I'll confess: one of the reasons I went into academia, and one of the things that has stayed my hand from LEAVING it when times got bad in it, was that I was done for Christmas by mid December, and didn't have to be back until after New Year's. (Granted, maybe at R1s there's cultural pressure for folks to work on research all through their breaks, but I'm at a teaching school with several people in my department whose attitude is "F it, they aren't paying us to come in when classes aren't in session" [actually they are over Christmas, but....we put in enough extra unpaid hours the rest of the semester])
So this weekend is me gearing up to go on break - I have to do a little house cleaning, a little mouseproofing (it's that time of year again), did all the laundry last night and will just do one last load before I leave.
I'm skipping the in-person graduation: they did not require faculty to be present like they did in the before times, and I thought: well, I live in a mask-phobic and vaxx-phobic place, I'm traveling to visit my mom (vaccinated, but in her 80s) and several friends who are similar, and I have to affirm to Amtrak that I am neither sick nor have I been exposed....so sitting in the basketball arena surrounded by thousands of people is a risk not worth whatever reward it might bring.
Today, I have to go in and turn in final grades, and deal with one small unpleasant assessment task, but then I'm done
yeah but given the low quality of animation of the day, I'd probably be more likely to interpret it as driving goggles....or that the guy just had a really late night the night before. Or even it's a shadow from the brim of the cap
Good article, much enjoyed. One of my favorite "vintage" cookbooks is my circa-1950s version of The Settlement Cook Book, and I knew the Mrs. Kander story. (I got interested in the cookbook because my mom had a copy, not sure if it was a wedding present like many of her other cookbooks or one bought later). I love that there are like fifteen different variations on pancakes in them. And yes, you can learn a lot of "home history" of the US by examining the foods cooked.
I'm also familiar with Dr. Alice Hamilton; I know her as one of the founders of industrial hygiene. I make a little bit of a deal about her (along with Jane Addams and some of the others) in my Environmental Policy class, as sort of one-half of the trains of thought that lead to some of the environmental (work and home as well as "out in nature" environmental) legislation. I also admit I talk her up because I have a number of our Industrial Hygiene majors in that class, it's a major that leans VERY heavily male, and in the past I've tangled with a few guys from that major who seem to believe that they don't need to pay attention to the person teaching them if she's a woman, and I hope I blow a few minds by reminding them that one of the founders of their discipline was a woman.
as for latkes, I've only made them once or twice in my life. Not really part of my heritage (I'm more likely to make Eccles Cakes this time of year) and I am often not good at panfrying things (get distracted and tend to burn them)
my plans are to mentally stick my fingers in the ears of my anxiety-about-omicron and scream "la la la can't hear you" and go to the yarn shop that's about 45 minutes away from me for the first time since February 2020. (So that's what, 21 months? 21 years? I forget). (I've been boostered and will mask and will avoid crowds, but still). Might stop by the Ulta, I don't know, will see how crowded it looks when I get near it. This is life for me now, I guess.
Classes will be done for the semester; next week is finals. I feel less triumphant and more flattened than I remember being before - this semester does NOT feel like a success and I'm afraid a lot of my intro students will be repeating the class through some combo platter of my teaching being less good than it was in the past, their own pandemic stress, and study skills that have atrophied during the last 2 years of "virtual" high school for most of them (this is the freshman level class). I wish this semester felt more like a W than an L, but it is what it is.
11 days before I go to see my mom for Christmas; hoping and praying I don't have to decide "you know, it's not worth the risk of stepping on an Amtrak sleeper car just to see her" and spend another Christmas alone. I'm more sanguine about the possibility of "what if things blow up so much it's not safe to travel back home in January" because I have plans to deal with that.
If it takes a booster every six weeks for me to be able to teach in-person with safety for myself and my students, then I'll do it. Like I said on twitter: get me a loyalty card so I get a Slushie or something for free after 10 boosters.
And I got a day's fever and two days hives and swollen armpit lymph nodes after this booster
Ending awards for "good attendance" which means that kids with chronic conditions can never win, and there's a slight incentive for the "gunners" to go to school sick so they don't lose the award.
I don't LOVE the idea of always doing the dang camera thing (ESPECIALLY since instead of there just being already set up cameras and mikes in the room I have to do it myself) but yeah, for people with some kind of longer term illness it probably helps. However, I'm also seeing students who are most likely NOT sick using the "I can Zoom in" as a way of not being present in person, and based on some of their exam grades, I think they're half-listening to class and doing something else during lecture time.
I suppose it means I have to work in in-class "clicker" questions, which means I will have to learn the "clicker" utility and be sure all my students have a device that will do that. I haven't had the energy or bandwidth for that yet, I keep hoping it will get to the point where I DON'T have 1/3-1/2 the class joining online.
I've given up on ever being able to go out in public unmasked again. I don't feel comfortable walking into the walmart IN A MASK, and I'm not sure I ever will again.
