Things are still a mess, but as they say, we may have peaked. The rate of infections has slowed everywhere, we’re all wearing masks, staying six feet from everyone else, washing our hands, sanitizing (when we can find sanitizer) and doing what we’re told, for the most part.

For whatever it’s worth, it looks like the nCov2019.live website is dead as of this morning (4/19/2020) and CNN has stopped displaying their worldwide and US totals on-screen 24/7 overlaying every show on their network. I guess this means we probably peaked and things and less critical. The total in my title is the last total I remember seeing on that site, which was last night.

Now there are protests all over the country trying to get the government to loosen restrictions and “open up” the economy to allow them to go back to work. Many people are very upset, fed up with all of the isolation and shutting-down of everything, and feel they need to start getting things back to normal before it goes too far, everyone goes out of business and the economy crashes. Who know what’s best?

I won’t get into it much here, plenty of others explain the situation much better than I can. One of those is Wil Wheaton. He tells it like it is. A tragedy.

Personally, I’ll speak to our own situation. My boss is talking about having us return to working on-site starting Monday, April 27th. Just one more week of working from home and I’ll be back at the hospital working on-site full time. Right now the tech on-call works on-site two days a week (Tuesdays and Fridays), and this week (ending today, Sunday) is the second week I’ve been on-call and working from home. Working on-site isn’t too bad for us, as we can do most things from our IT office and remotely, only needing to go onto the floors when there’s an issue we can’t resolve remotely or when we need to round on the WoWs and PC equipment on the floors.

At home we’re hanging in there. We have plenty of entertainment to keep us busy with all of the movies and TV shows I’ve collected over the years. When watching these, I prefer to watch everything I can locally instead of streaming it, saving the Internet traffic for those that need it more than us. Not that it makes a difference to anyone really… I think it’s just a psychological thing that makes me feel better about consuming so much data.

Sandy is such a wonderful cook and enjoys it so much, we’re staying nice and healthy in that regard as well. She’s also cooking much healthier food than she used to, so that helps as well. Our occasional dining out has been replaced by either curbside pickup or delivery from our favorite restaurants, so that’s a little different, but we’re still dining out just as often, hoping that helps support our local businesses a bit.

For specifics:

Food: Sandy usually posts everything she cooks, as either a recipe or a video from someone else preparing the recipe. Restaurants: The Garage, IHOP, Red Robin, McDonald’s, etc.

Entertainment: We watched several movies lately, including: The Turning (hated how it ended), Bad Boys For Life, Troll World Tour, Outbreak (classic from 1995 with Dustin Hoffman and Morgan Freeman), Vivarium (super weird), The Call of The Wild, and we’ve started watching the series Six Feet Under again. I think both Sandy and I watched it when it actually started airing on HBO in 2001, but have forgotten enough of it to make it interesting again. I remember it being pretty morbid, but kinda funny as well, and stars Michael C. Hall in his pre-Dexter days. We will usually watch an episode or two of a series and see if it “catches on” with us. If we want to see more, then we’ll keep watching it. Well, this one did that, just like Bates Motel did recently, and we’re off and running. We’re halfway through season one now.