Nature knows its time for spring to get springing! A week before these turtles were sunning themselves in a local oxbow—at the beginning of Spring Break—the pond was completely covered with ice! But several days of beautiful sunshine chased away Ol’ Man Winter and woke these critters from their winter nap in the mud at the bottom of the oxbow. Ducks are flying in from down south and happily splashing around, too!

My plan for Spring Break: So this was my plan for the two weeks of Spring Break: relax and get out and about in nature! Well, I did get out and about as you can see … but by myself. I would have loved to have had the grandkidlings come for sleepovers and play in the parks and explore dollar stores and thrift stores together. But as I’m sure you’re all aware, extended family fun was not meant to be.

What actually happened: big tutoring changes: I didn’t get quite as much relaxing as I’d expected either. Before Spring Break started, I made sure I had all my tutoring plans ready for after the break—fully expecting to have my tutoring students come as usual to my home tutoring office for in-person lessons. Well, that didn’t exactly turn out the way I had planned either. Turns out I’ll be tutoring with distance learning by Skype and Edmodo. So I’ve been spending a lot of time making new tutoring lessons more suited to online learning—and connecting with my students to do practice chats, scanning and emailing them worksheets, and so on. Not so much of a “break” as I expected, but definitely a new adventure so I can’t complain because you know me, I love new adventures.

And more editing than I expected: I had planned to do just a tad of editing during Spring Break—but it turns out that lots of writers are doing more writing since they’re staying at home and “isolating.” Consequently, I’ve been receiving some unexpected editing jobs. I’m actually okay with that, but again it wasn’t the “break” I had planned 🙂

And strata complex issues: Like a lot of other stratas, our townhouse complex has run into insurance issues that have cut off our current strata insurance—as well as facing a 50% increase in our monthly strata fees to get the insurance up and running again. We’re being asked for a “onetime payment” of over $1000 to get it going again. And it happened right when so many people are laid off from their jobs. We’d all like to get together and have a meeting; in fact, our AGM was scheduled for April 7, but that will not happen, though legally it must. Everyone is madly discussing the issues on our private Facebook page. What to do? Another unexpected Spring Break situation that isn’t very relaxing.

Business income taxes: Yes, I got them done. Do I want to talk about that little adventure? Not so much. Okay, let’s carry on …

Blogging changes: I planned to get started on blogging again—and I’ve done that! A couple of posts on this blog; a couple more on my PentictonPedestrian.com blog (using lots of photos I took on my nature walks); and quite a lot more on my PenAndPaperMama.com blog as I wanted to help all those parents who have suddenly discovered that their kidlings will be home from school for a lot longer than just Spring Break and are desperately wondering how they will educate and entertain them. Well, good news! If you’re in that situation, check out my posts. Lots of great ideas!

My WIP: My one big plan for Spring Break was to work on my WIP as most of my beta readers have kindly sent me their input. Sadly, I have got little done on that front—well, I needed to take a spring “break” somewhere, right? Actually, I’ve at least been jotting down lots of ideas on how I can make some major changes to my WIP that will make it much better (Thank you so much to all my readers for your ideas! You are all awesome!)

What did you do on your Spring Break? Will it be carrying on as a much longer-than-expected break—or do you have to keep working like so many others are doing? I’d love for you to share what you’re up to in the comments. Huge appreciation to all the folks who are keeping things going! And please take care of yourselves, whatever your situation is.