I was reading my great grandmothers Journal. Inga wrote, in 1918 after World War I ended, there was a terrible kind of influenza around the world. They called it ‘The Spanish Sickness’. She experienced it in Norway. She described the sickness as ‘grownups were vulnerable’ just like today! Her husband, Olav, was the first to come down with the sickness, and she was next. She said her fever soared, her eye sight was blurry and she lost her hair. The physician told her mother there wasn’t anything he could do for her, and he needed to leave to tend to other patients that had a better chance of living than she did. She asked the missionaries for a blessing. They came and blessed her. They said she would be well if she kept the Lords commandments and particularly keeping the word of wisdom. She lived through that pandemic, another World War, drove horse and buggy and then gas vehicle, and saw man stand on the moon! She lived until the age of 99.
When we heard little about what was going on in China about Covid, we didn’t think anything of it. We didn’t think it would come over and affect us the way it has.
March 12. My day started out like any other day. I ran my miles.
I went to Sam’s to grocery shop and I saw empty palettes. I thought that was strange, so I kept shopping….
More empty palettes. Every isle I went down was empty. It was kind of a scary feeling. I called Paul and asked him if he knew what was going on. He didn’t know, but other people on his team were getting calls from their wives about full parking lots and empty shelves.
I picked up my mom and we went to another grocery store and this is what we saw.
Packed with people and everyone with packed shopping carts. Every isle was full of people and slowly the shelves were emptying.
That evening, Paul went to the grocery store next to our house and saw an empty space where shopping carts were stored.
Empty shelves.
Lines to check out were miles long.
We haven’t seen stores packed like this.
Check out. Kind of eerie.
This is March 14. Still out of everything. People panic shopped for 2 days now and cleared out the stores of everything.
Store workers just left palettes in the isles and instead of putting it away, they let people pick away at it.
March 20. Panic shopping has calmed down and the shelves are starting to be stock up again.
Starting to stock up.
What is going on at the store? My sales have slowed drastically. The health department closed all restaurant seating. Customers can still come in, make their sandwich, they just can’t stay and eat.
What has changed with the family? Eli goes to a private school so while the school districts have sent all students home, Eli’s school is still up and running. We have decided to keep him home 3 days out of the week and home school like we have done in the past.
Paul? This is his commute.
This is his work station. Set up to work from home for the rest of the month. I had him shut off his work monitors, but during the day, all 4 monitors including his laptop is on 🙂
march 23. Stores are almost back to normal. They have limits on everything.
March 28. News came out saying they are finding Covid on the floors, so panic started hitting the cleaning isles and shelves started emptying of all cleaning products.
At the store? March 29. One customer today so we closed early. We cut back on our open hours and we closed the store on Sundays.
Next day the Health department closed all fast food lobbies. I now have to act as a drive thru. We are now 80% loss in sales. Have I cried? I may have lost it a few times. Not sure how we are going to pay our $4,000 rent next month.
