Summer Concert Series

Quarantine Memorial day was relatively mellow over here. We didn't go down to the beach with the masses. Kristy and I both unplugged from our computers for all three days and we tried to do two things every day...1) Reading, Maya now picks her favorite books and assigns them to Kristy and I to read (I was assigned El Deafo and a Dogs Life this weekend) and 2) Streaming concerts. We have been watching a number of quarantine from home concert shows recently, but we had also heard that a number of artists have been releasing old shows online. So here was the concert series at the Cortez house this weekend....Not the same as being at a concert, but still fun none the less (cheaper drinks and shorter lines at the bathroom)...

• Sat - Ed Sheeran in Dublin (Pic below)
• Sun - Foo Fighters at Wembley 
• Monday - Norah Jones from her house (she does a mini set from her house every week)

Frisbee and our park....

So we have this great park across the street from the house - Fulton Playfield. It used be a part of an elementary school (Fulton Elementary) that closed in the late 80's and is now a private school. The new school took over the building, but the play field became a city park, now known as Fulton Playfield. The kids always complained because there wasn't a play structure at the play field, just an open grass area. I have always thought of it as a great open space, but tended to agree with kids, it never got a lot of use because there wasn't a play structure there. That all changed with pandemic...The open grass area was one of the few parks in the area that never shut down (because it didn't have a play structure). One of my highlights every day (multiple times a day) is to see what is going at the park at any given time. Over the last 8 weeks, I have seen sun rise golf/chipping practice, family soccer games, one cricket game, daily lacrosse practice (where the Dad looks way more into than his daughter) and this morning I saw what look like two college athletes practicing discus throws...As for us, our park athletic contribution started a couple weeks ago. We are working on perfecting our Frisbee toss.  We try to practice a couple nights a week after dinner when the park starts to clear out. We aren't great, but are slowly getting better (we actually watched a You Tube video to help with our form)....Find your open park space, find your activity and enjoy... 

 

Creativity

So we have constantly been cleaning and re-arranging the house the past 2 months. We finally decided to get rid of the kid's art table that they have had for probably 5+ years now. We put out on the sidewalk last Friday and surprisingly nobody took it.  It is the first thing we have put on the sidewalk that somebody didn't take in a couple hours. Kristy's theory is it looked to much like a kids quarantine lemonade stand. After a day, I brought it back into our drive way and Maya asked if she could paint the old art table and make it look nice. Below is a pic of what she came up with. Really fun to see the creativity of a 10 year old. And now we have been using the table in the drive way as we have our daily happy hour with our front neighbors every afternoon....Side note - This creative 10 year old didn't invite her younger sister to help with the painting project which led to quite a bit of chaos in the house, but it was still fun to see her creativity before the shouting and tears started between sisters....Hopefully, there were a couple lessons learned from this restoration project :-)

My Quarantine Lists...

The calendar says May today and all the days have blended together a bit...With that in mind (and full calendar month under quarantine now), I decided to put together a list of everything I have done since the quarantine started with some observations...

Hygiene (in order of occurrence)

• Grew a goatee (almost all gray)
• Let the kids color my hair (rainbow)
• Let the kids buzz cut my head
• Grew a mustache
• Let Kristy cut my hair 

Exercise

• Riding bikes in the street w/ kids (we do it almost daily)
• Ran an all out mile on the open road (5:19 as a part of the Brea alumni virtual mile challenge, want to start doing 1x/month)
• 60 pushups in 60 seconds challenge (1x successful, 25+x unsuccessful)

Reading/Listening

• Finished a book that had been on my night stand for months (Bill Gates, Business at speed of thought). 
• Just started a new one (Dan Brown - Origin)
• Subscribed to the Washington Post (it came pre loaded on my new Amazon Fire Tablet. I still prefer the LA times)
• Podcasts - I know I am super late to the game on this one, but just started listening to Podcasts (current play list is a mix of Outside Magazine, LMU Magazine, and a bunch of tech industry stuff)
• Live streamed a couple concerts - A couple different events with the Lumineers (my favorite band)

Fun Family Stuff

• Camped in the backyard with Natalie (pic below)
• Fostered and adopted a dog  (Tokyo, probably the most surprising thing we did so far)
• Learned one new skill on the Alexa - The announcement feature ("Alexa make an announcement"), great for announcing meal times. 
• Downloaded 3 new apps for the kids (Tiktok, Facebook messenger, and Prodigy)