Four Years ago today

HughFreakingDillon

curmudgeoness said:

Yep. Four years. I remember people on here were upset -- I reminded them of the "Philly Flu" (H1N1) that took out so many of us in 2009. I had just cancelled my own flight to Boston to see my son's recital (his school closed at the end of the week).

My husband had worked on, among other things, the H1N1 pandemic response. On his (mostly empty) flight across the country on the 11th, he looked at the available information, did some mathematical modeling, and upon landing informed me that we were f--ked.

The tone on here seemed to change pretty quickly with the cancellation of the NBA season, etc -- went from "the band is paranoid" to "they were ahead of the curve" in the blink of an eye. A lot of things changed rapidly that week.

yep. at the beginning I was admittedly "has the world gone mad???" and then I realized, as you said, the band had made the right decision when others were still waffling. 

mpedone

My partner was working in an ICU outside of Boston at the time; she was starting to freak out a bit at the beginning of March, but still really wanted to go to at least Toronto (we had tickets to Toronto, Baltimore, Nashville, and St Louis). She was concerned about air travel, but was looking into driving (which we ended up doing in 2022) though she wasn't sure we'd be allowed back into the US. We were both crushed when the word came down, but also a little relieved? We were both aware of the risks that would have been involved, so having the decision taken out of our hands just made it easier.

Of course, it wasn't long before we realized how deluded we'd been, especially with her being near the front lines (at the start of March 2020, she transitioned into a critical care educator role, so still working with the ICUs (developing training and policies for the pandemic)). My office shut down that week, too, with the hopes that we'd come back in a few weeks. We did go back to the office - in June of 2022.

I didn't actually listen to Gigaton fully until later in the summer, when I'd go out for drives just to get out of the house on nice days. It quickly became the soundtrack to that period for me, along with Ed's solo album the following year and Pluralone's "Welcome to the Show". When I listen to pretty much any of those songs, I am transported back to sunny, warm days either in my office or driving around town. I hesitated to listen to Gigaton because I didn't want it associated with that time; by the time I started to listen to it, things were still scary, but less acute. More just general dread.