Spring Break | Catch a Falling Star

Tag Archives: Spring Break

March 17, 2021 · 7:32 pm

A Second Broken Spring Break

Spring Break, a year ago, was the start of the pandemic for me and proved to be the end of my limited time as a substitute teacher. We went into lockdown and my bedroom became my bunker for the duration of the Covid War.

My family went on a jaunt to Colorado for part of that week, as Texas was not yet a seriously infected land. But knowing how much my health issues made me a risk of contracting death by the disease, I stayed home with the dog and number two son. In 2021, my family went for three days to visit relatives in San Antonio. I was alone at home with the dog once again. There are odd parallels between that Spring Break and this one.

I hadn’t used the gingerbread house kit that I had bought for Christmas 2019. So, we broke that out, put it together (my daughter and I after she got back from Colorado) and ate it.

It so happens I now have a gingerbread castle that wasn’t used during Christmas 2020, so I have vowed it will get made, photographed, and eaten this coming weekend.

I had finished a manuscript for a new novel in February, and I edited it during the Spring Break 2020.

It was my novel about a nudist family called A Field Guide to Fauns. It was published in March of 2020.

I don’t have another novel ready to be published this Spring Break, but I will do a free promotion of the Field Guide this coming weekend.

The pandemic brought an end to my teaching career as I will never again have the physical strength or freedom from arthritis pain that it takes to stand in front of a classroom all day. Being confined to the bunker all day every day has worsened all my health conditions.

All my plans for visiting nudist parks went pretty much the same way. My psoriasis has worsened and made me more susceptible to the ravages of hot sunlight. Even though I know more nudists now than I ever had before, most of the ones I know live in England, France, and California. So, no one will be able to go with me to a nudist camp as my family won’t even contemplate the idea. I have relatives who are quite happy that the pandemic probably ended that part of my life as well. No more Mickey the Nudist.

But the big difference between last Spring Break and this one is the fact that I am now on the waiting list for a vaccination. It is just possible that the whole horrible ordeal will both begin and end with Spring Break.

Spring Break Colored Blue

This week has been Spring Break for our little family. But as Spring Breaks go, this one leaves a lot to be desired. Rain. Thunderstorms and tornadoes did damage to the north of us in The Colony and Frisco, Texas. More rain. Gray skies, flood warnings, tornado watches… the sun is supposed to come out on Sunday, the last day of Spring Break. I want a do-over.

But it is all about the focus. We have done some house cleaning. My son took the water-damaged carpet out of his bedroom with a carpet knife and discovered an old linoleum floor under it, complete with a sincerely ugly 1960’s style pattern. And my daughter and I baked cookies.

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The bedroom with its mustard yellow linoleum with brown snowflakes in the pattern.

The cookies were Halloween candy-corn cookies bought for a sale price at Aldi’s in an after-Christmas sale. (I think I paid less than a dollar for them.) We mixed the two colors of dough up with butter and tried to make cookies with a swirl design as described on the box. It didn’t work. We made spectacular splashes of red and yellow all over the cookies. The cookies looked radioactive as they baked. No wonder they were cheap.

My share of the cookies (limited for the sake of blood sugar stability).

But they were delicious. Probably more because we made them together and laughed about the goofy outcomes. I ate my two cookies (the limit reasonably suited to proper blood sugar levels) with a tall glass of Diet Coke and milk.

So, Spring Break has been a bit of a bummer. But misfortune does not rule our lives unless we let it. Sometimes you have to simply reject the glooms and just be happy.