Dear Sam c.April 2020

Dear Sam,

I am a Dungeon Master, Teacher, Writer, Nursery Worker, Atheist.  That is in order of importance to me, but many of them are tied for second place at one time or another.  I am not your Number One Fan, but I do listen to, nay, enjoy listening to your podcast, to the exclusion of all other podcasts.  I like listening to the plight of Atheists in your country because we are so close to you and yet so far away.  I live in Canada, in Ontario, in Mississauga, but I have been listening to you from Parry Sound, Toronto, and Oakville since I started.  I feel for you as I have been perpetually low level depressed from 1979 straight through 2016; it was a side effect to my version of Autism, but I am much better now.  That is not what I wanted to talk about though.  I just wanted to tell you how I am surviving the Pandemic, as asked.

I have been declared an Essential Worker, paper thin quasi-legal, if anyone blew on the reason, it would collapse and it would be gone, but I go to work as required.  I do it because I am recently promoted to be a supervisor and I am charge of the outside nursery part of the Garden Centre, and I needed to get all the plants out of hibernation mode and out into the selling place of the Garden Centre and I am the only person doing that.  Then, they decided to open up the place for curbside pick-up and so my job has been placed on hold as I do the curbside five days a week and one day a week I do what I am supposed to be doing, setting up the nursery.  If the Social Isolation is ever lifted, I need to have the place ready to accept customers.

So, in Canada, Social Distancing means approaching no closer than 2m (6 feet) from every other person except the people that I am living with.  I know, The same thing as in the US.  But we are doing curbside, so that means there are ten people receiving E-orders and telephone orders, filling the orders and calling customers to queue at an appropriate time and load their cars.  I am not supposed to touch customer cars, them, or come within 2m of them, but it does not really work.  People get out of their cars, People want to go into the Garden Centre, they want to approach us.  They speak so quietly that you must lean closer to hear them, within a meter.  They want me to open their trunks.  They are young people; they are old people (mostly older people) and they are other people too.  They place their order and rush to get their product thinking that we can fill it faster than Amazon.  People are stupid.  Well not Stupid, but oblivious.  And . . ..

And, The more that we work together, the ten of us are getting closer; we are getting to know each other like we never did pre-pandemic because there were so many other employees, but no I mean we area actually positionally getting closer.  We, at the start were 2m away at all times, but then there was a narrow passage between to shelves, there was a counter where two people had to get something; there were jokes like ‘we held our breath’, but we just continued.  It is not like a grocery store with wide corridors and a lofty warehouse, well there is a lofty warehouse, but we area not there.  It is more close.  We do our jobs.  Our company is giving us Danger Pay, but I am not sure that that is enough.  I am not sure anyone thinks it is enough, but we go to work.  We see 70-80 customers a day, there was supposed to be a cap of 20, but we have rivals and we have people that just show up without appointments.

It is not New York City here.  It is not Italy.  None of our Leaders are remotely as bad as Donald Trump.  The Virus is not in control: as much as the Provincial Leader wants to promote Business, especially after two years of slashing health regulations in Long Term Care Facilities and cutting back on Health Care budgets, but as I said he is not Trump, in the end although he mirrored Trump in his first years, he has been more solid than people thought he could be, myself included. He has stated: people before the economy.  But, That is coming to an end, he is signalling that the Self Isolation is coming to an end.

The numbers: Ontario 11,735 cases, 622 deaths, pop. 13.6M  Area 1,076,395 sqkm (415,000 sqmi)

Canada 38,205 cases, 1831 deaths, pop. 37,700,000

I was just giving you a little context for when I am writing this.  Ending the Self Isolation, easing is a mistake.  I do not want this to continue, but I do not want people to get sick and die.  I do not want my parents, who are 73 and 78 to get sick. 