1. Someone somewhere made the joke that "Movies advertising themselves as 'only in theaters!' now sounds more like a threat than an enticement," and, yeah.
2. I remember March and April 2020. And May and June and July. My university closed in March and I tried to teach online for the remaining month and a half. It didn't go well, we had very little support and I didn't know what I was doing. I still don't. One thing this past year of semi-distanced classes (in person, but with distancing and an online component for those who must isolate) has taught me is *I am actually not as good a teacher as I thought* and that's really hard, because so much of my identity came from my work. I've had some very hard lessons about myself during this time
3. there were weeks in summer 2020 where the only person I spoke to was my mother, on the phone. I am not sure I am going to ever be the level of cheerfulness and positivity that I was before the pandemic, and even then, I was closer to Eeyore than to Tigger on most days.
4. I don't think we're done. I don't think Omicron is the last bad variant. Given how mobile we are and how non-civically-minded, I expect COVID to drag on for years after this, maybe into the 2030s. I'm beginning to consider if I could just retire early from teaching, if my reduced pension would be enough, because I can't make it through eight more years of contact-tracing students, and plugging the damn camera and microphone into the classroom computer every morning and do the extended dance of logins to be able to broadcast class (which is much worse than being in person)
5. I recognize most of the "problems" I faced are minor compared to many people - I was able to be vaccinated early, I only lost two people I knew well to COVID and they were people I'd been somewhat out of touch with (one had been unwell for years). And yet, that doesn't make it any easier when I'm having a really bad day of it, when I just want to stomp on my webcam and run away and live in the forest forever.
6. I think people's mental health is going to be affected for years. Especially those in the medical fields who saw COVID patients die (I think of a friend's sister, who is a NICU nurse, who had a couple babies in the NICU who were taken early by Caesarian as their mothers were dying of COVID). But I think even those of us who were fairly comfortable in the pandemic will be affected - I find walking into a large store makes me nervous, even if it's not crowded, and I feel safer at the tiny neighborhood grocery than I do at the cavernous superstore, even though probably the superstore has a smaller density of people. The ONE time I ate in a restaurant since February 2020 (it was in October), I almost immediately after got a cold that was bad enough I went and got COVID tested, and so now I have an aversion to eating inside restaurants....
7. I do not foresee anything like the "roaring 20s" when this is "over" (or over enough that we're not having thousands of deaths worldwide). Maybe in some social strata? But a lot of us are just tired and are close to the burnout point and really all we want is to sleep and maybe go shoe-shopping without a mask on and without worrying about being close to people.
My prediction: it's already in the US, it's maybe what's driving some of the northern surges we're seeing, but because our testing-for-strains is far, far, far worse than South Africa's, it's not been picked up yet and may not be until later this week.
Remains to be seen "how bad." I am holding out hope that at least vaccinated individuals will have SOME protection against severe disease; most in-the-know epidemiologists seem to say that complete immune escape is highly unlikely. But I don't like this at all. I am bracing to either hear "you can't travel back home after Christmas" (FINE, THEN I WILL TEACH ONLINE FROM MY MOM'S HOUSE) or I will get back here and be told we're going all online for spring. My only consolation is that the "don't travel interstate" advice will not come - if it winds up coming - until AFTER I have arrived at my mom's, about 2 1/2 weeks from now.
I don't know that anything could have made this better, I don't even know if high vaccine rates or "vaccine equity" or sending all the vaccines to the Global South while telling folks in the so-called developed world to wait on Dose 2 (let alone boosters) would make this better. I don't know if the whole vaccine/masking thing had not become an idiotic political football if things would be better. I know how I FEEL (that if people had just masked and assumed the epidemiologists knew what they were doing, things would be better), but there's no way to rewind the tape and run an "Earth 2" scenario.
I am just very discouraged right now and trying to acclimate myself to the idea that the life I lived for the roughly first 50 years of it is never coming back, and my reality now is "stay home as much as you possibly can, avoid other people, wear a mask in public, and teach half online for the students who wind up having to isolate" and I'm just angry at everything right now. I'll stop being so angry if omicron turns out to be a nothingburger but I don't think it's going to be a nothingburger, and who knows what's coming AFTER omicron?
I am decorating for Christmas. I don't CARE that it's too early and some people hate it; I travel for Thanksgiving and then when I get back it's a mad dash to the end of the semester so it won't be worth doing if I waited. I put up the (artificial) tree last night and got the lights on. If I can get the take-home exams graded this afternoon I will put the ornaments on tonight, if not, that's a Saturday thing.
it's been a Hell of a week - started off with the plumber finding an opossum in the crawlspace of the house, which had to be evicted (a live trap baited with Friskies' "Chicken and Liver Dinner" did the trick). He also replaced the old line to the shower that had cracked, which drained a decent amount out of my checking account. Then Wednesday I had three meetings - one acrimonious, one mercifully short, and the third not acrimonious but just long. Gave and graded an exam yesterday and now am questioning whether my students didn't study at all, or if I just have lost ANY ability to teach I once had. And today's been a comedy of errors of forgetting things or people needing things at the last minute.
