The 43

The one thing that might have provided some normalcy this spring is the start of the baseball season. However, like every other sport, no games are being played. That means nothing to watch on TV, and nothing to listen to on the radio. The lack of sports must be a burden on people who rely on consuming sports to escape the stresses of everyday life. Here we are faced with a huge stress, yet there's nothing to turn to. Even though we haven't as many sports televised since we cut the cable cord, I still love listening to ballgames through the MLB radio app. The new (top) and classic Strat-o-Matic boxes Plus, the start of baseball is the surest sign that the winter was survived and that summer is just around the corner. Without that milestone, along with no basketball, it doesn't feel convincing that spring has begun. What's helped is YouTube and Strat-o-Matic. I've blogged about my affection , now almost four decades old, for the Strat-o-Matic board game. Th...

There are two sides to the trepidation of the coronavirus lockdown. The first is the life disruption -- the economic chaos, thinking about toilet paper, getting stuck on the news and worrying about the pandemic, trying not to go stir crazy. Surprisingly, some if this hasn't been so bad. Yes, the news can stress me out, but that can be avoided or at least minimized. I miss the freedom to work somewhere other than the basement, but sheltering in place (which isn't official here but it seems most people are adhering to the recommendations) hasn't been so terrible. The other side is the health equation: What if I or someone I love catches this? Although most people recover from it, there's always that fear that I'm the one whose lungs go crazy, or Michael's exercise-induced asthma has a bad reaction to this, or Lori or Ben struggle with the virus. I know the odds of that are low, both because of the isolation measures we're taking and just because for most peo...

Today was not so bad -- it seemed to go fast. I slept well last night and woke up at a reasonable time. Work wasn't super productive but not a total bust, either. I'm optimistic for Tuesday that I will be at my full creative power. I allowed myself a little bit of news and social media today (and the couple things I did see pissed me off), but I'm hoping for a full blackout tomorrow. The difficulty is websites that I'm not going to for COVID-19 news, such as YouTube or my email accounts, are still providing it to me. But I didn't let myself go all in on news today. I still have the crisis more on my mind than I want to at 9 p.m., but I'm hoping to unwind enough for the next couple hours. We found out Ben will be out of school until May 1. Michael is already out until April 20, but I bet that gets extended. I was hoping we'd only be looking at three more weeks of distancing, but I'm betting five is more realistic. The crisis is supposed to spike this ...

I haven't blogged for a couple days because, believe it or not, Friday I forgot to. After the news embargo , I slept really well Thursday into Friday, then kept the ignorance up all day Friday. I wasn't perfectly insulated from the all the news, and I wasn't in a completely optimistic mood, but the combination of some late working and just being exhausted led me to go to bed without even thinking of writing. After realizing that Saturday, I wasn't in a hurry to again write. I'm sitting on the porch on what I'm calling Day 9, with another week of work looming -- and I'm feeling a little bit of apprehension. I'm fairly confident I'll be more creative and less distracted than last week. I know that avoiding news sites helps with avoiding stress. The novelty (no pun intended) of the changed reality has passed. We've been good about social distancing, and we're getting plenty of exercise. Also, I'm thinking we won't have another earthq...

Day 6 was productive, less stressful, and even a bit enjoyable. I didn't sleep that well again last night, and I'm still paranoid I might be running a slight temperature -- to the point I told Lori to hide the thermometer (I was never higher than 99 degrees). The social distancing is still in progress, and were making do the best we can, which, honestly, has been somewhat good. What made today better was I declared a personal news embargo. I determined that I was looking at too much news about the crisis, visiting websites with updated case numbers too often, and stumbling into other people's struggles on social media more than I need to. I'm not dismissing friends' real need to communicate and vent during this crazy time, but I'm allowed to not expose myself to it in an effort to keep my own stress under wraps. I was planning on attempting this yesterday, but then the earthquake hit and it was difficult for the journalist in me to not want to know more. To...

Someone forgot to tell the ground beneath us that there is a pandemic in progress. A 5.7 earthquake woke me up this morning. I probably slept through the first half of the temblor, which lasted about 20 seconds. At first, I thought it was just Lori getting out of bed that caused the stirring. After a second or two, when the shaking became stronger, I realized what was happening. A funky 10 seconds later, it was over. Lori was rattled, waking up the boys and instructing Michael to get the pet carrier and put the cat in it. I believe she was thinking what if we had to get out or part of the house collapsed and we couldn't find Maggie, but after a couple minutes, she regained her composure (she really didn't lose it, but again, this freaked her out wide awake -- I only experienced the quake groggy), and we both had the same revelation: "Are you kidding me?" Nothing in the house was damaged -- the quake was centered 15 miles west of us, we only experienced the shaki...

We've had a nice stretch of spring-like weather here in Salt Lake City the past 10 days or so. Things are starting to bloom a little bit. People are getting outside, albeit not near each other. There have been some blustery breezes the past few days, but that comes with March. All this means allergy season is returning. Unfortunately, I'm allergic to spring, summer, and fall -- and in the time of Covid-19, that can be a little unnerving. I'm a little sniffly right now, surely because I just was on a long walk, worked outside for a couple hours, and have a dog that rolled around in the need-to-be-raked-one-more-time-after-winter lawn and brought dead vegetation inside. Still, trying not to think the worst isn't easy. I've checked my temperature (which is low) and blew into a peak flow meter (to measure how much lung power you have, I'm at a normal range for my age) in what can only be described as hypochondriac measures. I also tried not to look at news s...

I'm calling this Day 3, even though I started blogging only yesterday. Saturday was the first true day of social distancing, so this is the third day in of what I'm betting will be at least 20. This was also the first day back at work, completely in the office I straightened out yesterday . I enjoy the flexibility my job offers that I can work from anyplace -- and often, I'm more productive somewhere else, plus I don't graze as much. So five days straight, week after week, in my office feels a little daunting. I have coworkers stressing about having their kids at home during this; I'm stressing about just being at home during this. I never want to work in an office again, but I thrive on the idea that I can change my environment up whenever I need to. Until it gets warm out and I can work outside -- and I tried the porch today for about 20 minutes but spring isn't quite here yet -- I won't have a coffee shop or a library or a swim practice to shake things ...

I've been writing this blog intermittently for 13 years now, trying to document the important moments in my life, the minutiae that I don't want to forget, and everything in between. I'll occasionally look at posts from years ago, reviewing what I was thinking, doing, feeling, and writing. Some things I remember, some I forgot -- and the blog is there to capture both. As the coronavirus crisis reaches an unfathomable point -- with plenty of more fathoms inevitably and frighteningly to be crossed -- I'm feeling the need to document what happens. The fatalist in me says I want to write what happens to our family if everything in the world goes to hell. Then there's the historian who wants to document these days when something big was a happening and how we reacted with it. I was thinking about both 9/11 and the 2002 Olympics today -- how I wish I blogged during both. I don't want to miss that opportunity this time. Perhaps most crucially, the Joe in me just ...