Home alone

By Evelyn C. McDonald
Arts & Culture Reporter
March 22, 2020

Since the coronavirus introduced the term “social distancing” into my vocabulary, I’m staying inside a lot more these days. It’s made me realize that staying home takes organization. You can only clean so much and there’s only so many chores on your long-ignored list of things that need to be done around the house. Eventually the walls seem a bit confining and you’re wondering how long this social distancing is going to last. You miss art, you miss culture (and we won’t even talk about toilet paper). What can you do?

Quite a bit as it turns out, thanks to the Internet. Let’s just look at a few things at your fingertips on your keyboards. Books, for instance, are a great way to spend time enjoyably. You can download eBooks from the library if you have a card. Story & Song offers eBooks for sale. And there’s a site called BookBub.com that features eBooks as specials from Amazon, Barnes & Noble and others. Their books range in price from free to around $3.99. They are a great way to get introduced to an unfamiliar writer. BookBub is free to use, you just have to set up an account with them.

Maybe you’re tired of reading. It happens. Have you always wanted to see the Musee d’Orsay or the British Museum? Travel and Leisure’s site features a list of 12 famous museums with virtual tours. These sites don’t require a computer science degree, just some eye-hand coordination. Other sites have video lectures as well. The National Gallery of Art has one on The Moon in Photography, that accompanied the recent Moon Landing exhibition.

Do you miss learning about new things? Try Coursera, one of the online education sites. Coursera offers free courses given by professors from many US universities as well as some foreign ones. There are lectures and videos. There are also quizzes and projects but you can ignore these if you just want to get a grounding in a new subject.

Music lovers have at least two choices. The Metropolitan Opera offers webcasts of live performances, a new one each day. Broadway offers streaming of many shows though probably not anything currently running. There may be subscription fees for these sites. I think the Met’s is $8.99 a month.

As an Amazon Prime user, I was aware that I could access movies and TV shows. Many of them are free but rental fees are usually under $5. Recently I found out that Prime Reading has eBooks and eMagazines that are free. You select a title and it is put in a library for you. You’re entitled to 10 books at a time but you can return one to get another one.

These are a few suggestions for whiling away the hours at home. The world of art and culture is out there. Go explore.

Evelyn McDonald moved to Fernandina Beach from the Maryland suburbs of Washington, D.C. in 2006. Evelyn is vice-chair on the Amelia Center for Lifelong Learning and is on the Dean’s Council for the Carpenter Library at the UNF. Ms. McDonald has MS in Technology Management from the University of Maryland’s University College and a BA in Spanish from the University of Michigan.