Planning a Vacation During a Pandemic

I feel like there should be sitcoms devoted to the comical ways life has changed since this pandemic. Like the fact that I received this in the mail yesterday:

It's from a Jehovah Witness who, due to social distancing, was unable to come to my door. Now their only path to converting all of us heathens is to hand write really long letters. I was so tickled by this little piece of mail that I almost didn't have the heart to throw it away. (Almost. I ended up throwing it in the fireplace. I do appreciate this lovely woman's effort, though).

But nothing beats trying to plan a vacation during a pandemic. Last year, my extended family (Mom, Dad, sister, brother in-law, nieces, etc.) and I booked a summer cruise to Alaska for my grandpa's 90th birthday, which falls on July 13, 2020. At the end of May, our cruise was cancelled. We were disappointed, but we moved on. We found a resort on the island of Kauai that was still welcoming tourists. We booked the resort and all our flights. In some ways, the new vacation sounded more fun than the original.

Then in June, Hawaii brought down the hammer. They decided that anyone flying into their islands would be required to be quarantined for fourteen days. Not a possibility for us, considering we were staying for only a week.

After that, Clint found an amazing deal for an all-inclusive resort in Jamaica. Jamaica has no travel restrictions or quarantine requirements--they're pretty much welcoming tourists with open arms. Clint and I went ahead and booked it. My mom and my niece were super excited, viewing this vacation as even better than the first two! The one caveat was my sister would now need to get passports for her kids super fast since we were only a month out from our vacation. No big deal; the passport agency is willing to expedite passports for an extra fee. 

Oh wait. No they're not. Not during a pandemic. Apparently a worldwide virus required them to downsize their staff and they no longer have enough employees to expedite passports. 

So we waved goodbye to our Jamaican dream. After that, the conversations regarding "Where should we go for vacation" reached ludicrous levels, with a lot of manic-type crying and kicking and screaming (along with some hair pulling) over the subject. Some ideas originally open for discussion due to the public reopening were quickly disregarded due to these same areas going down into lockdown again, or due to safety concerns with the recent looting/rioting (because, you know, a pandemic isn't enough. Let's throw social upheaval into the mix as well).

So what's the verdict? What did we decide to replace our beautiful Alaskan/Hawaiian/Jamaican trip with? Are you ready to be awed by the glamor of my upcoming vacation?

We're RV camping at a KOA about 2 hours from my house.

*sighs*

Yep. Most of life's 'new normals' are inherently unfunny, but there is some humor in all of this if you look hard enough. Like, really hard. Really really har--yeah, okay. I hate this sh*% too.

COVID-19 - A Post for my Future Grandkids

This post isn't for the general public. We're all going through this quarantine together, so there's nothing I can say here that would be new or interesting for you.

This post is for my future grandkids. I want them to know what life was like here in California when Coronavirus hit America. So Ling Ling and Thing 2 (and any other grand-babies that end up popping into existence), this is for you. 

When it comes to shocking events, everyone remembers exactly where they were or what they were doing when their world was suddenly spun off its axis. My grandparents remember where they were when Pearl Harbor was bombed. My parents--though little at the time--remember the shock that swept through the nation when they got the news that John F. Kennedy was shot. For my own generation, it's 9-11. We all remember the sickening numbness that washed over us when we saw that second tower crumble down, and the fallout that resulted from that terrorist attack. But for your parents (I'm talking to you, Ling Ling and Thing 2), it's Coronavirus. As I write this, I'm 41. Your [future] parents are in their late teens. This pandemic...well, this is their life altering event.

Pandemics don't work like bombings or presidential assassinations or planes hitting towers, though. There's no "Where were you when..." discussions, because it doesn't slam into you the way other calamities do. Instead, a pandemic creeps upon you slowly, where you see it first from a safe distance, and you think nothing of it. It continues to inch closer and closer, and you adjust to every new development. You get used to its omnipresence in your world. But then you wake up one morning and realize you were the frog boiling slowly in the pot all along, and your entire world has been turned upside down. And you take a step back, and scratch your head, and mutter to yourself "What the hell happened?"

