Kevin Standlee: Fandom Is My Way of Life

About 7 AM Sunday morning, I decided to see if if the Wigwam Restaurant, which reopened a week ago, was sufficiently lightly loaded to risk having breakfast there. On the way, I spotted one of the local rabbits, and it spotted me as well and dashed over to what it presumably thought was a safer location.

( Keeping an Eye Peeled )

There were only two other patrons in the Wigwam, so I decided I could risk having breakfast. The previous morning, the parking lot was full of cars and I didn't even bother going inside. The staff of the Wigwam all are wearing masks, half of the tables are marked off to preserve distance between them, and there are no condiments on the table. Everything is brought to you so that they can wipe them down after you're done.

I enjoyed my breakfast, and I still think the risk under these conditions is low, but I do note that I'm the only customer who wore a mask into/out of the restaurant. (Obviously, I had to take it off to eat.) There have been very few cases of COVID-19 in Lyon County, and only one death, but that doesn't mean I won't take precautions, including making sure there are a minimal number of other people around.

I wonder if the people complaining about restrictions as being contrary to their Freedom think that all science can be put to a vote. Maybe they don't think the law of gravity is real, either, and it infringes upon their freedom to jump off a cliff without dying. Maybe they should organize a cliff-jumping protest to Show Gravity Who's the Boss.

Because I haven't been going by the fire station at the right time of the day (lighting-wise) for taking photos, I ended up missing one of the signs because they've already changed it from what it was displaying:

SKYNET
IS
WATCHING

...which is sort of spooky.

Yesterday after work, Lisa and I ran to Reno and went to four different grocery stores loading up on a lot of stuff, in the hope that we do not have to go into Reno for some time. She and I both think things are likely to open up too soon, and that the large quantity of idiots out there convinced that they just have to say three Hail Trumps in the direction of Mar-a-Lago and they can go anywhere and do anything will lead to a much larger second wave of infections and deaths. The Quad-county area that includes Fernley has been pretty lucky so far, but it may not last. Too many people still think the whole thing is a hoax, and claim that they'd rather die than give in to the liburls. Well, my attitude about this hasn't changed: I don't care if idiots want to kill themselves, but I don't want them taking me with them. They're welcome to go mingle as much as they want and die in order to "own the libs."

After we finished up with the brush burning yesterday and put away all of the tools, Lisa nicely cooked up brunch.

( I Have No Complaints )

This morning we did a local grocery run. Sunday morning isn't that busy, which helps, but it's worrisome to watch so many people, including store employees, who don't know how to wear a face mask. It has to cover both your nose and mouth, people, and you have to not play with it unless you're also immediately washing or disinfecting your hands.

Speaking of hand washing, I'm sure glad that, just before the virus hit, I'd bought several large pump bottles of moisturizer. With so much heavy hand washing, my hands get all lizard-skin. It would be worse if I wasn't just a home-worker with a computer-related desk job. Any opportunity I have, I apply some moisturizer to try and fend off the dry and scratchy skin.

I've been surprisingly fatigued lately. A bit after Noon today, I went and took a three hour nap. It seems to help a little. Part of me says I should get dressed and go for walks. The rest says that my body is telling me that I need more rest. Maybe I'll just sit here and watch the birds coming to our feeder instead.

This morning, we went to Raley's for groceries, in the hope that it would not be too crowded. (It wasn't.) We kitted up as best as we could with what we had.

( Protect Ourselves, Protect Others )

Raley's also now has installed plexiglass shields to separate staff from customers. They allowed us to use our own bags, but they couldn't be put on the counters, which makes sense. They even listened to us when we told them to let Lisa bag stuff, to reduce the number of times they have to touch it.

With the pandemic restrictions and requests not to travel, use of transport services is down everywhere. I read that Amtrak was reporting a 90% drop in passengers. Watching the daily California Zephyr passing, we could see that the cars were all but empty. So it came as no surprise to hear that Amtrak has temporarily suspended service on the CZ between Denver and Reno, with trains 5/6 terminating/originating in Denver and running from/to Chicago. The Reno train station is closed. No alternative transportation is offered between Reno and Denver.

