How 'bout that... It's been another two weeks. Things are pretty fast and furious with my work and around the Herriott household. We've been cutting loose things that aren't absolutely necessary or at least immediately important when we can. It's wild to consider how drastically things have changed in the last few months with so much of our lives spinning back up to our current "normal."
It's almost quaint thinking back now to late March and early April where you could FaceTime someone you'd not spoken to in months knowing they were also not busy and stuck inside. I almost miss being uniformly terrified about touching anything without first drowning it in bleach and tripping out because you couldn't find toilet paper or hand sanitizer. Hopefully it didn't show, but do know internally I was smug AF about being ahead of the sourdough curve when that nonsense got going.
As of today, Tuesday Oct. 27, 2020, we're 228 days from when Quarantine got started for us in NYC. 228 days. Saint Anne the Wife and I are still living in Oklahoma City with the two house fires at my mother-in-law's. Yesterday at a Post Office in Sea Girt, New Jersey, I dropped off a check to pay our first monthly mortgage payment on a house in Oklahoma City we've yet to move into and never intended to buy. It's not like we "accidentally" bought a house, but it's 2020 for goodness sakes.
This week has me back in the greater New York City area for a documentary project with a non-profit who'd reached out back in late May. Seriously, the world has yet to stop drastically changing and the 2020 of now would been unthinkable even then. Our list of priorities and storylines for this short film looks completely different than the proposal I'd written back then. Still, I'm incredibly thankful to be working and getting a chance to partner with this group.
In addition to our NYC/NJ shoots, part of the project will include interviews with people in multiple cities over Zoom. Obviously video calls are now as common as breakfast and dealing with your kid's remote learning, but I'd not done the whole thing of producing and directing remotely just yet. We had our first one over the weekend and should have a couple more by the end of this week. Crazy thanks to the internet and YouTubers who've already figured out some best practices in making the most of this hot mess.