For me personally, it all started Wednesday, March 11. With over a thousand cases of Coronavirus (COVID-19) now in the U.S., the virus was already on the peripheral of my thoughts, but at this time most of us considered it nothing more than an extreme cold or flu (except for my twin, Shannon. She's known since December that this was something different). That night, the World Health Organization officially declared COVID-19 a pandemic. In school the next day, our principal came on over the loudspeaker in the middle of third period to ask all teachers to play a safety and hand-washing video for our students. At my school, it's rare for the school's intercom to be used to interrupt teachers in the middle of their lessons, so the loudspeaker announcement was probably my first real sign that the outbreak had finally stretched its long, spiny fingers far enough to graze my part of the world.

That night, panic buying ensued. Aisles were cleaned out of food, especially bulk food such as beans and rice. And of course, hand sanitizer, and toilet paper. I don't even need to mention the Great Toilet Paper Shortage of 2020 because that one will be forever marked in history.

The next day was Friday the 13th. We found out that Disneyland and Disney World had closed, along with Universal Studios and every other major theme park. Students and teachers scraped by the school day. I was out with a sub to take Elijah to the doctor's for a possible ear infection. I never went home that day; we had planned a trip to Las Vegas for my nephew Dylan's 21st birthday. So after Elijah's appointment and lunch, we started the long drive. We were nearing State Line when we got the news that school was cancelled until further notice.

Our weekend in Vegas was...surreal. Buffets were only allowed to stay open if gloved restaurant workers dished out the food. There were workers stationed at the escalators with disinfectant spray and towels, whose only job was to continue to spray the moving hand railings and wipe them down. Everyone--visitor or worker--had hand sanitizer. You'd see hand sanitizer every five seconds, next to slot machines or as you were walking the aisles. Despite all this, there was a relaxed vibe in Vegas. Kinda. It was calm, yet there was an underlying uneasiness in the air; a nervous energy. It was an accident that we all happened to find ourselves in Sin City in the beginning phases of a pandemic, and I think most of us wanted to go home. No one likes to be away from home when the shit's hitting the fan. We still had a good time, but it was the weirdest 21st birthday ever. Our family spent a lot of our free time during meals following the events happening in California and laughing over the latest toilet paper memes. 

We returned home on Sunday, March 15. The entire Vegas strip shut down a few days later.

Here's where I start to lose track of dates, because every day seemed to bring a new damage report--and still does today. So what I can tell you is this: Sometime after returning home from Vegas, we were given "Stay at Home" orders from the governor. All non-essential businesses were closed down. Grocery stores (of course) remained open, but movie theaters, parks, dine-in restaurants, etc., were all closed, and remain so today. Gatherings of any kind are prohibited, so birthday parties and social events are now being held over video conferencing. Here's me and some colleagues enjoying "Wine Night" together:

If you take your dog for a walk, you have to practice "social distancing," which means you must avoid coming within six feet of another person. It's so odd, because we hear this phrase a thousand times a day now, to the point where social distancing feels like it's been a fixture in our lives forever. But in reality it never existed a month ago. 

Seniors (such as Trinity's boyfriend, Caleb) will not have prom or graduation this year. The Class of 2020 is probably the most gypped class in our nation's history.

Visiting any of the essential stores that are allowed to remain open is...strange. Unless you show up right when they get their new deliveries, aisles are still cleared of food and other provisions. Half of the shoppers are wearing face masks. And more rules keep getting added.

My mom works as a nurse, and you should see the 'gear' she has to wear. It looks like a hazmat suit from the movie Outbreak. Here are the confirmed cases here in America, as of today:

It's expected to peak at the end of this month. School is now out for the rest of the school year, and Distance Learning starts tomorrow. 

I think the most surreal part is, unlike the assassination of John. F. Kennedy, or 9-11, this pandemic is not isolated to the United States. It's happening across the globe. We're all in various forms of lockdown. I've never in my life experienced an issue that everyone on the planet can empathize with. It's disconcerting on the one hand, but unifying and equalizing on the other.

The plus side of all this is the amazing quality time I'm getting with my family. We play games regularly, take walks, have movie nights, etc., and I get to do leisurely things that I've never had time for in the past, like take Neil Gaiman's online writing class, home interior projects, and play Sudoku. My favorite thing though is sending and receiving "Polos" from my mom, sister, and niece. These are short video messages, and we go back and forth all day, staying a part of each other's lives.

