Tag: social distance

The Stir Crazy Files – Episode 3

I just finished season two of Star Trek Discovery.

Ever since I became a step father I have found that I often get overly emotional while watching things that never would have touched me before.  I start crying like a little baby at the oddest things.  More often than not it’s during scenes that involve difficult family moments, more often than not involving parents and little kids.

Most of these episodes happen in the obvious places.  The filmmakers push a button and I respond.  The first season of This is Us was utter hell for me.  I shed so many tears it left me dehydrated for months.  The last scene that Ned and Jon have together in like episode two of Game of Thrones.  On first watch it was a nothing moment.  On a re-watch years later it destroyed me.  Military stuff is really hard to get through.  The opening 20 minutes of Saving Private Ryan on first watch was spectacular.  On second watch, now as a married man with two step kids, turned me into a gigantic puddle of emotional goo.  Some things effect me in huge ways when they absolutely should not.  The one I can’t get over is from Wonder Woman.  Yeah, Wonder Woman.  The scene where she jumps out of the trench and crosses no man’s land?  I ball my dumb stupid eyes out.  Every time I see it I completely lose my shit.  Why?  It’s a super hero movie for goodness sake.  It’s a Greek Goddess fighting a bunch of normal people.  Why does it wreck me so?

Well… Star Trek Discovery.  It happened again.  There is a goodbye scene in the last episode.  I literally had to turn away to keep my eyes from leaking like a leaky faucet.  Why did this stupid show mess me up like this?  What is it about the world around me that allows me to be effected like this?

Oh yeah… the world around me… that might be it.  I wonder if being at 99% of my maximum allowed stress level for 24 hours a day for over a week might have left me vulnerable to an emotional unglueing?

Yeah… I wonder.

As for the show?  Season one was really good.  Season two… awesome.  Star Trek Picard is a mystery show.  It’s a whodunit, where you’re trying to put the pieces together.  Discovery has elements of that, but it’s basically just an action/adventure/blow shit up kinda thing and it is just sooo good.

Fight the stir crazy, watch Star Trek.  You’ll thank me, even if you do fall apart like a baby near the end of the last episode.

Happy Spring, at Last

Winter is dead, long live the spring.

And while we’re at it, hows about you go and choke on a big bag of dicks, winter.  You prick.

The forecast for the first day or spring is temps in the mid 60’s and a 74% chance of rain.  Pretty much the text book spring day.

California is telling the entire state to shelter in place (assuming the headline I read this morning is correct, of course).  New York is in a worse state than California and they have said they will not do the same (assuming the stories I read yesterday are correct, of course).  We haven’t heard anything along those lines from Massachusetts and New Hampshire yet.  No one I know is sick… yet.  Statistically speaking it’s just a matter of time.  As of yesterday’s state health department update there are 328 confirmed cases in Massachusetts.  The expectation is that there are probably more like 6,000.  At least that’s what they said yesterday.  The CDC count has the United States over 10,000.  I have to guess the real number is also much higher.

There is nothing we can do about it beyond the meager steps we are taking now.  We’re staying home, we’re avoiding contact as much as we can.  We’re trying to avoid going stir crazy.  Last night Jen and I got in the car and drove around.  We didn’t go anywhere.  We took the highway north a couple of exists and then took the backroads back.  It was nice to get out.

I am feeling disconnected from everyone outside of the house.  I sent some emails and texts and facebook messages yesterday.  I just want to make sure everyone is still out there.  They are.  All is well.

Just hang in there, people, and don’t forget to wash your damn hands.

The Stir Crazy Files – Episode 1

Our toaster is a fickle minx.

Prior to the concept of social distancing taking over the known universe, my sweet, angelic, brilliant, beautiful, beloved wife Jennifer started having a hankering for English Muffins.  I get it.  Every once in a while I go through a phase where I can’t get enough of those muffins.

