Corona Vita
You don’t need me to tell you this, but life as we know it has changed, for now. Baseball has joined Tony on hiatus. We’re all cooped up or about to be cooped up, there is no toilet paper* or hand sanitizer to be found on the shelves, and thanks to a wildly incompetent administration and an outrageously contagious virus whose contagion period is long and can be entirely asymptomatic, it seems we’re going to be here for quite a while. Sure, there have been some vaccines developed, but those take a significant amount of time to test, even when fast-tracked.
* Seriously, who is planning to poop this much?
Meanwhile, we’re doing our best to explain to a child who is not quite three just what germs are, why we can’t go to the playground or see grandparents or go in the store or… well, you get the idea.
I’ve wished countless times for the world to magically pause for a solid week’s worth of time so that I could get things done and “catch up,” but I certainly didn’t intend it to be like this.
To really just pile it on here, I got laid off on Tuesday. The company I worked for is events-based. There were $50K worth of cancellations in two weeks, and all future bookings ground to a halt. So yes, I do have some time to take care of things at home now.
But my wife is still working – from home, of course – and needs to be available from 9a-4p every weekday, “or else.” So that means the abundance of time I have is being soaked up by dad duty, chore duty, and job hunt* duty. Somehow all of that time has simply vanished.
* Ho, boy. Job hunting is never fun, but job hunting in this environment is super-duper not fun. You don’t even know if the company you are applying to is even in a position to hire at the moment.
So you’ll have to forgive me if I don’t utilize these next few weeks to get caught up on all the overdue posts. I’m anticipating just banging out small entries every couple days, and holding onto that as a mental health thing, so hopefully I can keep things moving around here – but don’t count on it.
What I will probably do, however, is to use some of my time to go through my photo archives and put some prints up for sale. Unemployment is (currently) only going to cover about 25% of my salary* and that’ll dry up in 6 months time.** So anything I can do to bring in some spare change will help. Whenever I get to that, I’ll be certain to post it here, and the “shop” will likely be here on the site as well.
* That doesn’t include the extra bill to cover my health insurance, which was entirely paid by my employer.
** I really, really hope our timeline isn’t that dark, but one can’t be too certain right now.
At any rate, I’m also hoping to spend a little time organizing the office here, tackling some honey-dos, and if time allows, spend a little bit of time on my cards.
Speaking of cards: at the beginning of the month a PWE for Tom of The Angels, In Order slid into my mailbox. We were all itching for real baseball to start, apparently. For now, we’ll have to bide our time with cardboard, blog posts, and streaming the many, many baseball movies out there. Pro Tip: Ken Burns requested that PBS make his massive Baseball documentary available to stream, which they did. If you haven’t watched it yet, do take 80 minutes out of your boredom to watch The Battered Bastards of Baseball on Netflix. It’s an absolutely delightful documentary about the Portland Mavericks. I guarantee you’ll like it at least as much as I liked receiving these two 2018 Topps inserts from Tom. Yeah, that’s right, I managed to bring it back full circle. The Jackie Robinson Day card of Altuve is especially nice.
There were two more hits inside the envelope – a superb gold parallel of Gerrit Cole from 2018 Big League, and the Bregman from last year’s Stars of the Game giant flagship insert set. These were both nice finds, so thanks Tom!
Most importantly, however, was this trio of 2020 flagship, which put to rest my Astros needs from Series One.* Sure, Cole is a damn Yankee now, but at least Verlander is getting extra recuperation time after undergoing surgery on his groin recently. Man, I miss baseball. Stay safe out there, stay home, and wash them hands.
*Outside of all the SPs, of course.
