Excellent!
I’m personally safe and fine thus far - didn’t lose job, haven’t gotten the virus, family is doing OK, etc. But my relationship with my girlfriend (who lives 1,000 miles away) is getting pretty strained. She does not want to go a long time with physical separation, and has hinted the relationship may end because of that, even despite the fact that the virus is only getting steadily more severe nationwide.
Today my father has come down with COVID-like symptoms. He’s irritated that I won’t bring my kids to visit. His Fox-addled brain cannot seem to pull out of talking-points mode. i.e. “If this is the virus, then it’s no big deal” (on day 1 of symptoms) and “can’t you exercise personal choice or risk tolerance?” and my favorite, “people die all the time, that’s just life (talking about his own 70-year-old life possibly ending)”
I’m worried he’s going to die and infect my mother and others that he interacts with. Yet if it turns out to be minor or nothing, I know he’s going to go around telling everybody not to worry about COVID because he beat it with elbow grease and apple cider vinegar. sigh
It’s really sad what’s happening with people nowadays.
New one:
Mr.Wrekker is going to Georgia to work for 3 mos. or so.
I’m fine: lots of moolah going in the bank.
I’m effed:
Georgia is full of COVID, assholes who won’t wear a mask and a little too close to Florida for comfort.
The man’s gotta come home some day. Gah!!?!
Who knows what will be going on three months from now, but maybe consider him going through a 2 week quarantine at home before you interact.
We will take all appropriate precautions.
To be on the safe side, you should take inappropriate precautions as well. Eye wash stations, condoms, ear muffs, the works.
Compared to a lot of people, I feel very lucky. Both my partner and I are able to work from home, I am still on full pay (and pretty busy) so we have no financial worries at the moment. He’s a contractor so always at risk of being out of work very suddenly, again he is lucky to still be working. We have enough room in the house that we can have our own space for work and still spend some time together in the evening.
My mother passed away in January so we were able to give her the kind of funeral she would have been happy with, I managed to clear her flat out before the lockdown started so all of that is out of the way, her solicitor is dealing with the estate affairs so I have nothing to do but wait for him to finalise everything. I have lost some very dear friends in the last 6-8 months which has been hard to deal with, harder because we can’t be together to mourn their passing and celebrate their lives.
My biggest passion is live music, it has been hard to see all the gigs (small and large) disappear from my calendar. Some have rescheduled, some can’t for a variety of reasons. I feel strangely bereft over this and the loss of two planned holidays. A trip to visit friends in Eastern Europe is tantalisingly close but at the moment quarantine restrictions means we have to spend 14 days in isolation on entering their country, but not on returning to ours, so that trip currently hangs in the balance.
All things considered, I am doing fine and my friends/family are all ok. In a way, we are all mourning the life we should have had this year, the things we should have done, and the milestones we should have reached. Whilst I am deeply grateful for good health and employment, I still feel as if I am grieving for everything else.
Hubby and I have home offices, even before we were told to work from home. So we have jobs, with income and live in a relatively small town, so we’re able to go for walks and not have a lot of contact with others.
Our families are on the other side of the Atlantic ocean. Not sure when it will make sense to see them again. Theoretically we could go now, but there’s quarantine on both ends of the trip, and lots of potential risk. So we’ll stay where we are and keep doing what we’ve been doing.
So our dearest are safe, but far away.
Thanks again for the reports!
First world Covid problem: a few days ago I made one of my 3-4 times/year pilgrimages to Costco, on the other side of the island (a 2-hour drive each way). I spent $600, some of it on non-perishables but much of it on meat, cheese, and frozen fruits and vegetables, so my upright freezer was packed. We had a couple of moderate earthquakes shortly after I got back but I didn’t think anything of it.
I don’t know if the quakes caused it, but the timing, in terms of thaw levels, seems about right…my freezer (only 18 months old!) died on me, leaving me with a huge, dripping mess. I had frozen blueberries on the top shelf that melted and leaked juice; now the freezer looks like I killed someone in it.
Anyway, I managed to save the food (it was still quite cold, just not frozen) although I’m sure there will be some loss of quality from the thawing and refreezing, by totally stuffing my fridge freezer and my boyfriend’s fridge freezer.
But, the repair company is closed for a week so I can’t even make an appointment for a technician to take a look yet. I sure hope that once they come, the part the freezer needs, if any, to repair it is available on island. If not, I’m possibly looking at months until it arrives.
And of course, there are NO freezers available to purchase on the entire island. When Covid hit, every appliance store on island was bought out. The nice lady at Home Depot who helped me find the repair company told me that their next shipment is due in September and the way things are going they will be sold out immediately.
Such is life in paradise. On the very important plus side, our infection rates are among the lowest in the country (particularly on my island - Oahu has the bulk of the state’s cases.) Also, thanks to the “spirit of aloha” people are fantastic about wearing masks. On the less important but still annoying minus side, we’re going to have to do without progressively more of the stuff that gets shipped in. It’s back to basics for us.
On the plus side, I’ll live to see the fuckface in the White House end up on the trash heap of history. On the minus side, the fuckface in the Kremlin will likely still be in office when I croak.
Well, through March, April and May my family didn’t leave our 1150 sq ft apartment (except for my supply runs like something out of some post-apocalyptic video game). That kind of sucked, but at least we were both working.
Then in May my company laid a ton of us off due to the impact on COVID-19 on the business (which had sort of just tenuously rebounded from a merger last year). So now I have to hunt for a new job, which I hate doing.
