Pennsylvania has a 3 tiered pandemic response system.

Red is stay at home. Yellow is some more stuff open but with lots of precautions. And I guess green is “pretend this never happened.”

We are down in that red area, which I am completely cool with. I know that there are lots of folks who want to get back to work and life, and some of those folks are jumping up and down about how unfair it is that we are still in the red and the only reasonable solution is to go straight to green.

To them I say…sit down and stop it.

It’s not over. We can’t pretend it away.

I am signed up for this “neighbor” bulletin board thing – NextDoor – and there is a massive thread of people talking about how we should just lock up the old people and shoot anyone who coughs and equally ridiculous recommendations. (They didn’t say the shooting thing – but it is implied.)

Young people get sick from this thing.

It is extremely unpredictable.

If you want to go on out there and germ all over everything that is certainly up to you (is it though?) but I am not ready to throw my parents, my kids, my friends, myself – under this viral bus to test the waters.

How is this even a thing?

I know I have written this same exact rant many many times. But I do not get it. How is life > money something we are questioning? Why is it political?

Absolutely I feel like there should be more support for unemployed folks, essential workers, people and their businesses who have been impacted by staying home. The $1200 thing was not nearly enough for the people who really needed help.

Absolutely millions and billions of dollars shouldn’t be landing in the pockets of people whose pockets were already overstuffed with millions and billions of dollars.

What would Jacinda do? We need Jacinda. Or maybe Justin. Maybe both.

Definitely both.

Anyway – I don’t want us to be yellow until the scientific benchmarks that they laid out have been met. If the cases are really coming in at a lower rate, if we have the medical equipment that is necessary, if someone who gives a shit about the number of people getting sick and dying going down says so. There are people who give a shit about that, right?

We surely are not ready for green. I’m not anyway.

Well – like I said, none of this is new information if you’ve been checking in with me here (Thank you and welcome!) but it keeps coming back around.

Tonight was Jack’s senior award ceremony. He sat at the table in front of the Zoom eating fish sticks and trash talking (camera off and muted obviously – we aren’t animals). When they gave the award for Academic Team he turned on the camera, flashed some hand signals that I can only believe were gang signs (they weren’t) and then turned the camera off again.

I can’t decide if this was better than the version where we sit in an auditorium for 2 hours waiting to hear his name.

Probably a tie.

We finally received the graduation yard sign that I ordered a while back. I wasn’t originally going to get one because we live on a cul de sac and don’t actually know any of our neighbors anymore, but when things went virtual it felt like we needed something to make the whole graduation thing tangible.

This is a huge ass sign. Very tangible.

The building of Porch-ugal also made some progress today with a new rug to cover the old stained one (thanks Dixie). So now my new hobby will be making sure she doesn’t pee on this one.

Tomorrow starts a nice long weekend which I am happy about. It won’t be a lot different from a regular weekend, but more weekend is always a good thing in my book.

Also how was March 500 years long and then April and May only lasted a week?

That’s all the news (much of it not new) from this neck of the woods.

Hang in…hang on…keep hanging.