A happier day @AHappierDay Quarantine, day 14. Me and my boyfriend spent the whole day setting up an art gallery for our gerbil.

As a result, the right often opposes government interventions even when they clearly serve the public good and have nothing to do with redistributing income, simply because they don’t want voters to see government doing anything well. COVID-19 Brings Out All the Usual Zombies by Paul Krugman in the Opinion section of the New York Times.  

We will not go back to normal. Normal never was. Our pre-corona existence was not normal other than we normalized greed, inequity, exhaustion, depletion, extraction, disconnection, confusion, rage, hoarding, hate & lack. We should not return, my friends. We are being given the opportunity to stitch a new garment. A Tweet by Sonya Renee, Social Activist and reTweeted by Rashida Tlaib, Unbossed Congresswoman for Michigan’s 13th district.

Jared Kushner. The Patron Saint of Unqualified White Men. Tweet by Vanita Gupta on learning that Trump’s son-in-law is now running the coronavirus response.

Ensconced at home, every day is the same, sort of, while out in the world, the numbers of people infected by COVID-19 continues to grow exponentially. Then in California, Sunday was lower than Saturday, both in deaths and new cases, and then Monday was even lower and I thought maybe the last two weeks of the Bay Area sequestering ourselves was actually working. Then, today, infections jumped to over a thousand new infections and the total number in California now is 8,548. That’s a lot but way less than 83,712 in New York today so maybe the sequestering is working.

Last weekend, we went to our first coronavirus birthday party. We all stayed at home and wished the birthday girl a Happy Birthday over Zoom. Before the party, Craig Taylor baked 24 cupcakes and distributed them far and wide, at 7:30 we all Zoomed into..what? the matrix? let’s just say an imaginary space…on a server in the imaginary cloud. Maybe in Prineville Oregon? There we all lit our candles together and sang Happy Birthday to Carol Drummond.

I have to take a blood test and rather than just blithely going down to the lab at Sequoia Hospital and doing it, I am strategizing the safest way to get tested. My doctor’s office building has a testing facility on the lower floor and wide halls so my plan is to go there.

A couple of days ago, we went for a delightful walk in Edgewood Park but it is now closed because too many people were using it. Now we are walking around the neighborhood which is almost a park anyway but I wonder about people who are living in small apartments, where do they go? How do they get out? and I realize how lucky we really are.