Quarantine - April 7, 2020

This post is going to be longer and more boring than usual because I have nothing better to do.  ;)

Today it has been a full week since I have gone to work.

Last Tuesday, I got up, showered and dressed for work, and was ready to walk out the door when my son came home from working a double shift and announced that he was feeling feverish.  I panicked, afraid that he had come down with the coronavirus.  He took his temperature:  98.6.  Because he was exhausted, he showered and went straight to bed.  I called my boss and told her what was up.  She told me not to come to the office.

A couple of hours later, my son took his temperature again:  99.something, and a couple of hours later, it was 100.something.  He said his throat was sore, and his ears ached.  He had a cough, but it was not a dry cough.  A while later, he blew his nose, and - well, I'll spare you the description, but it looked like he might have a sinus infection.  He did a video consultation with his doctor, who opined that it probably was a sinus infection and prescribed antibiotics.  By the next day, his fever was gone.  I called my boss that night and told her I would be at work the next day.

Wednesday, when the boss came in, she sat far away from me as we talked about what we needed to do.  Since she is a judge, and since the courts are closed for everything but emergencies, we have very little work to do at present.  We are both afraid of the coronavirus and have been limiting our exposure to other people.  However, we both live with sons who work in facilities that employ hundreds (thousands, in my son's case) of other people.  We decided that we should take turns going to the office every few days to return calls, open mail, etc., so as not to expose one another to whatever our sons might bring home.  Since I live 15 miles from the office and she lives only 2 miles from it, she said that I should just stay home for the rest of the week, and she would drop by to check on things the next time she had to leave her house.

Since then, the governor has issued a stay-at-home order, and people are not supposed to be out in public except for essential errands.

I have been doing my grocery shopping online for several months.  Lately, the wait time for pickup has sky-rocketed.  I ordered groceries last Wednesday evening, and my earliest pickup time was Sunday afternoon.  So Sunday afternoon, I went to the supermarket to pick up my order, and when I got there, they said they had no record of an order for me.  I checked my email on my telephone, and could not find an order confirmation, so I left the supermarket, intending to pick up a few necessities at a locally-owned grocery store that is not usually very crowded.  When I pulled into that parking lot, it was crawling with traffic.  No, thank-you.  I drove to a Dollar General store that is not far from my house and managed to pick up enough stuff to see us through the next few days.  When I came home, I checked the supermarket order that I thought I'd made, and discovered that my cart was still full.  I added a few things to it, and finished the check-out process; it would be Wednesday, April 8, before I could pick up my order.  Fortunately, we had enough food in the house to keep from starving until Wednesday, but I only have enough half & half left for one more cup of coffee, so things are about to get real around here.

In the days between my last trip to work and today, I have been making masks.  My sister-in-law is a nurse in the cardiac ICU at a hospital.  Two weeks ago when I asked her if her hospital needed masks, she didn't seem too concerned, but said it wouldn't hurt to have a few re-usable masks, just in case.  I made her about a dozen masks before I ran out of elastic.  A few days ago, she said the hospital's mask supply was getting low and asked me to make a dozen more, with ties instead of elastic.  A day later, the coronavirus experts were recommending that everyone wear masks out in public, and The Husband asked me to make masks for him and his 28 co-workers.  So I got crackin'.  Sewed all day Friday, Saturday, and Sunday.  Making the ties slows the process, but I figured out a fairly quick way to make them using a 1/2" strip of fabric with a 1/4" bias tape maker.  I'm still a few masks short of The Husband's requested 28 masks - ran out of ties - but I took the day off from sewing yesterday to give my neck and shoulders a rest.  I plan to finish my quota today.

When my son goes back to work on Thursday I will have the house to myself during working hours, and I plan to resume work on a book I am trying to write.  This book is based on a real story, something that happened in my father's family prior to the Civil War, the details of which I stumbled across as I was doing genealogy research.  These people moved from South Carolina to Alabama before 1820, before Alabama became a state.  Tribes of Creeks and Cherokees still had territories in the surrounding areas.  Our family was working class - blacksmiths and sharecroppers - moving with wealthier families to help them start new cotton plantations.  Mary, the "heroine" of the story, was just a child when her family moved to Alabama.  She never married, but gave birth to four illegitimate children by at least two different fathers, one of whom deeded property to Mary and their two children prior to his death.  When he died, Mary had to file a lawsuit against the man's one legitimate child in order to gain the property deeded to her children.  The case went on for years - went all the way to the Alabama Supreme Court and for years afterward - with many twists in the tale brought on both by human subterfuge and by the onset of the Civil War.

I'll let you read it when I'm done.  ;)