I’ve been practicing for this moment my whole life and am ready for it. Finally, an excuse to stay home! My yard is going to look so good this summer–I vow to pull every last weed.
Seriously, though, this is ruining more than a few things (besides the obvious).
First, the shelter is now closed to the public (though it is open by appointment). Given the pandemic and the subsequent economic fallout, who knows what will happen with all of those animals? Hopefully those who are able will step up and help out. People can still volunteer there, but you have to contact them ahead of time to make sure there will be a staff member there. So, I’m probably going to cut my volunteering back to one day a week (the pack walk) for as long as we’re all still allowed to leave the house. While that does involve other people, we’re outside for the most part, so I’m not too worried about it. I almost brought the pending pandemic up at the last board meeting, but (generally speaking) whenever I brought up the topic to others in the past, people looked at me like I had three eyes. Who has three eyes now, huh?
Everything at work had been going great the past few months. Things really picked up at the end of last year and haven’t let up since. We’re still busy at the moment, but I wonder how long it will last in this climate. The governor made a request for non-essential businesses to close their doors to the public this week, so we asked all of our employees to work from their homes starting on Tuesday. Brian’s still going into the office. Jake and I will as well, but we’re both going to work from home on occasion, too. There are some things I cannot accomplish from the house (like paying bills, doing the banking, etc.).
Jake had some big changes as well. He was on spring break when this first hit the state just a week or so ago. Pitt extended spring break by a week so he’s off this week, too. Next week, classes resume and will be online for the rest of the semester. There are four weeks left plus finals week (I’m not sure how they’re going to administer the tests). It sounds like pretty much all schools are doing the online thing at this point. I only hope he will be able to return to school in the fall. It sounds like things are getting back to normal in China and that whole thing lasted about two months, but they were in a severe lockdown, the likes of which we won’t see here. They also did a lot more testing, which is important. They better ramp things up here soon.
The nice thing about Johnstown is that it’s pretty much recession proof as we’ve been in one for 30 years now. But is it depression proof? I guess we’ll find out soon enough.