Its been about two weeks since my last post. I had just briefly mentioned the start of Corona Virus. In the last two weeks things have only gotten worse. Everyday there is breaking news. Today we just hit 1 million worldwide infections, and I believe upwards of 50,000 deaths. There is no sign of it slowly down yet. Especially in the US. Washington has been ordered to stay home unless absolutely necessary. I am going on week 3 of being remote for work. Just the other day my firm extended the closure to April 20. Will be about 6 weeks at this point. I will not be surprised if that gets extended again. Trump also announced an extension of the "social distancing" guidelines until May 4th. New York has it the worse by far. Central Park is becoming a war zone hospital with tents and beds being constructed for the sick and dead. I also heard that we are ordering 100,000 extra body bags from Canada. Projections right now show 100,000 to 250,000 deaths in the US alone. The economy is taking maybe its biggest hit ever. In the last two weeks just about 10 million people have applied for unemployment. As a comparison, in 2008 about 300,000 people applied for it. The markets surprisingly have not reacted much since the massive drops almost a month ago. There has been some rebound in the last few weeks. I have a feeling in the next two weeks that will not be the case. I am fully expecting the worse and a massive drop like we have not seen before. The unemployment numbers are wild and stimulus packages are taking longer than expected to hit. Also it doesn't seem like things are getting better yet. Trump said the country will go through hell in the next few weeks. Also speaking of the economy, today my firm announced pay reductions starting May 1. I am losing 5% of my salary which completely blows but I am staying positive being thankful that I still have a job right now. I still have it good compared to many others. Although it is strange that no other accounting firms have announced pay reductions. It makes me wonder what mine did or what is making our situation different. My friends at other firms have only heard they are not getting bonuses. Also we were one of the last firms to close down but the first to cut pay. Not giving me a lot of faith in my new firm.
Other than Corona I have just been held up at home everyday all day other than the occasional trips to the store for food. Austin and I are thriving here. We are talking a lot more and our friendship is the best it's ever been. I love that. We are cooking a lot together. We made a pact to only eat wings for dinner until we perfected the process which we did after about 6 days. Wing restaurant coming in the future. We are also playing a ton of Runescape which actually amazing. I use to play in elementary school but was too young to fully grasp the game. Nostalgia is real when playing it. We spend more of our days working, usually 8am to around 6 or 7pm. Tax season doesn't stop for the sickness. Motivation is almost nonexistent so working is the biggest drag of all time. Days feel so long.
I have been going to my dad's on the weekends to continue van escapades. So last time I posted pics of the cabinet doors on and the flooring secured in. I have some updates but I will have (hopefully) some massive updates in a couple days. I ordered a lot of fun things to do and install so I hope all that goes to plan.
I ordered carpet from the front. A cooler instead of a fridge. I found a dash cover for the nasty gash it had, I went with black and painted all the red pieces on the dash black, as well as the engine cover. I also fixed the power steering since it was leaking. I added handles to the doors. And I added the cover to the battery box.
Below are pics per usual. I will add some VW pics since I cleaned her up some.
