Your comments on the breakfast post put me in the mood for baked oatmeal. I have been having trouble sleeping (I know from Twitter/blogs/Facebook that I am not the only one), and when I woke up at 4:45 and couldn’t get back to sleep, I thought happily, “I’ll get up and make the baked oatmeal!” It is in the oven now.
You were all more interested than I’d expected in the topic of breakfast, so I will add that one of my OTHER favorite breakfasts, which I think I could eat every day for the rest of my life, is half of a toasted/buttered/salted bagel, plus two scrambled eggs. Something about that combination is almost magical.
It made me very happy to read how many of you appreciate a good Second Breakfast. I too appreciate Second Breakfast. One of the benefits of waking/getting up too early is there is plenty of time for Second Breakfast.
I had a down day yesterday, with a particularly down evening. I’m fretting about whether I should go back to work part-time at my mostly-closed library. I realize I am extremely lucky (on multiple levels) to have the ability (on multiple levels) to make this relatively low-stakes decision. Those of you with less choice, more stress, and more at stake may want to skim, or skip entirely: there’s nothing on any other topic for the rest of the post, so you won’t miss anything.
We are not in a high-exposure area and/or large city. The library is still doing curb-side service, which I could possibly opt out of participating in (and might not even be asked to participate in, since I am a re-shelver, and they might be thinking of curb-side as more of a checking-out job); the building is closed except to employees. There is a quarantine process for returned items: I don’t know exactly what it is because I’m not there, but it looks like things hang out on a cart down in a storeroom for a week, and then are sanitized. The number of employees in the library is kept very low (it looks like four or so), and everyone stays at least six feet away from each other. What I’ve been hearing/reading is that transmission of the virus on Touched (or even Coughed On) Items is not anywhere near the concern of transmission by particles actively being coughed/talked in your immediate Face Vicinity.
That seems to me like I could go back to work. And I would LIKE to go back to work, and I would enjoy being part of this experience with my co-workers. But with Edward’s immunosuppressant medication, I wonder if that’s being foolish. The library IS still handling materials that other people have touched and coughed on and licked their fingers to turn pages of, etc. And there is a lot we still don’t know for sure about the risks and transmission of this particular virus. And being around / talking to / sharing a bathroom with co-workers is still a not-insignificant increase in risk, even if we’re trying to be safe and stay away from each other.
One test I often use for decision making is “How would I feel explaining this decision later to a police officer / ER doctor / etc.?” There are plenty of things that seem like No Big Deal until you imagine explaining them that way to an expert or authority figure after the plan has gone awry. I’ve seen that framing used in things being shared on Facebook about Covid-19: basically, if you found out you’d had the virus for a week, and the doctor asked you to please make a list of everywhere you’d been and everyone you’d had contact with, how would you feel about that list? It’s not the kind of question I want someone else to ask me in a shaming, judgey way, but it’s the kind of question I like to ask MYSELF, as part of the figuring-out process.
And so it’s a question I’m asking myself while trying to decide about the work issue. If I went back to work, and then I became sick and then Edward became sick, and the doctor was trying to trace down how Edward got it—how would I feel about my decision to go back to work at my low-wage, low-importance job, where almost anyone could fill in for me?
If I think of that same question about the decision to get together with a friend, I immediately flinch: I’d feel terrible. I’d hate to have to admit it to the doctor, and I’d want to lie. I’d feel I’d made a stupid mistake for no good reason, and against specific and clear recommendations. But if I ask it about a decision to go to the grocery store, I don’t flinch: We needed food. I didn’t go excessively, I took precautions, it’s a very, very contagious virus and we were all going to be exposed to it eventually.
Work is somewhere in between, especially because it is a low-paying part-time job and we don’t HAVE-to-have-to have the income: if I lost the job involuntarily, we would not be desperate for me to replace it (though I would start looking). But obviously we would prefer to have the income, especially during uncertain times, and when it might not be safe/possible for the older boys to get the summer jobs they’d normally get to help pay for college.
It is also harder to decide because I would LIKE to go back, and so I worry I am looking for rationalizations/justifications rather than accurately assessing the situation. I am also worried I will let anxiety (“BUT WHAT IF???”) exaggerate a small normal reasonable risk.
Another issue is that I can’t tell from my boss (the director, who is personally calling each of us every two weeks to see how we want to proceed with our own work plans, and the next call is coming up soon which is why it’s on my mind) whether they even need me or not! They’re doing a brisk curbside service, but it’s still nothing like the usual level of circulation. They might be RELIEVED if I don’t want to come in, because they don’t want to have to find things for me to do. But my boss is also very kind and understanding, and she is careful to be accommodating and low-pressure, so she could be trying to make it easy for me by down-playing how inconvenient it is for me to be out. Well. This is a question I could ask my direct supervisor: I can picture emailing her and asking her to be frank with me, and I can picture her being frank with me. But FIRST I have to decide what I want to do: no sense getting her to say frankly that they’d like me to come back, and then saying, well too bad, I’m staying home.
Well. I’ve told Paul I want to talk it over sometime soon.