Notifications and Nostalgia

It could have been an advert but it was purely a sincere testimonial. While looking for story ideas, I found this conversation on Twitter:

I'm not as content with VOD/home viewing options, so this'll be tough on me. But I did stock up on library DVDs in expectation that the library would close indefinitely, which it did earlier today.

I signed up for kanopy, which seems pretty dope so far

!! Which library system? I didn't think it was available locally. But maybe that's changed?

I signed up for it with my howard county library card easy-peasy two days ago!

I just tried it myself and it is easy-peasy. In addition to a range of film including documentaries there’s also Kanopy Kids, with plentiful choices for children. So, there’s just one more helpful service provided by your Howard County Library. Just go to kanopy.com and follow the directions to sign up. Have your library card handy, and you’ll need your four digit access code as well. (I think it’s the last four digits in your phone number.)

An addition to the list of ways we can help out while quarantined is this ongoing fundraiser to feed hospital workers during the Covid-19 crisis. It costs $6,000.00 a day to cover their meal expenses and food is being purchased from local restaurants, which will be a boon to our area businesses.

Caring for our Caregivers

I was thinking last night about how the only other life experience that most of us have to this kind of community wide isolation is during heavy snow events like Snowmageddon in 2010. It seems almost quaint to imagine HoCo employees at the emergency response center, prioritizing and managing the issues of the county, or meeting around a table, assigning responsibilities.

Already we have moved to a world where that would be altogether too much togetherness. How would that look if all of them were six feet apart from one another? Is it safer for most or all of them to work from home? Many things can be done remotely now which might not have been so easy in 2010.

The biggest difference is, of course, that the obstacle that keeps us confined to our homes is not piles and piles of the white stuff, but a fast-moving adversary with which we are largely unfamiliar and unprepared to fight. I already miss the feeling that all I need to do is wait for the snowplow. Remember all the brouhaha every time the snowplow tracker  didn’t do what we wanted it to do?

Boy, those were the days.

Now we scan the internet for trustworthy sources that explain how the virus will replicate and possibly be tamed by “flattening the curve”, but that is only the beginning. There is no snow-plow tracker for this one that assures us that our time will come and we will be able to venture out as free as we were before.

A shoutout to all our County employees from the Executive on down who are tasked with facing this all-encompassing crisis. Thanks to you, my friends, for staying home as much as humanly possible and following suggested hygiene practices over and over again. Perhaps we all need one of those Facebook icons which mark us “staying the f@#* home” during the Coronavirus epidemic.

As hokey as it sounds, we are all going to need to be each other’s snowplow trackers: encouraging one another that there is hope, that we shouldn’t give up, that better times will come. The world we return to will not be the one we left. But if we work together we will bring as many of us as is humanly possible along to experience it.