How the Nation is doing it.  We have a Social Safety Net.  When we lose out job, we can claim Employment Insurance (50-55%) of our wage with a ceiling of about $1200/month.  With the Virus the Prime Minister has said that for the next 4 months anyone* that is out of work due to the virus can collect $2000/month.  And the roll out has been swift as he promised and everyone, I heard applied got money within a day and it keeps coming.  Win!!  Companies that lose more than 25% due to the virus can apply to the government and the government will reimburse 75% of the payroll.  So they don’t need to lay anyone off.  Things are good that way.  Teachers, who had been fighting the provincial government for months in contract talks continued to talk and the province in the face of the pandemic seemed to come to their senses about increasing classroom sizes and quietly settled and worked out a deal so they could concentrate on the big problems.  School has been out since our March break start on

My partner has two children, they are 13 and 16.  They are coping well.  The boy plays computer games all day and hopefully does his Grade 8 online work.  The older one does her online work just before it is due at 11:59pm every day and reads the rest of the day.  She is not allowed to see her Girlfriend at all.  This she does not like very much at all, but you cannot tell.  Their father lives here too, he works for a company based in New York and they implemented lock down procedures much earlier.  He cannot date, because of social distancing.  The best he got was a social distance date/walk and Zoom Dates.

My partner works from home and can treat her clients with Zoom meetings.  She misses seeing her friends face to face at her BNI meetings.  Her business is suffering as her clients are tightening their belts as they are reducing their hours and income.  Too bad, she treats people’s stresses and anxieties.  A few people are suffering more these days because of having to live in proximity with their spouse 24/7.  She is building an online course that she can make a little more money and help others out also, all her trade shows that she had spent money on have been cancelled.  She keeping busy, though.

I am building a data base so that I can see all the products that are available at a moments glance for the nursery.  I am busyish.  I wish I were playing more Dungeons and Dragons.  I had three games going on in my life, but no one wants to play online, they only want to meet in person.  One includes a couple of ADHD people, and one is something I threw together to keep people in touch over the Winter.  The Last one is a more recent gaming group, a bunch of people that are older than me who have been playing since the early 1980s.  It is the human element that people like from games like D&D.  That is what is missing in these days, the Human Element.

Oh, I am riding my Bike to work most days now.  It eats up time and I get some good exercise, also it means that my partner is not driving me there and coming in the evening to get me, four trips.  The buses are practicing social distancing too, rear boarding and thus free trips.  It is funny, right now transit is the price that it should be. but no one uses it for fear or because they are not working.  Oh, I should add Environmentalist right before Dungeon Master.  People are driving too much these days because they are bored, but pollution is down everywhere, and the price of gasoline is lower than it has been in decades.  Pollution down is what I am happy most about.  It is time that we make permanent changes to society.  Flatten the curve on CO2 production!! 

I want this to be over.  But I do not want this to be over before it is over for good.  Working with the public as I am, I feel that every little ache and pain, headache, muscle tension, sniffle is a sign that I am sick and a carrier of the virus.  I know that before, back in the before times, that this was part of being alive, but right now I am hypervigilant to the contact that I have with people.  I see the coffee shop person press the lid of my tea with his hand and in my head I ask, “When was the Last time that he washed his hands, when was the last time that he touched his face,”  My lips then brush the place where his hand just was and I drink from my tea.  The Cashier at the convenience store, that has been deemed essential because it has food in it.  She is Chinese, she is wearing a mask.  I ask her how she is doing?  I bought a snickers bar and a lottery ticket, but that was the excuse, so that I could ask how she was doing.  Her smile touched her eyes above her mask.  I chatted so very briefly at the coffee shop to the man who pressed his hands down on the lid where my lips would brush.  I think of it not as buying a tea but saying hi to another human and touching their mind.

Hi Sam.  How are you doing?  I love listening to what is happening In the Seattle Region, in the Obtuse Triangle, with those silly people who seem to want to spread this virus around.  I hope You and Becky are safe and well.  Have a good evening.

 from the Internet.

