Minda Goes West

What a week. It felt like at least three. I know I'm not alone in this, and yet it seems odd. After all, we are all healthy. We have a comfortable place in which to shelter, with expansive views and some outdoor space. WriterMan and I can both work from home easily, and although our investments have taken a serious hit, we are not in any immediate financial difficulty. Our older kids are safe and secure where they are, as are our parents, siblings, and other family members, and we have many ways to connect with them. On the surface, our week was normal, or possibly more relaxed than usual. After all, there was no commute, no Boy Scouts, no errands. (We were already living like this, and the city of San Francisco joined us, by order of the Mayor who declared "shelter in place" effective 12:01 AM on Tuesday. On Thursday, that extended to all of California.) And yet, I'm exhausted, and have been pretty much all week, despite getting plenty of sleep on paper. So

Fortunately, Friday was emotionally smoother than Thursday, although I still struggled to focus at work. Note to self: In the future, try to avoid putting a work trip with a fair bit of post-trip effort, a significant change in responsibilities (hello, learning curve!, hello, new team members!), and a global pandemic in the same two weeks. Thursday, the cascade of cancellations marked a clear Before and After. Like the fall of the Berlin Wall, or 9/11. Or, I wonder, the London Blitz? Except instead of coming together as a community, we have to stay 6 feet away from each other. Friday, things had settled down a bit, perhaps because, with school officially cancelled, WriterMan home, and me working from home until further notice, I was not obsessively checking the news every 5 minutes. We are slowly figuring out the rules of this new life. For example, Youngest Kid needs to be up and dressed by 8:30 each weekday morning. An hour of reading a day is mandatory. And as long as the

Hi. It's me. Yes, I'm still here, although I haven't blogged in so long that I literally forgot how to create a new post and bumbled around for an embarrassingly long time before I figured it out. It's been a little over a month since the coronavirus started appearing in the news here. WriterMan was quick to understand that this could be a Big Thing and placed our first apocalypse order with Amazon the first week of February, when I was away on a work trip. Over the past month, we have slowly built up about a month's worth of food and basic supplies. Since we don't have a car and I have to transport all the groceries back in my little shopping cart, we were not at Costco, piling carts high. But I did buy a little more at the grocery store each visit, and there was a definite uptick in the Amazon deliveries. We've watched the cruise liner in quarantine in Japan, and the outbreak in Washington, and the first cases around Sacramento. We've seen the su