Stay at Home

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SAFER AT HOME – DAY THIRTY

~ michaelhvs ~ Leave a comment

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May 2, 2020

Thirty days.  You’d think I’d be climbing the walls by now. And who knows…some of you may be…

In all honesty, this distancing we’ve been asked to do has been manageable for us. What does that meme say: you realize how anti-social you are when the world goes on lock down and you hardly notice.

Believe me, we’ve noticed. But we’ve also found ways to accommodate whatever it is we’ve had to do without.

Eating out:  We used to frequent local restaurants once or twice a week; for date nights or just to avoid having to cook. So for the past thirty days, we’ve had our date nights at home and we’ve still managed to support our local eateries by ordering takeout and plating it ourselves at our dining room table.

Live entertainment: No theater, no concerts, no movie house experiences, that’s true… but there has been more network and streaming entertainment made available than could ever be consumed in a thousand pandemics.

Family gatherings: This has been the toughest part. My mom (91) lives in an assisted living facility which has blocked visitation for over a month now. My mother-in-law (92) has been sheltering in place in her home with a full-time caregiver.  We get by with daily calls, care packages. In some ways, we’re more connected now than before and we take comfort in knowing that the lockdown, in a large part, was designed to protect them from this virus.

On the plus side, our house has received a thorough cleaning, we’ve been able to catch up on some reading, we’re healthy and in a position to bounce back quickly once we receive the go-ahead from our health officials.  I hope all of you have found your way of enduring this unusual time. Just remember, this too shall pass. Keep yourselves safe and know that while it may seem like you’re going through this alone, we’re all in this together.

Michael Ondrasik and Home Video Studio Mount Dora specialize in the preservation of family memories through the digitalization of film, videotapes, audio recordings, photos, negatives, and slides. For more information, call 352-735-8550 or visit our website.

Safer at Home – Day Twenty-Eight

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April 29, 2020

We listened to our governor’s address today as he explained the steps Florida is taking to “re-open” our economy. In phase one, not much has changed.

Our restaurants seem to have been given the biggest consideration, allowing them to offer outside dining (tables separated by the 6 foot social distancing parameters) as well as inside dining (as long as it does not exceed 25% of capacity.) In other words, let’s keep on ordering take-out to support our local dining establishments.

Assisted living facilities are still on lock down as well as bars, hair stylists, nail salons, and most other personal services. Non-essential retail establishments can begin to open but they are also under a 25% capacity rule along with masking requirements and the other CDC guidelines.

While we are a small business hybrid which is not under specific closure guidelines, we have chosen to err on the side of caution. We will continue to meet with people on an appointment basis. Call us and we will discuss your potential project. If you decided to move forward, we will schedule a day and time for you to bring us your source material. We will meet you at the studio for a drop off transfer. We’ll take your material, draw up an invoice which we will send to you via email. You can put down a deposit via electronic link. We’ll process the order; notify you when it is completed and you can pay any balance due electronically while scheduling a time to pick up the finished order.

This has proven to be a safe and effective way to conduct our business during the pandemic. Thank you for your understanding. We’re actually doing it to protect you as well as us while not interrupting the service we can provide to you.

On a positive note, we have decided to extend our “quarantine sale” at least until we reach phase two of the Florida plan. So, if you are still stuck at home, now is a good time to go through those closets and find all those home movies/videos/slides that need to be digitally transferred.

Michael Ondrasik and Home Video Studio Mount Dora specialize in the preservation of family memories through the digitalization of film, videotapes, audio recordings, photos, negatives, and slides. For more information call 352-735-8550 or call our website.

Safer at Home – Day Twenty-One

~ michaelhvs ~ Leave a comment

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April 22, 2020

It took 21 days but I finally looked into where we got the name quarantine.

Socially distancing contagious people has been around for a long time. There are records in the Bible of people with contagious infections forced to stay outside the city gates. People affected with leprosy, arguably the oldest of human infections, were kept segregated from the rest of the population, in colonies established on remote islands or on mountaintops.

The word itself was coined in the mid 14th century. The bubonic plague, aka The Black Plague, managed to kill one-third of the European population in the space of 3 years. During this time, a law was passed in the Venetian controlled port city of Ragusa (now in Croatia). Called trentino, which means thirty days, this law established a thirty day isolation period for any ship arriving from a plague afflicted area. No one was to board or disembark for those thirty days.

The law was quickly adopted by other cities and within the next hundred years, an additional ten days was added to the isolation and the practice went from trentino to quarantino, hence our English word quarantine.

The United States Congress, in 1878, passed the National Quarantine Act permitting the federal government to act during an outbreak of yellow fever. By 1921, the quarantine system was completely nationalized.

Michael Ondrasik and Home Video Studio Mount Dora specialize in the preservation of family memories through the digitalization of film, videotapes, audio recordings, photos, negatives, and slides. For more information, call 352-735-8550 or visit our website.

Safer at Home – Day Nineteen

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April 21, 2020

You can tell that the days are blurring together. Two days without updating a post and I didn’t even notice. (So if you’re looking for days seventeen and eighteen, they aren’t there.)

