My mood today is anticipatory. I just found out that my best friend is coming to visit. She lives in Pennsylvania, which is luckily not a state on the quarantine list. As you may have guessed, I live on Staten Island, on the outskirts of New York City. I haven’t seen my best friend since before the pandemic started, and the last time she visited was in February. We have been best friends since grade school, and she only moved away about five years ago. I can't believe it has already been five years since she moved. She moved because she wanted to live in a place with cleaner air, better schools, and just a better life for her and her kids. She is still married, unlike myself, to a clean cut guy who loves her dearly. They have four kids, and they will all be coming along, too. It is going to be a truly crazy house for two weeks! It's quite alright, though. My kids adore her kids, especially my two boys. I have also heard whispers that one of my boys ha

  Today, my mood is content. My kids and I have been having the most wonderful week. They have been super helpful, which is always a surprise. Like everyone else, we have been home due to the virus that is circulating around. And now that it's summer, they have been getting really bored and antsy. So, I gave them an idea last week: go through their closets, dressers, and their entire rooms, getting rid of any clothes that don’t fit them anymore. Or rather I should say, getting ready to get rid of their old clothes. See, we realize that there is no reason to throw away your old clothes like garbage. What we do every few months to every year (depending on whether there is a growth spurt in progress, like two years ago when my youngest boy was growing half a foot in three months) is we take out all of their clothes and put them in a pile in the middle of the floor. Whatever they don’t like goes into the Staten Island clothes donations pile. Whatever they aren’t sure