From Red to Yellow

My county, and the surrounding suburbs, are planning to go from Red (full COVID lockdown) to Yellow (partial lifting of restrictions) on Friday, June 5. Churches will begin reopening on Saturday. My first interpreting since March 8 will happen on the second Sunday in June.

We had a Zoom chat with the local Catholic Deaf community to discuss what will be happening. Here is how that is going to play out. As an interpreter, I need to walk into the church with the mask on, but once I am in the sanctuary, I will take the mask off. Communion lines will ensure that people are standing 6 feet from one another. Everyone will have to take Communion in their hands, and I think carry it back to their seat before consuming the Eucharist.

I don't even know how many Deaf will be at the Mass two Sundays from now. There is one person who is both a regular attender and sits up front; however, there are some others who come sporadically and sit elsewhere in the congregation, so I can't reliably predict whether they will be present on any given Sunday. But hey, no matter what, the interpreter will be there if they decide to brave the crowd and attend Mass.

Then there's my deaf-blind friend who I normally help on Fridays. I miss going there and they miss having their signing aides coming in. I told his mom that I was willing to start coming back again as soon as their county and mine both went to Yellow. She called me yesterday and said we might have to hold off on that for a little while longer, because he has freaking SHINGLES and gave her chicken pox. Un-freaking-real! They can't catch a freaking break. 😡 So when both our counties are in Yellow *and* the freaking shingles/chicken pox are gone, THEN I can resume going there on Fridays.

In happier news, my parents celebrated their 59th wedding anniversary yesterday. It also was the 100th anniversary of the birth of my maternal grandmom. So that was nice. I really hope that we are able to go out and celebrate like normal humans NEXT year, which will be my parents' 60th anniversary.

Oh, and last night, the city did not send out the very jarring cell phone alert to signify the beginning of the curfew. I thought we would have a break from being deafened by that shocking noise, after getting the alert every day since Saturday when curfew began. But no such luck. We got the deafening cell phone alert because of a TORNADO WARNING instead. At least I knew it was coming. When we were on the Zoom chat, someone's phone sounded the alert, and just then, our weather radio started talking about tornadoes. So I figured my phone was about to go off at any moment with the same alert, and a couple minutes later, the alert came in. Fortunately, we only got heavy rain and high winds, but as far as I know, no tornadoes. The storms we did get yesterday, one around lunchtime and the other around 7:30 PM, were pretty severe, with a ton of trees and branches down and power outages, but tornadoes would just have made an already-serious situation even worse.

We are supposed to have feisty weather today, too. I hope it's not as insane as yesterday's storms. The news called it a derecho, which I had to look up, and this is what it means: a line of intense, widespread, and fast-moving windstorms and sometimes thunderstorms that moves across a great distance and is characterized by damaging winds. Yikes! That's a big NO THANK YOU to any more of those!