{"id":997,"date":"2020-04-12T20:52:18","date_gmt":"2020-04-13T00:52:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/nicolewillson.com\/blog\/?p=997"},"modified":"2020-04-12T21:06:42","modified_gmt":"2020-04-13T01:06:42","slug":"random-notes-about-living-during-a-national-emergency-part-two-happy-anniversary-to-me","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/nicolewillson.com\/blog\/random-notes-about-living-during-a-national-emergency-part-two-happy-anniversary-to-me\/","title":{"rendered":"Random Notes About Living During a National Emergency, Part Two: Happy(?) Anniversary to Me"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>
This is how I dress to go out to dinner on Friday nights now. Even though Bill goes into the restaurant to get our food and I never get out of the car, I figure one can’t be too careful.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Today is Easter Sunday. April 12th<\/sup> also marks a fairly grim milestone: It\u2019s now officially been an entire month since I started sheltering in place. I\u2019ve only been in the car on Fridays when Bill and I go to pick up Thai takeout from our favorite place.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

My company had my department work from home on March 12th<\/sup> as part of a process to test everyone\u2019s telecommuting capabilities. At that point, I was already scared shitless of being on the bus and the subway every day and decided I was no longer willing to risk my health for a job that wasn\u2019t even going to be around much longer, so I worked from home that Friday too.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

And on that Friday afternoon, we got the word that the company was requiring everyone to work from home for at least the next week. (At least!<\/i> I love the optimism!) And the rest is history\u2014some fairly unpleasant, scary history.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Some things I\u2019ve noticed in this month of near-exile:<\/p>\n

Vanity is history<\/b>. For me, at least. I\u2019ve seen some people get all dolled up just for something to do, but I can\u2019t be bothered. I go out for walks most mornings and I\u2019m lucky if I remember to brush my hair first.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

However, my gray roots were still bothering me, so I started playing with the Manic Panic bleach kit I\u2019ve had for months but have been too chicken to use.\u00a0 <\/span>The thought of bleaching my hair myself has always made me nervous, but no longer. Nobody but Bill would even see if I fucked my hair up, I figured, and he\u2019s seen me with bad dye jobs before.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The results? My hair color is a mess right now, with bleach blonde roots and the rest a paler red, the remnants of an old dye job that did not completely lift out.<\/p>\n

Even so, I kinda like<\/i> it. I\u2019d probably die a thousand deaths if I had to go into the office like this tomorrow, but now? Meh<\/i>. It looks kind of punk rock. I might dump some Vampire Red over it all tomorrow, but I also might not.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Stockpile Mentality:<\/b> As I mentioned in a previous entry<\/a>, Bill and I made a point of picking up extra cans of beans and dry goods and TP well before most people started panic buying. The number of COVID-19 cases in Fairfax County has been climbing at a scary rate this past week, so we elected to skip our\u00a0biweekly grocery store trip.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Over this month, I\u2019ve found myself in a mindset that I probably should have adopted a long time ago: Be mindful of how much you\u2019re using. You don\u2019t know if we\u2019ll be able to get any more when that runs out. <\/i>For example:\u00a0<\/i>Although I want to be drinking more<\/i> coffee, I\u2019ve been drinking less because boy, do I not want to be coffee-less at any point.<\/p>\n

If we all get through this, I\u2019d like to hang on to that mentality. Every time I do things like open up another can of tomatoes or use another paper towel, I get a little tense. We\u2019ve been stretching meals for a much longer time than we used to. Even so, my state is probably in for at least another month of lockdown, and canned tomatoes, which are a staple of most of my dishes, are apparently a very hard thing to come by right now.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

But even when this is over, I hope I\u2019ll remember to be mindful of what I\u2019m using and not take things for granted the way I once did.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

It\u2019s A Day That Ends in a Y<\/b>: When you\u2019re at home day after day after day, it gets damn hard to remember what day of the week it is. I fell asleep on the sofa on Friday night and when I woke up at 3:45 am on Saturday, I couldn\u2019t for the life of me remember what day it was, or if I\u2019d have to get ready to go to work in a couple of hours\u2026 it was a really weird, disorienting feeling. The last time I lost track of the days like that was when I was hospitalized for almost a week with a ruptured appendix. The days all look and feel exactly the same when you\u2019re confined to a hospital floor.<\/p>\n

The only day that still feels exactly the way it did before this all happened is Saturday. We sleep in, we eat leftovers from Friday night\u2019s restaurant meal, and I cook a big pasta dinner that we wash down with a pint of dark beer. Now more than ever, Saturday is my favorite day of the week.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Today is Easter Sunday. April 12th also marks a fairly grim milestone: It\u2019s now officially been an entire month since…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[44],"tags":[45,48],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/nicolewillson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/997"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/nicolewillson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/nicolewillson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/nicolewillson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/nicolewillson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=997"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"http:\/\/nicolewillson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/997\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1003,"href":"http:\/\/nicolewillson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/997\/revisions\/1003"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/nicolewillson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=997"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/nicolewillson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=997"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/nicolewillson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=997"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}