Pandemic catch-up post
Aug. 16th, 2020 06:39 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
melliciousI apparently haven't posted here since that week I stayed home sick back in March. Man, that seems like eons ago. Usually I think time goes whooshing by incredibly fast, but pandemic time seems to have changed that. The first couple of months, especially, seemed to crawl by. I've heard other people say that too, but I wasn't even cooped up at home all the time, so I found it a bit surprising. (I'm sure I said some of this way back when, but I'll repeat it since I'm sure not everybody remembers what I said months ago!)
Our workplace closed for two months. Our immediate workplace, that is - but since we work for an academic medical center we are automatically "essential" employees. I ended up working something similar to my normal part time hours, in the mostly-empty building with maybe three to six other people, doing spreadsheets and later working on setting our software up to do what we needed to do for the way we are running now that we're open again. Rob ended up working in the hospital on the mainland, screening people coming in and out of the building. He did it for, like seven weeks. He kind of enjoyed it for a while, as a change of pace, but I think by the end he was totally ready to come back.
So for those of you who don't know this already, where we work is a gym. We had to shut down because it was in the orders the governor gave for the initial shut-down, in the middle of March. In May Texas started opening up again, and we got the go-ahead to open in mid-May. Normally we are open 7 days a week, about 360 days a year, from very early in the morning until late at night. (In the old world I think we were only closed about 6 hours in the middle of the night, at least on weeknights.) In the new world, we still open very early in the morning, but we close earlier at night, and we're not open at all on weekends. The first couple of weeks we were at 25% capacity and then we went up to 50%. We doubled up on housekeepers and so far so good. We work on a reservation system, which was the thing that I mentioned that I worked on setting up. People complain about it a lot - I complain about it a lot - but it does work. And there's no Covid running rampant here like there's supposed to be in Houston. There are cases, but they're pretty scattered.
Life is kind of gradually seeming more normal. Normal, except with masks, I guess? We go out to eat once in a while - cautiously. We go in stores occasionally - but I've always bought a lot of stuff online anyway. (My Amazon profile says I've been buying stuff there since 1999.)
Rob is buying a new car. And my sister came down here last week and bought a house, no less! In our old home-town, which is pretty close to me, and that's what seemed to have been her motivation. (She bullied her husband into it somehow.)
I put the UT icon on this post because I heard this week that both UT and A&M are going to try to play football. I don't see how you can do socially distant football, but I guess we'll find out.
Our workplace closed for two months. Our immediate workplace, that is - but since we work for an academic medical center we are automatically "essential" employees. I ended up working something similar to my normal part time hours, in the mostly-empty building with maybe three to six other people, doing spreadsheets and later working on setting our software up to do what we needed to do for the way we are running now that we're open again. Rob ended up working in the hospital on the mainland, screening people coming in and out of the building. He did it for, like seven weeks. He kind of enjoyed it for a while, as a change of pace, but I think by the end he was totally ready to come back.
So for those of you who don't know this already, where we work is a gym. We had to shut down because it was in the orders the governor gave for the initial shut-down, in the middle of March. In May Texas started opening up again, and we got the go-ahead to open in mid-May. Normally we are open 7 days a week, about 360 days a year, from very early in the morning until late at night. (In the old world I think we were only closed about 6 hours in the middle of the night, at least on weeknights.) In the new world, we still open very early in the morning, but we close earlier at night, and we're not open at all on weekends. The first couple of weeks we were at 25% capacity and then we went up to 50%. We doubled up on housekeepers and so far so good. We work on a reservation system, which was the thing that I mentioned that I worked on setting up. People complain about it a lot - I complain about it a lot - but it does work. And there's no Covid running rampant here like there's supposed to be in Houston. There are cases, but they're pretty scattered.
Life is kind of gradually seeming more normal. Normal, except with masks, I guess? We go out to eat once in a while - cautiously. We go in stores occasionally - but I've always bought a lot of stuff online anyway. (My Amazon profile says I've been buying stuff there since 1999.)
Rob is buying a new car. And my sister came down here last week and bought a house, no less! In our old home-town, which is pretty close to me, and that's what seemed to have been her motivation. (She bullied her husband into it somehow.)
I put the UT icon on this post because I heard this week that both UT and A&M are going to try to play football. I don't see how you can do socially distant football, but I guess we'll find out.
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