Saturday, nowhere to go other than a few places to stock up.

First, though, we do a little exercise, walking a few miles. Thankfully we have a nice park nearby and there aren’t too many people around.

We then proceed to Costco, intent on buying just a few things, but of course we wind up getting far more. Costco opens very early on Saturday, used to be 9:30 AM but now they open around 9 AM. I guess. We arrived just a few minutes after nine and there was a line of people already waiting to go in.

Since the last time I went to Costco, they now allow a certain number of people in at a time, then stop the line and make people wait for others to leave the store. Further, they have created a long line area which keeps people separated. You’re asked to stay behind your cart and its a prudent measure for sure.

Once inside, it was a breeze looking through everything and buying stuff for the week -or longer. Today they had both toilet paper and paper towels (!!) so we took advantage and bought. There is a limit, however, of only one of each per customer.

Mind you, we have enough for ourselves but we’re no hoarders: We bought extra a week ago for one of my wife’s co-workers who had surgery on his ankle and can’t get around too well… and was running out of toilet paper.

This week we bought for her parents (they’re elderly and are isolating almost completely) and they’re running out of the stuff.

It was also, I might add, the first time we entered one of these stores with both gloves and a mask. While I’ve made it a habit in the last week plus to wear gloves when out to a store, we decided it was prudent to go the extra step and wear a mask as well.

We weren’t the only ones.

The other thing Costco is now doing is only allowing two people to enter the store per membership card so my daughter, who accompanied us, headed back to my car and hung out there while we did our shopping.

I suppose that’s one of the good things about having a Tesla: There’s a lot of entertainment/video games to spend the time with there.

Regardless, we made our rounds, picked up a bunch of stuff and headed out…

…and stopped at Target.

Target is on the way from Costco back home and since it was still pretty early (maybe 9:40 AM by that time) there weren’t all that many people at Target.

Like Costco, it appears Target is also counting the number of people within the store but, at least when we went, it wasn’t very busy at all and entered without waiting in any line.

We had a few more odds and ends to pick up (including food for the pets) and, again with mask and gloves, we finished our major shopping and headed home.

On the way back, it occurred to me the reality of the situation is certainly becoming real to many.

As I mentioned, most if not all the people in both Costco and Target had at least gloves. Many also had face masks and, thankfully, they all kept their distances from each other… and we certainly did the same.

But a weird sense of paranoia does begin to enter one’s head, doesn’t it?

You’re looking around, making sure there aren’t people coughing and making sure the guy/gal just over there doesn’t get too close.

And if they do, even if its unintentional, one can get annoyed and stop moving and/or move away, grumbling about how careless these people are, especially if it seems they’re not being proactive in their social distancing.

Social distancing. Self-isolating.

Two terms that were -to my mind anyway- never used much if at all have become the terms of this era.

Now and again I like to think about how much longer this is going to go on.

In the last entry (you can read it here) I figured we would be self-isolating and social distancing into May and likely the summer months as well.

My opinion hasn’t changed much.

I strongly believe April is gone in terms of the possibility we emerge from this.

If -and its a HUGE if- some kind of medication/treatement is discovered that deals well with Covid-19, then maybe we start emerging from this self-imposed exile in May. But if not, add May to the list of months we’ll be practicing both self-isolating and social distancing.

Two full months.

I suspect by then we must reach a point where the virus has gone through most communities and the larger number of people will have been affected and -hopefully- most will be through with it and essentially immune.

Hopefully –hopefully– the number of dead will be on the low end of the estimates and we can perhaps start to emerge a little from this daze.

But, again if there is no clear medicine or treatment available, we may see June and July join in the exiled months.

As always, keep safe out there.

I know there are those -especially on the Fox “News” and in this current administration- that tried to soft-pedal the disease and make it seem like it was no worse than getting the flu.

They’re changing their tunes but we still get stories like this one, by Matt Novak and presented on Gizmodo.com:

Georgia’s Idiot Governor says he didn’t know people could spread Covid-19 without symptoms

Yikes.

Keep informed -and stay away from anything that uses the two word combination of “Fox” and “News” together and we’ll hopefully get out of this fine.

Hopefully!