On the Corner at 8th – Revisited -- Pandemic

These are strange times in which we live. That’s not news to anyone who is sitting at home in their pajamas and bunny slippers at 10:00 a.m. on a random Thursday drinking coffee from a chipped mug that they got at a professional conference 3 years ago when they would usually be in “office attire” and participating in their employment.

The world began changing for lots of us in mid-February, 2020, and since then many of us have realized that the ski slope we are on isn’t those little green circles of the bunny slope but is instead a couple of double black diamonds and we seem to have lost at least one of our poles (not to mention that most of us don’t know how to ski)!

So while things are moving at a bit of a slower pace, I’ve decided to once again try my hand at blogging. At first, I was going to start a new blog but coming up with a name wasn’t working – it can’t be too flip but I also don’t want to be entirely morose despite the gravity of the situation we all find ourselves in. In the end, I’m just going to try to pick up my old blog – “On the Corner at 8th” and move forward with it.

So we all start a new chapter of our lives. Not one that most of us anticipated, and probably not one that most of us wanted. My goal here is to look at a bit of history / interesting factoids about disease generally and the Covid19 virus specifically and maybe help put things in perspective a bit as well as provide some perspective on how society is suddenly changing.

Nobody should kid themselves – this is going to be BAD. This could crumble the economy not only in the US but around the world in a way equivalent to the Great Depression in 1929 and through the decade following, and believe it or not, we are not set up to address those issues presented as well now as we were then. Anybody who tries to argue this is a hoax or made up by the media is a fool and will be publicly called out as such, although I’ll try to keep that at a minimum.

I want to try one communal project with this – we all have lots of time on our hands while we are home on lockdown, and if most of you are like me, there are literally dozens of little projects around the house that I’m going to take care of, “ . . . when I get around to it”. Well, now’s that time, so I’ll pick one project every day or so that ought to take no more than 30 minutes to complete and suggest that we all do it together. Please send your suggestions, too, since it is entirely possible that we could run out of projects before we run out of plague days.

Today’s project – Go to your kitchen and open the “junk drawer”. Don’t try to deny it, everyone has some version of this. It’s full of all kinds of stuff – pliers, a screwdriver, about 15 half-used bottles of hand sanitizer, random screws from projects long forgotten and at least a dozen ballpoint pens pilfered from a variety of businesses, none of which write. We don’t need most of it. We kept it “. . . just in case” and, well, “just in case” isn’t going to happen. It is time to participate in “Swedish Death Cleaning” (more on that later) so clean out the drawer. Throw out all the superfluous stuff – not just move it to another drawer or the closet or something, but THROW IT OUT. See how much better you feel being able to open that drawer when you need something that is stored there? Send before and after pics. Share your progress.