Day 18: Sunny Spells and Scattered Showers

Overnight we managed to dodge a few tornadoes that came up our way through the midwest...lots of wind and rain, but woke up to a sunny, blustery day.

We enjoyed a good four hours of online D&D as the high winds brought spring leaves dancing by our windows and cracked a couple of limbs down in our backyard. Thankfully, nothing hit us or our neighbors, although plenty of monsters were hit in our virtual game.

After an afternoon very well spent, we are all learning the online gaming system much better. Dare I say, it's even becoming relatively intuitive!

As we battled against imagined enemies near and far, we did also check in on the enemies nearer to home. Although there is a lot of fear worldwide about the inevitable overload on the hospitals and healthcare workers, our state is doing an exceptional job of releasing numbers as we get them. The main statistics that we have right now are the number of people testing for positive cases of COVID-19. Since we have a shortage on both testing kits (for symptomatic and asymptomatic people) and no data yet on recovered individuals yet, there are a lot of data points that still need to be filled in. That being said, looking at the graph as of today...Ohio is appearing to flatten the curve.

We are still in the beginning stages of the ramp up of this virus and this is NO TIME to become complacent with protocols as predictions of multiple models see this virus getting much worse before it gets better, but this is potentially really positive news. This is what we were hoping to see with all of the actions that Gov. Dewine and Dr. Acton have been putting into place. Let's just hope against hope that everyone continues to take this as seriously as they have been taking it so that this trend can continue.

At home, we already have a couple thermometers and a blood pressure machine from previous medical needs from us and/or other family members. With this pandemic, we also bought a pulse oximeter, which reads both your pule and the efficiency of your body taking in oxygen. This is a helpful tool for knowing a patient's O2 level and how they are "trending" with their ability to take in oxygen. When a person is allowed to be recovering at home (again, we are not symptomatic and not suspected of having COVID-19 at this time) this can be useful for knowing if/when hospital care is required. So far, all systems are go, and our machines are charged up should we need them.

We spent the rest of our afternoon making my office more homey--filling my bookshelves with some favorites, getting the furniture and fitness equipment organized, and tuning up all of my instruments. Lastly, my mom is finally able to see us since she has been in quarantine herself long enough, and brought the most important feature of all: my father's guitar. I have a couple guitars from my beginning years, but my dad's guitar is the exact make and model I idolized as a child. It is a warm, bright, Martin guitar, now imbued with my dad's spirit. I figure that there has never been a better time than now to dust it off, change the strings, and starting loving it the way my dad did.

We both needed some cuddles after all of that, even though it was really beautiful to play a couple round of Wagon Wheel and think about my dad singing along.

We ended the evening with one of my favorite activities, reading our favorite book series out loud before bed. Rory and I both love Alex's character voices.

Tonight we finished The Sorcerer's Stone and will be starting The Chamber of Secrets tomorrow. Who's ready to start the week with me?

Prepare, don't panic.

-Allison