family to the routine as well. i call this new one "house tip of the week".

this stems from a belief i have that if there is some life matter (versus s...

a new TROYSCRIPT was posted today. quick tongue

recently i wrote about my obsession with living the perfect day (ref). a few weeks after that a friend of mine called bullshit on this pursuit. he didn't say it was greedy of me, he said it was irrational, and in truth not possible. he, and his wife, argued that you can't have multiple perfect things. it defied the point of perfection. you ju...

marty is at her most spectacular minutes, moments even, after waking. she will argue this to the end but for me, that is when my marta's quintessential beauty is at its peak. no makeup. no brushing (of hair or teeth). no coordinated wardrobe. just the rosy flush of her skin from a night's rest and a bed's warmth. i've been telling her this for more than twenty years and she has been shushing my m ...

PART 5 - the one that almost didn't get away
shortly after getting keisha and baker's paperwork finalized, the rescue lady said, "so, are you ready for your next challenge?". before she finished her sentence my hands were in the air crying uncle. i confessed after fourteen months with keisha, i needed a break. a long one. she said ok but assured me this one would be super fast...

PART 4 - bella saves the day
after the front-porch moment, i told the family that even though keisha and baker weren't turning out the way we hoped they might, they did think of our home as their home and we shouldn't give up on them just yet. i sensed the others in the family weren't as moved by keisha's voluntary return as i was, even after my dramatic re-telling of the morn...

PART 3 - keisha earns a second chance.
working with keisha was tough sledding from minute one. we saw gains but they were infinitesimal and the kids zeal for the true rehab work at hand was waning given the small returns they were seeing in return. after several months, the guy who placed dog with us, andy, brought us a second dog that was part of the same rescue. he apologize...

PART 2 - bella finds a loop hole
bella missed her curfew. i was never destined to be one of those parents who world ignore these adolescent mis-steps. i had the wrong mother for that. so when she was three minutes in default i texted her asking why she wasn't home. her reply came immediately. "sorry dad but i can't come home right now because i'm holding sleeping, day-old pupp...

PART 1 - mom hates dogs
i have been quite happy about the childhood i was able to make for my kids with one exception--pets. having pets in the home is one thing i always imagined for my children but was never able to make happen. readers of the site know the main road-block here has been marty. fact is, marty and all six of her siblings are famous pet-haters. granted, it is h...

this week i'm going to be be doing something a little different. the more astute of you may have noticed that i have let this year's monthly gallery section lapse, by quite a bit. there have been times in the past where i've missed a month or two but could dig out without much issue. this year, i have fallen 8 months behind which will require a bit more to recover.

first, in explanation of the arrears, in January my company won a contract that we kinda thought we weren't going to win. the good side was this was a huge get for our small and new company. the bad side is this meant a whole lot of work for our small and new company. this is why the last gallery post happened in February.

so i have made a plan to mend this motley fence by posting two long-form pieces. the first is about family pets and the second is about family lessons. this week will be a five-part story about our experience fostering dogs.

Part 1 - Mom hates dogs.

how many things have you done 15,000 times and aren't perfect at? for me that list is remarkably short. so short in fact there is only one thing i haven't perfected in that many attempts--living the perfect day. and doing so repeatedly.

i am 50 years old and on my 50 birthday i have gone through this exercise more than 15,000 times. now if we take away the child years, and even the adolescent years, and even the college years and just leave me the years where i have had a lot of control over my time, that means i have failed to figure it out in more than 7,500 attempts. this fact makes me absolutely mental.

so fixing this is my current obsession. well, one of my current obsessions at least. because a part of my perfect-day theory is that the more obsession-based activities your can sprinkle into the hours of the day, the better chance you have of milking every minute of that day in a meaningful and purposeful way.

bella and i were having one of our, what she calls "red-leather chair chats". these happen when she and i are both around and have twenty open minutes. she will ask if we can meet in my office. this is a request i have rarely, if ever, said no to. once settled into our respective chairs we catch up with each other's life. these largely replace what used to be our dad hours which haven't happened for bella too routinely since, honestly, she began middle school. i blame this largely on me no longer being able too pull her out at lunch time for our father-daughter lunches like i used to in elementary. problem in both middle and high school is their lunches are not long enough for me to sneak them away and get them back in time for their next class, which is a bit bizarre to me.

on this day, after getting me up to speed on her life she asked what was going on in my world. i shared that we had just started a new marketing outreach campaign and i had to call about twenty people a day to see if they were interested in our service.

BELLA
why do you sound so unexcited about it? that is unlike you.

TROY
i don't know. it just hasn't been turning out the way i thought it would and i'm a little discouraged by it.

BELLA
how long have you been doing it?

TROY
two days.

BELLA
two days! that's it?

TROY
uhh. yeah.

BELLA
and who are you calling?

TROY
law school registrars.

BELLA
dad. you can't give up after two days. i mean you're still getting your script worked out. it took me weeks before i had my approach down at club fitness. AND the people you are talking to are professionals. they can't even be mean to you. has anyone hung up on you.

TROY
no.

BELLA
six or seven of the people i call every day just hang up on me. don't even say a word. just hang up.

TROY
i guess i didn't think of it that way.

BELLA
you can't quit after two days. it's not the dearmitt-way.

the next day i made ten calls. seven people answered. and all of them were pleasant and helpful. when i was done for the day i may have even thought to myself--well, that was kinda fun, but i would never tell bella that.

i recently had reason to go on facebook and came upon this lovely bit of history. glad stacey wrote it down as i failed to and it was nearly lost. i don't recall this bit of wisdom but it surely has marty's thumbprint all over it. thank you stacey!

at the end of every week, i write two journal entries--one for my business and one for my personal affairs. i do this with several things in mind. i like to reflect on the happenings of the prior seven days. this is both to celebrate any progress and achievements as well as help set the tone and priorities for the week ahead. last week's personal entry, shared below, felt a little more potent than most.

there's more than a little truth in that closing sentiment.

i always wanted a sibling. i can't say if i wanted a brother or a sister more, but i always felt like i was missing out on something special living as an only-child. then over the years as a ravenous collector of people's personal stories, i heard some things that made me think maybe it wasn't all bad that i never had to share my toys or bedroom or mother with another. obviously that ship sailed l ...

in case my level of joy at how things played out wasn't clear enough yesterday (ref), allow me to submit the following. i think bella's emotion is a bit more fear-based in that she is less than ninety minutes from her first college class. mine is pure elation that i get to see my girl off for another first day of school from the same spot i have for the last fifteen years.

do good baya as you always have and you always will.