Neal Wilson ✅ @neal@social.typica.us

Morning cat

Scratch that. Hotel reservation got auto-cancelled, so it's just the train. Next year is New Orleans. It's been a long time since I've been there, but now I can look forward to some great shrimp creole.

SCA Expo is finally officially cancelled. I sent an email to them earlier today letting them know that I can't legally get to that event to teach now, so that's good. Now I need to figure out how to cancel the train tickets I can't legally use and the hotel reservation.

I do want to give a shout out to the WI Dept of Agriculture, Trade, and Consumer Protection. I already have an email from them with specific and actionable guidance relevant to my business regarding the new order. The city used to contract them to do our health inspections and that's an agency that's been a tremendously useful resource for my company over the past couple decades as we try to do things in ways that won't get people sick.

The new order lasts a month starting tomorrow unless another order makes it shorter (unlikely and unwise) or longer (possible). The assistance programs that I've looked at so far appear to be mostly useless for us here and the stuff that's upcoming, we can't know what that is until it's actually passed, it's not coming fast enough, and a lot of what's being teased also looks equally worthless.

Further service reductions for the shop will be published later today. My sister is on the phone with the bank about loan options. We're covered under the exemptions for being able to continue operating, but with the new state order we're expecting sales to fall off a cliff and also want to take additional steps to ensure everybody's safety while not going bankrupt. I'll also be working on figuring out how to flip on free shipping for online orders later tonight, but that's not live yet.

This morning the cat was extra insistent that I should stay home. Probably because she just watched the episode of DS9 when O'Brien becomes patient 0 in a station-wide pandemic that only gets as bad as it did because Quark refused to flatten the curve. While the cat made good points about petting the cat, I'm roasting coffee because my shop is probably now the safest place in the city to get that.

Today was stressful. I'll just be over here alternating between eating pizza and hugging the cat.

That's the spot.

Next coffee shipment is going out in a Penzeys Spices box. That box had an Embrace Hope sticker on the outside that I'm not covering/removing.

Someone should probably talk me out of this.

Oh my, it looks like I might really be able to build everything I need server side out of shell scripts. curl and jq gets me most of what I need.

Cat was talkative after work. Asked if she was a good cat and she seemed offended by the question.

Was just forwarded a thing letting me know that my shop is considered part of a critical infrastructure industry by the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (part of DHS), which makes it harder for the state to shut us down or prevent us from coming to work if further emergency actions come out. I think this means that even if a shelter in place order comes out we should still be able to ship web orders.

I'm still waiting on some feedback from my review team, but I'm thinking I might push off the book launch until at least April 1 even if that feedback is prompt enough to get the book out sooner. The local sales tax rate is changing (going down) effective that date and that'll save me the trouble of needing to change the tax calculation data so soon after launch.

My alderman stopped in to buy lattes for everybody working at one of the local pharmacies. We're also doing lots of coffee roasting today. It looks like we'll be switching over to the next lot of Kenyan coffee soon so I'll have to figure out how I want that roasted.