[vcf-midatlantic] How's everyone doing?

[Ethan O'Toole]

> Things are rough these days. How's everyone handling it?

I drive to work everyday. Huge building (over 20 floors.) I get rock star 
parking every day. 1st floor closest spot to the entrance. I touch nothing 
going in really. Sit at desk, 2 other coworkers are there usually. I go to 
the mall everyday for lunch, it's attached sort of to the building. There 
is maybe 3 to 5 food places open for carry out. Once again, basically 
touch nothing. Almost every store in the mall is closed. It's like 
watching the Dead Mall series on youtube where the music is playing and 
all the stores are missing except the stores are there in one of the 
wealthiest malls in the USA. It's eerie, I want to shoot some video of it.

Traffic last week was way lighter than this week. Even though traffic is 
light, people still do below the speed limit and stuff which plugs the 
roads up. I was looking out at the beltway and this week it seems like big 
rig traffic is up quite a bit.

Personal projects... been re-belting a nakamichi tape deck, working on an 
arcade system that boots from a raspberry pi to load the games into the 
hardware (Sega Dreamcast) and reading forums releated to computer stuff, 
SCUBA diving and reddit talk of the virus thing. Friends chatting on 
Slack, Discord and IRC. The downtime is kind of relaxing not having 
some geeky social thing every night but at the same time it seems off.

Part of me feels bad for not getting more project stuff done, or dabbling 
with music instruments more or something... but I'm still pretty zapped 
after working all day. The customer I work for just doesn't let up and 
always has a backlog of work. They laid off 10% last Friday I think and 
news is talking potential bankruptcy so no idea what that means for the 
future. I had planned on taking a trip to Florida in mid to late April to 
get some diving in, run some laser show stuff with friends at Kennedy 
Space Center and take a break from work. But all those plans got trashed. 
So many events delayed or in limbo it's not funny.

I seriously regret not getting a haircut two weekends ago, but a friend 
was in town and figured I would spend time doing fun stuff with him 
instead. I regret that one.

I hope everyone is safe and doing well.

 			- Ethan