Quarantine Accomplished!

 I last left off with our Covid-19 test kits as having been tagged as received by the testing laboratory and wondering whether they would get the analysis done before before Christmas Eve.  I had little doubt that we were going to test negative but taking the test and getting results back were crucial to our kids allowing us to come to their house and being with them and the grandchildren.

Christmas Eve was the 14th day of quarantine but that alone was not enough to satisfy our kids, getting negative test results were part and parcel of the deal.  To our relief the tests were completed on time and the expected negative results were confirmed in writing.  We were on for a Christmas family gathering.  Well, sort of.  It would just be Cyndee and I and our daughter's family of four.  Our son, an essential worker in telecommunications, could not quarantine at all.  So he took his truck camper and pointed it south for a holiday long weekend in the Everglades and south Miami.

Our son, Miami bound for Christmas since he won't be able 
to join us because of not being able to quarantine.

But after nearly 10 months of not being in physical contact with our grandkids it finally happened Christmas Eve and Christmas Day and a two night sleepover with the soon to be six-year-old and the day we took her home and then a couple days later for her birthday.  The six year old was beside herself in anticipation of our arrival and she just about tackled us as we came in the door the first time.  The two year old we expected would be a slow process of getting to know us as he had a tendency to be clingy to his mom the last time we saw him.  But instead of the couple of days we expected it to take it was barely two hours before he was asking me to pick him up and hold him.  Heaven.

Now we will have one last day together on New Years Day and then break quarantine.  We'll share a meal of black-eyed peas and cornbread, play with the grandkids and then head out to get back to fulfilling our volunteer duties.  Next gathering will be when vaccinations have been obtained.  I guess that means several more months of daily snapshots and facetime calls.

All of our planning to do the quarantine paid off.  We had adequate supplies of household goods and our meal plans worked out as good as we could have hoped for.  Some of our fresh fruit such as strawberries and blueberries ran out but that was expected.  We no longer have stacks of food in every nook in the camper, as well as all counter tops.  With the exception of a few cans of soup in the broom/coat closet everything is down to just what is in the panty and refrigerator.  It looks way less cluttered in the camper and that is a good thing.  Seeing clean counter tops and not having food fall out at you with every cabinet door you open is a welcomed relief.

We are going to make the best of New Years Day and then get back to the routine of living in a pandemic.  See you next year.

Day 9 of Quarantine

 My last post we were in day 4 of quarantine.  Boredom had set in but now in day 9 we are starting to get a little stir-crazy.  400 sq ft of living space in our 5th wheel is pretty roomy as far as RVs go but not so much for extended periods of confinement.  But we do what we must and yesterday that meant we did our covid-19 test.

To stay in quarantine and get tested without breaking quarantine we ordered a home sample collection kit.  One has to go online and request the kit, we used a company called EverlyWell.  The kit is sent to you by United States Postal Services.  It should arrive in 1-3 business days but with all the shipping/mailing services being overwhelmed our kits took eight days to arrive.  That had our kits arriving on Thursday the 17th of December.  On Tuesday the 15th, EverlyWell sent an email telling us that we had to get our samples taken and sent back to them no later than 5pm the 18th.  Between shipping delays and a backlog of testing they had to have it on the way to them by Friday afternoon if we were to get our results before Christmas.  So on the 15th when EverlyWell sent the email saying the drop-dead day to return kits was going to be on that Friday we had no idea if our kits were even going to delivered to us by then.  The tracking number just returned a message that the package was in transit and that it was arriving late.  No estimate of delivery day.  Ugh!

But late in the day on the 17th the Post Office came through and delivered the kits.  Now it was time to coordinate with the kids for us to all take our samples and get the kits to a UPS drop box.  So, if you didn't catch that, the kits came to us by USPS and they are going back by UPS (overnight express).  The instructions were explicit, the kits were only to be placed in a drop box.  You could not take it to a UPS affiliate, a UPS store or anywhere other than a drop box.

The kids and we took our samples and then they found a drop box that was on the way back from our campground to their house.  You should have seen the pick-up of our samples by the son-in-law.  I laid the sample kit packages on our picnic table and backed off about 30ft (this is outdoors).  The SIL told me to go back in the camper while he retrieved the samples with both hands gloved and a full-face gas mask.  The samples were in by 2pm and by 7pm Friday night they were showing up on the UPS tracker.  Mid-morning Saturday, the 19th, the tracker showed "delivered".  It seems like we're in business.  Only thing now is that the lab has to get their thing done and then we'll be good to go for Christmas with the grandkids.

The grub and household supplies are holding out well.  It was a lot of work planning almost 20 days of menus but so far so good.  I do admit I am hankering an all you can eat hotwings at a place I like in town.

Here We Go Again and Decision Time.

 Well, the post-Thanksgiving covid surge is happening exactly as predicted if people didn't stay diligent.  The whole country is experiencing positivity rates, hospitalization rates and death rates well above the peak surge in the summer.  As I write we are losing in excess of 3,000 souls a day!  More, day after day, than those we lost in 9/11.  So, here we go again with shortages, closures and restrictions.

The county we are in in Georgia, Bartow, is spiking as a hot-spot and that's not good because access to advanced health care is minimal.  They are pretty much shipping covid cases to counties closer in to Atlanta.  The county I grew up in in Texas, Hutchinson, had been relatively unscathed until now.  Since this was home for both Cyndee and I our first thirty years of life we watch the local news and are in close contact with family and friends still there.  One of the things Cyndee keeps close tabs on is the obituaries.  There are three funeral homes in the area and between them average about six people a month combined.  In the first 12 days of December there are already twenty burials.  We are praying that our upper-80's family members can be careful and hang on until the vaccine is available.