The announcement is a bit misleading in certain ways, and it would have been more accurate to say that trains 5/6 are suspended between Emeryville and Denver. There are ways to get between Emeryville and Reno on Amtrak, however, on the combination of the Capitol Corridor trains and Amtrak Thruway buses that operate between Sacramento and Reno, serving Roseville, Rocklin, Auburn, Truckee, and Reno. One place is totally out of luck along the California segment of the CZ, and that's Colfax, which isn't on the Thruway schedule but was served by the CZ.

As of this morning, I'm not seeing any CZ services on Amtrak's "Track my Train" map, so possibly the remainder of the service Denver-Chicago has been suspended without Amtrak having updated their web site.

I'm not complaining about the suspension of the train. It does make sense to do so, with people being urged not to travel and nobody actually riding that train. FWIW, maybe they will have a chance to do a deep cleaning and disinfection of the train sets that I assume are sitting idle. I only hope that someday things get back to the point so service can restart. Our current plans are to go to next year's Worldcon in DC by train, and I hope that we'll be able to travel freely and safely again by then.

Tonight's meal was pork stew, consisting of stewing pork picked up at Raley's, carrots, potatoes, Lea & Perrins Worcestershire Sauce, and a bit of flour, according to Lisa, stewed for a long time, and served with HP brown sauce. It's very good, and had enough left over for lunch tomorrow, or maybe the next day, as I still have a helping of chicken and rice soup Lisa made a few days ago. We'll have this stew again soon, because the stewing pork came in a large enough size that Lisa only used half of it for tonight.

Our grocery bills these past couple of days have been monumental, but this must be offset against us not traveling to Seattle for Norwescon and otherwise simply staying home. Lisa is aiming to keep us well fed in our semi-isolation. And fortunately, Fernley is sufficiently thinly populated that we can still go out for walks and maintain 2m separation from people most of the time.

I'm sure everyone has heard that events are being canceled left and right. As a consequence of all of these pandemic-related cancellations, I've decided to call off the three-week trip to the Bay Area and then on up to the Pacific Northwest, where Lisa was going to drive to meet me and where we would attend Norwescon to promote Westercon 74. Even if Norwescon itself is not canceled as a result of the recent declaration from Washington's governor banning gatherings of more than 250 people, other elements of the trip were starting to come unraveled, even ignoring the actual risk of travel with a growing pandemic. So today I spent a while canceling hotel reservations and planned appointments I had in the Bay Area. Pretty much everything could be canceled without penalty, but my airfare up to Seattle isn't one of them, at least not yet. Alaska Airlines is waiving cancellation charges, but only for trips through the end of March. As I expect things will not be improved much by then, I hope that Alaska will extend that offer. Otherwise, the cancellation fees pretty much eat up the airfare, which would be a pity, but isn't a catastrophe. If I can 'bank' the fare for a future trip, I would consider using it to go to OryCon, which we do hope to attend this November.

I'm relatively lucky in that I wasn't in transit and could make this call two weeks before the start of the trip. CostumeCon 38 in Montreal, which was scheduled for this weekend, was abruptly obliged to cancel when Quebec's premier issued an order similar to Washington's. People I know were actually in transit to Montreal this morning when the order came down. I guess they'll be in Montreal without a convention. (Actually, some pieces of CC38 that were unstoppable are still rolling, but the convention itself is officially canceled.)

Consonance, the Bay Area filk convention, is also postponed to a future date to be determined. Conventions are being canceled or postponed left and right. I certainly hope that these steps to stop the spread of the COVID-19 coronavirus work and that things can get back to some semblance of normality sooner, not later. We currently have trips to BayCon and Westercon in the pipeline, plus of course the Worldcon in July.

And speaking of the Worldcon trip, is it wrong of me to wish that I'd put off booking our air travel to New Zealand until now, with airfares plummeting?