Today is August 13th. Five months ago today was the last time I was in the office in Waltham. Five months. At the time the work from home order came, we were expecting it to be two weeks. Five months and counting.
My step daughter was on spring break, expecting to go back to Vermont. Nope. My step son kept saying that they can’t close schools, that would be crazy? Nope. Closed. My wife read a news report that hinted things could be bad enough to keep us home until the Fall and I thought that was ridiculous.
Now we are planning for back to school. University life will require a quarantine and a negative test to be let onto the campus, and from there on it’s a bubble. High school life… who the hell knows. Even the administration doesn’t have a friggin’ clue where they are going, never mind the students and their families. It’s a complete disaster.
Work? It’s looking more and more like we won’t be back in a building until sometime early next year. Jen’s company is still closed down completely. Mine has been sneaking people back into one of the buildings, and next month they are going to open another. My building is not on the reopening radar yet so it’s unlikely we’ll go back this year. We don’t know for sure though. We had wondered if we might be making working at home permanent, but the company squashed that talk emphatically. We’re going back, we just don’t know when yet.
In the last five months I have bought two tanks of gas. Normally it’s two a week(ish). I’ve been to my parents house a few times and been incredibly nervous about it each time. What if I have it and give it to them? What if they have it and give it to me and I bring it home and give it to everyone else?
I haven’t set foot in a store since a few days after we were sent home. That first weekend (I think) I went in a grocery store a couple of times, and maybe a drug store once. This was before stores put their Covid restrictions into place. I haven’t had to wait outside for the headcount inside to go down. We’ve been using instacart and amazon for pretty much everything we need. I’ve done a couple of curbside pickups, one at Best Buy and one at Home Depot.
Are there signs this is coming to an end? Not really. There are hints of vaccines. Until I and my family have one in my blood I’m not going to stop stressing. So many of our fellow citizens seem to think it’s okay to start reopening, and every time they try there is an outbreak and a new spike and it’s time to stop being stupid and just shut things down again.
I want this to be over, and it won’t be over until we all take it seriously… and there doesn’t seem to be much chance of that happening.
Inside the Red Head's Head 