My brother’s surprise 60th birthday party. My niece’s spring break trip to Greece. My sister’s annual pilgrimage to the NCAA men’s basketball tournament.

All canceled due to the coronavirus outbreak.

These are strange times.

A manager at my local supermarket told me the other day that he ordered 500 cases of toilet paper and only 15 cases arrived. He handed out the toilet paper that night, one package per customer. Every morning there’s a line out the door before the store opens.

One grocery store I visited didn’t have sour cream but had plenty of eggs. The next store had sour cream but no eggs. You get the idea.

It feels like the old Soviet Union.

I try to limit my shopping because I’m high risk, almost 63 and I have a cold.  “Are you sure it’s not coronavirus?” people ask. “Yes, because I don’t drink,” I answer, trying to joke.

But there’s nothing funny about this worldwide health crisis, which has become an economic crisis, too.

I feel for the ski towns, where so many workers struggled to get by even before the resorts closed, for the folks on Nextdoor saying they just got laid off and to let them know about jobs, and for many, many more.

A bright light in all of this has been our governor, Jared Polis, who acted swiftly, smartly and openly to contain the virus.

Polis declared a state of emergency on March 10 when there were 17 confirmed cases.

“What it does is it gives us access to resources and more legal flexibility to take steps now to protect the most vulnerable and better contain the outbreak, truly reducing the chances of the trajectory that has occurred in countries like Italy from occurring here in Colorado,” he said at the time.

Six days later, Polis ordered bars, restaurants and other large gathering places closed for the next 30 days starting the following morning. By then, there were 160 cases.

I’m not surprised that Polis understood that coronavirus was going to get a lot worse before it got better.  He’s nerdy smart, if you know what I mean.

I covered the 2011 redistricting trial for The Denver Post when Democrats were trying to put Larimer and Boulder counties in the same congressional district. Of course it was for political reasons but their argument was both areas had a problem with pine beetles destroying mountain forests.

Republicans wanted to keep Larimer County in the same district with the Eastern Plains. GOP attorney Richard Westfall cross-examined then-Congressman Polis from Boulder.

“I’d like to start with the pine beetle or the bark beetle issue,” Westfall asked. “Do you know the difference?”

“Pine beetle — Dendroctonus ponderosae — is the Latin name for the pine beetle that’s affecting Colorado,” Polis said.

Folks in the courtroom stared at each other. It turns out Dendroctonus means “tree-killer,” and ponderosae refers to “pine tree.” Polis had a poster of the pesky bug in his congressional office.

Westfall quickly moved on.

Like so many others,  the text messaging from my family is constant.

From my sister Caroline, who works at a private high school which, of course, is closed:

“As bored as I am, I haven’t been to the gym since my friend, a biologist who works for the state, told me no more gyms, stock up on food (because he knows I go out to eat most nights), and self-quarantine as much as possible.

“He says it will get worse before it gets better. He’s been at the lab every day from 5 a.m. to 10 p.m. and was called back to the governor’s office the other night after he was already home in PJs.”

She spent her first few days home from work doing a deep clean of her apartment. Tucked into her yearbook she found a letter she wrote while in high school to another sister, Susan, who was attending Cottey College.

“I just got my hair permed,” Caroline wrote in the 1983 letter. “BITCHIN. I am so cute I scare myself sometimes. Sorry everyone, only one person can be this cute. Sorry kids. I never asked for all this.”

“Needless to say,” she wrote in her text, “I was weeping I was laughing so hard. Ah, thank you, COVID-19, for something to laugh at!”

Yes, Caroline has long played the game of saying she’s the cutest in the family. I will say this: I was with her once when someone asked if she was the Revlon model.  The big lips. The huge eyes. (And yes, she is my full-blooded sister.)

My sister, Brigid, who lives in Denver,  gives Caroline a run for her money.  I used to call Brigid and me the Quaid sisters. She was Dennis; I was Randy.

The most touching text came from my sister-in-law Jodene. I had planned to fly into Sioux Falls, S.D., on March 18, spend the night with Jodene and my brother Joe, and he would drive me to Vermillion, S.D.,  the next day for my brother Jerry’s birthday party that night.

Joe and Jodene met at the South Dakota School for the Deaf in the ’70s. She did not want Joe to go to the airport and she didn’t want me flying in.

“We both scared,” she wrote in her text. “I love your brother joe. I really care for him. Will be 37 years of marriage in june”

I’m not traveling.

My 86-year-old mother recently called all excited that her grandson Josh, whom she helped raise, had called. He didn’t even bother to say hello before saying, “Grandma, you can’t leave the house.”

“None of my kids even called me,” she said.

Of course not. What is the point of telling my mother to do anything?

So have you been out? I wanted to know. Of course she had. But not to worry, at her women’s group, they’re practicing social distancing.  (As if they can hear six feet apart.) And there weren’t many people at the restaurant when she dropped by.  And on and on.

I should talk. I go out every day, supposedly on the pretext of looking for toilet paper but I still have a supply here at home. And Broomfield’s election manager, Todd Davidson, promised he has extra at home and will swing by if things get dicey.

I remember meeting my neighbor Pauline Marsico, when I moved to north Denver more than 20 years ago. She and her sister were raised by family members after their parents died during the Spanish influenza pandemic. They were not the only ones in their Italian neighborhood near what became the Valley Highway.

“You can’t imagine what it was like,” she said.

I hope I don’t have to find out.