Reading Material

Tomorrow will be Quarantine Day 40, meaning we've spent just about as much time in our home as Noah did on the ark. Clearly, the upside here is that the animals stay on the outside and there's no seasickness to contend with.

We haven't done a ton of new or different things during quarantine, which I will surely regret someday. This isn't to shame us or validate the regret - we are still working, exercising, keeping up the house, sending fleets of cards to kids in our lives, and the never-ending task of cleaning the place... but we haven't learned a new language (although I did finally download a refresher course on French in the dull hope that the language I gained and lost 20 years ago will make a comeback in my brain), or picked up new hobbies or discernible skills. The bathroom still isn't done, although Eric has reworked the tile multiple times. We are close, just waiting on orders that are pandemic-backlogged.

What we have done is make a concerted effort to get through the years' worth of magazines in the house.

Seriously. Years.


We don't actually pay for magazines; rather, when some credit card or airline threatens to cancel the tiny fraction of points we have left with them (my work puts us on the lowest cost air and hotel options, so I have random bits and points from travel that  never add to anything substantial) - we order a magazine subscription rather than let them waste.

The challenge however, is that we don't always read what we've ordered, and we won't waste them by recycling them before they were read. Once the subscription expires, unless we have more points, we don't renew.

But they do stay. Yesterday, I read Conde Nast's Traveler from June 2015. I'm guessing some of the hotels I read about have closed or remodeled since press time.

Looking around, we have past issues of the following in the house:

Consumer Reports
The Family Handyman
Sports Illustrated (this, as a result of something else going out of business and being replaced automatically by the parent company, who also kindly extended the subscription period)
Men's Health
Conde Nast Traveler
Travel + Leisure
5280 (although we may only have one or two left. I only see one and its from June 2017)
Food + Wine
Mountain Living (a recent freebie. Definitely won't renew.)
Runner's World
Better Homes and Gardens
Money
Outside

PLUS, the alumni magazines from Kalamazoo College, University of Michigan and Huntington University.

It's ridiculous.

But now we have the time to read them. So we've been going through them at the rate of about 2 a day.

Each.

We still have stacks to go.

If you would like some reading materials, come on by. We'll leave the ones we've already gone through on the porch for you. Don't mind the address forwarding labels on some. There was a lot of mail forwarding a couple of years ago, and not a lot of time to do anything but pack, unpack and clean.