Head Tale

Premier Scott Moe had a press conference tonight to announce that…he will be having a press conference tomorrow night to talk about how his government has a five point plan for reopening the province now that we’ve flattened the curve…maybe.

There’s no doubt that Saskatchewan has done very well during the COVID-19 pandemic compared to most other provinces and many other parts of the world as well.

Some of that is credit to the government but a lot is also due to circumstance and luck.  For example, Saskatchewan has the advantage of being a geographically spread out, thinly populated province with no real international airport and only two large cities (which is also relative – by Ontario standards, Regina would be somewhere around the ninth or tenth largest city instead of the second.)

If we had a chance to predict what two events in Saskatchewan were going to fuck us with the Coronavirus I would’ve guessed a snowmobile rally and curling bonspeil 100 times out of 100.

— Krista (@Krista_B_85) March 29, 2020

Beyond our natural advantages, we were lucky too – we didn’t have any major outbreaks in care homes or food plants.  The government was actually slow to limit larger gatherings (getting pushback from cities in the process).  And up until a month ago, the government was pushing for a snap election that likely would’ve taken place sometime in mid to late April right when quarantine measures were at their highest.

No, I’m not convinced the government deserves too much credit for where we’re at considering they actually *laughed* at the opposition leader (a doctor who specializes in community health and epidemiology) when he tried to raise concerns about the coming pandemic about, oh, four days before they ended up announcing there wouldn’t be a snap election after all:

Anyhow, all of this has me thinking about the last month which has been the weirdest mix of anxiety and banality, uncertainty and dark humour that I’ve ever experienced in my life.

But as I try to wrap my head around the past month – the worldwide impacts, the economic impacts, the human impacts, the climate impacts – on and on, it’s like trying to wrap your head around what a billion actually is.  I mean, we all know of it conceptually but the reality of experiencing it feels beyond comprehension.  COVID was like that – something so large and overpowering that you have nothing to compare it to.

It remains to be seen but COVID will likely be this generation’s World War, this generation’s Great Depression, this generation’s ice age.

So, since I can’t really wrap my head around what I’ve experienced for the past month, why not try to do a few funny lists instead? 😉

MY PERSONAL HOPE FOR PREMIER MOE’S FIVE PHASE PLAN

Phase 1. Hair salons – if this lasted much longer, I was going to let the kids loose with my beard trimmer to give me their best boot camp brush cut!

Phase 2. Off-leash dog parks – so I can stop trying to avoid all the bombs that terrible dog owners are leaving in the green space behind our house

Phase 3.  Seasonal Campgrounds – selfishly, the thought of losing our entire camping season was one of our biggest #FirstWorldProblem worries through this pandemic.

Phase 4. Liquor Stores – What?  They were deemed essential in the first week of shutdown?  Just kidding – I knew they were open.  In fact, there was one week where our liquor bill was literally higher than our grocery bill (to be fair, we were stocking up for a quarantine of unknown duration and liquor stores don’t have established delivery systems like many grocery stores do so we were buying for a month instead of a week!)

Phase 5. Libraries – what can I say, I’ve gotten used to working from home! 😉  But seriously, I think places that are less reliant on the bottom line like most private, for-profit businesses but also where large groups traditionally gather – whether that’s  schools or libraries or swimming pools – should proceed with great caution as they plan to re-open.

FIVE THINGS I DID ACCOMPLISH DURING THE PANDEMIC

1. Managed to pull off a virtual birthday party for Sasha and though I didn’t manage to arrange a drive-by from the fire department *or* an appearance by a magician like I hoped to do, I think we still made it pretty memorable with a few other ideas and treats.

2. Shea tends to do most of the cooking in our family but with me being at home, I took on that role more and had a few pretty damn good meals if I do say so myself!

3. I did get a lot of reading done, mostly because TV was wall-to-wall COVID coverage and it got pretty repetitive and/or depressing after awhile.

4. Flattened the curve on my personal spending!  (Those two alarms were probably the times I bought booze!) 😉

5. Picking up the dog shit in our backyard (long story but the people we bought from had a dog and, well, we didn’t want to piss them off by making it a condition of the house sale for them to clean the yard expecting they would do that.  They didn’t and so I was able to do it during the past month which had less to do with quarantine and more to do with weather turning nice enough that shit wasn’t frozen solid in the ground!  And now you can see why I’m so mad at people letting their dogs shit in the green space behind our house!)

FIVE THINGS I DIDN’T ACCOMPLISH DURING MY MONTH AT HOME
(The past month seemed like it would be a bit of a paid vacation…for the first couple days.  But then you realise you’re still trying to work PLUS you have kids at home PLUS your wife is still going out of the house to work so more household chores fall to you and suddenly you *really* want to go back to work to get away from it all!)

1. Teaching myself a new language

2. Writing a novel.

3. Learning to Travis pick on the guitar

4. Unpacking some of the still packed boxes from our move (if it hasn’t happened by now, what made me think being at home during a pandemic would prompt me to finish unpacking?)

5. Get truly settled in my “home office” since Sasha and I battled it out for the space which also doubled as her art/craft room.

FIVE TRASHY REALITY SHOWS THAT SHEA AND I BINGED ON
1. Tiger King
2. Too Hot To Handle
3. Dark Side of the Ring (me only)
4. Love Is Blind (mostly Shea, I only caught parts of it)
5. Donald Trump Press Briefings (and really, anything on CNN is borderline trashy reality TV.  Sensationalistic anyhow – does the reporter in the shot below *really* need to be wearing a mask outdoors with no one around?)

FIVE THINGS I’M WORRIED ABOUT AS THE WORLD GOES BACK TO “NORMAL”
1. What is going to happen in the US where they definitely have *not* flattened their curve.

2. What fall elections in the US (and hopefully Sask though I wouldn’t put it past Moe to still call a snap election) look like and how COVID impacts everything from campaigning to fundraising to turnout.

3. I’m honestly nervous to go back to work and start reconnecting with many of my patrons who I know had a much rougher go of this than I did.  I suspect there will be a  bit of “survivor’s guilt” to know I weathered this whole thing relatively easily and unscathed when some of our patrons were not so lucky and will have had their lives and jobs and families upturned completely.

4. I’m worried about the ramifications for the future of pandemics – will COVID come back in the fall?  When will there be a vaccine?  Will it mutate in a way that we can’t keep up with?  Will a different pandemic hit us or is this a once-in-a-hundred years event?  If another pandemic hits, when?

5. Obviously the short term adjustments of daily life (including at the library) but more importantly, what the long term impacts and changes will be for everything from how we interact to how we are taxed to how we prioritize what is important in life.  Early on, I saw a great quote from a former RPL coworker – “I’m not worried that the world won’t go back to normal, I’m worried that it will.”  Exactly!