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bookstore in a pandemic
Wednesday, April 8 2020
Gretchen did another shift at the bookstore in Woodstock today under pandemic rules, meaning her only interactions with customers were over the phone. Nevertheless, she managed to sell about as much as she would've on a Wednesday before the pandemic. She actually worked an hour longer than expected because there was so much to do. Evidently people still want to buy books from local bookstores even in these conditions. This might be partly because of delays in Amazon orders caused by such a huge uptick in business.
When Gretchen came home tonight, she had another bag of carry-out from the Garden Café, a business she is determined to support through these lean weeks. Today's haul included four units of potato-kale soup, an order of cauliflower tacos, an order of roast potato wedges, and probably other things.
Tonight was also the first night of Passover. We'd managed to get a single box of matzoh the last time we'd been to the Hurley Ridge Hannaford, but one box is nothing against the way we eat matzoh in this household. Fortunately, we had something like three old boxes of matzoh leftover from Passover a year ago. Both Gretchen and I had matzoh pizza in addition to various things from the Garden Café.
Gretchen tried again to watch Jeopardy! using the Spectrum app on our AppleTV, but it was impossible. Clearly we will need to use some other service. I don't know what the hell happened to Time Warner cable, but, at least in the stuff it's installing under the Spectrum name, it's not up to the task of supplying video amusement in 2020.
In pursuit of a somewhat better household network, the other day I'd ordered am ASUS RT-AC1750 B1 AC1750 Dual Band Gigabit Wi-Fi Router (mostly because it could accept a DD-WRT open-source firmware). The UPS guy who dropped it off today was as friendly as ever, but I noticed he was wearing a mask. He was wearing it as if it was a permanent part of his outfit, not something he strapped on when leaving his boxy brown truck.
This red squirrel has a territory he or she is defending around the greenhouse. It includes the tree where the pileated woodpeckers nested last year (and their abandoned nest might be one of the squirrel's). Unlike grey squirrels, this little guy is relatively tame and will cheerfully nibble on a pinecone even when I am only thirty feet away.
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