Out of an abundance of caution, Jess and I have been staying almost entirely indoors, aside from our weekly-ish trips to the grocery store and our building’s laundry room.

But as recent research seems to imply that longer-distance airborne transmission is unlikely, and as we had started to go a little stir-crazy with apartment fever, last night we strapped on masks, and braved a long walk through Central Park.

The paths were almost entirely deserted. Which, on top of our general anxiety these days, gave everything a subtle undercurrent of dread.

Still, as we looped around the Reservoir, I was increasingly glad to be out, reminded of how beautiful NYC is.

Even if, at every turn, we were confronted by small reminders that these aren’t normal times.

Or, at least, not normal times for humans. The rats and squirrels and ducks and racoons were out en masse. And the flora had begun to awaken for spring, flowers sprouting and trees budding all around us.

At the top of the reservoir, we saw lights that weren’t normally there, and realized it was the (controversial, evangelical-run) COVID-19 field hospital.

It was still a ways off in the distance, but we were doubly glad to be wearing masks nonetheless.

So, again, a slightly strange trip. But, on balance, a comforting one. Even in difficult times, New York keeps on being New York. We’ll be alright.

As I was recently reading about the disparate COVID-19 risk of different blood types, I realized that I don’t actually know my own.

Jess is 0+, which fortunately puts her at lowered risk.  My parents, who I called for any insights / memories from my childhood, are unfortunately riskier types A and B.  They also didn’t know my type.  And, given theirs, I could literally be any of the four: A, B, AB, or O.

So, not at all sure what this research means for me in the short term.  But, in the slightly longer term, it’s definitely put ‘donate blood’ on my to-do list.  Both because it’s a good thing to do, and because (more selfishly) it’s probably my best route for figuring that out.

Still, between being type 0, and being both younger and female-er than me, I at least now know Jess should be at substantially lower risk overall.  I initially thought about suggesting that meant she should be the one who heads out to check our mail and pick up packages.  Though I vetoed that idea pretty quickly, as I realized doing so might provide an even more immediate risk to my health.

At this point, we have enough fresh food to make it through the weekend.  And though we have several weeks of frozen / shelf-stable food, I’m trying to keep that untouched.  Based on the number of COVID cases reported already at Amazon warehouses, in freight and shipping and delivery companies, and with grocery store clerks, I can easily envision a world in which the food supply chain grinds more or less to a halt here in NYC.

So, while I can, I’m hoping to restock our fridge.  Which, it seems, will necessitate a trip to the grocery store.  At this point, every single grocery delivery option here – Whole Foods, Amazon Fresh, FreshDirect, PeaPod, Instacart, Shipt, etc. – is entirely booked, some for the full two weeks ahead that they accept orders.  And, even if they weren’t, I’ve started to feel increasingly unsure about the morality of it all. I’m young and healthy, and I don’t see how I can justify paying someone minimum wage to take on equivalent or greater Coronavirus risk on my behalf.

Fortunately, it appears the Fairway supermarket about 15 blocks off is open 24 hours.  Hence the current plan: head there at 2:00 or 3:00 in the morning, when I can shop with minimum exposure to the biggest source of risk – other shoppers and employees.  Similarly, while I’ve been cooking up a storm thus far, I’m going to try and streamline my next week or two of dishes, to require fewer separate ingredients.  That should help me get in and back out quickly, touching as little as possible along the way.

At this point, leaving the apartment really does feel like something out of a dystopic sci-fi film.  So, channeling my inner Will Smith, and making it work.

I’ve been thinking of late of the Lenin quote: there are decades where nothing happens, and there are weeks where decades happen.

Exactly two weeks ago, I was puzzling over whether I should cancel client sessions and work from home. Two days later, when I made the choice to do so, at least half the people I emailed seemed to think it was a ridiculously over-cautious choice. Three days after that, Cuomo closed all the gyms in NY State.

All that felt rather fast and dramatic. But the week and change since has felt anything but. While the COVID-19 numbers here in NYC have continued to double every three days, and hospitals are apparently nearing capacity already, the whole thing still seems rather abstract. While I hear ambulance sirens outside my window all day, this is Manhattan; I hear sirens outside my window all day most days, and it’s hard for me to tell if this is more than the usual.

Instead, Jess and I are sort of just floating along in our tiny life boat of an apartment, one day more or less the same as the next.  There’s a certain timelessness to it all; if you told me we’d already been doing this for months, I’d believe you.  In fact, I’ve already lost track enough to have needed to check my calendar for the timeline of events earlier in this post.

