Welcome to the Becker Bear Den! : August 2020

It is August 8, 2020. I am finally getting around to updating this blog since December. There are so many things that we have experienced and learned in the last 6 months.

First in January of this year our dear friend Willie unexpectedly passed away. That same weekend I flew to Oklahoma City with my Mom to adopt our newest fur child Lucy. We drove her the 18 hours home.

Next, Henry and I traveled to Las Vegas for a quick getaway right as the covid crisis started to make headlines. We were planning on flying home Friday, March 13th, but instead decided to fly home Thursday, March 12th. We definitely think this was a prompting we were glad we followed. Upon returning home, I was told that our office was now closed, and everyone would be working from home. Flights started getting cancelled. Planes were parked all over airports. We quickly became living on lockdown. Stores closed, schools closed, churches closed, even our temples closed. People started hoarding supplies, especially toilet paper and bleach. The news was crazy with constant updates of death tolls around the world. When we got home from Vegas, we went to the grocery store the next day to load up on food storage.

Looking back now it is so crazy to think, that I really didn't realize how long this would last. We thought maybe a month, maybe two tops.

Then while on lockdown, as if things didn't feel weird as it was, we had an earthquake in Utah, bigger than we had in a long time with many aftershocks to follow for days.

Then starting on April 1, Henry had to take unpaid leave from work for 60 days. We didn't know if he would ever get to return to work. Luckily on June 1st, Henry was able to go back to work.

Today the world is an even crazier place. Riots and violence and unrest throughout cities, vandalism of statues and monuments, arguments over whether covid is even a threat, a huge debate over wearing, or not wearing a mask. Debates of whose lives matter. It is an election year, and pretty convenient timing that so much of this craziness is happening to likely undermine our current presidency. Children had to finish out the last school year from home over zoom calls. Now the debate is whether to let the kids go back to school for fall.

Currently we are allowed to attend church once a month for 45 minutes, wearing mask, but not singing. I have been working from home since March. I have visited my empty office a couple of times and it has felt so weird to have every routine I have known for the last 14 years be completely changed.

My office is in our basement, so I spend of lot of time down here working. Luckily I have been able to do my job from home without any hiccups, other than my internet being down for a day. The hardest part is that we hired someone to join our team and I have had to train her over Zoom which hasn't been ideal. We have spent probably over a hundred hours on the phone now and still haven't met in person.

It has been nice to be home with Henry more (be careful what you wish for) and the dogs. I have always wanted to work from home. But this might be a little more extreme than I was looking for. I think ideally i would like to be in the office a couple days a week and working from home a couple days a week.

If I wasn't a hermit before, I sure am now. I will literally go days without leaving the house. The only time I go out is to go grocery shopping, but even then i usually do a clicklist online and have the grocery employees load my car with the items I picked out, or take the dogs somewhere they need to be like the vet and the groomers.

For the first few months I didn't even see my own family as we quarantined. I was too afraid to unknowingly give the disease to my mom or my sister and her new baby.

In May Henry and I decided last minute to go visit his Mom and Rick in Virgina. We flew on a mostly empty plane wearing masks the whole flight. We were able to fly standby both ways which was nice. It was nice to spend time with them, but also tricky because there were still no restaurants open, and you couldn't really go anywhere. I did get a chance to see my sister and her family and play games one night.

All this while Lucy has been growing like a weed, being the craziest Saint Bernard we have ever had. She seems to have unlimited energy, no concept of her own size, makes her brothers crazy, and has been crazy destructive. Whenever new damage is discovered, my line to Hen has been "You wanted a puppy".

Oh and to add to the craziness of this year. Our neighbors called the cops on Oscar for his barking, which is crazy because I had been working from home for a couple months at this point and had been monitoring his barking. Also crazy that they couldn't be decent humans and call us on the phone, stop by to talk to us about it, or even write a letter before going to the cops. Since that day we have had to live on pins and needles. We have spent a few thousand dollars putting up additional fencing to help with the issue. And now all our routines have had to change. Previously our dogs always had access through a dog door to the inside and outside of the house. Now we have to control whenever they go in and out. It is really sad. All the while dogs around us bark all day long, and yet we are the ones we have to keep our dogs inside all the time.

This all happened because once everyone was on lockdown people were outside walking past our house literally a hundred times a day. This was not an issue before.

Even though Henry is back working, the airline industry has still taken a huge hit, and who knows when it will bounce back. So as of now we are waiting on pins and needles for that day that he could be laid off.

The good news is, Hen has now completed 2 semesters of school in the new career he is pursuing, mortuary science. So I guess if something happens with his job, he will just start moving towards his next career sooner than expected. As part of his coursework he had to take an accounting class. So we have basically spent 4 hours a week doing accounting together, which I would never have anticipated would happen in our lifetime. Then again I could have never anticipated Hen would want to go into this line of work.

People have started traveling again, but still not like before. I am afraid to travel, what if we get stuck somewhere and can't get back?

Hen is excited to be traveling back to his family's cabin on Lake Champlain with his family for a week. So that will be nice for him to get away.

One of the things we did, that couldn't have been timed better, was get a swim spa. We purchased an Arctic Ocean swim spa from Arctic Spas in Salt Lake and it was installed on May 20th. I have since found out that there is now a wait list of 3+ months to get one of these. We got one of the last ones before the factory was on shutdown from covid. We have been able to enjoy so much time this year using it. And my favorite feature are the jets that create a current you can swim against.

Well that pretty much brings us to today. I am still working from home. Hen is still working from Delta. Since we haven't gone too many places these last 6 or so months, alot of the blog updates are dog pictures, so just a warning. It is a crazy time we live in, and I have a feeling life will never go back to quite how it was before.

I miss hugs, and seeing friends and family more, I miss going to church and doing temple work. Even though it is nice working from home since I don't have to care about hair and makeup, or even the commute, I miss going into work and seeing my coworkers.