Ross Catrow

  • Coronavirus: Day 120

    Actual Day 120 was a couple of days ago! I'm going to put a pause on these daily updates, both because literally everything is the same every day and because looking at the ever-increasing number of coronadays is bumming me out (autocorrect suggestion: numbing me out). I've got a "vacation"—staying inside a different house for a week next to some water—coming up and might reboot these afterwards. Until then!

  • Coronavirus: Day 119

    My mostly-weekly, fully-remote game of Dungeons & Dragons continues to be the highlight of my week and one of my favorite parts of these coronatimes.

  • Coronavirus: Day 118

    I have a bad feeling about the conversation we’re all about to get into over schools reopening. People are—rightfully—ultra stressed and we’re lacking meaningful leadership at the state level. How can you fault folks for having incredibly strong opinions about their kids' health and safety or their own health and safety? I just don’t feel like we’re set up for success.

  • Coronavirus: Day 116

    Someone yelled at me to “get the fuck out of the street” while I was riding my bike today. Nature is healing.

  • Coronavirus: Day 115

    Top five books I’d put on a bookcase behind me during a Very Important Zoom Call:

    1. House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski
    2. The Dragonlance Chronicles—Dragons of Autumn Twilight, Dragons of Winter Night, Dragons of Spring Dawning—by Margaret Weiss and Tracy Hickman
    3. A Prayer for Owen Meaney by John Irving
    4. Leviathan Wakes by James S.A. Corey
    5. Severance by Ling Ma

  • Coronavirus: Day 114

    We got dinner from Peter Chang tonight, and, my god, remember real, excellent food? I mean, maybe you don’t, but I’m hear to tell you it’s something else. Like, full of both flavors and textures. I mean, wow.

  • Coronavirus: Day 113

    I rode the absolute mess out of my bike with my dad the other day. I was totally blitzed by the time we got home. He looked at his Strava and said “Hmm, about 200 calories short of where I like to be.” 😒

  • Coronavirus: Day 112

    I love the sound of fireworks. It reminds me of summertime and watching The Sandlot.

  • Coronavirus: Day 111

    I'm really enjoying my garden this year. I think part of that is due to the pandemic giving me more time to spend watering, pulling weeds, and just generally futzing around out there. It's wild how you can just grow food right out of the ground! I think I'm going to invest in a nice sprinkler so I can automate the watering part of the process and focus more on the futzing part.

  • Coronavirus: Day 109

    I worked from an actual desk today and felt way less like a half-human schlub! It took 100 days, but setting up a Work From Home Zone was a good idea!

  • Coronavirus: Day 108

    Since the coronavirus isn't going anywhere, and we're not going anywhere, Val and I thought it'd be nice to finally create a space for me to Work From Home. Up until now I've been Working From Bed a lot, which I know is not great (see this particularly helpful video from CGP Grey). Now we've put a second desk in the spare room / her office and plan to block off Val-only time, Ross-only time, and shared time. We've shared an office before, but, as she put it, “we've both matured a lot since then.” 😬

  • Coronavirus: Day 107

    Bourbon and ginger beer is sooo much better than bourbon and ginger ale—like, way more better than the amount ginger beer is better than ginger ale. If anything, coronatime has encouraged me to drink alcohols other than Miller Highlife and Evan Williams Green. There's an an entire rainbow of booze to explore!

  • Coronavirus: Day 105

    I started reading Philip Roth's The Plot Against America for some reason (who recommended this to me??), and it frequently blows my mind. This description of living in a world where an anti-semitic Charles Lindbergh beat FDR and kept America out of WWII hits way too close to home in the current Trump/pandemic/racism moment:

    And as Lindbergh's election couldn't have made clearer to me, the unfolding of the unforeseen was everything. Turned wrong way round, the relentless unforeseen was what we schoolchildren studied as "History," harmless history, where everything unexpected in its own time is chronicled on the page as inevitable. The terror of the unforeseen is what the science of history hides, turning disaster into an epic.

    The terror, and the trauma, of the unforeseen is such a perfect way to describe what we've all been living through the last several months.

  • Coronavirus: Day 104

    While following the COVID Tracking Project on Twitter may not help me maintain a reasonable level of doomfeeling, it is certainly fascinating. Coronavirus cases in the South continue to skyrocket, but things have not yet progressed to a New York City Levels of Apocalypse. Still plenty of time for that, I guess, as states surrounding Virginia continue to plow right on into reopening.

  • Coronavirus: Day 103

    Benadryl still works during a pandemic. Whew! Heckuva drug.

  • Coronavirus: Day 102

    Due to the pandemic, we canceled our annual trip to Blacksburg for the Virginia Tech spring football game. It's one of my favorite family traditions, and this is one of the first year's we've skipped since my son was just a couple years old. Honestly with all of the…everything…going on, mid April rolled right past us and we kind of forgot about it. Part of what makes that trip special is mandatory stop at Benny Marzano's for “pizza as big as your face” or “big-face pizza,” as we call call it. I don't know why it took me so long to remember, but we've got a Benny's in Richmond—Benny Ventano's. So we celebrated/memorialized our annual trip at home with plenty of big-face pizza. We'll hit up Blacksburg again, though. Maybe in 202…1?..2?

  • Coronavirus: Day 101

    It’s weird how part of my nightly quarantine routine is to wait until the sun goes down and then check Goad Gatsby’s Twitter timeline for updates on the evening’s civil unrest. Didn’t have that on my coronavirus bingo card!

  • Coronavirus: Day 100

    💯

  • Coronavirus: Day 99

    I'm having frequent coronavirus-related nightmares. They're not terrifying dreams, more like frustrationmares: I forget my mask, I'm stuck in a crowd of maskless people, I have to organize an event but can't provide proper social distancing, stuff like that. I haven't slept well in over a week due to these low-key, boringly upsetting dreams. I mentioned it in couple of grouptext, and apparently lots of folks are experiencing the same thing. Weird timeline we live in where we can build solidarity through shared nightmares.

  • Coronavirus: Day 98

    With just five episodes of Lost left to watch, I'm positive we'll look back on these quarantimes as the "Catrow Family's Lost Era." I do wonder if we've got enough time trapped in our house ahead of us that we'll split up quarantine into its own mini eras. Era 1: Lost…Era 2: Every single episode of Star Trek ever made??

  • Coronavirus: Day 97

    I feel weird about how my beard spreads out around the edges of my mask.

  • Coronavirus: Day 95

    I've now been in two buildings other than my house since March 13th: The mortgage refinance place and my parents' house. My quarantine world is expanding! I think I'd have flipped my biscuits by now if not for riding my bike all over the dang city as much as possible.

  • Coronavirus: Day 94

    One of my neighbors just planted a ton of corn in his front yard. Lol, coronatimes!

  • Coronavirus: Day 93

    The seven-day forecast is an endless stretch of potential rain. If I get trapped in this house for the next week with no escape THERE WILL BE CONSEQUENCES. And, by consequences I mean I will be unintentionally rude to my family while eating lots of chips.

  • Coronavirus: Day 92

    My son finally got Chick-fil-A for lunch as part of his graduating-from-5th-grade celebration, and it was probably the happiest he's been in three months.

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