Wednesday, March 11, 2020

EDITOR’S NOTE: This blog covers each day the group spent in quarantine. The first five or so days are longer form narratives, but the bulk of the pages are short diary entries and images of the daily happenings, meals, and dogs. There are also dogs in the first few days, so buckle up!

What started as a weekend at Calvin & Mackenzie’s cabin quickly escalated to a short-term (then long-term (then very long-term)) hideout from a rapidly deteriorating situation in the NYC area. Calvin & Mackenzie bought a house in the Catskills in spring 2019 and spent about half of their weekends there, though they lived full-time in NYC. They invited Anne & Patrick to join them for the weekend of March 14th for a casual weekend in the woods. The original plan: Calvin & Mackenzie drive up to their cabin on Wednesday, March 11 and work from there until the weekend, with Patrick & Anne joining on Thursday night. Anne was going to visit a work customer relatively close by on Friday morning, so this was working out well and shaping up to be a great 3-day weekend.

The plans were finalized earlier in the week, but as the days passed, the situation declined, even as the case numbers appeared to be low. The previous weekend, Anne & Patrick realized that it was unlikely that they’d be able to have their wedding in April as planned. The stock market crashed on Monday, March 9th, requiring the “circuit breakers” to trip multiple times. A pandemic was officially declared by the WHO on Wednesday, March 11, followed by Trump giving a public address, followed by Tom Hanks, Rita Wilson, and Rudy Gobert all announcing they had tested positive for COVID-19, and finally the NBA announcing that the current season was on hold. That night was a major turning point in the seriousness of the pandemic in the US (at least to us).

Calvin & Mackenzie (and Eddy their pup) arrived at the cabin as planned.