And, looking forward, things seem similarly abstract.  With apologies to the President, I’m pretty sure we won’t be back out by Easter.  But, eventually, we’ll be returning to the world.  Right?  But is that in a month?  Two?  Three?  And how many years from now will that seem?

Fortunately, for the moment, we’re still having a pretty excellent time, all things considered.  I’m getting a bunch of work done, cooking up a storm, getting to spend quality time with Jess.  And despite being cooped up together nearly 24/7 in not a whole lot of space (I don’t know the actual square footage of our apartment, but it’s certainly under 600 square feet), I’ve apparently not yet annoyed her enough to smother me to death with a pillow in my sleep.  Here’s hoping that keeps up.

Despite my prior hesitancy, I did, in fact, head out for a run yesterday.  And, at about two in the afternoon, the streets of New York were still surprisingly busy.  Though I was able to steer clear of anyone I saw by a margin of at least 15 feet, I ran past our local Trader Joe’s, where dozens of people were queued up outside, sandwiched together, waiting to enter a store I assume was even more densely packed inside.  We’re not exactly crushing this whole social distancing thing, apparently.

Then, late in the evening, when foot traffic had all but disappeared, Jess and I headed out together, walking down to a deserted Riverside Park.  Along the way, we crossed the street (or re-routed entirely) a few times, to avoid the rare handfuls of people (mostly in their teens and twenties) whom we did see.  As we both agreed, we’d never felt more like characters in a post-apocalyptic thriller.

Back home, we re-inventoried our food and supplies, and placed an Amazon order for the last few things we’d need (aside from, ideally, perishable food items nabbed on weekly grocery runs) to survive two months of lockdown.  Once those packages arrive, we should be good to go on everything.  Or, at least, everything but toilet paper.

As a result, I was up past midnight, Googling around, scouring outside-the-box options for some still-stocked Charmin.  But, despite my best efforts, all I found were gougingly-priced listings on eBay, and I’d sooner rinse my ass in the shower, bidet-style, each time I poop than pay $150 for a dozen rolls.

So, this morning, I headed out again, to see if I could find TP in any of the brick-and-mortar stores nearby.  Doing my best to give everyone wide berths, and wearing a single latex glove on my left hand (like an immunocompromised Michael Jackson) for anything I needed to touch (and using my phone solely with my clean, ungloved, and otherwise mostly pocketed right hand), I headed into nearly a dozen spots – grocery stores, pharmacies, hardware stores, bodegas.  And, in all of them, bupkis.

Fortunately, we’re still about a week and change from running out our current supply.  And I’m hoping the reporting – that we’re not facing an overall toilet paper inventory shortage, just distribution difficulties in getting it out quickly enough to keep up with spiked demand – means things should look less dire in a few days.

In the meantime, Jess has suggested we simply stop eating, which would eliminate both toilet paper and grocery restock concerns.  Which, indeed, has a sort of logic to it.  This is a tough time to be full of shit.

Jess and I haven’t left the apartment for about 48 hours now, and, thus far, I’m enjoying it immensely. I’ve been productive working from home during the day, and we’ve been cooking up a storm, and watching our way through The Crown, in the evenings.

Still, by Friday, we’ll have eaten most of our perishable food items, and I’m trying to leave the few weeks of stuff we have in the freezer and pantry untouched, just in case things take a turn for the worse. I had hoped to get groceries delivered going forward, but Whole Foods is still wildly low on inventory, and it’s far more difficult to order around that in the abstract than it is to adjust plans on the fly if you can actually look at the shelves. Similarly, I considered going back to Fresh Direct, which I used some years back, but they literally have zero available delivery slots in the next week.

So, it appears, I’ll be venturing back out into the world at some point soon. A block or so off, there’s a Key Foods, which remained fully stocked this weekend even as the neighborhood Whole Foods and Trader Joe’s largely sold out. (I suspect that’s a function of the largely Black and Latinx customer base; there’s a lot of privilege inherent in hoarding.) But, it’s also relatively teeny, with close aisles that back up with even just a handful of people in the store, and the selection of fresh foods is relatively sparse. Conversely, our neighborhood Whole Foods is fairly wide open, and seems to be full of vegetables (at least per Instagram). So I’m weighing out options, as well as crafting a shopping list ordered by aisle, so I can show up at either store as soon as it opens, and charge through in minimum time.