I don't know. Is the world still like this a decade from now? Because right now, it feels like it's never going to end. It's permeated every part of our lives. Even when it does end, it won't end. So many Americans who are considered nonessential employees have lost their jobs--either temporarily or permanently--and despite an emergency stimulus package that was recently approved, our nation might be heading for a bad recession, if not another Great Depression.

As I write this, I wonder how your lives--Ling Ling and Thing 2--have been changed as a result of Coronavirus. Is it normal in your world to see people wearing face masks? Do people still carry hand sanitizer everywhere they go? Are they still practicing social distancing in public? 

I'm going to end this with a few random pics that capture a bit of the world we live in today. I believe that, for the most part, life will return back to the way it was before a pandemic held the entire globe in its grip, and that someday this will all be a blip in the radar of our world's history. But I also believe this pandemic has created waves that will be felt for generations. LL and T2, you'll be born in the wake of those waves, so you won't know the difference. But they're there, and will always be there. Every little ripple will be felt and known by the people who remember what life was like before the outbreak of COVID-19. Your parents and grandparents--their lives will never be quite the same.

 

 

 

Doctor wheels elderly Coronavirus patient outside to watch the sunset.

Goal for 2018: Be Boring

In the past two days I managed to tear down a huge wall of writer's block. This sucker was beefy and cost me several months of writing (though looking at my word count, we're probably talking closer to a year). The culprit, I think, has been all of the life changes my family has gone through. Not only have these changes been distracting (and even derailing), they've also been entertaining. Walls to paint, rooms to decorate, new places in my neighborhood to visit...I guess it sounds like a good thing, huh? I mean, a lot of people believe that the key to writing a lot is living an interesting and varied life. The thing is, I disagree. I think the key to writing a lot is stability, and even boredom. When I first started teaching, it was my dream to write a book, but I couldn't get anything down on paper. Teaching was too new, and it was taking every ounce of creative energy I possessed to create lessons. The job turned my life upside-down, and I was perpetually drained. It wasn't until 2011, after I had been teaching for 4 or 5 years, that I was settled enough in my job to finally write a book. Three years later, my novel was finally finished.

~ Gustave Flaubert

Steal Like an Artist by Austin Kleon devotes an entire chapter to this principle. The first paragraph sums up his argument nicely:

I'm a boring guy with a nine-to-five job who lives in a quiet neighborhood with his wife and his dog. That whole romantic image of the creative genius...running around...is played out. It's for the superhuman and the people who want to die young. The thing is: It takes a lot of energy to be creative. You don't have that energy if you waste it on other stuff (Kleon 119).

I think that's the key. I need to get to a place of consistency again. I need my life to take on a sort of dull harmony, so that boredom can set in, and I can take all of that pent up creative energy and purge it onto pages on my screen.

Thus, my New Year's Resolution for 2018 is to be bored.

(For the record, I think this resolution is better than the one I made in 2015, in which I vowed to be a hermit crab stuffed into a broken piece of bottle).

Seriously, 2017 was too exciting. And too unsettling. Boredom sounds amazing. Can I get me some of that, please?

Happy New Year, and may yours be more exciting than mine!

New Everything

I feel like we just did some kind of life swap. It's exciting, but also unnerving. I get a little spooked when life throws too many changes at me, and even good stress is stress. I started mentally cataloguing the things that have changed in our lives recently, and taking smaller things out of the equation (such as the renovations we're making on our house, Trinity learning how to drive, etc.), here's what I'm trying to adjust to:

New Career: Not for me, but for Clint. He went from being a train conductor and engineer to a 7th grade math/science teacher. Though this has been a mostly positive change for our family, it has come with it's share of stress (having him buried in school work, his exhaustion as he copes with his new position, etc.).

New Home: You already know about this one. But one thing worth mentioning is that though we moved only 29 miles away, 9 miles of it is straight up a mountain, which means our new house is in an entirely new climate.

New Car: Because of the above-mentioned new climate, we need a smaller vehicle with more maneuverability for narrow, curvy roads, yet something that can get us through the snow. I wanted a Jeep Wrangler Unlimited. I adore Wranglers. There's just something so classic and timeless about them. Unfortunately the crash rating for the Unlimited is only a 2 out of 5 for the passenger (3 out of 5 for the driver). This was an instant deal breaker. So we ended up with this:

This is a 2017 Jeep Renegade Trailhawk (crash rating 4 out of 5). It has everything on our wish list. It's a 4-wheel drive with a tight turn radius and has special settings for the snow. And yes, we got it in hyper green! I'm not a silver or beige car-person. Best part is we never had to go to a dealership. We found everything we wanted online, and the dealership came to us! We signed all of the paperwork at my work and they delivered us our car. It was pretty crazy showing up to work in a minivan and leaving in a brand new Renegade.

