·          Most of all the pandemic makes everything feel like it could be suspiciously contaminated.  It feels like everyone else could be potentially contagious.  It makes every one of your own coughs, aches, sniffles, and sneezes seem like you could be infected.  So there is this constant dread around most activities outside of the house, a constant monitoring of bodies within the house, and an entire set of processes and prayers involved any time we want to bring something from the outside world to inside of the house.  Thus we have mail sitting in the garage for a few days (since the virus can live on cardboard for a day or two), we sanitize the food we buy in the store before bringing it inside, and we try to limit our travel as much as is reasonable. 

·          Today we went for a drive just to get out of the house, and we noted the relative strangeness and stillness of the Sunday afternoon.  Some Spring colors were starting to pop, but few people were out and about enjoying one of the warmer (if wetter) weekends of the year so far. We drove by the hospital and noted that they had a big tent set up outside of the Emergency Room, a tent that I assume is a sort of triage/quarantine area that ER patients must go through to be screened and sorted based on if they have COVID-19 symptoms.  

          The things we encounter within our diversions can remind us about the very thing we went into the diversion to get away from.