Economic Quarantine, a Diary: Day 16 (Monday, March 30th)

On Sunday I had a lightbulb moment.  Walmart offers free pickup.  Let a Walmart employee do my shopping for free.  They even bring the order to your car.  Sounds like the smart thing to do in this age of social distancing.  So bright and early yesterday I placed an order, but no order windows were available until today.  Still, this is much better than Amazon Fresh.  They haven't had a delivery window available for days.  I even managed to grab a pack of toilet paper, but that is being rationed and I had to go inside to purchase it.

There were several issues that popped up over the weekend and today.  Two of my Birmingham properties had issues.  I have to replace the HVAC system at one property.  The other one had a pipe inside the wall burst which leaked through the ceiling in the garage.  I got on the phone with the air conditioning guy, who I've worked with in the past, and was able to knock $1,200 off his quote.  Still going to be painful.  The burst pipe repair is likely going to cost around $1,000.

If that weren't enough, the battery light came on in my car this morning while I was doing Doordash.  I finished my delivery and went home to try to figure out what was wrong.  It's a newer battery so I didn't think that could be the problem.  I cleaned the corroded terminals, but that didn't make the light go off.  Doing some Internet research, it looked like it could be an alternator issue.  I took it to my mechanic, and I was right.  That's another almost $1,000 expense.

So, I'm at home, carless.  The alternator had to be ordered and won't come in until tomorrow.  I spent the day reading.  Sadly, the Tampa Bay Times is cutting back paper distribution to 2 days a week and will be available online the other days.  It's an excellent piece of journalism and I was sad to hear this.  The editor said they have lost over $1 million in ad revenues due to COVID-19. 

We also prepared dinner together.  Usually my partner does the cooking.  We made homemade meatball sliders.  They were AMAZING!  Afterwards, we signed up for a 7 day trial of Cinemax so I put on The Sitter.