Quarantine: Week 2
It’s official, Governor Charlie Baker placed Massachusetts under a stay at home mandate. Schools are closed through the end of March and all essential businesses are ordered to close temporarily. We are definitely living in an altered state now.
Mike and I do the only thing we can, we prep and plan for the extended lockdown. We are both fortunate enough to be equipped to work remotely, so we’ll continue working from home. We’re also well versed in Zoom meetings and Microsoft Teams, so the transition wasn’t too rocky.
And we made another run for groceries, this time armed with a week’s worth of meal plans. Just to be on the safe side, I grab some latex gloves for our shopping run. We’ve always kept a box of them in the basement for various uses, like staining furniture and dying hair, or that time I had to remove a dead bird from the bird bath. Now they are for grocery shopping in a viral outbreak.
One upside of this new situation, is that since we’re not waking up super early and spending hours of our day in traffic, we now have energy to get creative in the kitchen. This is what Mike’s homemade gumbo looks like and how his chicken pot pie turned out:
I used the down time to perfect my tuna noodle casserole recipe:
Also, there was a cheese plate. I think cheese is my stress coping mechanism. While working from home is easy, work itself is chaos. All the events I was designing for are now either cancelled or in limbo. Projects are being scrapped by the hour, communication plans are evolving by the minute, and our VPN is crashing from the overload because it wasn’t designed for this. On Mike’s side, all his classes are now either cancelled or pushed back. They’re scrambling to try and make them virtual, which is new territory for everyone.
So yeah, keep calm and make a cheese plate.
And now for something completely different. Remember on Saturday when we drove to Concord and spent a sunny day walking around outside? Well, this was two days later on Monday:
And this photo below was taken on Friday. It was about 62 degrees and I worked outside in the gazebo for the afternoon. Weather is weird and New England is a bizarre place.
While we feel safely insulated from the outside world in our little bubble here, we are keenly aware that not everyone is in the same boat as we are.
Every day our social media feeds are filled with local independent businesses that are fighting to stay afloat during the shutdown. It hurts seeing people and local business you love struggle, they don’t have the financial cushion of large corporations to fall back on. A few weeks down won’t leave a mark on Delta Airlines but it’s enough to put a small immigrant-owned shop out of business for good.
Mike and I are both actively working (although we are feeling increased anxiety over the future of that) and we are in a fortunate position where we can spare some funds to help out our community. So we have decided to do what we can, where we can. Two or three times a week, we choose local restaurants to order delivery from. And we order gift cards and merch from those businesses who cannot provide delivery services, like breweries and local artisans. We bought records, pins, shirts, stickers, books, pint glasses, gift cards, and hand crafted goods from everyone we could support.
Here I model some excellent socks from Exhibit A Brewing. W
We also took time to unplug too. There’s a constant 24/7 stream of COVID-19 outbreak news on television and online right now. There are hourly updates on death tolls, hospital supplies, ventilator shortages, and lockdowns around the world. Doctors and government officials and newscasters giving you every detail whether you need it or not. It’s overwhelming, and you have to consciously take a break from it all because it will crush you.
So, everyday we find time to shut the tv off and do something away from it all. Like a puzzle or Star Wars Trivial Pursuit. Mike still won’t play Scrabble with me, so if you’re reading this and want to Zoom a round of Scrabble with me, hit the contact button.
