Kim

Covid-History Item Type Metadata

Age

50

Date

05/27/2020

Location

Galway, New York

When did the impact of COVID-19 first occur to you? How did your reaction to COVID-19 change between then and the first case in your town?

In mid-February I began larger shopping trips, but didn’t take it all too seriously. On March 6 I attended a small education conference (15-ish people). We were not taking any distance precautions, but it did occur to me that the speaker was taking chances exposing himself to the virus as he traveled to different states presenting. I don’t know when the first case hit my area, but one week later on March 13, I went to a funeral in CT, but after that I began staying at home, only going to the store every 2 weeks.

How is your life different now than it was before the pandemic?

For the most part it didn’t change much. I homeschool my child anyway, so we are home often. The classes he takes once a week outside of the home moved to online video calls, but because many homeschool classes are online video anyway, that wasn’t a big adjustment. My son’s job ended, but that left more time for school work, so that worked out well too. My son’s friends quickly planned Zoom get togethers. My husband and I miss going out to eat quite a bit, but Village Pizzeria has a fantastic family meal deal that we pick up at least once a week. My husband is concerned about his businesses surviving this, so I shop more carefully than previously. .

How are you feeling? What are you doing to relieve stress?

Because we live on multiple acres with a variety of activities and are homebodies anyway, for the most part we are in good spirits. We are exercising everyday; my husband makes it a point to workout for 2 hours everyday. We’ve had friends over, mostly staying outside, but we did have friends from out of state come for the weekend in May. It’s time to begin getting back to living. When the stress of the possibility of losing all of our income gets too great, we give thanks to God for what we’ve been blessed with and brainstorm what we could do in the future to make our businesses viable. And of course we’ve been praying a lot!

What have you noticed has changed in your community since the outbreak? What has surprised you?

One of the surprising things is that some of our friends who are extremely positive people in regular life, have shown the greatest fear in this situation

Are you a business owner who has had to close? If you are still open, how have you had to adjust how your business operates?

Two of our businesses had to close. It was difficult for our employees to first deal with unemployment, then come off unemployment to be paid through payroll protection, then have to go back on unemployment because the governor has kept the state shut down longer than the government money was allowed to be used. The other business was allowed to remain open, but most employees have worked from home. The jury is still out on whether or not that business will survive.

Do you have children at home? How’s it going?

I have a 15-year-old son. It is going well. We homeschooled before this happened so we were not inconvenienced as much as most people. He and his friends quickly set up a zoom get together’s and In May they started going to eachother’s houses.

Do you have animals? Did you adopt a pet? How have they impacted your day?

We have a dog and chickens. We increased our chicken flock so that we were less reliant on the stores for our food We increased our chicken flock so that we were less reliant on the stores for our food

What positive things did you contribute to or notice take place?

We contributed to the homeless shelters who are doing a good job of helping those who need it.

Did you or someone you know contract COVID-19? What was it like?

Yes, we have a few friends who contracted the virus. All were mild cases.

What would you want future generations to know about the 2020 pandemic? How would you recommend they prepare for it?

Make your life as non-dependent on government and others as possible. We came through this better than most because we grow as much of our food as possible, we educate our child, and we don’t spend money needlessly.

Dublin Core

Title

Kim

Subject

COVID-19 (Disease)

Publisher

Southern Adirondack Library System

Contributor

Southern Adirondack Library System

Rights

Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Language

English

Type

Covid History

Identifier

11641477924

Coverage

Coronavirus Pandemic

Citation

“Kim,” Leaving Our Fingerprints on History, accessed March 29, 2024, https://fingerprints.sals.edu/omeka/items/show/162.

Output Formats

Geolocation