I like them on the well-done side.  Jen and the kids like them on the just-barely toasted side.  What ever your preference, our toaster can do it… it just doesn’t want to.  There is a sweet spot setting but it’s so hard to find it.  When I make toast it’s either just a little too done, or just a little too underdone.  No matter what I try it’s always just barely not-quite perfect.  That’s not to imply the English muffins don’t come out delicious, put some peanut butter on one of those little suckers and it’s bordering on bliss, it’s just that they could stand to be a tiny bit perfecterer.  Dig?

Yup… it’s only day four of the working from home/social distancing experiment and I am feeling rather stir crazy.  Hold on, kids.  It’s gonna be a bumpy ride!

Embrace the Bad Situation Part II

After doing all of the chores imaginable before work this morning, we found another way to embrace the shitty situation.

My wife and I took our lunch breaks together and went for a walk around the block.  It took about 15 minutes at a moderately brisk pace.  Weather permitting we are hoping to make this a regular thing.  If this mess continues long enough maybe we’ll be able to make more than one trip around the neighborhood.

Optimism AF, people.

Embrace the Bad Situation

By 10 minutes past 8:00 AM today I had done the following:

  • Folded the laundry
  • Washed the dishes
  • Cleaned up the living room (just a little)
  • Changed the cat’s litter box
  • Taken out all of the trash

That’s what I call making the (domestic) best out of an otherwise crappy situation.

Wash your hands, stay at home, and do the dishes before work.

Still Not Real

I listen to a lot of podcasts.  I use the podcast app on my iPhone to queue up a whole slew of episodes and I just let it play.  I play it in the car, I play it while I work, I play it while I’m cooking dinner, and so on and so on.

When I work from home I don’t use my iPhone.  If a podcast is playing and my phone rings, the podcast keeps playing in my ear while I’m trying to listen to the person on the other end of the call.  Tres annoying.  When I work from home I either use my MacBook, or my iPad, or my iPod Touch… yes, I am King Apple Fanboy the First.  After the work day ends I go in and edit my running podcast playlist on my phone so that it doesn’t try to play a podcast I’ve already listened to.

On Monday, the first day of social distance telecommuting, I didn’t listen to anything.  On Tuesday I did.  Just a couple of episodes (The Walking Deadcast and Grumpy Old Geeks) before shutting it down.  I used my iPad.

Here’s the sad part of the story….

After I punched out for the day I picked up my iPhone so I could update the queue for the next day’s commute.

Meaning, I was setting it up for this morning’s drive to work.

You see the problem?  There is no drive to work.

At my core I have still not accepted the changes our society requires from us.  In my heart of hearts, yesterday was just another day.  Yesterday was not a lock down to try and slow the spread of a virus that is going to fuck up our health care system and overrun our hospitals.  The company I work for sells software to hospitals.  The division I work in within the company supports new customers as they implement our software.  Even before most of the tech companies around here started talking about keeping their full staff at home I was hearing that some of our customers, hospitals, were telling our training staff to stay away from them.  They were implying that their lives were about to get really difficult and they didn’t expect to have time or energy to deal with anything other than their own patients.

This is real.  Don’t you doubt it.  Still… my tiny little wisp of a brain isn’t evolved enough to take that information into itself and impose a new, albeit temporary, reality onto the old reality.

Crud.  This sucks.

Wash your damn hands and stay home.

Live Streaming Music

Tonight while I was cooking dinner (chicken breasts [because my wife rules], instant mashed potatoes, and steamed broccoli) I was listening to today’s new episode of the Gig Gab podcast.  They were talking about making the best of every bar and club and music venue in American being closed and all of their gigs canceled by live streaming their bands.

Lizardfish has done that a couple of times and it’s always goofy fun.  Listening to the discussion really made me want to get the four of us into a room together to just play for Facebook Live.  It’ll be a couple of weeks as we’re not all riding it out in the same general region of New England, but I think once we all are back in the same state again we should do it.