But on day nineteen under our stay at home order, we are looking more closely to what our “new normal” will be when our governor lifts the ban and allows us to once again light up our OPEN sign. Here’s what our plan will look like.

Right now, we are going to the studio at the times when someone has made an appointment just to receive or deliver their order. When the stay at home order has been lifted, we will resume our normal operating hours of 9:30 am to 5:00 pm Monday through Saturday. But we will continue to encourage our customers to set appointments so we can better control the flow of people in and out of our studio to avoid people arriving at the same time and having to share our space in close proximity.

Right now, we maintain a six feet distance from people and will continue to do so until signs of the virus are no longer present. We are currently wearing masks while dealing with the public and will continue to do so for their safety and ours.

We still have and will use sanitizing products to keep our studio germ free. Please don’t be offended if you see us wiping down doorknobs and surfaces as you leave. It has become a habit for us and we’re doing it for everyone’s safety.

We hope there will come a day when these stringent health precautions will not be as needed but for right now, it just makes common sense to continue to employ them. I read a meme on Facebook the other day that summed it up. Abandoning safe practices now just because we’ve flattened the curve of the spread is like saying, “Look, the parachute has slowed my descent… guess I don’t need it anymore.”

Michael Ondrasik and Home Video Studio Mount Dora specialize in the preservation of family memories through the digitalization of film, videotapes, audio recordings, photos, negatives, and slides. For more information, call 352-735-8550 or visit our website.

Stay at Home Journal – Day Three

~ michaelhvs ~ Leave a comment

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April 5, 2020 – Day Three

It is dawning on me that our approach to life has begun to change – slowly but surely.  My behavior is undeniably altering to the new reality which surrounds us. Today, I found myself, still in my bathrobe, drinking coffee and watching the news shows and before I knew it…the clock read 11:30.  I am going to have to be careful going forward that I don’t fall into slovenly habits during our locked in status.

Today was Palm Sunday and we did attend afternoon services… from the privacy of our living room via a telephone hookup. While it is the best we can do under the circumstances in which we find ourselves, it is a poor substitute for a genuine church family’s full sharing fellowship. But we still give thanks for what we have.

We are finding entertainment interests to help pass the time:

My wife, fond of historical dramas, has found what is for her a new binge-worthy series. It is Outlander – a time-bending show that transports a 20th century English woman back to 1740s Scotland. A bit too violent and graphic for her sensibilities but she’s taken with the characters and is using the show as impetus to do a little research on the Jacobean rebellion of 1745 which is a pivotal event in the narrative of the story.

As for me, I’m much more drawn to pure fiction so I decided to start rereading the Harry Potter series of books, figuring that tomes that large would eat up a substantial portion of the month long stay at home order.  I started three days ago. I’m halfway through book five as of this writing. At this rate, I’ll be done with book eight by Tuesday. I’ll have to find something else to do during the remaining twenty-five days. I’ll keep you posted.

Michael Ondrasik and Home Video Studio Mount Dora specialize in the preservation of family memories through the digitalization of film, videotapes, audio recordings, photos, negatives, and slides. For more information, call 352-735-8550 or visit our website.

Safer at Home

~ michaelhvs ~ Leave a comment
April 2, 2020 – the eve
Our statewide initiative of “safer at home” because of the COVID-19 virus begins at midnight tonight and ends April 30 so I thought I would document our activities for the next 30 days.  We’ll see how long I can keep it up without getting a little buggy. 
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This morning, I “met” with my BNI (Business Networking International) chapter using a Zoom account. It feels good to still be connected to others even while we are preparing to disconnect and operate from home during this time. I have a feeling we will all become teleconferencing experts before this is all over. But meeting with them did give me some ideas as they all began to explain how they were adapting their varied business models during this pandemic.
Kate and I took what might be our last trip (for a while) to the studio today to determine what we might bring back with us that would be helpful.  Other than cleaning supplies, some coffee pods, and an extra roll of toilet paper, we figured that our two stand-alone devices would be the easiest to relocate.  Moving forward, we will have the ability to scan, crop and color correct 35mm slides and be able to capture and transfer 8mm and Super 8 film all from the safety of our home. Those captured files can be converted to a digital format (mp4) that can be stored on a usb drive. So we will obviously be marketing those services during the next month.
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We can accept new orders by mail or overnight carrier to our home address. We will process those jobs at our home and ship them directly back to our clients. Call for more information.
Our videotape and audio tape transfer service requires multiple machines that are interconnected therefore we did not opt to bring those home with us. However, if I read the governor’s instructions properly, there is nothing to prevent me from leaving my home, traveling alone in my car to my empty studio that is five minutes away to process videotape/audiotape orders as long as I do not come into contact with anyone else. We are working up a no-contact dropoff/pickup protocol. Call us at 352-735-8550 for more information.
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On a personal note, while we are in self-isolation, we’ll be looking for TV watching opportunities. We’ve already blown through Picard season one; discovered and finished the third season of Designated Survivor; finished all episodes of Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee and there’s no more Downton Abbey on the horizon. I’ll let you know what our next TV guilty pleasure is going to be.
Stay safe. I’ll touch in tomorrow.