Mike and I talked and talked and talked (you know us) about whether to go on our March trip to Punta Cana. Based on the international and national news in the days leading up to the trip, we decided to go but, as things go with a pandemic, things changed quickly and the news on Wednesday, March 11, sent us scrambling to see if we could come back sooner than our Saturday flight. There were no good options but the trip home was really harrowing.
The Punta Cana airport was absolutely mobbed and people had lost their minds regarding how to check bags. We were flying Southwest so we know the drill for self tagging your bags and doing the two second bag drop. Even with the extra international steps, tagging was really quick but we waited in line for almost two hours to drop the bags. There was a snafu at the gate and we ended up being the last three people boarding the plane. It was one of those airports where you board from the tarmac so there was definitely an evacuation feeling about it.
In Houston, Mike's passport wouldn't scan so he had to wait in the line rather than zipping through global entry as Brady and I had. In the line, they saw he had food wrappers and a breadstick that Brady hadn't eaten from the airport food in Punta Cana. They flagged us for an agriculture violation and took his passport. We had to go to a private room to be interviewed and our bags rechecked, all the while worrying that we were going to miss our connection. The TSA folks were super nice but things take TIME. We finally rechecked our bags and got to the security line where the TSA lane was closed. There were about a 100 people in front of us and we had about 15 minutes before takeoff. I started begging people in front of us to let us cut in line. Many, many people wanted to debate the exact time of our departure, did we really need to cut, etc. It was awful. We finally got through and started running. I was hobbling due to my Phoenix airport hand sanitizer incident. We sent Brady ahead and told him to get to the gate asap. By the time we all got there, there was no staff at the gate. Sinking feeling for sure. Finally we decided to just board ourselves and went down the gangway and boarded. It seemed like they were waiting for us because the flight attendants quickly asked some folks in the last row to move for us so the three of us could sit together. A+ to that woman because we were frazzled by that point.
We stopped at a grocery store on the way home from the airport. It was just before closing time but we wanted to get milk, bread, etc. We got the last loaf on the shelves and had to buy tiny little bottles of milk because that was all that was left. Nearly all of the shelves in the store were bare.
Needless to say, the conversations from Wednesday to Saturday and the return trip itself formed a plan and a position of how we would be handling things going forward. Mike went to the store on Monday and stocked up as best as he could and then we decided that was it. We were in self-imposed lockdown.
Mike was not feeling himself while we were on the trip. He had no appetite and his chest felt constricted He has the usual sinus problems. There was a guy walking around the resort telling people he was trying to keep it quiet that he was sick but didn't want to miss the destination wedding he was there for. Based on our travel, we decided that we had to stay in for at least two weeks to self-quarantine.
The lockdown has made life different, that is for sure. So many things became more complicated overnight. They day before we flew home, my company decided that IT should start working from home immediately. When I returned to the office on Monday, my coworkers were feeling stressed, panicked and they were scrambling to figure out the technical and logical issues. Over the next week, nearly all employees shifted to working from home--nearly 41,000 people. That's quite impressive. Suddenly I had lots of meetings scheduled to keep us all connected--a great thing since I was no longer the exception.
Brady still had a week of spring break left so we had some time to see what the AZ schools would do. Because of all of our conversations about our position on lockdown, it took away some of the stress because we had decided we weren't sending Brady to school anytime soon. Luckily, they made decisions pretty quickly to close in the short term and to close for the rest of the year. Similarly with sports, they were slow in deciding but our decisions meant that we knew we weren't sending Brady to practice anytime soon.
Things got more quiet and calm after some of those decisions were behind us and we got into the rhythm of ordering food deliveries, prescription deliveries and postponing appointments. My coworkers had figured out telecommuting and Brady had a plan for school and sports virtual meetups. I started to really enjoy putting a pause on some things but I hadn't really decided how I'd focus my time--books? quilting? home improvement? We were scheduled to have a home renovation in early May so that was disappointing to postpone but, otherwise, it was nice not to be pulled along by other people's deadlines.
By that time, all of the sewing social media groups I am in were bickering bitterly about all of the mask making posts. It was really making me riled that it was so contentious. A neighbor who is a nurse at a local hospital put out a request on our neighborhood page asking people to make masks for her floor of 40 nurses so I started making them for her and dropping them off in a box on her porch each night. Soon, other neighbors were asking for them and I heard about a more organized group that was making them for healthcare staff across the state. I "adopted" a facility and started fulfilling their order for 25. Since then, that has been my routine. Work my usual day and then sew masks for a couple of hours working on orders. Before our vacation, I was up against a tight deadline to make a raffle quilt for the MS bike ride but that had been cancelled and I wasn't really inspired to work on it anymore. I just kept going with the masks. I've been enjoying the singular focus and the demand persists so I keep sewing the masks.
My guild posted a virtual mystery QAL this weekend. It uses only three fabrics and it is lap sized--doable. I dug into the charity fabric bins in the garage and pulled some Xmas prints. We will see how inspired I am working on something other than masks here and there. I think there are only 5 steps and I've done 1, 2 so far (fabric selection and cutting). We will see!
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