Today, I’m also considering possibly heading out for a run. The Upper West Side looks sparse out my window, and I usually run along the street, next to the parked cars, rather than on the sidewalks. So, I think, I should be far enough away from any other pedestrians to keep the risk low. Right?

Either way, still puzzling through this semi-quarantine, and the life logistics it’s going to entail. Though, as I suspect it will extend on until at least the end of next month, I should have plenty of time to figure it out.

Back in 1999, I was running my first tech company, and also completing my junior year at Yale. So, on the one hand, I was closely following all of the tech news (and the related tech industry apocalypse prep and panic) around the Y2K bug, while, on the other, living most of my daily life surrounded by people blithely unaware of the impending potential crisis.

Of course, in the case of Y2K, all that worry ended with a whimper rather than a bang; the new year rolled in almost entirely problem free. So, admittedly, that ‘boy who cried wolf’ lesson is a bit on my mind these days, as I’ve been following news on Twitter about the growing COVID-19 pandemic.

Yet, unlike with Y2K, where the threat was entirely theoretical beforehand, here we already have concrete evidence of a serious disaster unfolding. Reading about the situation in Italy, and seeing how closely the spread of the disease in the U.S. seems to be following precisely the same path, simply two weeks behind and with no substantial attempts to intervene in changing that curve, has been more than a bit worrisome.

And especially so, given the logistics of my life here in NYC. First, the city is incontrovertibly a hot-spot for the disease. And, second, working with fitness clients live to test out Composite programs, I end up on the subway to and from Midtown Manhattan daily, then spend hours a day standing next to people who are breathing heavily, as well as picking up and handing off to them weights and equipment that dozens of others have handled in the hours before. So, basically, about as far from the advised ‘social distancing’ as humanly possible.

At some point, I could put all of my live training and testing on hold, retreat back to the Upper West Side, and simply send digital programs to clients to bang out at home on their own. But, as I haven’t really built the logistics to handle that yet, the move would likely come at a big cost, both in terms of dollars and progress.

So, in short, I have absolutely no idea what to do at the moment. Keep slogging ahead? Give it a few more days and then roll up the drawbridge? Or get outta Dodge right this second?

As I weigh it all out, the Y2K experience is still in my brain, but so is the news unfurling across my Twitter feed, as well as an understanding that people tend to wildly underestimate the power of exponential growth. All of which, together, makes me think I’m already maybe pushing my luck. But, possibly, doesn’t make me think that strongly enough to yet take real and drastic action.

In the meantime, puzzling through, and sending healthy vibes my readers’ way.

Despite my crazy work schedule, Jess and I have been trying to cook more. And, living on the Upper West Side, we’re lucky to have a slew of good grocery stores – Whole Foods, Trader Joe’s, Fairway, etc. – nearby. Or, at least, sort of nearby. While a seven to ten block walk seems relatively quick on the way over, hoofing back ladened with armfuls of heavy bags feels decidedly less so.

At one point a year or two back, Jess did the sensible thing, and purchased a rolling grocery cart. But, in New York, the ability to stagger along with a half-dozen full bags in your hands is an unspoken point of pride. For the most part, you just don’t see anyone below the age of 80 rolling their groceries home.

So, each shopping trip, I’ve let pride get the best of me. I do head out with an empty Go Ruck GR1 backpack, which makes it far easier to handle a case or two of seltzer and other particularly weighty items. And, having switched entirely to reusable bags for the sake of the environment (we’re now even using reusable produce bags, to avoid the piles of plastic we otherwise return home with and quickly discard), I’ve been pleased to discover that totes both hold more (reducing total bag count) and have handles long enough to carry (only semi-painfully) over your shoulders. All of which has made even large, food-for-the-entire-week shops substantially more feasible.

Still, those walks home are inevitably some of my toughest workouts each week. I’ve found I count down the blocks remaining each time I cross a street along the way, so I can will myself the full distance one small chunk at a time.

Which is why, this week, I finally sucked it up, suppressed my ego, and rolled the cart along when we headed to Whole Foods on Sunday. And, frankly, I’m glad I did. Even with its large capacity, we still completely filled two additional totes. And though the cart itself was heavy to drag behind me, and navigating foot traffic, street construction, and winter puddles was a bit of a challenge, it still made for a wildly easier trip.

So, going forward, the cart it is. I’d always heard one advantage of advancing age is caring increasingly little about what everyone else thinks of you. Turns out, for me at least, that’s true. For better or worse, it seems I’m ready to roll.