The big budget-killer for us was always restaurants. My husband and I loved going out to eat, and we didn’t put enough effort into planning meals. So when there was no food in the fridge or we didn’t get home from work until 6 PM — oh no! — we’d go to a restaurant.

I’m using past tense because everything is different now.

Restaurants are opening in our area, but we’re going out to eat or getting takeout only once a week or so.

We’ve made grocery shopping and meal planning a priority. We have completely new habits and a new routine thanks to the coronavirus lockdown. It seemed impossible before, but this is who we are now. We’ve changed.

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There’s a lot going on right now. Many of us have experienced dramatic changes to our lifestyle and livelihood.

Any one of these changes would be a lot to get used to and would require a period of adjustment, and they’re all hitting at once.

On top of that, many of us are sick. And people are dying. That’s reality.

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Once upon a time, I was trying to make the case to an eleven-year-old that she would need to learn basic skills like doing laundry, cleaning the kitchen, and blow-drying her own hair.

“When you’re eighteen, you’ll be on your own,” I said.

“Well then, can’t I just learn it all then?” she asked.

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I was the last customer at a favorite cafe. While an employee swept the floor and I packed up to go shortly before closing time, we struck up a conversation. She confessed that she has a tendency to procrastinate.

“What are you procrastinating about?” I asked.

“Everything,” she replied.

She said that she had just transferred to a new college and was anxious about her tendency to procrastinate. She’s always been this way and she’s not sure how to change.

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I was on my way to work one morning in my early twenties when I saw someone at a stoplight who changed the way I saw the world.

As a young adult in a new city, I had a rigid set of rules about how to live and, at the same time, a limited ability to operate in accordance with them.

These rules governed what I could eat and when, what I could spend, and how I could spend my time. It was my best attempt to tame the chaos of my circumstances.

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After years of searching, I have discovered that the best breakfast burritos in my city are to be found at a counter inside a suburban gas station.

And just as with many such establishments around the world, business there is conducted entirely in Spanish.

I don’t speak Spanish, really. I know a few words. But the other day, I was delighted to find that I understood the woman’s simple greeting and all of her questions without mentally translating them into English. It was as though a little window opened up in my brain — an unexpected pop-up shop, not unlike the taco counter itself. Something had changed.

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The 50th anniversary of the moon landing has come and gone. Nothing has changed as a result of marking that moment. In fact, the argument is that not much changed as a result of the moon landing itself.

That may be true for the moon itself, cold and still and untouched since the Apollo missions. But we are still reaping the benefits of the technological advancements that were required to achieve Kennedy’s ambitious goal to put a man on the moon before the end of the 1960s. Many decades of research and development were compressed into just over eight years. That is the benefit of a clearly defined, time-bound objective.

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A fellow math teacher presented an intriguing brain-teaser involving coins. I think of myself as someone who enjoys problem-solving, so I gave it a whirl.

Solving the problem took several hours of work over the course of a couple of weeks, including some time spent talking it through with my husband. There was some eccentric behavior on my part, like staring off into space with a frown and sitting on a park bench manipulating a lap full of coins. I found myself in some tricky blind alleys that required challenging mental three-point turns to get out of them. I thought I had the solution, but then discovered that I didn’t; I thought my husband had figured it out, but he hadn’t; then I went for a walk and finally got there.

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