Cautious steps forward

Hello, friends.  Hope that you were able to spend time with the fathers in your life over the weekend.

I was able to spend some time with our son and his family Sunday evening, but it required a little planning and then a little more replanning.  Here's how it went down:

Our son contacted me Sunday morning to see if my wife and I would be open to meeting him and his crew at a local historic site with ample public grounds.  Not really a park, but he and his wife were married there and our middle granddaughter has had soccer practice there many times over the past two or three years.

Anyway, we knew that there would be a place to set up food and that we could find a nice space to meet in a socially distanced way.  So we readily agreed, and then we watched the weather forecast throughout the afternoon.  This was a little tricky because, well, it's June in Kentucky, and we don't get spring rain, we get sporadic rain and thunderstorm activity this time of year.  That was Sunday afternoon in a nutshell.

I told my wife that I thought we could have our little gathering in our garage, provided we clear it of cars and sweep up a bit.  She agreed, and about an hour before we were set to meet, we began prepping our space.

The rains came with a vengeance right around the time we were expecting a food delivery that our son had engineered.  He and his family arrived right then, but found out that the restaurant supplying the food was severely backed up with orders (big surprise on Father's Day, right?) and would be delayed.

Without too much additional detail, I'll just say that it was strange and yet wonderful to spend some time with him and his gang.  We had only seen the kids in passing through car windows or across a table outdoors once, so having them here was nice, even though it wasn't what we'd prefer.  Their oldest child said that she needed to go to the bathroom and asked if it was OK.  I shot her a look and said "yes, but don't touch anything."  That comment was received as intended and we all had a good laugh.

So that was nice.  

And there have been mentions here and there that my work teammates and I would be expected to return to visiting our business sources in the field in the very near future.  Only problem with that is that many of them are not accepting visitors, which would include us.  So this has been an on-again, off-again proposition, because of the logistics but also because there are relatively few places we are able to visit without an appearance being problematic.

During a brief on-again period early last week, I determined that one of my better business sources is, in fact, allowing people to visit, and my contact there was ecstatic that I would be interested in coming for an informal meeting.

So tomorrow I'll be trekking west to meet with my contact and some of her colleagues.  I will probably try to see a couple of other entities in the same city while I'm there, but I'm on the fence about checking with them first on visitor policy.

I'm excited but certainly ambivalent, as I knew this point would come after months of doing my work remotely (including contact with clients and prospects).  So I'll take the appropriate precautions, I'll wear a mask (my organization has supplied me with four that were sewn by a group of church ladies in the the area of our primary location) and I'll sanitize my hands between visits.  I'll have to grab lunch but will eat in the car.

And I'll worry the entire time.