Turns out I’m not the only one thinking of this.  Neil Young let it be known today that he’s going to do some live streaming from his home.  His wife is going to run the camera.  His wife is Daryl Hannah.  I had no idea he was married to a member of the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad, though she never got that Hattori Hanzo sword, did she.

After hearing this, I think we absolutely have to live stream our next practice.  I mean, Neil wrote “Rocking in the Free World.”  We play “Rocking in the Free World.”  Now we can have two things in common with Neil.  It’s pretty much our destiny, don’t you think?

A Supermarket Kinda Day

As implied by the previous post, I went to the supermarket this morning.  One of the (multiple) Market Basket locations on route 28 in Salem, NH.  I was able to get most of the things on my admittedly short list.  The notable exceptions were chicken and eggs.  Those sections of the store were either empty or filled with other stuff.  They only had a few check out lines open while I was there so the wait was pretty long.  Not terrible, but kinda long.

I’m working from home today.  My wife was too but she decided to take a little PTO.  The kids were both out of school.  They both start remote classes on Wednesday.  Today is actually a dad’s house day though so after hanging out here for most of the morning they went over to his house.

Jen decided to get onto the supermarket bandwagon too.  She’s doing a ton of reconnaissance/shopping as she hits a number of non-Market Basket locations in the neighboring towns.  They all, mostly, seem to be out of chicken.  She was able to get some expensive stuff at McKinnon’s in Salem, but other than that the pickings are a little slim.  I am hopeful that she will stumble across a well stocked supermarket that no one else in New England has heard about.  It could happen (no it couldn’t).  We live very close to a number of high traffic retail areas that have lots of options for food.  There are big supermarkets, little supermarkets, butcher shops, convenience stores, everything.  We have options if this thing drags on for a long time.

As of this moment, just a few days into the major Massachusetts shut downs, we are wanting for nothing… except chicken and eggs.  A huge part of my personal Weight Watchers menu revolves around eating eggs.  They are zero points.  I have to cut back though, in a big way.  I need to conserve eggs.  I never ever thought I would type that sentence, but here we are.

Most important, Harry is well stocked with diabetes supplies.  We had a few things delivered from Amazon today.  We expected them to be delayed but they actually got here early.  Thank you, Amazon.

On the news front, the big story I am seeing today is Canada is closing it’s borders.  The headlines all say they are closing the border to non-Canadian citizens, but in truth US citizens are currently exempt from the ban.  Bellana had plans to visit Montreal later this week.  I think those plans have been postponed.  I hope so.  I can’t imagine how much it would suck if they closed the border to US citizens while she and her American friends were on the wrong side of the border.  Not to imply that the Province of Quebec is anything other than beautiful and wonderful, but it would be terrible to be that far from home with no chance to get back.

The Massachusetts Department of Public Health should be updating the infection numbers within the next few minutes.  Is it naive of me to hope that the rate of transmission is dropping?  Yeah, I think so.  I’m still going to do it though.  Fingers crossed.

When You Come Down to it, This is Just Going to Suck

My wife and I were talking about COVID-19 today.  To summarize, both of our companies are on a full work from home and both kids (college and high school) are on a remote class schedule.

The kids haven’t had any classes since the policy went into effect, and I haven’t telecommuted since my company’s policy started.  Jen has been at home since Wednesday.

Today she said to me, tomorrow is the start of the first full week of all of this but it feels like we’ve been doing it for a year.

Truer words were never spoken.  There were some jokes going around on bookFayce around the start of February that said something like January was a really long year.  Again, how true… but… Something tells me we’re going to look back at March 2020 as one of the most painful experiences in any of our lives, and that’s not even bringing the possibility of the mortality rate into account.  The social distancing alone is going to eventually be flat out soul crushing.

It’s the right thing to do, no question… it’s just going to be tough.

Addendum: My mouse was hovering over the Publish button when we heard that all bars and restaurants in Boston are now supposed to close by 11:00 PM.  Again, the right move… just… ouch.