COVID-19 Updates

Now that you've read my initial thoughts on COVID-19, a week (or so) later it's time for updates!

Everything's weird.  There have been times in my life where COVID-19 would've been pretty disastrous, or would've affected me personally a lot more.  I'm not in school, which I can't even imagine.  These kids will be talking about this the rest of their lives!  I've had jobs that might very well have left me stranded under these circumstances.  To my mind the absolute worst thing, in the US, about COVID-19 is the economic havoc being caused, and as always I'm not as concerned about the big guys as I am the little guys.  When I was on unemployment in Colorado I found it surprisingly easy.  It was even easy to obtain, later, food assistance funding.  Reports here in Florida are indicating that such smooth sailing may not have existed before, and the response now is only going to get worse. 

My job has been relatively unaffected.  "Relatively," but insofar as I've continued working, so far it is for all intents and purposes business as usual.  I work in a childcare center at a military instillation.  One of the moms works at the medical clinic, and her babies were the most consistent charges I had last week, and I've been talking with mom about COVID-19 for weeks.  The biggest complaint she's had is mass access to testing.  Obviously that's become the obsession for all those curve-flatteners.  Everything we've seen happen in the US over the past week (and the things that were happening before that) has been an effort to flatten that curve, curb the spread of COVID-19. 

I've been slow to accept the seriousness of the situation in large part because as far as I can tell, the US has been affected, by far, more by the curve-flattening measures than by COVID-19 itself.  The response you'll no doubt have encountered in your own lives is the reaction to toilet paper hoarders.  To a certain extent, some of this hoarding is because some people really don't spend that much time at home, usually, and thus don't really know how much they use, when they're the ones supplying it, rather than, say, the facilities at work or a restaurant (or, you callous moochers, your friend's house).  And all those kids suddenly at home are requiring far more bread than normal (we now have a generation used to school lunches rather than packing their own; my own childhood was a mix of both, but I still vividly remember "bubble & squeak" in the cafeteria).

The libraries closed last week, and so I didn't get to hang out there this weekend.  I more or less blew the last two days watching movies and reading comic books.  I've been reading a really good book, but didn't want to spend too much time reading it (when you're reading a really good book, there are two ways of doing so: slowly, to savor it, or quickly, because you're insatiable).  I didn't tackle my writing projects.  I'm still waiting to see if we're going to get a "tactical pause," which will give me plenty of time.  But then I also start different hours (again) this week, which translates to an additional hour in the morning (which I'm taking advantage of right now to do some blogging), and I intend to use that for as long as I have it to get back to writing.

I did spend time frantically tracking down old notes, which I'm happy to report I found, plus others I hadn't really been thinking of, and some I'd plum forgotten about.  Some notes have faded from their original vivid visions, but that's an opportunity to discover them all over again.  I'm always the optimist, even when I'm feeling cynical.  Some day these ideas will bloom!  Some day they will sit on a bookshelf, and not just mine!

The family put together a group call to our dad on his birthday.  Grumpy as I've been, I decided to participate.  But I receded into the background, because I was still grumpy, and I've never been good at asserting myself in groups, and less so when I'm even less in the mood.  I called him, separately, yesterday, and had a good conversation.  I talked with the Burrito the day before, and she's apparently begun to notice how women's lips look.  I thought she was doing Fish Face, but she made herself clear later.  Don't grow up too quickly, Burrito!  (That's my beloved niece, remember.)

I've been posting a lot of nonsense on Facebook, and I'm not sure everyone's understood it as nonsense.  For instance, I called Knives Out "fun for the whole family," which is ironic, if you’ve seen the movie.  But if anyone actually watched it, based on my recommendation, I hope they ended up enjoying it.  Good movie.  COVID-19 is kind of like the hole in the donut for all of us at the moment, right? 

Life goes on...