Day 8 working from home

It's 2020. A lot has changed since I started this blog. I left it and really, it took me almost a whole morning to figure out how to log in again. Emails changed, links changed, I've changed. I know I have a handful of people who 'follow' me on this. I have no idea if you are notified via email, blogger, Facebook or what. I'm not even sure how you would unsubscribe. Apparently I was subscribed to a bunch but either they don't update anymore or I use a different email address. So maybe they won't be bothered.

I'm not here to write about what happened in 2013 or 2015 or even really 2019, although that definitely will come into play if I continue. I'm here to write about what is going on now. For me. For me to remember. For me to stay sane.

Today, I'm working from home. Although I'm doing way more than that. I've been cleaning, disinfecting, organizing, making dinners, making desserts, making things from scratch. I've even thought about making sourdough starter from scratch. I'm kinda crafty like that. BUT I haven't.

Why?

Possibly hope that this isn't going to require me to make sourdough starter and then live off it. I'm not a big bread eater and neither is Bryce or Patrick, so we won't need a ton BUT bread isn't easy to find a the grocery store right now. And I have 3/4 a loaf of white bread, 8 hamburger rolls, one refrigerated package of crescent rolls, one of refrigerated biscuits and two refrigerated french bread. BUT, it takes 5 days to make sour dough starter. Am I being smart about this? Do I have enough? I'm sure I have more than some. I counted my toilet paper rolls last night. 21 rolls. We've already used 2 in the last week. So, if this continues, we will be out in about 10 weeks. That should definitely be enough. Hopefully.

I should back up so I remember. I'm not sure of the exact date but in early March, Covid-19 was starting to show up in the US and become noticed on the news and in our government. Now, I'm a bariatric patient(possibly more on that in another post) and I've done pretty well with it. I've been within about 10 lbs of my lowest weight but really what this is about is my vitamins. I take a ton, still. Almost 3 years out. 6 chew able Calciums, 2 chew able children's multivitamins, 3 chew able glucosamine, 2 chew able vitamin c, one Vitamin D and one Monday's a Vitamin B12. I just added some biotin and something else too but those aren't part of the program. So, I was out of my Calcium Chews and close to the end of my multivitamins and thought, hey I should go grab a couple. This thing in the world is ramping up and I need it anyway, I'll grab two just to be safe. So off I went to my local Walgreens.

They had none.

What? This isn't possible. This Corona thing isn't even here, no one's really worried that I've been near. Why are they out? I'll just try CVS. Off to CVS.

They had one tiny package of chew able multivitamins. I usually buy the package of 120, this had 30 in it. I bought it.

I called Patrick. Now I was in a panic, what is going on? Why can't I find these items? He suggested I head over to WalMart and look there. He went off to another CVS on his way home.

I bought all Walmart had. And before you judge, it really wasn't much. They were out of Vitamin C and LOADS of other vitamins. So I ended up only buying 3 packages of chew able multivitamins and 3 containers of calcium. Patrick found a few others on his way home. But the supply will only last me about 10 weeks. - Wait, that's how much toilet paper I have left.... oh no....

So once I realized about the vitamins, it freaked me out. Really. I won't lie. That got me really worried. Now that I remember, my hunt for vitamins was on a Wednesday. I told Patrick that on Friday, we were going food shopping. They had already started closing schools down and with Bryce home alone, he could either eat everything or nothing. We needed to make sure there was something in the house for him to eat.

People were already talking about the stores being low or completely out of toilet paper (I had bought one at Walgreens without even knowing this information) and we get a meal delivery service so we don't really have a lot of food in the house. Thanks to EveryPlate and HelloFresh for making my life easier, although I was asked to suspend that yesterday so I'm back to preparing like a whole bunch of other people... When Patrick got home on Friday, there was more talk but still nothing too crazy. People talking about going shopping, stocking up, needing hand sanitizer. We went to our local Shaw's and dropped $330 on groceries. And then on Saturday morning, Patrick was in line at Shaw's to buy two packages of toilet paper (cause they were out the night before).

When they called the schools off, my thoughts and feelings about this went haywire. I was safe, Bryce was safe, Patrick was safe but Caleb... Two thousand, five hundred miles away from me.

AND HE CANNOT COME HOME.

Having a child in the armed forces is bittersweet. So proud but worried about 99.2% of the time. When my thoughts came to Caleb, I remembered something he had said to me in January. "Mom, this virus... please be safe. Wash your hands. Tell Dad. Tell Bryce. Stay clean." In January, I said thank you and moved on to something else. I didn't give it another thought, until sometime in March when his words came flooding back. He's not really in a position to 'know' something but did he? Was it intuition? Something they told him? I don't want to know.

Work. Thankfully we are cloud based for about 90% of the business. Well that's my guess-timate. I don't really know. But my percentage of what I have to do can be done online for about 90%. My co-worker, the Office Manager, still goes in. She's doing the 10% I can't do, plus her stuff. BUT I'm working. I'm doing the best to pull whatever weight I can from here. And, I'm cleaning. You know, all the stuff everyone else is doing here right now. They gave us the option on March 16th if we wanted to work from home, we could. I chose working from home.

After a LOT Of internal debate. I didn't make the final decision until about 1/2 hour before leaving.

While my anxiety about this was high, I'm a worker. I LOVE being busy. I have two jobs plus I volunteer for my local Boy Scout Troop, I'm taking online Real Estate Agent classes and I've got a great group of friends. I stay busy. In early March, I can remember telling someone that my first day off was going to be April 5th. But I wasn't complaining. I'm a worker. Actually what I really love to do, is teach crafting. And my second job at the Nailed it Studio really helps me with that. I can work 8 hours at the Monday-Friday job and go home miserable (it's just not what I really want to do) and then I can go on a Friday night, after working the M-F, and head to the studio to teach and it flies by. I LOVE it. But, it just doesn't pay the bills. So I do it for my own sanity. That job.... well, I'm hoping it will be there when this is over. So when I say, I had some internal debate. I did. I want to work. I'm not a I'll-stay-home-and-watch-tv type of person. Although, I am loving this working from home thing. I think it's the freedom. I'm going to have to explore this some more....

I've been out of the house 2 times since staying home from work. Once we went to Crochetti's, a local butcher, for some chicken and steak tips. And the other time to meet someone in the parking lot because I found about 100 yards of elastic string. They've been looking for elastic for safety masks and I had some. Not exactly what they were looking for but someone said they could work with it. So I bundled that up, the fabric I had and any 1/4-3/8" ribbon in the old store stash and met this Scout mom to pass off the supplies. I know they will go to a good use.

It's the best I can do right now.

Keep my son home and schooled (I didn't even mention having to learn logarithms to help him with his pre-cal homework). Keep my work up and do what I can there. Keep my house cleaned and my family fed. Patrick is considered essential, so he's at work. But they are changing that too. This is going to be a huge financial burden on us soon if things keep up. He's a flat rate auto technician. And if people aren't leaving and don't need work on their cars, he won't have any work to come into the shop to do. If he doesn't work on a car, he gets paid absolutely nothing. Flat rate means, he gets paid on the work he does. If an oil change charges 1 hour to do and he can do it in 30 minutes, he still gets paid the 1 hour BUT if a tie rod end charges 3 hours to do it and it takes him 5, he worked 2 hours for free. Regardless, if no cars come in, he makes nothing. He's not paid hourly. So this could change everything about our life as we know it. Oh, and the shop is now only open until 1. So, he's walking in now and it's 2:16, about 3 to 3.5 hours early.

I guess I should help him disinfect. It appears he's taken a customers car home. Who knows what they have.... these are the times.