- Quarantine Day 60
- April unemployment report: 14.7%. Highest since Great Depression (reflects conditions in middle of April, so reality is almost certainly worse)
- Another 3+ million first-time unemployment claims for each of the past 2 weeks
- Livermore cases: 45
- Alameda County cases: 2,233; deaths: 81
- U.S. cases: 1,412,000+; deaths: 85,900+
States around the country have started trying to open back up. Some with better plans and statistics than others, so we’ll see how things go. Alameda County has not loosened any further restrictions since the change that was effective May 4.
The Lab is still running in a limited capacity with high-priority projects getting on-site staffing as needed. At this point I expect to be working out of my closet throughout the summer.
Our relief/stimulus payment finally came through. Since I’m still working and getting paid it wasn’t something we were desperately waiting on, but if we had been the time it took would have been stressful.
Heather completed an art project for school that included describing what she’s looking forward to in the summer. It was mainly variations on not being stuck at home anymore.
Most of my free time has been spent generating new quests for our Dragon Strike campaign. I’ve put together a story arc and at least vaguely sketched out ideas for the quests that will fill in that story arc. I’m not going to prep too much detail ahead of time, there’s no telling when Heather will tire of the game. It takes me a few hours to fully design each quest. So I spend much of my weeknights writing the quest we’ll play that weekend.
Last weekend Heather and Jess won The Battle for Bree in which they had to hold the city against a horde of monsters until reinforcements could arrive. Yes, yes, it was basically Helm’s Deep, leave me alone, I’m not a story writer. But, I do have some somewhat original stories coming up.
Tonight will be the second quest for the on-line campaign with friends. They will have to rescue Kili and Fili from the collapsing mine. I will probably have to split up The Battle for Bree with them because it took significantly longer with Heather and Jess than my play testing suggested it would.
Retail spending reports for April came out today. A 16.4% drop in retail spending compared to March. Clothing sales down 78.8%.