Tuesday 01/04/2022
Rhonda sent an email to me and Marcia saying that there may be need/use for resident volunteers. Remember back in mid-2020 when we had so many staff out for quarantine we organized resident volunteers to deliver meals and do other tasks? That all ended in early 2021, and since then there has been a steady march back toward normal operations — until this week.
Today about 10am came an email saying the dining room would be closed for supper owing to shortage of staff. We could order food to go and pick it up at the dining room door. Later in the day came the announcement that the dining room was closed, all meals to be ordered to go, for at least a month.
We had the writers group meeting at 11am. During it, I confess I was checking my email while someone else read their piece, came an email from Stanford: while “winter sports” games will be played, only friends and families of the student-athletes will be allowed to attend. So there goes my plan to attend the Stanford-Oregon WBB game Friday night.
I went down to FOPAL and completed cleaning up the computer donations, that took from 12:30 to 3pm.
Rhonda held a general meeting by Zoom at 5 and I missed it! Read a book right through it. But she announced we finally, for the first time since 2020, have a covid case among residents, someone in the Lee center. So we are shut down: no gatherings of any kind, all meetings via Zoom or canceled, the planned bus trip to the Monterey Bay Aquarium canceled, dining room closed. Things are changing fast, please be patient with staff and be kind to each other.
Oh, and Gretta at CHM emailed to say that the normal all-day Thursday volunteer days would resume, but not all-day any more. We used to work from 10 to 11:30, then go out for lunch, and work again from 1 to 4. Now it will be just the afternoon session, to cut down on exposures. I replied I would skip this week at least as having a lot to do here.
Tomorrow morning Marcia and I will meet to figure out what resident volunteers might do. Not much, really, because the big job we had before, wheeling the carts loaded with meal trays, isn’t happening now. The ordering for takeout process has been in operation for months, quite a few people prefer to do that, and the kitchen staff is used to it. I’ve done it a couple of times just for fun. For people who can’t use the web, there’s an extension to call to give a verbal order, but the web interface is quite convenient. You specify what you want off the menu, and when you want to pick it up, and later you go get the tray. Afterward you bus your compost to the big compost bin in the basement.
So I don’t expect we will be organizing room delivery, at least not on a big scale. There are a few people who get food delivered to them, I hear the cart rolling by at breakfast time. So maybe. TBD.
Tomorrow is all meetings, I have to see Marcia at 10, then the RA exec committee — now via Zoom, the last few months it has been face to face — at 3, and a strategic planning committee at 4.
Codgerville 