Covid-19 first roleplaying session

There was a BIG break in the roleplaying for my young group.  The Work Group.  Two completely new player, a player that only played online, a player that had not played but once or twice since the 80s and then COVID-19 ended it.  But people still wanted to play.  We were all working together, except one player now, so we reluctantly decided to cut ties with them; they were the least regular player having only attended 2 of 5 sessions before then.  And one of the players invited a replacement, who I had already been involved with in two other games.  No biggie, except I wanted to run this game with him from the start in his other group, but it looks like that game was not going to happen anytime soon, if at all.  I will have another chance to debut this adventure, perhaps more.  Most of the players forgot their characters and we had to try to find them on my end, and some of those characters may have been in my possession, so my bad. 

Not that the players cooperate with me when try to get details out of them outside of game play.

The game started as I planned with the storm.  The storm being the foreshadowing that they will get to feel from later in the game after the Great River floods and sends the animals and the herds into the city. 

The dark clouds to the South reached toward them fading as their tendrils approached into a deep red sky.  To the North, and back where they came from the clouds were no less ominous but, instead held the appearance of violent storms; the lightning flashes could be seen, but the toiling thunder was lost to the distance.  The flat land of the plains made the clouds appear deceptively close.  The storm to the South was different, the wind from that direction held the odd stray snowflake, not an odd occurrence this early in the Spring period for here.  Tiarah looked toward her homeland and knew that it was snowing there heavily.  Sometimes the snows that came at this time in the season would dump several meters of snow on the ground from a mixture of the North winds bringing heavy rains and the South bringing crushingly cold air.  Causnought was not a place that she wanted to be on this day, which was fortunate, because she wasn’t.  The tail end of that storm had sent a crisp new coating of snow for the ground, whatever moved in the early morning would leave a clear trail.  The characters felt that it might be better to just stay where they were, but if they did that every time the weather was inclement, they would not have done a thing over the past few weeks at all. 

As they approached the ruined city of Awsland, they began to take the signs that they had learned from the expedition to the other ruins.  The signs of the presence of old walls became clear in the patterns of the way the grass grew, some blessedly few structures rose from the plains to show that there was a city here and there was a lot of in between type structures: walls half collapsed, a statue here or there knocked over, or just a mound of rubble like an island in the sea of grass.  A few of the larger structures on the edge of the city were reminiscent of gate houses and although most of them were collapsed or torn apart by looters, there were three towers still standing of the hundreds that there must have been.  Two were on the road that went from Dhewtudum and the last was on the road that exited the city close by to where they were standing.  Since it was closest, they headed that way.

The early morning snow melted as they progressed, the snow had beaten down the tall old grass, but let the younger grass more alone.  Nerwen stooped before the ruined gatehouse and examined the ground; some of the grass had been flattened not by snow, but by Kobolds and some other thing.  She motioned to the rest of the party to be alerted to the presence of their old foe.  Keylesh spotted an ancient window part way up the tower and decided that it would be best to climb and see what was inside the tower from there.  With her natural climbing tools, her claws, she was quickly able to climb the old rotting tower to look inside from that vantage point.  She saw nothing, so she continued up to the top of the tower.  The morning sun cast part of the fallen third story in bright light but the shadow was a deep black in comparison, so she missed the enemies lurking in it.

The night had been a little exciting for the troop.  They had been sent to guard and watch the North of the city.  They had survived and learned to avoid certain parts of the city as there were some dangers that would require a more co-ordinated approach along with a little observation and some planning.  The Necropolis and the Sewers were part of the puzzling aspects of the city, but they would be cracked in time.  There were dangers that they expected and dangers they did not expect, like last night the foolish Orc-kin that was found entering the city nearby.  She had been dangerous, but careful planning brought it down in the end.  Six of the Crimson Skulls had paid the price fighting it and bringing it down.  The Burning Daggers would not be pleased with the loses, but the honour the capture would be well worth it, especially if the Orc-kin were to join up in the Holy Crusade. 

