Coronavirus April 1-2

Like everybody else, the pandemic is "top of mind" 24 x 7 for me. I'm writing to help myself not internalize all of it. You can find other posts in the series at https://odonnellweb.com/pelican/tag/coronavirus.html

I just realized that I never posted yesterdays’ update, and now it is late enough on April 2 that I’m just going to combine them. Think of it as a blog post doubleheader, in honor of what should have been Opening Day at Fenway Park

April 1

Finally, something good is coming from the virus. Corporate America has shelved all the various stupid April Fool’s Day things they typically do online. May this new trend stick around long after the virus is under control. As somebody said on Twitter, the programming time Google puts into April Fool’s Day things could have sustained Google Reader forever.

On Sunday we had some buzzing insects in the house, that we quickly identified as swarming termites. 2020 will just not let up. So today we had two different pest control companies in the house, plus our landlord. I sent Michelle out of the house and I wore my mask while they were here, wiping all the door handles, etc. down with bleach wipes after they left. We contained the swarming quickly on Sunday by spraying household insecticide around the drainpipe in the water heater closet where they were entering from. We haven’t seen anymore since, although it’s also been much cooler since Sunday so it may be a ground temp thing. Either way, it looks like we will have a pest control guy back in soon to drill a hole through the foundation in the water heater closet to pump chemicals into the ground under the foundation. Yay.

April 2

I made my weekly trip to the grocery store this morning. I decided to do Publix instead of Food Lion since I’ve had more luck finding meat at Publix lately. I learned today that my spreadsheet shopping list of the Publix store layout is not accurate. Either the Publix near me reorganized or two Publix stores within 5 miles (ca. 8 km) have different aisle layouts. There were 3 or 4 people in line for each of the two registers (everybody with full carts) so I did self-checkout. I’m pretty sure the lady that was in front of me in line before I bailed for self check out was home and had consumed everything in her cart before I got out of the store. I had to call for help about 4 times when the self-checkout machine froze because it thought I was stealing something. At least nobody touched anything in my cart except me, not that I’m actually that worried about catching the virus from an apple or box of Cheerios.

We did a homeschool blogger virtual meet up last night, where I finally got to interact face to face with several people that I have been online friends with since the early 2000s, so that was really fun. By homeschool blogger I mean people that were blogging regularly 15 years ago. Only real weirdos like me are still updating a blog regularly.

Adam Schlesinger, the lead singer of Fountains of Wayne, died due to Covid-19 on March 31. Not sure how I missed that news, as the last update I had seen was his girlfriend saying he was stable, and they were cautiously optimistic. I’ve been playing Fountains of Wayne all day in the office. He also wrote “That Thing You Do” for the Tom Hanks movie, and a bunch of other stuff you probably recognize. He was an amazing talent, and apparently one hell of a nice guy too. The world is a worse place today without him in it. He was 52, the same age as me, which I’m not thinking about at all.