DuckHill Workshop in the time of COVID-19

Hey Guys, welcome back,

I’ve been debating starting this for a few weeks, I don’t know that I have any wonderful insight into all this but at least I’d like to record my experiences and observations for the pandemic, and subsequent stay home/shelter in place/safer at home orders we are experiencing.

I’ll keep updating this one post, instead of making multiple posts every time I come back to share more.

So first off, today is April 8th, 2020, I’m staying at my parents farm, which isn’t new, but I suppose relevant because we have myself and my wife, my parents, my sister, brother-in-law, and their two, soon to be three children under the same roof. We live in Minnesota, so that means we’ve had a stay home order from Gov. Waltz since March 25th, and it was just extended today until May 4th.

How does all this affect us?

First off, orders for our products which were just starting to pick up after the holidays have stopped, and since the stay home order, I have also stopped putting in hours doing maintenance at the Gardens of Castle Rock, which means personal income is none dollars. My wife teaches in a high school in rural Wisconsin, after an extended time away from school they have resumed via distance learning which has an interesting set of challenges, and little direction, but I’ll let her fill in comments about that as it’s all rather over my head. Megan also works at a local home center which is deemed essential, so she still has hours there, and as usual is the one keeping us afloat.

My Dad is still working, thankfully it’s a solitary job so we aren’t too worried. Mom has been working as a tutor, they are now doing it remotely via FaceTime, it’s a bit comical to watch my non-tech minded Mother run a video chat on her computer and also be sending and reviewing documents on her iPad, I’m certainly glad that she has the desk space to do so with the desktop that I built her last year.

My Brother-in-Law is mostly working from home now, so we’ve started milling timbers for the garden shed that we’re building. we’ve run into some snags and are taking a few days off milling to review our process.

My Sister is a stay at home Mom, and expecting their 3rd child in the next few weeks. Their main challenge is keeping the kids entertained, and now they cant go to the zoo, we all spend more time outdoors.

That’s what I have for now. I’m headed back to the shop to keep cleaning, and burning scrap wood.

Stay Safe,

Ben

————————————————————————————————————————————————————