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March 19 Sheltered in Place

PROMPT March 19th ▼

COVID-19. It’s affecting all of us in one way or another. Never in our lifetimes have we seen something of this magnitude and severity. So today, check in with yourself and your fellow competitors - how are you? Where is your head at? What’s worrying you? Let’s gather our WDC community around us and hunker down together.

This is a very weird and busy time. Monday I put a sign on my office door,

WE ARE WORKING FOR YOU,
however in compliance with the shelter in place guidelines
we will be avoiding face to face contact
and helping you only by phone or email.

Until this afternoon I have been working in my locked office fielding questions and helping my clients. As of 4:00 pm, I have remote capacity and will continue to work from home until the shelter in place is lifted. Arranging this switch has not been smooth. My company's computers are a closed system so I can't access client accounts from my personal computer at home. I do have a laptop which is now programmed which I will connect to my wi-fi tomorrow morning that will access accounts. The phones are through the computer system so when clients call, it will go to voice mail and their message will show up in email on my laptop, then I can call them back and help them. It seems clunky to me but I would rather work from home than my locked office because people have read my sign then knocked on the door. I'm tired. I'll be working alone for the rest of the week and people are anxious and are full of questions and for some reason think their insurance agent has the answers.

My husband is in Mexico on our boat and we agreed he shouldn't try to fly back right now. He can stay fairly isolated on the boat and he shouldn't be in the mess in the airports. My granddaughter went home to her parents at Christmas so I'm alone here with my cat Molly.

It is after midnight and a tree crew has been working on taking down a huge redwood tree from my neighbor's property on my fence line. It split last October and the portion that fell took out 20 ft of my front fence and my double pasture gate, plus took down power lines. They finally came out sometime today while I was at the office, and started working on it to take the rest of the tree down. They just dropped the top half of the tree into my pasture and it shook the house. They have a chipper and are chipping the brush but asked if they could leave the trunk in my pasture until they could arrange removal. They offered me the chips for my garden and of course, I said yes. I have a mountain of chips and they are going to add another mountain probably within the hour. I love it. It does mean I have a lot of spreading to do but, its easily about $600 worth of mulch that I was going to have to buy soon and now I don't. (My front yard is a half-acre of landscaping that is in dire need of new mulch.) Anyway, there is so much noise going on from the tree chipping I could never sleep. I'm in the country so I don't have many neighbors to be disturbed but anyone within a mile will hear the noise. This is a job ordered by the utility company and one of the workers told me that they were instructed to work until they finished.

I think I may be sleeping in tomorrow morning. Molly is very upset that I haven't gone to bed yet. But this is the craziness of my life right now. I have so much to do, just writing the blog is a push. I'm pretty self-contained and I can Facetime my family so I will probably be just fine through this strange time. My grandson Facetimed me this evening to show me a trick he taught his dog. I did have a flight booked to go down and stay with them next week but I cancelled my flight. I hope to stay well and I hope you all will be busy and well too.

giant redwood
split by lightning
felled by man
                   ~~jvg