How are you all doing? This has all been a little rough, to say the least.
I am staying home from work and my daughter from daycare. Tomorrow a stay-at-home order goes into effect in Ohio.
My husband is a fire and rescue dispatcher for the city of Toledo so he will be going to work no matter what.
We’ve gone grocery shopping a few times and we get what we can. The shelves are pretty bare. Stores now have limited hours and people are outside their doors early in the morning waiting for them to open. Tonight we’re getting delivery for supper. Thankfully that’s still a thing.
Shit got real this morning when I learned that a couple of people I know personally are now sick. It’s no longer just a story on the news. Needless to say, my husband and I are now taking this quarantine thing a little more seriously.
This may suck but I still feel grateful in our current situation. We are safe, we are healthy, and we haven’t killed each other yet.
How are you guys holding up?
I’m still expected to go to work (for now) but I likely won’t get paid. I’m pretty sure that’s illegal. This is the worst zombie apocalypse ever, LOL!
I spent the weekend outside doing springtime yard chores–mostly raking & bagging the leaves that fell during the winter and clearing out the flower gardens–and listening to the stay-at-home mothers whine about how they’re going to lose their minds if they have to spend any more time around their kids. Mostly the neighborhood kids have spent their days bouncing the basketballs in the street for hours or hitting baseballs off cars. No 6-foot social distance going on, so I’m wondering when the first cases will crop up.
On Friday, Taiwan declared the entire world as Level 3: anyone coming in from any country gets 14 days in quarantine, no exceptions. And Taiwan is no longer a point of transfer from one flight to another, it’s either an origin or destination. That doesn’t just protect Taiwan, it protects other countries. And yet on Saturday, human traffickers were caught smuggling in Vietnamese people to work.
Few infected people remain, but like the US and elsewhere there are dolts who “think” rules don’t apply to them. One went to a nightclub. Drinking and partying was his priority? Seriously? He deserves the NT$1 million fine (US$33,000) that’s coming. There are other selfish individuals who are quarantined asking how to break out. It’s two weeks in a hotel with meals, not a prison sentence.
The strangest thing is friends back in Canada asking if I’m alright. There probably isn’t a safer place in the world to be, I’m worried about them. Apologies to those who aren’t safe, it’s not boasting.
Yep. But don’t forget that Taiwan is an island with few international airports and zero land border crossings, as opposed to the EU.
Watching old movies on tv, reading, walking the neighborhood, itching for my wife to go back to work so that I can enjoy retirement again, worrying about my adult son who works in the gig economy and has no work for the foreseeable future, (we’ll cover him if necessary). I realize how fortunate I am that my wife and I saved and saved all these years, rarely eating out or going to movies, not taking expensive vacations, etc. Now we have a cushion to fall back on. I hope young people learn a lesson from all this and start putting money away for that rainy day. I promise, it will come.
Good luck to all.
I’m glad you’re doing well and hopefully, your son will pull through.
Unfortunately, many young people are in debt and just trying to make ends meet. There’s no money left over once bills are paid to put away.
I’m a millennial and my dad is a boomer. My dad once told me that he paid for college by working a summer job. Then he took out a student loan and invested it. I couldn’t believe it. That just seems absolutely crazy to me!
My husband (a Gen Xer) and I were able to buy a house and start a family so I feel extremely fortunate. I know many young people can’t do that.
Good luck to you and your family! Hang in there!
Today was supposed to be my first work-from-home day, but I can’t get logged in to the VPN for some reason.
I’ll probably go in for half a day today because there’s going to be a telecon that I don’t want to miss.
OTOH, I’m not very busy at work right now, so maybe I’ll just sit it out for a couple of weeks to make sure that I don’t have any germs to spread around. I’m fortunate to have both paid vacation and sick leave, and I have tons of both accrued.
I’m still responsible for teaching all my college classes online, and I’m working harder than ever.
I am fortunate in that I was pretty much completely set up for WFH, with a standing telecommuting agreement and employer-issued laptop (I work for a large university IT department). My wife, OTOH, works for a school lunch contractor, and has been out of work, and without pay, since the 13th. Still, I went to Costco and bought a sitting/standing adjustable desk, then went to my office (under strict safety procedures) to get one of my monitors and the docking station. I’ve been WFH quite well all last week, and on vacation this week. This was supposed to have been a vacation for one last fun event for a relative suffering stage IV pancreatic cancer. Now it’s likely he won’t even outlive this pandemic. Sometimes life deals you a shitty hand, so play your cards while you can.
GenX here; started college right as many colleges switched over from being tuition-free or nearly free (for the Boomers) to charging high tuition. All the Boomers were hogging the fast food/lifeguard/babysitting jobs when my gen was in high school so those of us who found part-time work, got the crap jobs NOBODY wanted. Got through college by working as many as 3 part-time jobs at once, worked 2 fulltime Mcjobs all summers. Graduated into St. Ronnie Raygun’s Great Recession, in line behind the Boomers who made fun of us for being “slackers” for working McJobs (because those were the only things open to us) with degrees in Computer Science. Had to listen to Boomers chortling over how they spent their summers backpacking barefoot through India, or, like, goin’ to WOODSTOCK, man…
As a generation, GenX lagged all along in income, and as soon as we got to middle-management age, the senior-leader Boomers hired their kids, the Millenials, and demanded we GenX train them…to be promoted over us. Nothing is too good for the children of the Boomers!
Now that we’re within a decade of collecting Social Security, now they’re talking about how it will be bankrupt by the Boomers when it’s our turn to collect.
When conservatives wax orgasmic about how good things were “in the good old days”, mostly they mean the period just past WWII until the late 1960s/early 1970s.