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Thursday, April 30, 2020

And then the world turned upside-down

Well, it has been a couple years since I have made any major updates. Merlin and Pyewacket are two years old now. Baxter will turn 13 in September. Mark is retired as of a couple years ago, because his employer moved his entire department from PA to FL and cut all the PA jobs. To get the severance package, the PA folks had to train their FL replacements to do their job. He passed his 40-year work anniversary at that company a few weeks prior to the job being cut.

I am still working for the medical system, a job which I started in late 2015 as a temp, and then converted to working full-time with Real Live Benefits nine months later.


In mid-March, the plague known as COVID-19 swept over the US significantly enough that PA started issuing stay-at-home orders. As medical system employees, we were classed as essential, so we could continue working. However, we all converted to a schedule that had us working part of the week in the office and part from home. This would allow for a skeleton crew in the clinic, but keep as few people as possible on the premises to reduce the risk of the staff being exposed to coronavirus.

Two weeks later, though, our schedules were revamped again. We were told that we had two days to retrieve all our personal effects from the clinic, as the entire floor of the building where we work was going to be converted to surge beds. The idea was that if the hospital across the street was overloaded with COVID patients, the non-COVID patients would be set up on our floor, so that the coronavirus patients could take up more hospital rooms. This meant that we were all going to be working full-time from home. And so that is where we stand now. We will be working from home for at least the next two weeks, as we are working on converting all appointments through the middle of May to telemedicine if possible. Folks who absolutely must be treated in person are being directed to other health system locations where the clinic is open.

We all miss socializing on weekends. The Misfit Toys have a weekly Zoom call at 5:30 PM. JFM, KR, Mark, DH, and I have been regulars. BAS and ES have joined in when they could, but BA has had work meetings that have kept her from coming in for the past couple weeks. I actually subscribed to Zoom to make sure that we wouldn't get cut off after 40 minutes on the conference call. I can have up to 100:participants now. I think I will not be running afoul of that limit any time soon, lol.

So, that's all the news that's fit to print.

Except this: I have a new project. I want to start writing for Medium.com. I think I am going to have to create my posts elsewhere and import them, though, because the freaking editor page looks utterly blank. I even double-checked to make sure I was using a compatible web browser, and I am. Therefore, Step One is going to be to find a tutorial or three that explains how to create a post on their FREAKING BLANK PAGE screen. I am used to Blogger where the fields are clearly marked so you know what you're writing, and where you're supposed to write it.

When I publish a new post on there, I will link it here.

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