Day 68- May 19, 2020

Day 68- May 19, 2020

The NJ Unemployment page is infuriating. I set a timer so we could certify for Jeff's benefits, and when we logged in, we got the message "Service Unavailable: The server is temporarily unable to service your request due to maintenance downtime or capacity problems.  Please try again later."  Of course, the issue with this is that there is only a half hour window per social security number, so you can't try again later.  For half an hour, we repeated attempting to log in, and at one point, even got to the certification page to answer all the questions about not working this week, only to get that error message again when he hit "submit".

After that, the message changed to say that "The Unemployment Insurance Web application for claiming Weekly benefits is not available at this time.  Please try again later."  Forget the errors in capitalization ("weekly" is not a proper noun!), the message is laughable because, in case you were keeping track, you can not try again later.  Well, sort of- there's another half hour at the end of the day where you can certify if you missed your time.  Guess what?  We got the same message then too.

I spoke to another agent in Jeff's real estate office today, who was having issues with her claim as well.  I lamented to her that there were some pretty simply fixes on the forms (ie, have a place to upload your 1099 if you are an independent contractor, have a form that makes sense for self-employed people) that would probably make the process run much smoother, but apparently, common sense is not a requisite for whoever designed this system.  And yes, I realize this is a new world of unemployment, and I'm grateful that independent contractors and the self-employed are able to get any benefits right now, but it seems like if you are going to offer benefits, you should take a minute to update your forms to reflect that.

We also had to deal with an Ebay order gone bad.  We had ordered an Intex Pool for the backyard using gift cards we had, but when I went in to check on the order, I discovered that the vendor no longer existed on Ebay. Fortunately, the Paypal Payment hadn't been accepted yet either, so I was able to cancel it.  But just another minor frustration.

On the positive side, the painting is mostly done at our friend's house, and the carpets were finished today.  It's a major transformation, and the rooms look lovely and fresh.  I'm glad we were able to do this for her, and I hope that the home sells quickly given the work that has gone into it.  The girls were happy to have their daddy home all day (even if he wasn't feeling well- too much working and something he ate not agreeing with him).

The girls and I also made Jeff a Father's Day gift.  It's a few weeks away, but since the Mother's Day presents we got our moms took a while to arrive, I wanted to get a jump on this.  One of his favorite photo mugs broke recently- it developed a crack in the side, and now leaks.  So we reordered it, and added a travel mug for coffee that also is decorated with "We Love Daddy" and a bunch of photos from the past year.  We're at the point where he can pretty much exclusively drink beverages out of receptacles covered in our kids' faces- but he loves these things, and they are personalized gifts that he can use all the time, so the girls voted for another one.

I made homemade tomato sauce, dough from scratch, and decided to create pizza for dinner.  We had www.harvesttohomenj.com delivered the other day, so I sautéed onion, eggplant, tomatoes and spinach together, then used them to top one full pizza.  The other was divided into a regular cheese portion (for R.), a veggie part (for me and E.) and salad section (basically dough with salad dressing that we top with salad when it comes out oft the oven).  Some people love meatloaf and potatoes as comfort food- I go for pizza.

fresh produce from

While it was cooking, the girls took showers (they had seen a baby deer in the woods behind the house, and went traipsing through the pachysandra, which has poison ivy in it, to take a photo.  I insisted they wash themselves in hopes they can avoid getting rashes).  E. finished first, and she and I turned on Sabrina The Teenage Witch to watch an episode about Salem competing in a cat show.  After dinner, we watched an episode about Harvey and Sabrina's first kiss, where he gets turned into a frog, and she has to go through a series of tests to prove he is her "true love" in order for him to turn back.

It's one of the girls' favorites, and admittedly mine too.  There is a great line at the end where her aunt tells Salem "at sixteen, it's always true love", implying that every sixteen year old thinks the person they are with is their true love.  Looking back, with hormones raging and a limited world view, I can agree with that statement.  Though in my case, the person I was with at sixteen turned out to be my true love straight through adulthood, and I married him (I wrote a bit about that several years ago in a post called "Before Midnight".  So maybe sometimes (as was the case with Harvey and Sabrina) that 16-year-old true love ends up being your soulmate too.

Day 64- May15, 2020

Day 64- May15, 2020

Today was HOT.  And if I never have to paint another ceiling or cut another door, I'm okay with that.  I've determined there are things I'd be willing to pay someone else to do, and these are them.

I spend much of the morning working on statistics for school- how much people are using our eBooks and audiobooks, and which online research resources are most frequented.  It's also the beginning of 2020-21 ordering, which meant I ordered the children's school supplies for the fall, and also started the task of ordering for my library.  Next year's goal is to organize the fiction with genre labels.  Down the line, I may decide that I want to divide up our fiction into more of a "bookstore" model (where fiction is still organized by last name, but is first split up by genre, like Historical Fiction or Sci Fi or Fantasy).

In the afternoon (after school), I headed over to help continue with painting.  The house is coming along great, but the carpet is being installed tomorrow in several rooms, and so I had to paint a ceiling.  I am NOT cut out to paint ceilings.  It was just drywall, so I got to work with an extender and ceiling paint, and discovered gravity.  I know, Newton discovered it years ago, but I put his theories into practice when I watched the paint on the roller, which was above my head, drop and splay down and out, landing on the floor, my face, my arms, my arms, and my hair.  Had it not been about 85 degrees out (and hotter in the un-airconditioned room I was working in), this probably would have been less annoying, but heat makes everything more uncomfortable.  It's for a good cause though, I know we're helping a friend, and I'm excited to see how carpeting completes the makeover look, but right now, I'm just flushed, sore, and covered in white speckles. I'm reminded of the Sylvia Plath poem Mirror, and the lines "Most of the time I meditate on the opposite wall/It is pink, with speckles". I too am pink, with speckles.

After returning home to a MUCH needed shower and dinner, the girls and I watched Sabrina the Teenage Witch (the original Melissa Joan Hart version), and rejoiced in the simplicity of a witch navigating high school.  I remember watching this show when I was a teen (and admittedly, through college), and loving every minute of it.  I was a hard-core fan of Sabrina and Harvey, and my kids have seen every episode at this point.

We discovered it a couple of years ago on Antenna TV (I hear their jingle in my head when I type that), and happened to catch it at the beginning of the series.  I set the DVR, and we literally watched season after season, in order.  It had been a solid fifteen years since I'd watched it, and while I remembered (spoiler alert from 1998) that Sabrina and Harvey end up together, I was happy with how many of the jokes held up, and how many I still find myself giggling over with the girls.  They are the perfect age for the show, and rediscovering it during quarantine has brightened our days.

Today's episode saw Sabrina moving to Paris with her dad- and when she checks in on her friends and family (and boyfriend Harvey), they all somehow seem to be doing well.  Of course, it's only for the brief moment when she's checking in that this is true- and it's just a trick of what she sees them.  But it leads to a Britney Spears dance along for Sabrina in her apartment, and she ends up heading back to her home when she realizes how much she misses it (and the people who live there).  The girls ended up squealing as Harvey hugged Sabrina and I was reminded how my kids are romantics just like me.  We just want the happily ever after, and I'm glad to report, this is one formula that the show nails. When it doubt, we can count on Harvey and Sabrina (and if we're lucky, maybe they'll do a spinoff someday).  We can dream.