Late to the COVID Party

You guys, Alberta is not doing okay with COVID. We currently have one of the highest rates of COVID-19 in all of North America. It is seriously jarring to me to see some of your posts where you are horse showing and having actual unmasked interaction with people because that is not the situation here.

I started this post a couple weeks ago when things looked even worse. Thankfully the additional "Stop the Spike" measures seem to be helping drive our cases down a bit, and every week more people get vaccinated, but things are still bad. I feel like in early days the pandemic united a lot of people but things seem more divided than ever right now when it comes to pandemic and political opinions. I cannot even get into that. While I have been dealing with the pandemic since spring 2020 like most of the rest of the world, in many ways right now I feel like I am late to the party in experiencing what many of you experienced a long long time ago: First, I am only now working from home indefinitely for the first time in the pandemic. A lot of employees at my company were sent home last spring but I was in the middle of managing a construction project where we had half dismantled a critical structure in order to rebuild it and so it was not safe to suspend work at that time. That meant that while I worked from home on certain days, every week I was physically on site all through Spring 2020. In the summer and fall of 2020 cases were lower and it was the busy time for our site so it was all hands on deck physically. Over the winter we did a rotation where I was physically in the office every 2nd or 3rd week and home the other weeks. Just two weeks ago the call was made to send us home until further notice.

At least I did pick up a nice antique desk and massive monitor to use at home last year Second, while showing is resuming for many of you after a missed season last year, I was able to hold my 2020 local dressage show (at the time there were only 10 active cases in my community and we had a lot of protective measures in place), but I had to cancel my show that was supposed to happen this coming weekend. This year I had planned on two shows so I still hold out some hope that the August dates will be a go.

Current guidance for competitions right now, though exceptions can be applied for I know that I have been very fortunate to keep seeing my horse throughout the pandemic but I am struggling with motivation with no lessons, clinics or shows on the horizon. In the meantime I will enjoy the show vicariously through your blogs! (And I would like to state again for the record, that even though I am a terribly infrequent blogger and commenter myself, I still really really appreciate those of you keeping this blogging thing alive, I do regularly read and enjoy all the blogs on my sidebar so thank you)

Luckily my last lesson for the foreseeable future was a really good one!