Both my husband and I have received both doses of the vaccine. The kids are back in person four days a week. We have tickets to see a hockey game in less than two weeks. The kids are signed up for summer camp. I have a schedule for the summer swim meets for the kids…

Two weeks ago, my daughter went back to school twice a week. Two weeks later, my son went back to school twice a week, on the same days as his sister. I was home alone for the first time in I don’t remember how long. It was quiet. The day my son went back to…

It’s the last week of summer – whatever that means when you’re in a pandemic. Next weekend is the Labo(u)r Day long weekend, almost falling in mid-September this year because of the quirks of the calendar. While some have already started back to school, my kids’ school distract has (sanely) decided to hold off until…

My birthday is in less than two weeks. Usually, we’re gearing up for the start of the school year for our kids, going back-to-school shopping, getting hair cuts and the annual physical, buying school supplies…And this year we’re doing none of that. Instead, I’m watching playoff hockey. It’s hotter than it’s ever been where I…

Each week, because time moves simultaneously too fast and too slow, our boss has asked that each of us provide a brief weekly summary of what we did the previous five days. Mine is always short on details; at this point if you don’t know how much work doing a Course Design Institute is, then…

It’s July this week. I don’t know where the time went, because it was just March, wasn’t it? The kids finally finished school, or whatever it was that they had been doing for the rest of the academic year. I have been working and working and working as the world burns. I don’t write anymore…

There are lessons I have learned in my life. I have worked to make myself small as not to be noticed because when I am noticed, I tend to get into trouble. Or ridiculed. Or cause trouble. Or all three. I am an extrovert who was forced into introversion as a survival strategy. But then,…

I’ve been too busy to write. I’ve been too tired to write. I’ve been too busy and too tired to do very much more than make lists of things that I want to do, that I should be doing, but instead setting them aside for the pressing things, like saving our university. We are all…

It started as a brief Twitter thread, how living in a townhouse complex during COVID-19 is a lot like being back in residence at university. You live with people 24/7 with strange habits and routines and varying degrees of commitment to the work they have to do. And there aren’t enough bathrooms. People are up…

Hi, welcome back to readywriting.org. Looks a little different. I had to move to from Ghost back to WordPress because…reasons. It has to do with the kind of shared hosting service I have through Georgetown Domains, versus the kind of hosting service I need to run Ghost and that I’m cheap. Fun fact: Ghost makes…

I love to eat. I don’t really like cooking all that much, with the ADHD and all, but I have always loved to eat. Cooking was always too much time and patience and concentration; I would burn everything, time-blindness made me completely unable to have things come out done at the same time, and because…

The title was enough to tempt me: “How to Make Art at the End of the World.” It came out less than a year ago, but surfaced to me on one of those lists of books necessary for this moment. I clicked on the link and then saw that it was as much about pedagogy,…

I have trouble getting up in the morning and even more trouble falling asleep at night. I didn’t work out before all of this happened, relying instead on the steps I took back and forth at the pool while coaching, and I’m finding it hard to fit it into the routine we’ve all fallen into,…

One of people’s pass-times while being stuck at home is to go through old photographs and sharing them on facebook. One of my friends and former teammates found a picture of all of us at a swim meet, faces orange (our team colors were orange and black), and half the boys with shower caps on…

My daughter turned 13 on Friday. We celebrated with take-out Italian from one of her favorite restaurant and a cake we bought, smuggled in, and hid in our overflowing fridge. We sang Happy Birthday and she is smiling in the picture she let me take. Her grandparents all FaceTimed with her. I was sad that…

There was a pink moon last night, the fullest and closest and brightest moon of the year. It was overcast, but not so much that you couldn’t see the light from the moon shining through, lighting the clouds from behind. The clouds were white in the night’s sky, and when they broke and the sky…

It didn’t feel any different than any other Sunday. We got up, husband made a more-elaborate breakfast than most days, while I had to get my daughter up and my son off the Xbox to eat. I started the laundry while the kids grudgingly did their weekly chores. Then I sat on the couch with…

I never remember if “future” has an “e” at the end or not. In French, the language that I first learned to spell in, the word doesn’t have an “e” and like apartment or literature, I always remember the French spelling and not the English; this is when the red underline is helpful for me….

I went for a bike ride two days ago for the first time in, oh, 5 years or so. I bought the bike when I started my new faculty development job in Lexington and we found a place about a mile away from my office. The ride was fairly flat, and so we bought a…

There are so many things I didn’t think I’d ever do. I wear makeup now (yes, now, even today, because I paid for it, damn it) in part because my daughter became obsessed with it (and because she dances, so performance makeup). I prefer dresses now (because, in part, it’s easier to just pick one…

Given the current situation in the world, if you buy one of my two self-published books, I will donate the proceeds to Hope for College. Buy Learning to Breathe which focuses on mental health, and Twist, Weave, Untangle about my becoming a critical digital pedagogue. I’m tired of talking about my feelings. I am grateful…

Given the current situation in the world, if you buy one of my two self-published books, I will donate the proceeds to Hope for College. Buy Learning to Breathe which focuses on mental health, and Twist, Weave, Untangle about my becoming a critical digital pedagogue. Next week, April will begin. February feels like years ago….

Given the current situation in the world, if you buy one of my two self-published books, I will donate the proceeds to Hope for College. Buy Learning to Breathe which focuses on mental health, and Twist, Weave, Untangle about my becoming a critical digital pedagogue. My kids’ school is out for the rest of the…

I had to drive into the office early yesterday morning to pick up my office chair. I’m not as young as I used to be, and my back cannot tolerate sitting on a wooden bench or kitchen chair for 8hr days or even a two-hour webinar. DC is in full bloom, and as I drove…

I started teaching in an online program for people in prison. I’m teaching a writing course to incarcerated men and women scattered across the country. If you thought the LMS was bad, wait until you experience the prison LMS, let me tell you. The students have to download all materials on to a proprietary tablet…

When we would have snow days, when the world would shut down because there was too much snow on the ground to safely travel anywhere, we knew that, eventually, and even quickly, the snow would melt. Or at least that it would be cleared enough so that life could return to normal. And, as we…

Day one of the new normal, we’re all social distancing and working from home. Kids are off school, and for two weeks won’t have organized, assigned, and required work while the district scrambles to figure out how they are going to manage this. Daughter snaps and facetimes and texts her friends; they making video diaries…

I want to start with a quote from a good friend of mine who posted this in response to these extraordinary times: “Nothing will be perfect. Everything will be ok.” He wrote this in response to his institution moving to a distance learning format for the rest of the semester, like so many other institutions…