I can see from the writings of various bloggers that the pandemic did, despite its horrific death toll, do a few good things: families getting to know each other again (maybe too much?), learning to relax and enjoy quiet time (if you don’t have five children), reconnecting with nature, learning to bake/cook or just doing more of it, finding out what your children are really learning at school (and having to relearn it to teach them).
I’ve been baking
Hubs and I are retired with my daughter and her husband living nearby, but my son is in Utah. We haven’t seen him in nearly two years now. Bummer. We were blessed with our first grandchild, Eli, just before the state shut down, and he kept us happy for the past year.
What the pandemic did for us is force us allow us to clean out our home of 35 years to get it ready for sale, which we had planned for 2020. My husband was at our local landfill so much they offered him a job. I think there is a whole section with our name on it. Mind you, we would have donated much of it, but nothing was open to which we could donate. While we were doing this, workmen were in and out of the house doing a million reasonable number of repairs: they repainted inside of the house in a nauseating attractive neutral beige, replaced the HVAC system, and dug holes in our lawn to check the septic system. 
We had thirty-two open houses until we arrived at an awfully low attractive price which generated an offer. Then my daughter and family moved in with us for a month. We packed during the day, they packed during the night when their working from home jobs were done for the day. And we got to babysit Eli.
Somehow, through all this, and taking reasonable precautions (masks and gloves for all visitors), no one got sick.
In the middle of all this, I edited and published my book The Last Pilgrim to the sound of silence great applause. Where in heck can you market when everything is closed? Luckily some of my blogger friends took up the cause!
Garfield, who had resisted all attempts to be put into a carrier for three years, amazingly went right in on the day of our move-out. And off to the vets for a week. He kept me awake all night when we picked him up, nuzzling and kneading and chirping his happiness to be home, even if it was a new home. 
When we moved out, we had to move into a hotel for a short indeterminate about of time until our new house was ready, a time of acute depression wonderful downtime and many phone calls pleading and begging both the construction company to finish and our moving company to keep all our belongings for a few more days – including running electricity to our freezer which was still full of food.
We ate take-out, cleaned our own hotel room and made the beds.
But…we made it.
The movers were carrying the furniture into our new house while we signed the mortgage papers. We lived without online service for three weeks, but we rigged up two digital hotspots for our computers and TV (one of which we burned out!) with help from our son-in-law.
And it rained and rained. Our backyard was a muddy river, and we thought about getting
out our kayack, but the bad weather forced allowed us to get unpacked. And in time to celebrate Thanksgiving and Christmas.
So this is my saga of 2020. We are blessed by good health, two vaccine shots, and time with our growing and incredibly cute grandson. I miss my pool…but more of that later, as we try to accommodate work around our many HOA rules (72 printed pages of them).
Charles Yallowitz was born and raised on Long Island, NY, but he has spent most of his life wandering his own imagination in a blissful haze. Occasionally, he would return from this world for the necessities such as food, showers, and Saturday morning cartoons. One day he returned from his imagination and decided he would share his stories with the world. After spending many years fiddling with his thoughts and notebooks, he decided that it was time to follow his dream of being a fantasy author. So, locked within the house with only pizza and seltzer to sustain him, Charles brings you tales from the world of Windemere. He looks forward to sharing all of his stories with you and drawing you into a world of magic.
Coming of age, teenage love, adolescence in a Jewish community, the social upheavals of the 1960s, murder mystery – all of these themes are woven together in The Boy and the Lake and set against a luminously described backdrop of life on a lake.
Adam Pelzman was born in Seattle, raised in northern New Jersey, and has spent most of his life in New York City. He studied Russian literature at the University of Pennsylvania and received a law degree from UCLA. His first novel, Troika, was published by Penguin (Amy Einhorn Books). He is also the author of The Papaya King, which Kirkus Reviews described as “entrancing” and “deeply memorable.” The Boy and the Lake, set in New Jersey during the late 1960s, is his third novel.
Birds Don’t Cry is a story of relationships between siblings, something to which most of us can relate. Middle-aged Kaffy Sullivan, ornery and set in her ways, lives in Sullivan House, an old inn set next to a magnificent forest and open for tourists to stay. She hopes to live out her life there, maintaining her grandparents’ legacy to their three grandchildren. Kaffy, with the volunteer help of her sister-in-law, Sylvia, is determined to keep the inn going. She has come to rely on Sylvia for setting up, chicken dinners on Saturday nights, and lively conversations with the guests (something which Kaffy can’t manage). Now she is faced with a reviewer from The Lonely Tripper books coming to stay at the inn, something that could make or break its reputation. Trying to bring the lovely innup to date, she has hired her creepy brother, Red, Sylvia’s husband, to expand the front porch before the visit.
Sandy Day is the author of Fred’s Funeral, Chatterbox Poems, An Empty Nest, Head on Backwards Chest Full of Sand, and Birds Don’t Cry. She graduated from Glendon College, York University, with a degree in English Literature sometime in the last century. Sandy is a trained facilitator for the Toronto Writers Collective’s creative writing workshops. She lives in Georgina, Ontario, Canada.
Ashmole Foxe is a bookseller in Norwich, England, during the Georgian era. He is well-to-do from the sales of his bookstore and also his ability to find and sell rare books for significant profit. All of this he finds mundane, and over the years he has acquired a solid reputation for solving murders, which has become his raison d’etre.
William Savage grew up in Hereford, on the border with Wales and took his degree at Cambridge. After a working life largely spent teaching and coaching managers and leaders in Britain, Europe and the USA, he retired to Norfolk, where he volunteers at a National Trust property and started to write fiction as a way of keeping his mind active in retirement. He had read and enjoyed hundreds of detective stories and mystery novels and another of his loves was history, so it seemed natural to put the two together and try his hand at producing an historical mystery. To date, he has focused on two series of murder-mystery books, both set in Norfolk between 1760 and around 1800; a period of turmoil in Britain, with constant wars, the revolutions in America and France and finally the titanic, 22-year struggle with France and Napoleon.