Thursday, April 2, 2020

What the ?!? 2020

The beginning of 2020 had been going along pretty uneventful. Just the regular busyness of school, work, girl scouts, hanging out with friends (whether it was the teen doing teen things, hosting Bunco, or having some neighbors over for a Fat Tuesday pancake supper), grocery shopping, orthodontist & dentist appointments, etc. Just over all normal busy....and being around others.....


Then on February 29 (it had to be a leap year), COVID-19 hit Qatar with it's first case. We struggled with the decision of cancelling our spring break trip to Jordan at the end of the March (which we we did). On March 9th, we got word from the the kids school the Ministry announced closure of schools and they were moving to virtual schooling (the school had been prepping since February and having the kids practice submitting assignments in class). We have since survived two and half weeks of virtual schooling at home and one week of spring break. I have confirmed I am an introvert and the teen is definitely an extrovert. Virtual schooling starts back up again on Sunday...we shall see how this goes.


More and more places have been closed down by the government, places are eerily empty (note this photo was taken early one morning last year...I'm not going out when I shouldn't be). For the most part, these measures are working. The numbers are still increasing here (but there are also a lot of recoveries and very few deaths), but according to the Ministry of Public Health a lot of the new cases are associated with individuals returning from out of the country or those that had close contact with already infected individuals. I only go out for groceries less than once a week. Richard has to work, some days via telework and other days by going into the office. We are trying to eat dinners on our back porch, toss a ball around, and do other things in a yard (there have been a few confirmed cases in our compound). Pretty much....we are acting more like this camel now and wearing a face mask and practicing social distancing.


(BTW - we totally made the right call on cancelling the spring break trip. We wouldn't have been able to return back into the country if we had gone, days before the trip Jordan announced mandatory 14 day quarantines, so we wouldn't have see anything but a hotel room, and now they are on a complete shut down). 

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