Snow and virus - double joy...

Nothing different is happening. There's home-schooling, which is rather fun, really. Some of it happens with pencil and paper,

and some of it on the computer. Everyone's doing their best: the school teachers are sending stuff and the home teachers and the children are doing at least some of it. The little ones are being amazingly cooperative, really, considering that they get no outings apart from a walk after school and see no one but their parents and us (mainly me), and it's been so cold recently that even our walks aren't lasting very long.  

In what seems like an unreasonable extra trial, the snow's back. This is quite stressful where we live, since it's a dead-end street, which never gets gritted, at the bottom of a hill. The only way out of our street - the street at right angles to ours, which is also on a hill - never gets gritted either. We don't normally get much snow so we tend to think - oh, it'll melt. And then if it doesn't, various people's cars have by that time squashed the snow into ice, which makes it much harder to shovel away and also much more slippery to drive on. At the moment it's passable, which is good, since on most weekdays I drive to get to Daughter 1's house to help with the children. I could get two buses there and two back, which would probably be perfectly safe, since buses have hardly any passengers at the moment, but it would take an hour each way and really one would prefer to keep off public transport at the moment. 

Still, Son-in-Law 1 brought the children round today and they enjoyed playing outside, so that was lovely. 

But we haven't seen Daughter 2 or Son, or their little ones, since September and October. And all our lives are ticking away.

The vaccine is slowly being administered, though - my brother and sister-in-law in the south of England have both had the first dose, for example. Here, however, it's much slower (why??) and lots of over-80s are still unvaccinated. As for us... I think it'll be a while.