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Some musings from Northern California...

“Locked Down” here in Santa Clara County, CA (one of six contiguous counties to do so). It is eerily quiet out there and so very strange.

Went hiking yesterday in the hills of the Arastradero Preserve in Palo Alto. Parking lot was full about 2:00 pm which was extremely rare on a weekday. It’s a small lot, holds maybe 40 cars and is normally almost empty on a weekday. There was excellent “social distancing” on the trails — but there always is.

Stopped at Safeway on the way home and the shelves were a bit more full compared to the previous day. The meat coolers were now fully stocked. The normal shortages of paper goods, beans, rice, bread, soaps, and hand sanitizer have not abated. There was an semi truck trailer parked at the loading dock which was good to see. I read the other day Safeway and others are desperately looking for people to hire to distribute products. My son told me this morning that they are hiring on the spot, almost no questions asked.

My wife arrived at our Idaho house this morning and said it’s nice to be in an area where things are (so far) operating normally. That will probably change quickly in the next two or three weeks. She’s going to work remotely from there for the next weeks or months.

We watched the 2011 movie “Contagion” last night. It was fun, but got scary when food ran out around week 16. The movie was implausible in that there was zero national or Presidential leadership, the epidemic ended around Day 135, and they got a vaccine into production within five months. I found it plausible that they used a lottery system to determine when people could get inoculated with the limited-supply vaccine.