Day 5: school via webcam, piano gruesomeness, chess match

Yesterday was a ludicrous illustration of the human (or at least my) brain's ability to completely misprioritise threats. It was the first day of 'distance learning' for la p'tite, and we'd received boatloads of instructions through the school with regards to schedules and links to packets of work for the kids and on-line tutorials for stuff, and in my head I was thinking I'd be able to set her up in front of the computer at the beginning of each hour, press go on whatever activity she was supposed to be doing, and then get on with what I was supposed to be doing (which was telephone visits with patients; I set her up in the other provider's empty office, meeting requirements of both social distancing AND HIPAA, so there). However, it wasn't quite as seamless as I'd imagined; every few minutes she would somehow manage to click out of the Zoom meeting with her teacher, or the online tutorial thing she was supposed to be doing, or she would accidentally hit mute, or (etc. etc. etc.) and would distress-yip for rescue; so much for her being a digital native - perhaps I have done her a disservice by previously insisting on limited screen time, since apparently, even though the revolution will not be televised, we'll be spending 98% of Armageddon on the internet. She even complained at the end of the day that it had been "very screen-filled." But here's the stupid part: I was more stressed out physiologically (elevated blood pressure, constricted pupils, sweaty palms) at the thought of not getting her logged in on time and successfully to the Zoom meeting with her Chinese teacher (we were four minutes late) than I was on reading the new update from the CDC that people in their 40's infected with coronavirus are way more likely than previously realised to require hospitalisation; my autonomic nervous system is seriously crap at threat triage.
In any case, I can see that I am going to need to rethink my romantic notions of enjoying homeschooling, since we somehow have more to do schoolwork-wise than we usually do during regular school. B. reports from Barcelona that school there is just straight-up cancelled and they are spending their days playing video games, working out on the stationary bike, playing with the cat, etc., and occasionally doing some reading, so I'm grateful for the structure that school is providing.
In the afternoon we had virtual piano lesson, which was hideous - while she's routinely low-grade horrible about practising, usually she pulls it together quite well for piano lesson in person, and sits up and plays properly and doesn't race through stuff and is more or less polite to the teacher. Yesterday for virtual lesson, however, she was frankly vile, lolling around on the piano bench, being offhanded with the teacher, racing through everything at breakneck pace with frequent excruciating collisions into wrong notes that she made no attempt to pretend to care about, etc., and I kind of wanted to murder her. (Wait, not 'kind of'. I wanted to murder her). But! It is a truth universally acknowledged that it is my choice to inflict piano lessons on my unwilling kid, so I decided my penance was to suffer in silence (although, ha, after the lesson was over she kept playing on her own for half an hour without any prompting). Mostly I am putting it in writing so that, if we all survive this, twenty years from now when she comes back and says thank you for making me take piano lessons, I can feel smug.
After that I let her bugger off to her room and play Lego while I sanded down the dining room table in preparation for dragon fabulousness, then dinner online with trophy BF (who should by rights have arrived on the plane last night and be lying next to me while I type this, but coronavirus), and then a chess game with Grandpa by phone while I (eek) ran back to clinic to rescue my laptop charger without which (see above comments re: Armageddon happening online) we are screwed. I returned in time for the last half of the chess game, which was pretty great: we'd labelled the board A-H and 1-8 down the sides so they could describe their moves to each other down the phone, and by the time I came back they had developed a large-animal variation on the military phonetic alphabet, and madam was gleefully calling out 'Queen to crocodile 2! Knight to gruffalo 8! MUMMY, come look how badly I'm beating Grandpa!" I am hoping to institute a regular weekly chess game, if only for the comedic relief.
They finished while I watched a helpful video sent by E. (hello, E!) on, exactly as requested, vent-settings for dummies in the event that primary care doctors get drafted to help in ICUs, and I also texted and emailed various friends, and generally felt that so far, coronavirus has provided some fairly seriously ironic silver linings in terms of connection with others. And then to bed, with an icepack for my poison oak rash.