Started quarantining on March 11

My 69th birthday:  4/13/20

Life under quarantine has been an experience.

This was driven home a couple of days ago when we received our Google Maps Timeline for the month of March. If you're not familiar with what that is, the Google Maps phone app keeps track of everywhere that you go and then provides a report with maps (daily/weekly/monthly), photos, milages, etc. It even knew if you are driving or walking (somehow). Nothing invasive or Big Brotherlike at all.

There have been interesting months that included Scotland and Ireland or San Francisco, Hawaii and Los Angeles. This wasn't one of them.

Kristen put a 'Q' in our calendar on March 11 to indicate that we had started to quarantine ourselves.

Before that, we were treading lightly but did some things that we knew were about to end for a while. We had lunch at 3 of our favorite spots, made trip to our local market and Kristen got her hair cut.

After March 11, grocery shopping accounted for just about everything. Kristen braved the local market a couple of times during the 6-7am senior hours. That was too stressful so, after determining that grocery delivery doesn't exist for Oakham, we landed on Wal-Mart. Kristen fills our online cart, chooses a pickup time and pays. Once we park in the designated spot, someone runs out groceries out and loads them into the back of the truck.

On March 15, I did take Gus to Lowes to get doors for his new home office (a break of quarantine but his truck wasn't working).

We did make one trip just to get out of the house. We'd never seen Quabbin Reservoir. It's just to the West of us and is the main water source for Boston and about 50 other cities. It stretches about 20 miles from North to South and the fact that the major East/West roads have to pass to the North or South of it explains why our area is as isolated as it is. We took a picnic and stayed in the car. We'll have to return when we can get out of the car.

Other than that, Google provided reports and maps of our daily walks.

Social distancing hasn't been a problem (except for my trip to Lowe's with Gus). Gus had a piece of wood that needed to be ripped down for one of his office doors. Briar gave me the measurements and drove it over while I got the saw set up. She handed it to me from 6' away. I made the cut and handed it back. Later, Gus needed to borrow my 1/2" drill. I set it down at the edge of the driveway as stepped back while Gus loaded it into his motorcycle an left. When I retrieved it a few days later, Briar just left it on her porch (the kids waved from inside).

One thing that was a problem with Wal-Mart was meat. Briar has told us about a local farm that raises grass fed beef and will deliver the meat. They also brew beer and have a taproom (several local farms brew beer and have taprooms). They will be delivering meat and a growler of IPA this afternoon or tomorrow afternoon (probably tomorrow since we're having a thunderstorm right now). They'll leave it in the ice chest that we have on the porch.

Glad that we got our raised vegetable garden built and filled with soil back when we did. Our normal sources for plants might not be open this year but we think that we've got alternatives lined up. We grow lettuce from seed. Briar is growing seedlings that she will share. People up the road have tomato seedlings in their greenhouse and will have them out on a table (payment via the honor system - we'd rather not touch cash but sometimes it's necessary).

-JC-