The funny thing about working from home most of the time is that when you’re suddenly mandated to start working from home all the time, your day-to-day routine sorta kinda doesn’t change all that much. I sleep the best I can, wake up, drink coffee, read the news, and then go upstairs to my office and start my work day. And work has been busy lately, so hours and hours will drift by while I edit technical documents, and suddenly I’ll look up and think: oh yeah… that’s right… we’re stuck here. There’s a crisis out there. Not that is looks all that scary outside in my neighborhood.

What is different is that there are more people in the house with me all day long. My 16yo has lamented to me more than once that she misses the days when it was just the two of us in here during the day, working at our own pace, plenty of space between us both, no confusion over lunch times (or menus for that matter), no bottleneck at the coffee pot….

Yeah, it’s been an adjustment of sorts during the past couple of weeks. I’m glad of my private office upstairs. In normal times, I’ve tried to keep the upstairs office dedicated solely to my own writing work, and to keep my technical editing job downstairs in a room off the kitchen. But now my husband is home and needs that space too, and he’s on the phone a lot more than me, running meetings, so I retreated quickly to working full time upstairs, wearing noise-cancelling headphones when needed. It’s okay, for the most part, and I’m glad to actually still be working. So many people have suddenly found themselves among the millions applying for unemployment, I can’t complain about anything.

We’re all also not currently sick with this virus in our house, and for that I’m extremely grateful. We stay home as much as we possibly can, but it still feels like I’m running out to do some necessary errand almost every day. The first week we were home, the cat almost died which necessitated several trips to the vet, mostly to keep getting refills of his special kidney-failure diet food. I held off ordering the stuff online for a week or so because it’s on the expensive side, and, to be perfectly frank, I didn’t want to buy a case of it only to have him up and die the next day and not eat it.

But the cat has rallied unexpectedly. He doesn’t look like he’s about to die any minute, and he’s even gaining weight, slowly. I talked to the vet on the phone and she said maybe he had an infection on top of chronic kidney disease that tipped him towards end of life, but maybe the antibiotics have changed the scales back in his favor. She wants to see him again soon, to run the same tests and see if she’s right, but I haven’t made that appointment yet. Because we’re not supposed to go out at all anymore. Colorado has mandated that we all stay home until at least April 12, which will surely extend to April 30 to match the new federal mandate, and let’s face it… it’ll most certainly go longer than that. It’s only a matter of time before they extend it into May, and probably June too, like Virginia has.

We’re not anywhere near the other side of this thing yet.

So, I’m hesitant to venture out again to the vet’s unless we really absolutely need to. But at least the dreadful weight of an impending death of a pet is lifted a bit for now. Which is nice. He’s my daughter’s cat, but we all love him. As for the rest of it: my husband and I have decided to try to curb even takeout dinners and to try to only grocery shop once every two weeks, instead of these quick bi-weekly jaunts out to the store for a few things here and there. I had to get pet food for the month, so I ordered online and arranged for curbside pickup. This is the latest way to shop it seems, and I’m wondering why we can’t do that all the time. It’s damn convenient. But it was still one more trip into town for supplies. And every trip we make, we risk picking up the virus. I’m in El Paso County, which right now has the highest death rate from this thing. I keep reminding myself of that, and then reminding myself that I don’t really need to go anywhere. I’m just accustomed to it, is all. We are so habituated to just popping on down to the store the very second we want something. It’s a hard habit to break, but we’re learning.

Yesterday my 16yo popped into my office to tentatively ask: is the world sort of… ending? I assured her that it wasn’t. That this situation is serious, definitely, but the world will go on. Enough people are doing enough of the right things that we’ll get through it as a nation, as a global community, and hopefully we’ll learn from all this. We won’t be tumbling back down into some sort of post-modern Dark Ages just because our leadership is inept, insane, self-motivated, delusional, and criminal.

I’m 99% sure of it.