Last fall, we realized that our deck was showing some severe signs of wear, including a few boards that felt rather unsteady under our feet. Since we were replacing gates in our fence, we had the same company replace the bad boards – but the problem didn’t go away completely. The company, on the other hand, did – they said they’d come out to estimate the additional work, but it never happened (I guess it was too small a job).

We did have another vendor who we’d used a few years ago for re-staining the deck, so we called him – but he had decided to take the entire winter off, and by the time he was ready to open back up in the spring, COVID-19 had arrived. He did remain responsive by phone, though, and today, he came out to the house to give us an estimate.

It was strange to hear the doorbell ring, and to know that there was someone outside waiting to talk with me. He, of course, was masked and stayed far away; I told him to meet us in the backyard. And by “meet”, I meant “stay six feet away from us” – but that wasn’t a problem; we could communicate just fine at that distance.

A few minutes later, we had a plan and a deal; sometime in the next few weeks, I expect to have a re-stained and repaired deck. Progress!

My cousin Mickey made an interesting comment on Facebook to my blog entry yesterday: “You are NOT sheltering IN PLACE as you have traveled.”

As far as I can tell, our travels have been within the limits of the order for Santa Clara County, but we definitely have been moving around a lot. But some things have definitely changed.

There are many places we can’t go because they’re closed: the JCC, Temple, enclosed malls, sit-down restaurants, wineries, and most stores. And, of course, we can’t get our hair cut.

Our chiropractor is open, but we haven’t seen him since the lockdown started.

We make many fewer trips to the supermarket and drug store (we used to go to the supermarket almost every day; now we go weekly). And we’ve given up on Whole Foods – the Los Gatos location is too cramped, especially the produce section.

On the other hand, we do significantly more shopping at Safeway than we used to because their salad lasts longer than what we buy elsewhere (and they tend to have good prices on Talenti gelato) – and if we’re going there, we want to get the most out of the visit.

We still hit the Farmers’ Market most Sundays, but now I pre-order the fish so we can get out faster.

We’ve stopped our Sunday walks on the Los Gatos Creek Trail – it’s far too crowded for social distancing (and the cyclists are dangerous even in normal circumstances). Instead, we walk a few miles on downtown and adjacent streets – once we get a couple of blocks from the Farmers’ Market, we see very few people.

We’ve gone to Tony and Alba’s Pizza for take-and-bake pizza a few times – that’s something we never did before, and we might keep doing it when things get back to normal.

And yes, we walk several miles every day – our goal is 15,000 steps per day, and we can’t do that inside the house. But in the old days, we’d often combine at least one of our walks with a small shopping trip – no more!

Tomorrow, the shelter-in-place order will be eased a bit more, but I don’t expect to take advantage of the changes any time soon.

Thanks for making me think through this, Mickey!