My wife kind of ended up fucking herself by taking the kids to her parents house in the country. It makes sense because they have room to play out there and a pool to swim in. But it also means cramming everyone into a small hoarder house with her mostly useless parents while she works from home all day.
I mostly spend my weekdays in our apartment by myself in Hoboken, NJ, job hunting during the day. Weekends I drive out to the country to hang out with the family.
We’re pretty good about wearing masks (can’t enter a store in NJ without one).
In the grand scheme of things, we mostly have “rich people problems”. But it still sucks though. I’m generally a man of simple needs. My last job was great. Good relationship with my management (who also got laid off). Basically as long as my projects ran smoothly (which they generally did), I pretty much made my own schedule and would just pop around the New York area visiting clients to make sure things are ok. Socially, I have a group of friends I would hang out with for drinks from time to time. Every now and then take the wife to a NY restaurant for a date night or maybe even the whole family. Weekends we usually take the kids to the various zoos, museums or the NY Botanical Garden. On occasions when I find myself home alone, there are a few NY / NJ bars where I’m a regular and can just pop in for a drink or just to hang out with random people. So right now, I’m still not comfortable doing any of that stuff.
I feel you, @Dunkelheit. My parents were going to be coming from the UK to Aus for my 50th, back in May - that didn’t happen, obviously. Then there was a plan that mum wants to pay for me and my brother (currently in Europe) to come over there … which would be great, and I’m totally up for it, but I’m not allowed except for a serious family emergency.
I’m holding out for a cracker of a 51st
Hey, mid-century fist bump and belated happy birthday! 
And a non-belated one to you!
Depending on the specifics, your stepchildren may be protected from aging out under the Child Status Protection Act. I am guessing you are a U.S. citizen, and you have filed I-130 petitions for your stepchildren?
Wife and I are trying to get to Georgia (Augusta) for the birth of #10 grandchild!! Postponed now (our trip, baby coming anyway) because my wife needed a biopsy due to pain in her breast (had surgery two years ago, small tumor, stage 1, slow growth). Waiting for results this week. We’re both getting up there and Georgia is a hot spot. Airlines are packing flights again (thanks American). What else sucks? I’m blood type A+, male, past heart condition (a-fib) but still in decent shape.
Things are up in the air but we’re not. Like Carol, we live in Hawaii, good climate, folks that care about others, masks on everywhere for the most part. We have ventured out for dinner a few times and I hit the golf courses so some normalcy. That stateside trip is daunting though.
Though I oft refer to her as my wife, Mrs Iggy and I are not yet married. (long story) And since the applications is an I129F, the 20 year old Iggyette is at risk of aging out.
I found, much to my surprise, that when the president issued one of his recent executive orders on immigration that largely halted arrivals on several work visa categories he included explicit language to protect dependents on those pending applications from aging out. So at least someone recognizes it is a possible problem. But it did not apply to non-immigrant I129F applications. Sigh.
So I sent my opinion to my Congressional Representative and Senators as well as the White House. More than an extreme long shot, but at least I tried.
The only other angle I have is that I do have a significant disability and may soon need spinal surgery that would require a significant recovery time. If the specialist confirms this then I might can apply to expedite the application so Mrs Iggy can be here to help with my recovery.
Another selfish pandemic experience for us.
The Son’s COVID test is negative!
He’s a warehouse supervisor at a prison, so it was quite worrisome that he had even a whisper of a need to be tested.
~VOW
Overall, I’m fine, with the potential to be more than fine. As horrible as this pandemic is, it’s also giving me some unique opportunities. My main concern right now is taking advantage of those opportunities.
I’ve been incredibly lucky so far. I feel for everyone in this thread going through horrible things right now.
March, April, and May were a crazy scramble, and my economic situation was looking pretty bleak for a while. I’m a tutor. Getting all of my students to go from seeing me in person to meeting online was hard; making sure they’d keep working with me online was even harder. All the SAT and ACT cancelations didn’t help. Neither did the horrible job many schools did with online coursework. For a while, I was making about 1/5 of what even my most pessimistic projections had led me to expect.
By some miracle, I’ve managed to bounce back. I got a PPP loan, which made up for some of the money I didn’t make in March through May. I lost a lot of students, but I gained others, and they’re making good progress. With a few more changes and some marketing, maybe I could just keep working online. Then I could go full digital nomad, working from anywhere. (Not that I’m planning to travel any time soon, but I assume we’ll be able to go places again at some point.)
I also got to join a weight loss group that I’d been interested in for several years. That group used to meet weekly in the city on a Tuesday, Wednesday, or Thursday night. I could never join, because I was always working in the suburbs in the evenings. I would have had to take a full day off each week just to be in this group. Now that the group is online, I could join. It’s been a great experience so far.
I’m slightly fucked in a few ways: 1) I can’t go to my dentist in Spain. She started some work on a problem that’s very expensive to fix in the US. I’m going to have to get the work done locally now. I’m dreading not only the work itself but the enormous cost of that work. 2) I’m single, and I don’t have any local friends. I’d like to have a social life, but I’m not sure how to make that happen until we have a vaccine. 3) Trump’s recent BS about student visas is probably going to make yet more families decide against college in the US. I still have some families who are expats living in the New York area, hoping their kids will go to American colleges. I have a feeling they’re going to change their minds about that soon.
But, really, those things are trivial in comparison to the opportunities to earn a decent living online and get my weight in check in a way that’s sustainable. If I do this right and keep staying on my lucky streak, I might have a much better life after the pandemic than I had before.