They rested in shifts, a fist watching the prisoner, a fist resting and a fist on watch in the upper area.  The ground floor contained the support for the detachment; they guarded the supplies and the lower floors.  The window in the top part of the room let natural light into the room.  It looked like in the times that the tower had been used it was a place for a lone defender with a bow could stand, but time had widened it so it could be used as a escape route should some enemy come to them here.  The light of the suns came through and brightened a patch on the wall opposite from it and from there defused uncomfortably into the room.  it was clear to all that the opening was obscured suddenly, the light winked out and the window was filled with a large head of a mountain cat.  The cat looked around the room and sniffled once before bounding up once more.  She placed a hind foot in the window and leaped up to the roof.  There was an intruder.  We began at once waking the sleeping Crimson Skulls and we were ready when we heard a yowl from the cat as the fist on watch dispatched the cat.

Dust lodged in the cracks of the dried timbers holding the floor above broke loose when the sound shattered the silence of the day in the ground floor rooms.  We did not know what had happened and at first thought that the fight above had damaged the structure of the building and it was coming down on our heads.  The Blessed Mother would not let that happen.  An enemy came up the stairs and charged the fist that was guarding the Orc-kin.  The Fist Commander yelled, “Tactics!”, but I saw another set of attackers climb from below.  They threw sand and things grew dark, the Eyes of The Mother were prominent, she was angry . . ..

Keylesh landed on the top of the tower and crouched ready to attack anything that should come her way.  “Anything could be here,” she thought.  There was movement and three Kobolds rushed out to attack her as three stone whirled out of the darkness too.  Two were aimed well and they impacted with bone jarring smacks.  The attacking Kobolds were clearly disliking the light of the Suns that she was crouching in, but they attacked, nonetheless.  It spoke of some discipline that Keylesh had not seen in the Kobolds before.  She dodged easily out of their grasp but thought that six kobolds might be too much even for her.  She attacked anyways and slew two easily with slashes from her claws.  She sprung back towards the ledge she had just leapt from, hoping to get away from the little foes and warn her companions, however, the kobolds would not have her flee so easily and lashed out at her, even though she had jumped up and towards the rising suns, the kobold was effectively blinded, but it struck as if guided by the hand of their god deep into her Achilles tendon; she stood and instantly lost her balance and plunged over the wall.

Nerwen and Tiarah hearing the yowl of pain, looked up to see Keylesh falling to her death, but still trying to slow herself down.  They looked toward the dwarf hoping that he might have something to help, but he had disappeared.  “BOOM!” the sound of the dwarven Blunderbuss discharging made it clear that he had charged through the front door.  Nerwen took up her bow and charged in after him, hoping that Tiarah had some means of saving Keylesh.  Tiarah attempted to acrobatically climb and vault up the wall in a manner that Keylesh had made seem so easy and make a leaping catch, a bid to save her friend, they tumbled together and Tiarah managed to dose Keylesh with a healing potion. 

Together the three companions charged in and up the stairs passed the bits of kobold that had been hit with the blast from the blunderbuss.  They found the dwarf beset by many kobolds, fighting over the corpse of some person.  Hopelessly out numbered, Nerwen and Tiarah cast sleep spells on the kobolds and knocked half the enemy’s unconscious.  It appeared that a rash of sudden deaths was visited upon the sleeping kobolds as they were murdered before they woke up.  The remaining kobolds were killed except for one who was interrogated. 

The body of the person it turned out was still in use, a barbarian half-orc with a disposition of one who had just been saved when his luck seemed gone.  He requested, in the manner of the uncivilized heathen, to repay his life debt to the party.  The Kobold spoke of a mystical holy quest that his clan was required to fill for their Goddess, to find the Treasure at the depth of the city and present it to her holiness. 

The party sent the kobold to its goddess early, with a progress report.