I ate at a restaurant the other day for probably only the second time over this period myself. For me, the idea of "outside" dining, where they're putting up tents and bubbles and things was just laughable anyways. And quite frankly, it gets cold here. And then it gets hot here. I like inside dining myself most of the time. I can't find the timeline easily, but we've had several periods where indoor dining was flat out banned, and for most of the rest of the time it was pretty severely restricted - and at most 25% of capacity. Heck, it was 50% up until yesterday.

For me though, the real reason I wasn't eating at restaurants really wasn't concerns over getting sick. I've always kinda felt that when you look at the actual numbers of cases in places around here, your odds of exposure even at our highest times were pretty insignificant. But to me, the idea of paying money to go somewhere to eat and put up the theater of nonsense that the various masking rules in restaurants has been just wasn't something that I had any interest in doing. And at times here, it was getting kinda crazy. So I just didn't go. And generally didn't do a lot of takeout from restaurants that I'd normally have eaten at, simply because I don't feel that the food tends to travel well enough for me to get it home and eat it.

As a result for me, I did a lot of eating from home. I've also done more fast good restaurants than I'd prefer. But as someone that did a lot of eating at restaurants, one side benefit to me ended up being that we've been able to spend this time period actually working on cutting down our debt to a much more acceptable level. The cost cuts because of the inability to really go out and do much have been something that while I have no interest in going through this type of situation again, at least in our situation we've been lucky enough to take advantage of to help improve that debt situation. Although it also means that while I'm more likely to go to restaurants a little more now that the situation is easier, I'll probably still be holding off some on that, because we still have a couple months to go to reach our zero debt (besides car and house) goal.