So, how's your coronalife going?

I feel like I'm overdosing on corona stuff. I told the ladies in the front office they needed to answer the phone: "Thank you for calling the Seward County Independent, where we're all coronavirus all the time." Our papers this week were wall-to-wall CV. It's been the lead story on the television news every night for the last month, I think. It's disrupted everything - schools, sports, social lives. I realize it's the biggest thing to happen in America since 9/11, but can we please talk about something else, just for a moment?

I started putting a puzzle together over lunch, which was different. I don't usually come home for lunch, but with CV impacting my restaurant routine (dang it, I can't get away from CV even here), I got my food to go, brought it home and listened to classical music while sorting out the outside pieces.

As you can tell (or maybe not at this point), it's a circle puzzle. Those are a little more challenging because the pieces are such strange shapes. The outside pieces have apparently straight edges, but they're all just a little bit curved. The design is called "Romeo and Juliet," so not only is it good for the hand-eye coordination, but I'm also allowed to let my mind wander through the Shakespearean canon while hunting for pieces that fit together.

While my mind wanders, I can work through scenes for the Christmas program (hopefully we'll be back to normal by then) and other random scenes for the other stories floating around in my head.

Every once in awhile random quotes from plays I've seen and read float into my mind. I took a Shakespeare class in college, and we read 10 of his plays - most were plays we'd heard of, but a couple were new to me. Then the other day I watched "The Complete Works of William Shakespeare Abridged" again. I love that performance. I get a kick out of Othello and the fast and backwards versions of Hamlet. Titus Andronicus (Shakespeare's Quentin Tarantino phase) cracks me up, too, as do the histories. I actually got to see the play done live from the front row (yes, the very first row in the theater), which was pretty awesome.

When I got home from work (no games to go to since everything's been suspended or cancelled because of, oh rats, CV), I got the outside put together. Hooray! It's always good to have a framework to build the rest from. We'll see how long it takes me to put the whole thing together. I'll have most of Saturday and Sunday at home with virtual church (CV again - it's pervasive!) and no events to cover.  I have a couple other puzzles waiting in the wings, too.

Happy coronalife!

It even looks like the sun's corona!