30 Days In

One month ago, on Monday, March 16, 2020, six counties in the Bay Area, covering 6.7 million people in the cities of San Jose, San Francisco, Oakland, Berkeley, San Mateo, etc., jointly issued the nation's first official "Shelter-in-Place" order dealing with the Coronavirus/COVID-19 pandemic, to be effective through April 7 (unless "extended, rescinded, superseded, or amended in writing by the Health Officer").

A few hours later Santa Cruz county joined the Bay Area group, and by mid-week Governor Newsom laid down the law for all of California. Within two weeks from that, nearly every state was under some sort of official restrictions. Currently, the order is through May 3, but likely to be extended at least a few more weeks before restrictions start easing up.

Frankly, we knew this was coming, and we (my wife and I) were pretty well prepared to shelter in place starting with the weekend. Still, we went out Saturday night to see my wife's cousin who was passing through town. We were the only customers in the restaurant for much of the meal, but got great service and lots of attention from the staff. A "good" but eerie experience.

Then on Sunday we considered cancelling our plans, but went out because how often does a friend have a 90th birthday party? Hard to imagine at the time that it would be our last "social event" for (perhaps) several months. That was in San Francisco, and coming back down an empty Van Ness Avenue felt like a scene from the Omega Man.

On that Monday, one month ago, we were already hiding out when the official order came. Since then we've only been out for occasional trips to a market, and for near daily walks. We have bandanas we wear around our faces as masks on walks, and a limited supply of disposable medical masks for the market.

By the third day, I'd started doing a daily "Quarantine Hootenanny," quickly recording and posting to Facebook a song on guitar or ukulele. A couple of days into that, I started posting the daily songs to YouTube, and cleaned up my channel that I'd been neglecting for several year. In these thirty days I've already posted 28 Quarantunes and four old-stlye vlogs.

Other original vloggers from way back in 2006 also came back and started posting at about the same time, and for the same sheltering-in-place reasons, and it's been something of a fun reunion.

Other activities: board games (Scrabble, Monopoly), puzzles, cooking, eating, washing dishes...

Work-wise, there's not much. A board I'm on, to start up a new nonprofit in Santa Cruz, has moved our meetings online, and changed from weekly to semi-weekly, as things have slowed to an uncertain crawl in our launch plans. But enrollments in my on-line course have surged, as people with time on their hands are looking for something to do.

Perhaps I'll do a separate blog about the political aspects of this, and how perilously close this country is to completely abandoning any pretense of democracy and accepting a Trump dictatorship, but my point here is just to document my personal journey of trying to remain sane and keep our spirits up.