March 29th Covid 19

So one more week.  It has been 21 days since I have been in a large crowd so I think that the worry of having been around a few hundred strangers over the course of a weekend has abated.   I don't personally know anyone that I know has contracted the virus but several friends and family of friends are fighting and a few have lost the battle.  I hear of people at various levels of fame who have it or in some cases survived it.  It still feels more like a stalker than something that is close to me. 

But I wanted to list some of the things I discovered over the last few days.

1.  When you haven't left the house since Wednesday and it rained all day Saturday, even a windy Sunday morning becomes a pleasure to be outside cleaning things. 

2.  Working on ZOOM from your home office will motivated you to clean things up and move a painting that may be, let's say distracting from behind you.  So we rehung a large painting in the stairway.  Now my background will be monkeys.

3.  When we bought the house and the kid moved out I thought this place would feel really big.  Guess what? 

4.  Time can be a real trickster.  Oh you got up at 7 a.m. to start your morning....whoops it is 10:30 and you haven't even brushed your teeth. 

5.  I have a whole different understanding of how people view toilet paper.  (enough with the photos).

6.  Some people are leaning on comfort food, today I found some comfort music.  Is that a thing?

7.  While social media can be a fever swamp and I do contribute to the negativity, at times, it can also be a place where we find fun in reliving old memories, checking in with people, sharing important information (as some of us can't watch the news) and of course provide a distraction. 

8.  Many artist friends who make their living traveling to make music have found ways to share their talent with others through virtual concerts for free.  We should remember them in the future.   

9.  I realized that over the last several years I have become a home body and that was good training.  I am not sure when I might start to feel differently.   

So we are still weeks away from this being over enough to go back to a normal routine.  We have airline tickets to visit Dianne's sister in the middle of June.  I still have hope that we can do so.  In the mean time, stay home when you can, wash your hands often and remember, we can do this.  Together, through science and compassion, through information and love, and through patience and supportive action we will get through. 

My Covid-19 diary March 22, 2020

Things are not great.  I have tried to keep a positive attitude but watching the news makes it difficult.  I have been not consuming it as much I would normally in an election year.  It does keep me up at night sometimes, I feel tired a lot.  But I am carrying on.  I feel like I want to do something, not sure what that could be.

Unlike many people I have been going into my office.  We are isolated in the building, few staff and I keep mostly in my office.  I think I am ready to just work from home, but I am not sure how it will work.   I think I have talked on the phone more this week than any other.  I have to hand it to our maintenance staff for keeping the building clean.  They are amazing.  The place smells like a hospital at times and that is not a bad thing.   

But life is still life.  On Friday I needed something checked out on my furnace. so I had a service guy come over.  He didn't seem to take social distancing that seriously but I managed to make that happen.  Anyway it was weird, usually I like to watch them take apart the furnace to clean etc but I left him alone and sanitized the area when he was gone.  New normal.

Shopping has become a bit of an adventure.  Popped into Market District the other day and well, that was a mistake.  I did see a friend who owns a restaurant that really can't do take out tell me about his plight (from across two parking spaces).  He is worried about his staff, and trying to help.  Inside however people were acting weird.  While stock was in place in many areas, there were some things out.  Eggs were gone except for the organic kind that cost $4 a carton.  I didn't need eggs but thought it was interesting.  We did our main shopping for the week this a.m. at the local Kroger, we were looking for staples more than anything else.  I was struck by the people who came in in their pajamas and once gain just bought toilet paper.  I was also struck by the number of limits the stores are putting on things.  The only thing we were hoping to get we couldn't were latex gloves and maybe hand sanitizer.  We have some and I hate using it but have lately.  The one thing is how much the people at the store appreciate us for saying good morning, smiling.  I hear stories of people being mean to workers in the stores.  I hope I never see that. 

Work has me playing lots of Hebrew Aps to see what I can share with the students, becoming a Zoom master (or maybe a Padawan) and thinking about how we stay connected.  My synagogue is doing a great job moving programming online.  By tomorrow night we have done some kind of connection to every age group as well as a form of online Torah study, services and havdalah.  While many congregations around the country are doing the same thing I feel truly proud of the staff and clergy of my shul for stepping into this with vigor.  As we start to do Hebrew online this week I hope my teachers are as successful.  We continue to move into this new and somewhat uncharted territory. 