New Dog: This is Gus.

When we moved to the mountains, George (our German Shorthair Pointer) became an absolute terror. Clint's dad has always had a soft spot for George, so he decided to take him. Giving up George left us with only one dog, and Beans gets pretty lonely while we're at work. So we got Gus. It was Clint's idea to go with a Corgi again because of how much we loved Cricket (our old girl who died last year). So far Gus is too adorable for words.

New Diet: I haven't eaten meat since June 22. In less than two weeks I'll be at the half-year mark. I really want to tell you all the cliches such as "Becoming a vegetarian has changed my life!" and "I have more energy than I've ever had before!" but the latter is simply not true, and mostly I just miss meat. Trying to cope with all of these life changes without any comfort food kinda sucks. I've decided to give myself one cheat a month now for fish only, but this doesn't help much when what I really want is a McDonald's double cheeseburger.

New Perspective: I've touched upon this on past blog entries. Ever since the accident the idealist in me has been chipped away a little, and I view the world through a more cautious lens. It's not a bad thing, it's just different.

I think that covers the major "new" things. I did buy a new set of pajamas that I really like, but that's probably not worth its own heading.

Strawberry Flats

It's only the second day of December but I've already been bitten by the Christmas Bug. (That's a thing). I think it's this place. These cozy curving streets and towering trees, the chill in the air and the scent of smoke and pine, all of the festive lights...I love the mountains to a degree that's got to be annoying to others because the wonder of living here is all I want to talk about. But recognizing I have a problem is the first step to curing it, right? (Do I want to cure it?)

Here is our home, decorated for the first time. Well, decorated for the first time by us, at least.

Today Trinity baked chocolate-chip cookies and wrapped them in cellophane wrap with ribbon, while I made Christmas cards. We're going to give them to our neighbors tomorrow. Attack of the Christmas Bug.

Oh, our Amazon purchases are a wee bit out of control too.

So speaking of my obsession with the mountains, last weekend I went to our local library to research the history of our town, and discovered these pictures:

It turns out our town used to be known as "Strawberry Flats", due to berries that were grown in the surprisingly wide/open areas of the community in 1865, along with a successful strawberry farm homestead run by a Mr. Smithson from the 1870s-80s. Twenty-five weekend cabins were constructed in 1914, bringing in an influx of visitors. According to the article "Best Kept Secrets in the Mountain," there were finally enough full-time residents by 1916 to apply for a post office and their own zip-code. Residents requested the name "Strawberry" or "Strawberry Flats" for their town, but the name was rejected because another community in California was already using it. Strawberry residents were forced to accept their second choice, "Twin Peaks," named after two prominent peaks nearby. These peaks are still known today as "Strawberry Peak" and "Little Strawberry." The post office pictured above would have been the very first building to display the town's new official name of "Twin Peaks." It had to feel strange to the locals, calling their home by one name their whole lives, then having to switch to another.

Every town/city has a history, so I'm not sure why I'm so intrigued by this one. When I lived in Oak Creek (WI) for 18 months, I never cared about the town's history. Even my beloved desert hometown, though it's backstory is mildly interesting, has never captured my attention quite like Twin Peaks. Maybe it's the size of the town that makes a difference. My desert hometown has a growing population of over 90,000 residents, and is constantly blooming with yet another chain, whether it be a Von's or a Starbucks. There's nothing quaint or cozy about it; nothing that makes a person want to dig for a story. But Twin Peaks has only 1,500 residents (with very little room for growth due to its geography). That's about the same population as the middle-school I work for. Our local grocery store is family-owned and has been around since 1940. 

When you're living in a town this small, history seems to resonate from every corner, and somehow your presence there feels so much bigger.

Maybe eventually small-town living will get on my nerves. But for now I feel pretty dang grateful to live in this sweet little slice of mountain. I feel very certain that, someday, one of my novels will feature a small foggy town in the mountains...a town called "Strawberry Flats".