Adaptation to COVID world

I have a 7:45 a.m. tee time for Friday. Cannot wait. But I'm not sure my happiness will translate into good play.

 

I actually shot my best score in six years last Friday. I haven't even flirted with breaking 100 in a long time, but I had a chance before making a snowman on the par-5 18th. Oops.

 

When we bought our patio furniture, someone told us that they significantly slash their prices at the end of the season, even more than most stores, and they would put all of their excess stock on the floor. So once we found what we liked, we had someone in the store look for similar items in other stores and drove around to pick it up. We did the same thing for our chairs/tables/cushions for our fire pit. I’m guessing that we paid about 30% of list price.

 

At least he's got a sense of humor about it.

 

Before COVID I was working in the office 3 days a week and at home the other 2 anyway. So I adapted to it well. But I do miss my coworkers. It might be time to set up another virtual happy hour.

 

I kind of reached a breaking point with trying to set boundaries this week. My friends, god bless them, want to do happy hours (porch, backyard, virtual, etc.) just about every night. And while I recognize that this is sort of an extraordinary situation, I needed to try to get back to some sort of normalcy now that I realize I'm going to be working remotely for at least the next few months. Drinking seven nights a week -- even if it wasn't much on some nights -- is unsustainable. I had gotten into a pretty good rhythm of slowing down on Mondays-Thursdays so work and working out wasn't affected. That had gone away, so I decided this week was the time to try to bring that back.

Seriously, I used to look forward to drinking on the weekends because, well, it was the weekend and I had way fewer work worries, etc. But if you do it every day, and you're waking up for your WHF shift on a Wednesday morning feeling sluggish and slightly hung over, it reduces the allure considerably. What the hell is the difference between Tuesday and Friday then? Hell, maybe this will give me at least something small to look forward to at the end of the week.

Side note: I really miss the gym.

 

In that movie "Oh God!", when God appears in Jerry's bathroom, and Jerry is stressing out, God tells him to start shaving.

His explanation: "When you don't feel normal, doing a normal thing makes you feel normal."

So I pack the same lunch I always packed and took to the office. I just take it upstairs. I dress as if going for work (nothing fancy, but not T-shirts and shorts, either). I try to make the routine as normal as possible. Now that I've adjusted to the one-monitor setup, I actually LIKE working from home. Never thought I'd say that.

Of course, there hasn't been real camaraderie in my newsroom in almost a decade. So that was long gone anyway.

 

A city zoning appeals commission I'm on had its first meeting in ten weeks today. Three of us watched on the government tv channel and texted in our questions & votes, and five showed up at the meeting site, appropriately distanced. Only one had a mask on, though.

Before the program started, I was pleased to see that our currently-closed indoor aquatic center is advertising for lifeguards, so I guess it may open soon. The place is almost empty when I go, so I'm not too worried about contagion, but I may avoid the locker room and just show up in my bathing suit.

Separately, at our civic club's zoom meeting yesterday, a nurse who runs part of our city's largest hospital said she had seen many fewer new virus cases in the last week. She said that car accident cases had been way down from usual in the last couple of months but that motorcycle and ATV accident cases were way up. Also lots of children drinking household cleaners. The way she described it made me think it was the result of parents having cleaning supplies out a lot and not that the kids are watching too many presidential press conferences.

 

Your supposition is almost certainly correct.

 

This has been a major issue with our city's big public pool. The manager said she ideally needs 25 or 30 lifeguards to operate, and last year she barely scraped together a dozen or so. It's apparently been a nationwide trend the past decade or so, as teenagers find better-paying jobs or spend the time playing sports instead of at part-time jobs.
What's killing her this year, though, is that they weren't able to certify any lifeguards. Red Cross certification requires a two-week class that was scheduled to start in mid-April, and was nuked by the shutdown. She doesn't want to hire people who aren't certified, therefore she can't hire or train them. She said today they would open the pool for lap swimming and exercise -- basically the folks who need minimal supervision -- but not recreational swimming.

 

Beaches on Cape Cod having the same problem in spades. They use college kids, but the kids have been home for two months and haven't been in the water for a long time. Qualifying standards are pretty demanding.

 

The no-mask crowd gets way more attention than it deserves.