The Corps of Engineers is taking note too.  The division headquarters in Mobile, AL has issued orders once again to work in a way that does not put people in close proximity to one another.  For us volunteers that means we are allowed to come into the office only for the purpose of getting keys to a vehicle and only then if it is to do something that will not put us in contact with people while doing our assignment.  And of course masks are to be worn at all times.  For the rangers this means there will be almost exclusive teleworking.  They have been told not to show their faces in the office until further notice.

But for Cyndee and I it is going to be none of the above.  In a previous post I mentioned that our oldest and her family have been extraordinarily diligent in their isolation.  So much so that Cyndee and I have not been allowed near their house or the grandchildren since March.  It has been an agonizing nine months of being so close to the grand kids but not able to be with them in person.  So, a couple of weeks ago we made the decision to quarantine ourselves for the two weeks leading up to Christmas so that we could be with them on Christmas day and at least a couple more after.  Our daughter and son-in-law agreed with the provision that we also take a covid home test.  We ordered two of them at $109 each.  We didn't just unilaterally decide to quarantine, there was a check with our volunteer coordinator.  Clearly we were not going to make our hours for the month with essentially being out of service from the 11th until after New Year's day.  But that turned out to be a positive experience as he was aware that we usually turn in 25% to 50% more hours than the minimum requirement.  He was perfectly fine with us taking a three week "vacation".

Quarantine started on December 11th.  We spent the 9th and 10th grocery and supply shopping.  With the recent surge in infection rates we had switched to the curb-side pickup that is now being widely offered.  Our pick-up at Walmart saw a cart with nine of those big blue totes come out, then there was Kroger and lastly, Publix.  When we got it all back to the camper we had food and household goods stacked everywhere.  Every cabinet was bulging, drawers would barely close and still the countertops and floor are covered.  And we don't know if we are sufficiently stocked to make it the two+ weeks.

As I write we are in day four of quarantine.  We've already watched more movies than we usually watch in a month.  We are both looking for books to download and I have been walking laps around the closed campground adjacent to the Volunteer Village.  I did three miles one day and two-and-half miles the next.  Unpleasant weather has kept me in the other two days.  As a bonus on my first day of walking I was treated to a bald eagle sighting.  I was not carrying a camera that was capable of shooting at the distance it was but I was sure to take my long lens the next day.  But of course the eagle was nowhere to be seen now that I had a capable camera in my hand.

Our volunteer neighbors know what we are doing and they have all (9 other rigs) offered to help with bringing in supplies we run out of, taking our trash to the recycle center and take our scheduled jobs.  Other than being in quarantine, we are in a good place.

Haircuts and Vandals

 There was a period in the early part of the pandemic when everything was in lockdown that a lot of folks got pretty shaggy looking and even now, eight months later, there are changes in hairstyles that reflect less frequent access to barbers and beauty shops.  Our daughter and her family are pretty serious about isolation so they have taken to cutting each others hair.  From the pictures we have and the FaceTime we do I'd say they do a pretty good job, everybody looks nice and tidy.

For me there has been no change whatsoever in my hair cutting.  There has only been one person touch my hair with a pair of scissors since 1973, and that's Cyndee.  However I can't return the favor.  I'm scared to death of getting anywhere near her head with anything that could chop chunks out of her hair.  I'm comfortable with doing things that require precision but in the case of hair cutting I must have a block or something, I just can't do it.

I tipped my hand a little about how long we have been a couple.  There was a five year courtship that started in 1973 with marriage in 1978.  In August (2020) we celebrated our 42nd anniversary as husband and wife.  But you add on the years that we were "exclusive" and it's 47 years of an amazing life together.

Our supervising ranger caught us fraternizing on the job.

To celebrate we decided be risky and went to a sit-down restaurant and did a three course meal of salad, steak and a gigantic chocolate concoction for two for desert.  It was great, it was the first food we had had without cooking it ourselves or got from a fast food drive thru window since May when we took advantage of a Mexican food restaurant opening.

Back in October I posted about some painting work we did to correct some vandalization to a trail overlook deck.  As we knew in the back of our minds, our handiwork was not to last and sure enough within a couple of weeks the deck had been spray painted again, with a vengeance.

Trail overlook deck - vandalized again.

I've got to hand it to them, somebody put in a lot work converting the dark brown paint to a white base coat and then polka dotting the whole thing.  Don't care for the messages they left but I admire their dedication.  We left the deck as you see it for a couple of weeks and then on a particularly beautiful day for working outdoors we once again backpacked in all the paint and equipment to make the deck right.

Cyndee is doing detailed trim work where the vandals even got the underside of the seatback rails.

Once again restored to the Corps of Engineers standard brown.

As of the time of this writing we have gone several weeks without being vandalized.  Fingers crossed it hangs in there a little longer.  But while we were in the painting "mode" the Corps dropped a work order on us for freshening up a campground host storage room.  

Since we were painting already, the Corps sent us to
Upper Stamp Creek Campground to put a fresh coat of paint
on the camp hosts storage rooms.

There has been some turnover of volunteers in the Volunteer Village.  Some have headed to Florida for the winter and others to various locations west of Georgia.  Two of our ten spots are empty but this won't be for long.  Our volunteer coordinator already had replacements interviewed and background checks in process.  We'll be back to a full compliment very soon.