The New Normal

The New Normal Copyright © 2023 Michael AndersenAll rights reserved. Contents CHAPTER ONE CHAPTER TWO CHAPTER THREE CHAPTER FOUR CHAPTER FIVE CHAPTER SIX CHAPTER SEVEN CHAPTER EIGHT CHAPTER NINE CHAPTER TEN CHAPTER ELEVEN CHAPTER TWELVE CHAPTER THIRTEEN CHAPTER FOURTEEN CHAPTER FIFTEEN CHAPTER SIXTEEN CHAPTER SEVENTEEN CHAPTER EIGHTEEN CHAPTER NINETEEN CHAPTER TWENTY CHAPTER ONE There is nothing new about falling in love with a woman and obsessing about her. Just like there’s nothing normal about how my life transformed after I first saw Kate. The term “new normal” refers to things that we now take for granted since Covid 19 upended our lives back in 2020, such as working from home, Teams and Zoom meetings, vacant office buildings and seemingly not enough people to staff just about any business. It also now applies to my life. I don’t know if it was fate or luck that put Kate and me on the collision course we found ourselves on, but at the beginning of 2022, I wasn’t feeling the benefits of either. I was stuck in an interesting job in the not so interesting city of Green Bay, Wisconsin, otherwise known as “Titletown, USA”, named after the 13 NFL championships the team has won since 1929, including the first two Superbowls in “66 and ’67. The reality is the town is ALL Packers, and when they aren’t playing, it’s a cultural backwater. There’s literally nothing to do there but drink, watch the Packers, and wish you were somewhere else. There are some big hotels though, including several owned and operated by my employer, Preferred Properties. My job is to create the graphics required for on-site and online content – mostly things like promotions and special events, but I also manage the websites for our hotels. In that capacity, I get to visit the hotels, meet with the managers and staff, hear about the events they have planned, and then create the content they need to promote it. This includes organizing and attending photoshoots with beautiful models who are brought in from Milwaukee, Chicago or Minneapolis. Quite often I get to attend the events as well – special dinners, wine tastings, New Year’s Eve Parties – you name it. If it happened at one of our hotels, I figured out how to pitch it so people would make reservations to attend, and hopefully stay in the hotels. If that sounds like fun, it mostly is, except back in 2020, when the hotels closed down for several months while we all tried to figure out how deadly the pandemic was going to be. When they finally reopened that summer, very few people actually stayed at any of our properties. There was no reason to – businesses were still working from home and meeting remotely, wiping out business travel. Live entertainment of all kinds was stopped, and most tourist destinations were closed as well. Even the NFL decided to play the season with almost no fans and remote broadcasters. Consequently, the cleaning, facilities and management staffs of our hotels were greatly reduced and I barely held onto my job. Even my boss was laid off since I was a low-cost replacement. It was excruciating. During that time, I became quite the outdoorsman. The great thing about Green Bay is that during the summer, there are amazing northern Wisconsin destinations where people can go boating, hunting, fishing, biking, hiking, camping, etc., etc. I took up biking in a big way, managing to chisel my already lean body into a sculpted thing of beauty. But I pretty much did it alone. I never had what could be called a “girlfriend” in Green Bay, and since I worked in a two person department, I didn’t make a lot of guy friends either. But luckily I was pretty good with the ladies. In fact, I never had a steady girlfriend - in high school or in college. Playing the field was just too much fun and I was good at it. Really good. I first realized that back in 2009 at Owatonna Senior High School in Owatonna, Minnesota. Owatonna is even smaller and more boring than Green Bay, although it too is surrounded by the natural beauty of south-central Minnesota. 2009 was my freshman year and almost since the moment I stepped into the building I noticed that the senior and junior girls took an interest in me – some of them just giving me the usual shit that upper classes give to the plebes, but also others who took pity on me and became friends and confidants. Now Owatonna is a small town of 26,000, so everyone knew each other, but things changed significantly for me once I made it to high school. We were no longer “kids” – everyone wanted to suddenly be an adult. I was flattered to be treated almost as an equal by all of those girls who had previously looked down on me as just a little kid. One of them was Laura Schmidt, who when I met her in 2009 was destined to become Prom Queen, an elected honor normally bestowed on the most popular girl in the Junior class. And she was all of that. She was the most vivacious and beautiful thing I had ever seen. Everyone loved her. She was accompanied to the Prom by the King, Scott Wesley, who was already the starting quarterback on the mighty Huskies football team and by far the most popular boy in school. They were like Owatonna’s version of Brad and Angelina, except Laura’s Swedish ancestry blessed her with gorgeous straight blond hair. For whatever reason, Laura took an interest in me from the start, taking me under her wing and treating me like her little brother. She endured a whole year of abuse from the other girls in her class to be seen walking with me in the hallways, sitting with me in the Library, and generally just being a good friend. When I started my sophomore year, Laura seemed sincerely