The changes pile up

The list of restrictions and cancellations grows almost hourly — Disneyworld, the Boston Marathon, sports, Broadway, concerts, schools, the entire country of Italy... Most if not all colleges have kicked out their students, and six states have closed elementary schools. Lincoln schools are closed, of course, and they just announced Boston schools will close as well, which is going to be a real problem for low-income kids with food insecurity, not to mention working parents. Reportedly the governor is being pressured to close schools statewide.

Thursday night and Friday were... busy. Becky is in Israel and is not due to return until March 24. Needless to say, all parents (and many of the kids) in the program. are freaking out and want to leave early. There was a Zoom call Thursday night from the school in Israel saying they were working on it, but many parents are going ahead and booking flight themselves. I did the same, getting her on a Turkish Airlines flight on Wednesday — a 15-hour odyssey with a layover in Istanbul. We may or may not get reimbursed for the unused El Al ticket on 3/24, but at this point, who cares.

So I was on that call Thursday night, the went back to work for a bit on a Lincoln Squirrel story about all the latest closings in town, then went to bed at 11:30 p.m.and was awoken by Becky's freakout call at 2 a.m. I calmed her down, then checked my email and saw that the schools had closed even earlier than expected (no school even on Friday), so I had to go and rewrite my original story before it went live at 7:00 a.m. Got back to bed at 4 a.m. and woke up at 7:00 to go to an emergency Board of Selectmen meeting to postpone the upcoming annual town meeting and election. Went home at 9:30, arranged Becky's flight, made a batch of challah dough and set it to rise, then went to the hospice house in Lincoln at noon where I volunteer once a week. It's easier than usual because visitors are now restricted to immediate family only. Kind of ironic having health precautions at a place where most of the customers go out feet first in fairly short order — I assume it's more to protect the medical staff.

This morning I went to the funeral of the mother of E., an old college friend. There was a notice on the door of the church that all services would stop after today. Our synagogue is closed (the electronic key fobs for the doors have been disabled) and services are being live-streamed — just the rabbi and cantor alone in the sanctuary, apparently.

The loss that will be felt with all this remote stuff is two-way participation. Parishioners, students, etc., can watch whats going on but can't come up for readings or respond as a group and feel the mojo of lots of other people around them doing the same thing.

Today: funeral, nap, then assembling more virus news for the Squirrel. Usually I only post Monday to Friday but obviously things have changed. Meanwhile, Becky is still freaking out since all the gils there are crying, so I asked the program about changing her flight to come home Monday instead of Wednesday. The house is filling up -- Sarah's best friend asked if she could stay here if the lockdown gets more serious, since people in er mother's and father's home are immunocompromised (cancer for her stepfather, MS for her father).