Watched a couple Star Trek movies yesterday.  Called my parents twice.  Talked to an old college friend yesterday.  His school in rural South Dakota is doing online teaching now.  He spends several hours a day with that.  His wife is also a teacher, so there is usually always someone on their home computer.  A friend of mine in Denver was classified as essential worker status because she works for a financial institution.  She’ll probably put in lots of hours for the near future.  Saw that my home county now has two confirmed cases of covid 19.  I live in a small college community of less than 40,000 people.  The town has gone eerily quiet since this was declared a pandemic two weeks ago.  For the last two weeks the only time I’ve left my apartment was to pick up grocery and medicine deliveries.  It will probably be this way for awhile.  The only time I see any real traffic on the highway outside my complex is during the morning and evening commutes.  I have a friend in Lincoln, Nebraska who works in a pharmacy and she said things are crazy there.  She wears masks and gloves every time she leaves her house.

My brother and his wife have worked from home for the last three weeks.  Their four kids are all doing online school for a few hours a day.  My mom and dad are doing alright.  They sometimes binge watch westerns on their streaming services.  I call them at least once a day.

I call my neighbors at least once daily.  My neighbor lady helped me with my laundry yesterday and her husband cooked dinner for us.  My cleaning lady will be here this afternoon.  I just realized there were some supplies I was supposed to pick up for her that I forgot about.  But some cleaning supplies like disinfectant sprays and cleaning solutions are in short supply some days.  Twice in the last two weeks I tried to buy Lysol spray only to find the store was out.  Fortunately I found an old can I had forgotten about stashed away in my closet.  I didn’t go stock up on toilet paper or anything crazy like that.  The craziest things I did buy was some bottled water.  At first I was afraid the water might go out.  But I needed some as I try to keep a few days worth of water stored away just in case.

I’m still holding good on my psych medications and over the counter pain pills.  I bought some ibuprofen a few weeks before things got real hectic.  I haven’t had a real shortage of anything, at least not yet.  I’m glad my family took disaster preparation serious when we were kids.  Living in a small Nebraska town with the nearest Wal Mart being an hour drive away, we stocked up whenever we had the chance.  It wasn’t unheard of to have a major snow storm shut down the highways for a few days.  When I was thirteen, we had an ice storm that knocked out power and water in our town for three days.  Some of the farms outside of town were without power for a few weeks.  So I guess disaster preparations were never foreign to anyone living in our small town.  Most of the people I grew up around worked in farming or ranching, so they were people who were used to having to be on their own just by the nature of their work.  Even though my parents weren’t farmers, I learned some of those habits of being self reliant and prepared just by growing up around it.  I guess my family and those I grew up around kept some of the old pioneer mentality even in modern times.