So two Fridays ago we were having a professional development day at my high school, and emails about the corona virus kept showing up in our inboxes, eventually ending with the big one that our spring break was going to be extended. I had planned on using the Walmart grocery pickup app to pick up a few items on Sat, as I was feeling lazy and didn’t want to hit the grocery store that day but seeing that email changed my mind.
I had made my big run of food items about a few weeks ago, and at that time there was hardly anyone in my local Walmart when I purchased food. One of my new year’s resolutions was to be more frugal and focus more on meal prepping, so I bought staples of what I needed to make some meals stretch out for a few days. So far that has been going well—I can make some gnarly rice dishes now. My favorite is salmon, rice, egg, and avocado drizzled in soy sauce (will do a recipe post another time).
My husband made a run for meats a few days after me and noticed the toilet paper all gone.
All of this nudged me in the direction to do my last-minute grocery shopping last Friday. I picked up some cat food and litter (the aisle was almost bare) and bought a few more staples to last us longer. The cereal aisle was filled with boxes, most of the food was still there, and I actually saw toilet paper in the wild, stuck behind some canned green beans.
There were soooo many people there, and by the time my husband went back on Sat (because he neglected to tell me we were out of dog food), in that same store all the aisles were almost empty.
My husband has already started to get calls and emails to his contracting business to see if he would be interested in taking contracts to help stock shelves at stores during the night.
Everyone seems to be hunkering down for the moment—even all the gardening seeds were gone by the time he left. It will be interesting to see how the next few weeks develop, and if we will be even more impacted by the spread of the virus.
You never know what will happen, so we wait and see.
We are also practicing social distancing, and only getting out sparingly. My husband has a weaker immune system (every time he gets the flue it rolls into pneumonia a lot of times), so we have been limiting how many places we go to.
But social distancing can slow down the spread of things. I found this great article here demonstrating how social distancing is supposed to work (it’s got cool visuals).
Currently my husband is doing maintenance on all of our vehicles in his free time. Last week the project that took the longest was replacing the heater core in one of our farm trucks. He had to take the dashboard apart to get to it:
I am mostly writing and working on school stuff. I am working on getting lecture recordings done for my classes that have already decided to go online. We do have some house projects coming up, and I’ve also been experimenting with cooking (more cooking stories coming soon). Overall, we are are enjoying the time off and keeping busy.
I did however, watch Outbreak on Netflix and got a little freaked out. While I am a little worried, I am prepared to ride this out and make the best out of the outcome. Tough times don’t last–perseverance does. My heart and prayers go out to those on the frontlines dealing with the virus. My plight seems trivial compared to theirs.
How has the corona virus impacted you?