Shabbat was a good break from the world.  I came home mid-afternoon and got ready to have our Shabbat together.  We have talked in the past about inviting more people over for Shabbat but there are times I am required at services and then I don't think about it when we are free.  I started thinking when this is over we have to make more of an effort to share our table.

In recent years I have become a home body.  I don't like going to the movies, we do go out to eat and see friends but even that is not the norm anymore.  But now there is no option.  Over the course of this weekend we have spent a total of 45 minutes outside the house going shopping.  So among the things I have done is cook.  We bought a lot of protein when I was in St. Louis from the Kosher butcher but since we won't be doing a big Pesach we have dug into what we were saving in the freezer.  I can't remember everything I have cooked in the last week but for Friday night I roasted a duck, rendering the fat for later, then finished it with a spicy fig glaze.  With a big salad and roasted asparagus we had a good Shabbat dinner.  Since a duck is too much for one meal I took one of the half breasts and made a Duck Pot Pie for dinner on Saturday.  Dianne loves pot pies so this was a little more decadent than usual.  Today the back and bones and left over meat become a stock for a Duck Barley soup.  I also had some ground lamb so I made some duck ravioli to eat later in the week.  I think I will use my friend Aaron's hot sauce to make a spicy tomato sauce for it.  Oh yeah, that was another weird thing, cans of vegetables were plentiful at the store but most of the canned tomatoes were gone.  With Red-Gold being an Indiana company I truly thought there would be more on the shelf. 

The other thing that has hooked me in has been YouTube.  I have watched/listened to dozens of videos about Game of Thrones as well as videos about those videos.  I just turn them on and they are like the background noise when I need a distraction.  We also have checked into nature shows that we haven't seen from the BBC.  I saw an orangutan sawing branches, a wild one who found a saw.  it learned quickly and seemed to enjoy it. 

I have many friends who make a living traveling and making music.  They are stuck at home as well, I am happy they are going online to do music for an online audience.  I too want to add my voice so I am doing some storytelling online tomorrow night on my story page on Facebook.  I hope I can get it right. 

This is quite a situation and no one has a playbook for it.  But we can make it through.  My friend reminded of the Jewish phrase  Gam Ze Ya'avor this too shall pass.  When it does I hope that we will remember all those who kept our society moving and honor them in appropriately. 

Living the Nightmare

Four years ago, as Donald Trump started to secure the GOP nomination.  One of the things I said, and have said several times since, is that the nightmare of a Trump presidency is that in a crisis we can't trust the information coming from the executive branch of the government.  Since the start of the Covid-19 crisis we have seen the President saying things that are almost immediately debunked by scientists, sometimes at the same table or podium.  The President is calling the virus a hoax, or the reporting on the virus a hoax, or the numbers a hoax, but the message is out there and news agencies and individuals are saying that this is being over-hyped to hurt the President.  Executive branch officials are going on news programs and are saying they don't know basic information that can mitigate the spread of the virus and members of Congress were making fun of the virus, one of whom is now in self-quarantine. 

It is easy for us to lose our minds over this.  I think there are people over reacting to the spread of the virus and I think the fear may be a little over-blown.  However, this is when we need leadership and clear science-based information.  But it seems like the information is being run through the political shop of the party and not the public health community.  In fact the leadership seems to be clueless about the process of testing and tracking the virus.  Maybe because the numbers will look bad for the President.  A cruise ship with a number of staff testing positive was held off-shore because, as the President said, he didn't want the numbers of infections added to the national total because it wasn't his fault.  His fault?  Like he sees this as a mandate on his Presidency and since he can't control the spread he is trying to avoid the reporting of the facts.  This could be devastating.  He has already begun polluting the stream of information by calling the reporting of facts in the media all fake.   So we are now in a place where we can't trust the government information and the government is telling us not to trust the media. 

So I hope people will take simple precautions and think about how we move through life.   Hand-washing, avoiding shaking hands, and thinking about large gatherings are all good moves to mitigate spread.  Thinking about the how we interact with the elderly or those immuno-compromised could actually save lives.  But again the President fails us.  He is continuing his campaign rallies, which skew older and often have very close contact.  Yesterday he got off Air Force One and went right to a rope line and shook hands with strangers.  It would be helpful if he had used that as a teaching moment. 

Fear and confusion is dangerous.  It is also feeding the financial collapse that we are struggling with as well.  We need a President that looks at this with a level-headed vision, not worry about his political future, and let the science run the policy.  Too bad we don't have one.