Sheltering In Place

What have we been doing–staying home and staying home. And we’ve been accomplishing a lot! The living room is painted, the Cowboy has started laying tile in the living room foyer area and I’ve primed the ceiling and walls in the dining room area. We’ve been eating–too well!

We have enough food to feed us for a while–a long while–but if this crisis continues for weeks as the experts are predicting we may need more. Saturday morning early I ventured out to the Willcox Safeway–wasted trip–the store was ravaged. I thought by going early I would avoid the crowds–wrong–I was there before 8am and the store was crowded!I was prepared–the mask is what the medical community refers to as a N95 respirator mask. We wore these masks in the operating rooms when caring for patients with contagious airborne diseases and wearing them was miserable! The masks work so well it’s hard to breathe through them. These are the masks our front line medical workers need during this COVID-19 crisis. We purchased these 3M masks at Home Depot of all places when we were demolishing parts of this house we are remodeling. I put my credit card in my back pocket taking nothing inside the store other than my list. The list was useless–so many empty shelves. I asked two different employees if they were having trouble getting deliveries and they both said, “no, we are getting our normal deliveries, this is panic buying.”

What groceries I did find I placed in the back of the truck. Once home I removed all of the items from the bags, left some out in the sun and wiped down the rest with sanitizing wipes. I changed my clothes and washed them. I think we are good.

On another note–it’s happening. Experts say it is not only important to study the number of cases, but also how they increase over time. Their growth rate. The number of confirmed cases in the United States has doubled in just two days with 5400 new cases Saturday. Three days ago Arizona had less than 20 cases statewide. We now have 104 and one of those cases is in our county. I wrote these last two sentences on Saturday afternoon–on Sunday Arizona has 152 cases. There is still only one case in our county.

So, we stay home and hopefully the precautions we are taking will keep us safe. Some of our Montana friends practiced some extreme social distancing today–

Photo by Lloyd Rue.