It seems like the coronavirus pandemic has impacted everyone a bit differently. My thoughts and thanks really go out to all of the hourly-paid, lower-income workers who still must continue showing up at work, dealing with mass volumes of people, and putting themselves at risk, all while earning much less than they deserve during this time. At least so far (knock on wood), my family has been pretty lucky regarding how the coronavirus has impacted us. Nevertheless, it has derailed us from our normal routines, and I wanted to share some of those impacts with you all today...
Jobs
My wife and I have been very lucky in that we've been able to maintain our current jobs / employment at 100% of pre-coronovirus levels. For my job, our company's laboratory and office location is completely shut down for at least the next month, with all employees working remotely at our homes. The only exception is that one person that lives close by to the office comes on Monday and Friday each week to check for major leaks in equipment and to receive packages.
We've been working remotely now for almost exactly one month. The first few weeks working from home were fairly busy, as we were trying to prioritize completing a few high-priority lab studies before stay-at-home orders were issued. However, even the high-priority studies eventually had to be postponed out of caution. In the most recent week, it's been noticeably a little more quiet as everyone hunkers down into their at-home duties and a slightly reduced workload it seems.
Daycare / School for Our Kids
Daycare is a big part of my family's daily lives. Both of our sons attend a local daycare facility about 15 minutes from our house 3x per week. As such, we do a lot of dropping off and picking up! However, that has been put on hold since their daycare closed about 3 weeks ago. At first, the daycare attempted to stay open to only the children of "critical" employees, but that too was quickly nullified after only one more week of the coronavirus spread.
Exercise
With our daily lives being a little less busy, I've been fortunate to have increased my exercise frequency in the past month. I go on a 3-6 mile run around the local green-way path about 5 times per week (instead of exercising only twice per week under normal times).
Car Usage
Like most Americans, our usage of our two cars has dramatically reduced. I drove around the neighborhood yesterday, with that being my first time in a car in three weeks. It definitely felt weird to see new sites and being going faster than a run! On my outing, I did see that gas here in North Carolina was around $1.80 per gallon. Pretty cheap! Too bad no one can really use it...
Daily Routine
During the week, we've developed a nice little routine. Not very spectacular, but it gets the job done!
- Wake up around 5 am: I've been having trouble sleeping as long at one time since this coronavirus thing started, and I usually get up around 5 am and cannot get back to bed until 6 am. I've been playing a lot of the game, Township, on my phone. Highly recommend. I got my wife sucked into playing it this past weekend.
- Wake up again (for real this time) around 7:30-8am: We have a daily check-in call for my work at 8:30am.
- Attempt to work until 11am while trying to keep the kids away from my wife while she gets her work done.
- Start work for real (11am - 12pm): I go up to the little desk I've built in our guest bed room and get some steady work done prior to lunch.
- 1pm - 4pm: I go back up into my work nook and get my work finished for the day. After lunch, my 4-year-old son goes into a lifeless, zombie-like state on the couch in front of the Amazon Prime TV for a series of hours while my 1-year-old takes a 2-3 hour nap.
- 5pm-8pm: Go for a run, cook dinner, eat dinner, and then watch some Star Trek: Next Generation with the boys. We then get started for bath and bed at 8pm. Here lately, I've been resting with my 4-year-old in his bed until he falls asleep.
Groceries
We've stopped going into grocery stores for our weekly shopping runs. Instead, we've been getting grocery delivery through Amazon/Whole Foods or grocery pick-up from Wal-Mart.
Restaurant Usage
Our usage of restaurants is pretty much the same as before this virus started. We still order delivery Chinese or Indian food once per week. We've been pleasantly surprised that the food delivery services are waiving a lot of the delivery fees during this time.
Personal Finances
As far as I can tell, the changes we've had to make due to the coronavirus pandemic have actually improved our personal finance situation. Since our daycare is temporary shut down and not charging us to maintain our children's spots, we save $2000 per month while still maintaining the same income level. We are spending slightly more on groceries due to using grocery delivery and more expensive item substitutions needing to be made when the target items we want are not available (for example, name brand vs. store brand).
***Photo courtesy of https://flickr.com/photos/143707811@N07/49629561786/in/
