The grass in green, the trees are budding, the sun is shining and life keep chugging along. Our Governor extended the “stay home” order until May 18th, but I feel that the natives are getting restless. There are so many people out at stores and I’ve even see traffic change over the last couple of weeks, it’s as if people are saying “okay, enough now” with their actions. Lots of people wearing masks in stores, but the toilet paper is back in stock! Yay! Unfortunately now, ziplock bags have taken a hit and it always seems I’m late to the game and in need of whatever the rest of the world decided to stock up on, so I had to settle for my “not favorite” brand of ziplock bags. (First world problems, I KNOW.) After reaching a low of $1.34/gallon, it seems as if gas prices are rebounding, up as high as $1.79/gallon (seems weird to think that that is “high”!) in some places! Our farmers, especially pig farmers, are in a bind. Many processing plants have had COVID outbreaks and had
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Well, here we are. Going on our 4th week of “stay at home”, still without our internet upgrade, which means you can often hear one of several people in our hone yelling out “WIFI PLEASE!!!”, which translates loosely to “for the love of all that is good and holy SHUT YOUR WIFI OFF!!”. I still find myself heading to the store more than ever and feel like we are single handedly keeping dairy farmers in business with our milk consumption. Yesterday we learned of the first confirmed case of coronavirus in our county, “confirmed” being the key word as I’m sure there have been many unconfirmed cases up to this point. Last Thursday came the order at work that masking for ALL employees is now mandatory, unless you are in an office by yourself, which, praise be to God, I am because wearing a mask makes me feel short of breath and these days that feeling is a doomsday sentence. Minnesota has not yet hit “peak”, which I’ve heard is projected to now not be until around July 4th because we M
We’ve now been on “quarantine” for 2 weeks and 3 days with a new extension until May 4th. I have a high school senior who is taking this like a champ while she watches event after event get cancelled or postponed. In the big picture, senior events don’t measure up to protecting people’s lives but in the life of a senior, these missed milestones are momentous and sad. All the kids have adapted well to “distance learning” with the biggest gripe being our snail-paced internet service. For posterity’s sake, I’ll document it here (I’m sure someday we’ll be shocked we even survived with this speed of internet): our internet through CenturyLink provides speeds of “up to 1.5Mbps”, a recent speed test during typical usage showed our speed to be at 0.6ish Mbps. Kinda tough to support 4 kids learning at home on those speeds, but we’re making do! We’ve also recently learned (and upgraded) that we are eligible now for speeds up to 10 Mbps, however our install is indefinitely delayed because
Long ago, I started this blog as a place to document life with 5 kids. To keep track of memories and events and funny kid antics and...just, life. I discovered that my brain processed life through words and I found so much joy in documenting the happenings of our life. I’ve been off social media for lent, but when the coronavirus started to disrupt daily life, I began snapping pictures to make a “Pandemic” memory book someday. Just today it crossed my mind to start to journal this historic time on this dusty old blog of mine. So here we go...a bit of a late start, but better late than never, right? Ellie and I traveled to Jamaica in January for a girls trip and there were murmurings about a virus in China...but China is a half a world away so these murmurings were nothing more than a blip on my radar. Shortly after returning from Jamaica, the news started to ramp up a little, and I’ll be totally honest, I didn’t pay any attention to any of it. We traveled as a family to Florida