Mar 23, 2021
Monday, March 23, 2020 — US Outbreak +54 days
The Senate stalled their huge aid package last night; the democrats defeated a procedural vote with concerns that the package is doing too much for the businesses and not enough for the workers and those that are sick. The vote was 47–47 with a number of senators in self quarantine. Stocks this morning are down again (Dow is at 18,333 as I type this, down 4.4% from open). All gains from the last 3 years have been wiped out.
School started back up today in a virtual only environment. Deana has been collaborating with her fellow teachers all last week to get ready. Zoe and Kaelie set their alarms for 7 am to be ready to check in at various parts of the day for their classrooms. Last year when Deana was not substituting, we had the house pretty much split up into two work zones, me in the living room at my desk and Deana at her computer in the dining room. Now we’ve added two more this morning with Zoe at the coffee table in the living room and Kaelie on the couch in the family room.
Not so much crazy news today, more of the same. We called up my mom to sing her happy birthday and she let us know that she and all her Thursday lunch friends are going to be doing a virtual lunch via Zoom. An additional perk is that there is a couple that had moved away previously and could no longer join them and now they can!
We keep getting more registrations for the Personal Shopper Program. We’re at 65 as of 7 pm tonight. Tomorrow is going to be a huge shopping day for us. We had 8 orders yesterday, 6 today but something like 30 for tomorrow. Sanjay wants to set up a more official website. He’s already got the 95033.org domain and will configure a Wordpress site that I will build out.
Trump is talking about trying to get back to normal ASAP so the economy doesn’t suffer too bad. He’s worried about his poll numbers. We had over 100 deaths today pushing the total past 500.
Congress still can’t pass a bill. Democrats say Republicans are allowing businesses to pretty much do what they want with all this cash, including stock buybacks and laying off workers. I’ve also read that the Democrats are putting all kinds of crap into the House version that shores up climate change regulations, labor union support and more tenuous stuff. I’m sure whatever they come to agree on will be a huge pile of crap. Latest I’ve heard is the Dems want to shell out $2.5T. They both need to focus, put a ton of money into the economy and try not to make it complicated. Oh well.
