There’s something about Sunday nights, especially now with all the quarantining and home schooling and so on. I’ve always been annoyed with myself because I have a hard time enjoying Sundays because they really always feel more like pre-Mondays to me. I’m wasting half the weekend dreading the coming week.

Ian and his much-beloved new rainbow sheets.

Anyway, all that to say, my week-in-review is again coming during the following week. Last week was kind of a doozy. It started off innocently enough on Monday. Ian proudly made crowns for both himself and Maya from an activity in one of his High Five magazines. “I made coronas,” he said, because corona means crown in Latin. Both the kids seemed proud of their coronas.

The kids and their “coronas”

Wednesday was a shit show. Sean wound up having meetings all day, so it was nearly impossible for me to make any progress at work. There were repair folks here in the morning working on our AC (yes, in Texas, that constitutes an essential repair). When it was time to pay up, the guy left his clipboard on the truck along with a pen and a pair of disposable gloves and walked away. I put on the gloves, signed the paperwork, and read my credit card information to him from several paces away.

That same morning, Nox the cat started vomiting. First it was just pile after pile of clear spittle barf. Then it turned bloody. Given the situation, we hesitated to take her to the vet right away. We were hoping it was just irritation from repeated vomiting, and so we decided to wait and see. After it happened twice more, I scheduled her visit for that afternoon.

She is super-thrilled to be at the vet’s office

In the vet’s office, I did my best to touch as little as possible. I didn’t sit down on the furniture. I kept my hands clasped in front of me so I wouldn’t touch my face. (I am sooo bad at not touching my face; seriously, I am one giant fidget.) I tried to stay back from people as much as I could, but it just wasn’t possible. The vet wanted to show me the x-rays (which were thankfully clear). I needed to pass the cat back and forth to the veterinary staff. I had to hand my credit card to the person behind the desk. After getting out to the car but before loading up, I swabbed down with hand sanitizer as best I could.

Nox has been doing great. They gave her a steroid and some medicine to suppress her urge to vomit. She’s back to eating and drinking and playing. She regularly sits in the kitchen, stalking birds through the windows, making a chattering/chuffing kind of noise. The kids think she’s hilarious.

The meow wolf and the cat-o-pus are playing chess

Sean has decided to teach the kids how to play chess. Individually though, because otherwise, they’ll just fight. By all indications, the kids are enjoying their lessons so far. I keep finding the chess board set up and various stuffed animals sitting around it getting ready to play.

Groceries have been … confusing. But attainable! We have a curbside pickup scheduled with our local HEB grocery store for April 11th. I spent some time Friday putting together a theoretical list so we could put in another pickup order for April 18th. Pickup schedules had been so full that we were trying as hard as we could to schedule them well in advance. Shortly after I put my list together, Sean noticed that they had just opened up a bunch of pickup times for the very next day. So, I quickly assembled a tide-us-over list to cover some of our fresh food requirements until we could get our pickup on the 11th.

Sean didn’t like his picture with the makeshift mask

By this point, the CDC had finally bitten the bullet and recommended wearing a mask. Save the N95 masks for the healthcare workers, but for the love of Pete, cover your face when you can’t maintain social distancing standards. Sean had two options for his curbside pickup: 1 – use an old N95 rated mask that he had purchased years ago (I think) to snake some oogy pipes or 2 – wear one of my old bandanas which could be fashioned into a mask with the help of a couple of pony-tail holders. I joked that he could choose between looking like Darth Vader or Jessie James. He chose the latter.

Had we not ordered beer, he probably wouldn’t have needed the mask at all. He pulled into a parking spot, texted the number for his parking spot to let them know he’d arrived, and they brought the stuff out and loaded it into our trunk. He had to sign to verify he was over 21 since we had added beer to our order. Otherwise, it would have been a completely touch-less handoff.

We were issued one notice from our school district this past week (I think) that schools would stay closed till May 4th. And then we were issued another notice that said they would be closed “indefinitely.” It’s still up for debate how they plan to handle grades for the remainder of the school year.

Things continue to look grim. Adam Schlesinger died from COVID-19. He was in a band (Fountains of Wayne) that was part of my 90s teenage years, but only tangentially. John Prine has been hospitalized with COVID-19 complications. This one hits much harder. He’s inextricably part of growing up for me, between Dad’s records and Mom’s singing. His funny and sad songs have always hit me just so. Plus, he always reminds me of my mom.

As of screen captures I took on Sunday night, Travis county had 484 reported cases (6 deaths). Texas had 7231 cases (138 deaths). And the United States had 336,958 cases and 9,626 deaths. I keep thinking it might be smarter to stop looking at the numbers so closely. Stories of overrun hospitals compete with stories of better and faster testing becoming available. There are so many places trying to get ventilators manufactured to meet this new overwhelming demand.

In the mean time, the economy is a wreck. New jobless claims were 6.6 million this past week. The week before they were around 3.3 million. The previous record had been in the 600k range. Around 10 million new jobless claims in two weeks and the news reports indicate that people are still having a hard time getting through overtaxed systems to make their claims, so those numbers seem likely to continue increasing.

Finding “Stephanie’s chicken”

There’s a lady who lives in our neighborhood that I used to work with. She and her husband live just around the corner from us, essentially. She has started leaving this ornamental chicken sculpture in various places in her yard so the kids can try and find it when they walk past. The kids LOVE IT. We’ve been by twice now and they’ve been happy to locate “Stephanie’s chicken” whenever they walk by.

The wren babies in the birdhouse in the backyard seem to be growing up. We now see their beaks poking out trying to grab at the worms and bugs their parents bring them nearly non-stop throughout the day. Sean has placed a large, thin corrugated cardboard box beneath the birdhouse just to soften the blow in case some of the babies have trouble with their flying lessons, once those happen. That concrete would make for a rough landing.