Desert Companion

Listeners and readers have asked where to turn for help during the COVID-19 pandemic. Nevada Public Radio has organized the following stories with links to useful resources. They refer to entities that are addressing the outbreak and its ripple effects, such as food banks, unemployment agencies, governmental support for small businesses, and more. Please check back often as we continue to develop this list.We want to hear from you. If we’ve missed something, please add it in the comments or e-mail heidi@nevadapublicradio.org.A Note from CEO and President, Jerry Nadal RESOURCESCOVID-19 Tracker PUBLIC INFORMATIONThe agencies below are leading the government's response to the pandemic at various levels. 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This regularly updateed list shows viral testing sites in Southern Nevada. How do you care for someone in your home who is sick? David Weismiller, a family physician and professor in the UNLV School of Medicine’s department of family and community medicine, has some advice: protect yourself, keep others away, and don’t stop washing your hands.Does your health insurance cover testing and treatment for COVID-19? Insurance can be tricky… full of exceptions and terms that can allow some insurers to skirt the law. So, what is and isn't covered by your insurance when it comes to COVID-19? PARENTING/EDUCATIONAnd you thought summer vacation was bad… At least then you could take your kids to the pool or play dates! Being shut inside the house with them 24/7 and having the expectation that at least some of their time will be spent constructively is a new experience for most parents. Fortunately, many agencies and community groups offer resources to help. 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Ode: The Soaker

By Andrew Kiraly

Published August 1, 2020 at 9:51 PM PDT

In praise of the cheapo kiddie pool

I don’t know why I didn’t get an inflatable pool earlier. Oh, wait, yeah I do — historically, I had a perpetual all-access family pass to my siblings’ suh-weet, brochure-ready backyard oases, proper pools resplendent with waterfalls, bubbling spas, beach entries, and cocktail grottoes — a privilege snatched away by the pandemic and relegated to the same purgatory of memory and longing where so much of our old normal life is now warehoused indefinitely.

But I didn’t just rush out and buy one. It took a little convincing. I had been harboring a kind of neurotic block against owning a cheapo kiddie pool, some knot of deep, class-based conditioning. On the one hand, I think I considered it frivolous, broadly unbefitting adulthood, declassé, desperado posh, this idea of a grown-ass man nursing a tumbler of grocery-store rosé in three feet of water because lol loser can’t afford a real pool. It was the sort of thing, I secretly thought, you should only see on the cover of a rockabilly album. On the other hand, I suspect I had some long-forgotten revenant subscription to a principled disgruntlement (maybe punk rock, maybe puritanical) with the traditional forms of suburban comfort, whose mode has always entailed industrializing your personal environment — that is, enlisting outlandishly resource-gobbling systems to make our lives a little bit cooler, wetter, funner. (Think of the elaborate machinery that runs our air conditioners, waters our yards, filters our pools, powers our digital home entertainment suites.) A cheapo kiddie pool was a venial gateway sin to a morally queasy realm.

I got over myself hella quick when it started getting hot. Thirty dollars later, I’m chinchilliiiiiing in my backyard, feeling like I’m rightly participating in a revered Vegas ritual. Today I endorse buying a kiddie pool, and encourage all adults to do so. Here’s one little trick to getting over any feelings of juvenile atavism that may prick your overdeveloped conscience: Don’t think of it as a pool per se. Instead, think of it as an outdoor waterbed, or a pleasingly puffy chaise lounge that a race of mer-people gifted our species in a gesture of fraternity and goodwill. Better yet, a kiddie pool’s pleasures provide all the summery, evocative swoon of a legit in-ground pool without the expense and infrastructural intensity — the oneiric heave and sway of water hugging your body; lounging afterwards in your damp trunks in the skin-dazzling honey pockets of late afternoon warmth; that lazy, sun-drunk, waterlogged waddle to the fridge for another round of beers; that bracing blast of sunblock to your back as you prepare for another meditative soak. O portal to a parallel timescape of permanent three-day weekends, bottomless screwdrivers, and endless summer laze, cheapo kiddie pool, this ode is for you.