Self-Care and Maybe Some Self-Pampering

My garden and my wildlife "pets" are keeping me sane right now. I normally have no use for gray squirrels, but there's one that comes around whenever I open the birdseed cans. It's a female, possibly pregnant, and has such a hopeful attitude that I usually end up giving her a peanut or two. This has been going on for a week now. I've started calling her Mooch. My neighborhood foxes continue to visit in the evenings, and I get a lot of pleasure out of reviewing their antics on my three trail cams. And of course, the birds are always there.

When I feel overwhelmed (usually after reading too many coronavirus articles), I resort to an online game of Spider Solitaire accompanied by the music of Keola Beamer, a Hawaiian slack-key guitar virtuoso. Here's his "Slack Key Music Box."

I've been a lot more focused on getting a workout in each day. I took a day off on Monday (the day after getting my first "perfect week (all activity)," "perfect exercise week," and "7 Workout Week" badges on my activity app), and I actually was pretty cranky, so I guess I'll keep it up, at least through my staycation. My gym has video classes available, my chorus choreographer has a few zumba classes via Zoom each week, and I've been walking a lot in the area when it's not too sunny, so I have a few options.

Has the instructor tried something like Zoom? It's a little difficult to use for chorus rehearsal (although we are) because we can't all sing together, and we're just following our director's hands and hoping that we sound good, but at least she can gather us together in one place (virtually) and give us some sort of direction. The biggest problem is that since she can't hear us, there's no way to know how our blend is, if someone's making us go flat, if there's an area of the chorus that's singing a vowel wrong, etc. Plus there's a slight lag time between when she's directing and what she sees us reacting to (much less that she can't hear any of us). This just makes it so we're just singing things over and over without knowing what we actually need to work on.

But I could imagine a dance instructor using Zoom and watching all the kids practicing via video to the music playing on their feed. The lag will still exist, but she could watch their moves more-or-less as one. I've been doing Zumba via Zoom, and had a lot more luck with the dance moves lining up to the music in the videos I can see (once the instructor increased her internet speed)

I'll be right over. I'll stand outside your window and you can toss me one.