There’s been quite a bit happening this week, so today’s Sunday Coffee will be one of those rambling posts on many topics…

Coronavirus
Obviously this is a big one going on right now around the world. San Antonio had its first case (unrelated to our quarantine center), and immediately things began to shut down. School is closed for the boys next week. Siclovia has been canceled. UIL is delayed. Fiesta (a major holiday/event here) is moved to November. Libraries are closed for the next week. Jason was sent to work from home on Wednesday and will remain so until further notice. Beyond San Antonio, Morrigan’s school (KU) has gone to online-classes only. Then, of course, there’s our Planniversary cruise to Alaska scheduled for late May. It leaves out of Seattle, and we have no idea if the flights will still be happening, or the cruise, or if the ports will change, etc. I guess we’ll see. And while some of this might be frustrating for some – is the toilet paper and egg hoarding really necessary?? – I’m glad our city is taking proactive steps to contain the spread of the virus.

Spring Break
In the meantime, the boys were already home from school this past week because of spring break, and due to virus protocols, we didn’t really do anything but stay home. (I’ll be honest – we probably wouldn’t have done anything anyway. We all kinda wanted to just relax at home.) This meant a lot of movies – we finally saw the new Aladdin movie, for instance, and Laurence watched Knives Out – and other cooped-up activities. I’ve not really felt like reading for the last month(ish), so I found other things to do with my time. Which leads me to:

Real Life Ghost Stories
I’ve never in my life been able to get into a podcast before. I’ve tried dozens and dozens. They’ve just never done anything for me. But then Andi mentioned Real Life Ghost Stories, and I began listening this week, and I fell completely in love. I love the hosts and the stories and how they combine the creepy and the silly all at once. I think it helps that it’s more storytelling than anything else, so it’s like having mini-audiobooks. Plus, I have SO MANY ghost stories and paranormal creepy experiences from my own life, and I love hearing what others have experienced. All that ads up to be perfect for me. So YAY for finally finding a podcast that I actually enjoy! Thanks, Andi!

Solar Panels
This is a weird one, and a bit of a long story. On Wednesday, a solar panel installation company showed up in the morning to install panels on our roof – only we hadn’t approved any panel installation. The city has a partnership program with several companies and essentially it goes like this: You take out a loan for the cost of the panels you need, based on your electrical use plus 10% more energy for the city’s use. The cost of your loan is the same cost as your average electrical needs, so your actual payments don’t change and you eventually have no electrical bill at all. It’s a great program, and we signed up to be considered, but our sales guy stopped contacting us at one point. We never received the plans for putting panels up, nor signed any loan paperwork. Plus we haven’t lived in this house long enough to know what our average electrical use will be (summer bills are crucial here).

So on Wednesday, we made a lot of phone calls and texts, and sudden our sales guy tells us that we signed papers and that if we don’t install now, we’ll be out a $2500 fine. None of that was true or legal, and we’d signed nothing but pre-approval paperwork to make sure we qualified. The sales guy then claimed to be the owner of the company, when the real owner (it turns out) was on vacation this week. We talked to the contractors – a different company than the sales one – and they said to absolutely under no circumstances continue working with that guy, that the real boss was informed and would be dealing with the situation next week when he returns. Also, they encouraged us to wait until we had several months of a/c summer usage here to get an actual estimate of our needs. We ended up speaking to the real boss via phone on Friday, and it turns out his sales guy was lying to him, too, saying that someone had come to trim back our trees already and that we’d ordered the system etc. The whole thing has been crazy and I have a feeling there’s a certain sales guy who might be in a frick-ton of trouble right now…

Injury
So late last week, I smashed my pinky toe into an ottoman, cracking the nail and causing a blood blister to form under the nail. Yikes. Thankfully, I didn’t actually break the toe! I really needed to rest and let the injury heal, but y’all know me. I don’t really like to do that. So on Sunday last week, I taped up my toe so protect it while out on a 5.6-mile hike. And it felt fine…until the last mile, when I developed a blister on the underside of the toe because of the tape. Really?? Then on Monday, I had this huge compulsion to run despite injury, rain, and heat/humidity. It’s been so long since I’ve felt that wonderful sensation, so I gave in to it and did my next C25K session. I left the foot rest on Tuesday, but was back out on Wednesday. After that point, the toe swelled up and got really red and itchy. Clearly, I needed to stop being stupid! Honestly, I was planning to still do my Shamrock Shuffle 5K yesterday, with my toe taped…only then the 5K was canceled due to this COVID thing, so I guess that was a blessing in disguise. Though I’m still sad about it. I’ll do it virtually at some point. After my toe heals, yes, I promise.

Hacked
I woke up on Friday morning to a message saying my appleID had been used to log into some unknown-to-me MacBook at 4:51am. So I spent most of Friday morning changing passwords and strengthening my security measures. The worst part was that I’m a dummy and had that same password for about 75% of my accounts. Even though it was a fairly safe password, one hack means potential multi-hacks. So now I have a bunch of crazy-safe passwords that are all very different, which is more difficult to remember and keep track of, but hey. The irony is that I started with my appleID password, and didn’t write that one down on my temporary password index card. By the time I finished all the rest, I had no idea what I’d changed that one to, so I had to change it again. Of course, as I was typing that last sentence, I suddenly remembered. Too late! Heh.

Birthday
Laurence’s birthday was on Friday! My baby turned 16, and will have his party this afternoon. We had lunch out on Friday at Magnolia Pancake Haus, mmm, and let him open one of his gifts. The rest will be saved for this afternoon. We were also supposed to have an online murder mystery dinner party tonight with Jason’s extended family. The mystery was set in a mansion in the 1930s. I was playing a former fashion model famed for her “far east eyeshadow” and Laurence was playing my rich husband (ha!). The online party was to celebrate a whole bunch of birthdays – Laurence, his grandmother, and his aunt’s boyfriend all have theirs on the 13th, and his grandfather’s is on the 23rd. Unfortunately, with the virus canceling everything, this party has also been canceled/postponed. I’m not sure exactly why, since it’s all online, but apparently there were travel plans involved that are no longer happening. So that will all have to wait. Ah well.

So that’s our week. It’s been insanity without much actually happening – how’s that for weird? I hope everyone is staying healthy and safe and out of the panic zone!!