Year end review 2020-Part 3-March/April

March

In the beginning of March, my daughter, Christy requested that as a birthday gift, I accompany her to Austin, Texas, so that she could check out whether she would want to live there. She found a great deal on airline tickets on Priceline and I went ahead and purchased them.

Right after that, on March 4th, a state of emergency was declared in California because of the rapid spread of Covid-19. Governor Newsom requested that people curtail gatherings and non-essential activities. It wasn’t a mandatory order at that point, so Christy and I continued to plan our trip thinking that we could be careful and take lots of precautions.

Meanwhile, my sister-in-law, who had been planning to stay in Santa Monica for a couple of more months, started preparing to return to her home in New York, fearing that she would soon be stuck in CA if she didn’t get going. It was around then that she told me she thought that whatever it was that had made her so sick at the end of 2019 had suspiciously similar symptoms to the virus that was now dominating the news. I later learned that her husband had been sick first and thought he might have picked up something at his gym. From him, my niece got it and had a cough that was bad enough to require a trip to Urgent Care. And then it passed to my sister-in-law, who suffered for weeks.
We started hearing more and more about how serious the virus was and how contagious. It was spreading like wildfire in a Santa Ana wind.

I don’t remember the exact sequence of events that led to us having to start wearing masks (to cover our noses and mouths) and standing in line to get into stores, or when the term ‘social-distancing’ (meaning that we had to keep 6’ from other people) was introduced, but on March 12th, I posted my first reference to the corona virus with a meme showing a picture of John Travolta that said “John Travolta was hospitalized for suspected Covid-19 but doctors now confirm it was only Saturday Night Fever and they assure everyone that he is Staying Alive. Apparently, he was diagnosed because he had chills that were multiplying. . .” Made me laugh.

At that point I still didn’t see a problem with continuing to get together with my friends, Ralph and Janeen until Christy got upset that I was not staying at home like I was supposed to. But when she decided we better cancel our trip to Austin, I realized she was probably right and taking it more seriously than I was, and I started to stay home.

On March 19th, a stay-at-home order was issued in California, meaning we were to stay home except to do essential activities, like purchase food, go to doctor’s appointments and the like. There were limits placed on the number of people who could gather and many businesses that were considered non-essential or where the virus was thought to be spread (gyms, churches, bars, restaurants, movie theaters) were shut down or restricted. We were told to wash our hands frequently and try to avoid touching our faces (funny how you don't realize how often you touch your face until someone tells you not to.)

In the ensuing days there was a panic-run on disinfectant, hand-sanitizers, toilet paper, paper towels, bleach, and all germ-killing cleaning products and every store that carried those items had gaping holes on their shelves because they couldn’t restock fast enough and their suppliers couldn't keep up with the demand to produce them. We couldn't find a can of Lysol Disinfectant Spray for a full year. Food items that would keep for a long time got wiped out too. I wanted a box of Bisquick and it was weeks before I found one.

Costco and Trader Joe’s implemented rules for shopping safely from the beginning and maintained the best management of their stores.

There were a couple of other good memes that I shared in March:

“I don’t think anyone expected that when we changed the clocks earlier this month, we’d go from standard time to twilight zone.”

And: “You thought dogs were hard to train. Look at all the humans that can’t even sit and stay.”

But the craziness that was to come was distinctly unfunny. It’s hard to describe how weird everything felt. Many people started working from home on their computers. It became verboten to touch or hug anyone. People started fist-bumping and elbow bumping instead of shaking hands. Traffic on the freeways almost disappeared. Schools were closed and teachers had to adapt to teaching online. It was eerie to see empty school parking lots, no activities on playgrounds or football fields, no hordes of kids coming out of schools at 3pm. The bathrooms at the public parks were closed because (besides the risk of spreading germs) people were stealing the toilet paper!

One day, when I was walking Roscoe, I saw where kids had drawn pictures with sidewalk chalk on several driveways in a row.

They were so bright and cheerful, with encouraging messages, that it inspired me to see if I still had some sidewalk chalk. Christy and I ended up borrowing some from our neighbor, Wendy. And on March 21st Christy and I drew our own messages on our driveway;



“Be kind” and, “We’re in this together.” Rain came along a couple of days later and washed it away pretty quickly, but we felt good about our artwork.

Just before Christy’s birthday, I started uploading my home movies (videos I had converted to DVDs) to Youtube in order to share them with my family and friends. Over the next couple of months, I uploaded quite a few and I also spent time creating a couple of special ones. It’s a very fulfilling activity to edit a video and find just the right songs to go with it. It’s one of the things I find most satisfying to create, along with my scrapbooks. And it was a good way to keep busy while being confined to the house.

April

In the beginning of April, Vladi and I decided that it would not be wise for us to make our cross-country trip in the time of corona virus, so we reluctantly notified everyone that we would be postponing until 2021. I took care of re-scheduling our reservation at the campground in West Virginia where I was supposed to meet my cousins, and we started hoping that all would be back to normal by then.

We had some N95 masks (supposedly the best kind) left from our time of cleaning my brother's house after he passed away, so we started wearing them when we went out grocery shopping. We posted a picture of ourselves in front of Trader Joe’s on facebook, April 3.



On April 10 I posted a meme that showed a cat sitting in a line of people waiting to get into a store with the caption “I don’t know what the cat needs, but it knows how to follow the rules.”

4/11 There was a comic in our local paper that captured how we were all feeling.

Our routine had been interrupted in a way that made us all feel like we were in some kind of alternate reality. One of the things that was most frustrating to me was that it started being difficult to discern facts from opinion and speculation. The country had a distinct divide between people who thought that all the restrictions and new rules were an over-reaction and those who were trying to comply in order to help stop the spread of the virus. It was mostly Republicans who felt that restrictions were a way of trampling on their rights, killing the economy and taking away their freedoms. They even called the news of the pandemic a hoax. It’s true that the shutdowns devastated a lot of businesses, but as time went by, those that weren’t destroyed began to figure out how to survive. The government did pass a stimulus bill that pumped money into the economy in an effort to keep the country going. And efforts to develop a vaccine were launched by a number of companies.

At the end of the month, Vladi and I took a drive to Lancaster to look at the poppies in bloom.



We needed to get out of the house. The orange covered hills did not disappoint. Reminded me of taking that trip when I was a kid.

 

I took this picture on a walk around CLU (a campus near our house) with Roscoe when I realized we had some poppies right there.

The uncertainty of not knowing how long it would take to get the virus under control was taking a toll on everyone and we had to keep reminding each other that we were all in it together.