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She has turned her kitchen into an office, she said in an interview, noting that the room has big windows and she likes to see people walking past outside. She works with three telephones — a hard line and two cellphones — two iPads that belonged to her husband, and two of her own. On Wednesday, she said, she learned how to do two Zoom conference calls at once.
“I never stop talking,” she said.
‘I Want to Do What I’ve Done for 40 Years’: Senator Charles Grassley
Holed up on his farm in New Hartford, Iowa, Senator Charles E. Grassley, 86, does not see much upside to Zoom. He has tried FaceTime for some family check-ins, but not for official business. No, for the longest-serving Senate Republican, the phone does quite nicely.
“I am trying to keep in touch with everything I would normally do through long distance,” he said the other day. He ticked through a dozen or so recent calls: to local TV and radio stations, with Iowa cattlemen and the state’s pork producers.
Mr. Grassley, accustomed to predawn runs in Washington, has started jogging in the afternoon sun. Last weekend, when the family farm would normally have been overrun by four generations of Grassleys, he and his wife quietly prayed at home alone and logged onto FaceTime to share the Easter holiday.
Other traditions cannot be digitized. Every year since at least 1981, Mr. Grassley has made a point of convening a town meeting in every one of Iowa’s 99 counties to face voters who set the agenda of each session. This year, he was only able to complete about a dozen before the virus froze his state in place.
“I sometimes do telephone town halls, but I have never had them take the place of a county meeting, because I want to do what I have done for 40 years,” he said. “I want to be physically in every county.”
