Coronavirus Closures

We’re living in odd times. It’s almost been erie watching the city start to shut down.

I’ve mentioned something like this to a few people.

The college where I teach extended spring break by a week. I’m starting spring break today, and it goes through March 31st. At that point, we’re going “remote” for the rest of the semester. Yesterday, I prepared 2 screen capture videos about some software we’re using with my intermediate photography class. The videos were 25 minutes total (12 and 13 minutes), but it took my 3.5 hours to create them. And I sent along a “project intro” that usually is a 25 minute lecture that has 4x the examples, but this one took me about an hour to do “remotely” with much fewer examples.

The boys are off school for 2 weeks now, and if they actually go back in 12 days, they’d just have 1 week before another 6 days off for spring break. So that’d be 5 days in school over 31 days (March 14 through April 13). And it’s not certain they’ll be back that day. (Kansas schools announced last night that they will be closed through the end of the school year.) Yesterday we were allowed to stop by and grab bags of prepared work from the teachers to work on over our break.

My wife’s 10 mile race planned for Saturday (along with every other race I know of) has been canceled for the near future. Here’s a good point on that topic:

My birthday was last week, and my wife was going to take me to a Lumineers concert, but that was cancelled. My boys were going to go to my parents house for a few nights, but we decided that wasn't the best idea. And family was going to come up to go out to eat for my birthday this past weekend, but we called that off as well.

On Sunday morning, I got to the gym around 8:30, and the parking lots was super empty:

Less than 30 cars in a lot that holds around 200 at 9 a.m. on a weekend!


There's NO ONE in this photo!


Again, as I'm taking breathers between pull-ups, there's NO ONE pictured on any of
those machines in the distance. Crazy for a mid-morning on the weekend.

Yesterday, my gym closed for (at least) the remainder of the month. The gym at the school where I teach closed yesterday as well (as I tried to see if they were open after my morning class for 1 final workout, but alas...). So I did a basement workout last night of pull ups, push ups, and some tricep dips. I looked at Craigslist and Facebook Marketplace for some 30-40 lb dumbbells yesterday, but I didn’t follow up on anything. My swimming is back to a standstill for a while.

Here’s a video from the rush hour view from our front steps last night. Usually, cars are zipping past our house. It can take a while to get across the street to our neighbor’s house who has watched our boys before they were in school. Many times, there’s a line of cars backed up from the stoplight 2.5 blocks away. But last night? It looked (and sounded) like this:

All public libraries are closed. Restaurants are open only for takeout. Our local popcorn and candy shop is only taking online orders that will be walked out to you. I need a haircut but Great Clips, Cost Cutters, and our local salon are all closed.

My wife (working at the second largest hospital in the Twin Cities) is concerned things are going to be getting worse for a long time. She’s thinking months. They’re already nearly tapped out of resources, and we only currently have something like 60 cases here in all of Minnesota.

Stay safe out there! Do your part to keep this from spreading!