covid diary: day 27

I tried very hard to disengage from the news over the weekend, and just have some sense of normalcy. It didn't work very well, but I tried.

On Sunday afternoon, my colleagues and I got the email we had been dreading: our boss had to let seven people go, and keep the rest on reduced hours. There were 24 of us to start, and now there are 17. I'm grateful that I still have a job, and that my work friends do too, but I worry for the people who got cut. My boss has applied to several relief programs for small businesses, including the one run by the federal government, but he's not counting on any of it going through, largely because the federal program is so poorly run as to be criminal. What is the point in setting aside massive funds to offer relief to small businesses if you don't also create a working mechanism by which those businesses can get that relief? It's all so far beyond frustrating that I don't have words for it.

In good news, we finished the office project, and now I am probably done taking on new projects, at least for a little while. I'm pretty happy with how it turned out though. Behold!

Here are the before pics. The office suffered from the same problems as the library: stained carpet and aggressively neutral paint.

I picked what I thought was a soft buttery yellow for the walls, only once I got the first coat on, I discovered that it was really a virulent Big Bird yellow. And I despaired for a while, then went downstairs and found all the stores of old white paint we have in the basement. I added a gallon and a half of white to the remaining bright yellow (which was also about a gallon and a half) and ended up with a color much closer to what I had envisioned.

It took three coats of the new home-mixed yellow to completely cover the walls, so I was a painting machine for most of the week. Mike put in the subfloor on Friday while I worked on my laptop in the other room, and Saturday morning I got to work laying the carpet tiles. There are a lot more weird angles in this room, so it was a challenging process, but eventually I got it right. Mike put the trim back in Saturday afternoon, and Sunday we spent the day putting the room back together so I could get back to work today. So here it is, my new and very cheerful work space.

 

Meanwhile, in the rest of the world, we're being warned that this week and next week will be "grim," possibly the worst two weeks of the crisis. I'd like to believe that means this is the peak and things will get better after that, but I don't think that's actually the case. This might be the peak for New York, and for some other areas, but it's definitely not the peak for many places. Oregon doesn't expect to see a peak until May, for example. Indiana's peak is predicted to be later in April, but all these predictions depend on people staying home and isolating properly. Which is hard to do if, say, you have to go back to work tomorrow like Mike does. I'm afraid for him, and for all of us.

Nationwide cases: 368,453. Deaths: 11,007.