I'm a home health aide and I worked all through the pandemic. I was doing 55 to 64 hours a week for over 8 months straight. It was great because I got a lot of free meals, and every convenience store was giving away free coffee to all healthcare workers and first responders, and the price of gasoline was so low that all the driving I did between my different clients' homes really wasn't as costly as it otherwise would have been.
I didn't write much during that time. Life was a blur.
One thing really kept me going all through the summer, and that was that the inspection sticker on my car was set to expire at the end of October. And my car was so old and junky that it just wasn't worth fixing (it was a 2002 Hyundae). I knew I needed to buy another one, and that I needed to save at least $6,000 by October to get anything decent. So I had that goal always on my radar.
Then in October, my one client who had me working for 48 hours a week moved away. And so I took the down time to shop for a new-used car.
The used car market was horrendous! The pandemic effectively shut down all the factories manufacturing new cars, --first all the Asian factories shut down, then a few weeks later all the Euro ones, and lastly about 3 weeks after the Euro factories is when the factories in North ansd South America shut down. And so by May, that left all the used cars out there as the only option. There were LITERAL bidding wars for used cars! And whatever Kelley Bluebook said the price should be ... triple it! And that tripled price was what you would pay! I could post more about the car marketplace, lots of additional geeky details of how and why the prices went benanas. But the happy ending here is that I was able to find a really decent car by about October 20th, but I still paid through the nose for it! I got a 10 year old car --a 2010 Toyota Yaris, which is the smallest Toyota out there. Teeny tiny little 2-door hatchback sub-compact car. And I paid $6.500 for it. It was really clean, and only had 34k miles on it. I would have paid a lot more except that it was a stick-shift instead of an automatic. ALL sticks are selling for about $2,000 or more less than the automatics of the same make and model, and the discount is due to the surprising fact that here in the year 2021, less than 17% of Americans know how to drive a stick! So I got a "deal" only because of that one advantage in my skill set. Because the car was so old (10 years!) I had to pay cash (no bank wll finance a car more than 6 hyears old).
I had only one other client all through October, so I was working less than 20 hours a week, which was fine. I had some cash saved from my crazy summer of endless overtime. But then I came down with COVID. So then I was unemployed. Bummer. But I got unemployment compensation, so I was fine. I had a fairly mild case, but I would not return to work again until I was symptom-free (no argument from me on that). I went back to work by late December. But I haven't really been the same since.
I lost my sense of smell. It only just came back a few weeks ago, so I literally had no sense of smell for over 7 months.
I experienced pancreatic difficulties and cardio-complications. I am now pre-diabetic.
I tried to donate my plasma right after I recovered from COVID. The plasma donations centers were paying anywhere from $300 to $800 per donation if you had COVID antibodies in your system. But when I answered all the questions, I got turned down fir just one problem in my medical history. Once again .... Bummer. I don't know if they are still paying such a high bounty. But if you have only just recently recovered from COVID, you might want to look into it.
I have writing projects in my old laptop. The new laptop has pretty much nothing. I made myself delete all my Facebook games so I would stop burning up time Candy-Crushing and other nonsense.
It's good to see so many of your names and avatars on my screen again.
Keeps me sane.
