Today was a long school day, Carol went shopping and had some fun resetting her card pin, we had parent teacher conferences, work calls and lots of time spent making reservations for our next few weeks.
Our early morning routine was normal until I got on my calls I think. Once I got on my calls, and I had calls and work stuff most morning, the girls were taking breaks all the time. Bia has regular breaks between classes and usually gets right back on to the next class after the break, and still gets done around lunch time.
Bella only attends the ELA class live consistently, and the other classes are more as she gets to them or what not. So, for Bella to be taking so many breaks something was not right. She really was just not into doing school work today. She did little by little, like one page and a break at a time.
Around lunch time I was done with work and work calls. I checked on the girls work, and Bia was on track to finish soon. Bella said she was done, but when I checked, she had done maybe half of the work for the day.. At that point she started asking for help, but I already know that in days like this her ask for help is more like.. “do this for me”. So, I didn’t help much, just offered that she could ask me a question and I’d answer type of help. She whined and did enough to get most of her work done, but didn’t finish her social studies work.
The girls were playing during one of their breaks and Bella came in and said Bia got hurt. I was on a call and could not leave, but within 5 minutes I freed up and they were walking back.
Bella was helping Bia by supporting her while Bia hopped around. She said he hurt her ankle, but it was all fine.
While all of that was going on, I had client calls, internal work calls, and work to do. When I was done with that, I worked on our reservations for the next few weeks. We are trying to be all setup past New Years as all campgrounds are pretty booked. I was able to get a lot done, and we have the plan all the way to 1/15, but reservations only done until 12/15 or so, so I need to finish it ASAP. Carol said today that she feels we are not planning as we did before, and the days move slower, we don’t have goals or the same ambition. Hahaha… well, kind of but not really. Early in the trip we had to get through the Central and North part of the country to avoid snow and freezing, so I had a tight schedule and all the campgrounds booked until we got to Oregon. Once we got to Oregon, we could move at our own pace and not worry about snow or freezing. So, we did slow down a bit right in Coos Bay, and now it will be a bit of time before we get to the next big park, and they are not quite all in the same area until we hit Kings Canyon / Sequoia, near Fresno, which will be around Christmas. But, planning the next few weeks in advance will help and now we have quite a few moves coming up, including a one stop. The schedule is going to get messed up as dates don’t line up with what we have found to be the best move days (Wednesday and Sunday), and some weeks we’ll be moving twice in the middle of the week, we’ll move on Monday’s and Thursdays, all kinds of stuff. I’m sure it’ll get busy and interesting again hahahahah.
Around mid morning Carol went grocery shopping. She went to Walmart and said the Walmart here is very different from what she is used to. They have very few things, like 1-2 brands of very basic items and that’s it. So then she went to a place called WinCo, which was a recommendation from someone here as a cheaper groceries place. Since she already dealt with budget places only taking cash, she asked someone as she walked in if they took cards, and got a “yes”. So, she went on and filled up her cart. When she was checking out she realized they do take cards, but only debit cards with PIN. hahahahaha… no problem since she had a card with her, but a problem since she didn’t remember the PIN. And that’s where the next adventure started.
Carol called the bank to figure out the PIN and they told her the fastest way to resolve it was to go to a US Bank location. WinCo apparently goes through this often, so they even have a process to handle this, which is to leave your stuff on a bin, and come back for it later. They hold your stuff until midnight. Carol drove around to find the US Bank location, trying to do a few things at once, she also missed turns and went too far, then went back, etc… eventually she got there. hahahah.. She reset the PIN, and went back to WinCo and got the groceries. That whole process took her like 3+ hours. Yikes! When Carol finally got back, we queued up lunch.
Lunch was burgers, so I got the grill going and got the burgers ready. We were about to eat and it was time for our parent teacher conference calls.
We had the Zoom call with Bia’s teacher first. It was good to hear from her perspective Bia is doing great. She’s participating in class and performing well, and got praises for being considerate and polite when asking questions. Then we had the call with Bella’s teacher, and Bella is also doing great. It was good to confirm that we’ve been doing well, and Bella has not missed any deliverables. We chatted a bit with the teacher to make sure we are not missing any assignments, and we are all good. We also broke in the news that we will not be back in person the remainder of the school year. 🙂
After the calls, we finished eating lunch. The girls were still working on school, so I moved on to getting our reservations done. I pretty much worked on reservations the rest of the day. When the girls finished their work, they went outside and played. They played by themselves and also played with some kids. Kids were not wearing masks, and even though our kids were, we made sure to tell them to not get too close. That’s kind of hard, so we had them come back in, and chatted that we really need to minimize contact with people not wearing masks and not caring about being careful.
We were going to have steak for dinner, so Bia helped season it. The secret weapon for seasoning steaks… coarse sea salt 🙂
Carol did laundry in the afternoon and got caught up on laundry the rest of the day.
That was really our day. Late in the day we had dinner, watched some TV, talked about some of our plans for tomorrow and called it a night.