*sigh* It's a good thing I'm not a drinking woman.
as it is, I am considering getting carry out pizza for dinner instead of going with some healthful option I'd have to cook myself.
Even more than the hour back, I'll be happy not driving to work in the dark for a few months now. The butt-end and very start of DST are woeful for us early risers. And yeah, I remember Bush approving the 2007 tinkering with it, and being vaguely annoyed then.
I guess I'm cleaning house. A plumbing leak means my shower and tub are currently unusable. I've been promised a plumber Tuesday, earlier if there's a cancellation (I do not expect that). I've mostly cleared out my closet (where the pipe access is) but would like to do more cleaning in preparation for them, but also because my house just needs to be cleaned again. It seems very rude that houses keep on getting dirty no matter how often you clean....
I'm a "geriatric" X (born 1969) and 529s hit the scene a little late for them to be a thing for my college edumacation.
(I got monumentally lucky, though, in the lottery of life - my dads parents finished out their lives owning a very small set of rental cottages on Lake Michigan, which appreciated considerably in price before my dad and his brothers inherited them and decided to sell them and split the money three ways. And then we got lucky again with how he invested it - pulling it out to a more secure investment shortly before the crash of 1987. I paid for three years at an out-of-state Public Ivy on that, my brother paid for a couple years at a SLAC, and there was enough leftover for each of us to have help with downpayments on our houses....)
Clearing out files in 2019 after my dad died, my mom found several hundreds of dollars in **UK** traveller's cheques that were leftover from a trip they took there in 2004.
I helped her do the online work to redeem them, and trust me, it was a friggin' JOURNEY. First to prove that she had a "right" to them (scanning in part of his will to attach) and second waiting for them to process 15 year old cheques, the original company which issued them apparently having gone bankrupt.
She eventually got the money for them but it was only after a chain of about 10 e-mails over perhaps five months....fortunately I think it got straightened out just before the pandemic got *really* bad.
I have some old, old treasury bonds in my safety deposit box I should probably look into cashing in....hm, maybe THAT'S where my new roof will come from
I dunno what I'm doing. Online knitting group is tomorrow, I missed the last one because I needed to get out of town or I was gonna lose my stuff, so I might attend at least part of this one. I also want to get out to the small (very small) local gourmet shop to see if there are any other things I might want to get anyone as a holiday gift (yes I'm doing it obnoxiously early but I see certain relatives at Thanksgiving and it saves me having to mail the stuff later).
we're FINALLY getting seasonal weather so I am contemplating making a pot of the rather-involved bean soup I make a couple times a winter (recipe is from my vintage-1974 Winnie the Pooh cookbook (yes, really) that friends of the family gave me when I was a small child. The recipes are fairly sophisticated and I mostly didn't like them as a kid, but as an adult, I make the bean soup and also the creamed salmon fairly regularly
honestly we need a "moneychangers in the Temple" moment in modern American Christianity. I'm a cradle Christian, have been a member of a church since I was born, and this past couple years have at times made me contemplate just leaving the faith because there are so many cheats and grifters in positions of power. I know it's not really possible to be a Christian all alone and I'd probably quickly lose what remaining faith I have if I left the church altogether, but behaviors like this appall me.
Granted, I am a slightly different stripe of Christian from Falwell and his ilk, but still.
so many things in the past few years have really soured me on humanity in general :(
It's all well and good until it's our ox that gets Tipper Gored.
other than that, I have no opinions. I don't generally find stand up funny and I don't have a Netflix subscription so I probably shouldn't even make the drive-by comment I did there.
Good! My (85 year old) mom is scheduled to get hers next week; I hope I can get mine soon. I decided that 2 weeks post booster, I will feel confident going unmasked to teach (unless I have a cold or some other transmissable thing) and once our cases drop below 20/100,000, I will start eating inside restaurants again and going unmasked in stores.
I assumed he was consumed at least in part my one of the many scavenger/predator species out there.
this is a sad story. I know there are a lot more missing people who don't get this level of attention (there was a graduate student who attended my grad-school alma mater who was apparently recently abducted and killed and some pretty horrifying details have got out). But it does seem the "pretty young white woman" is the type of missing person who makes the news stories.
OMG, half my one class was out sick today. They all e-mailed me and it's various complaints (so it's not that I gave them my cold on Monday - anyway I was masked then). Several cases of stomach bug (I had a v. mild version a few weeks back, so I believe it), one strep probably brought home from school by a kid.
it's like the Minor Illness Apocalypse this week, I think everyone was so stressed from 18 months of pandemic life their immune systems are at a low, coupled with lots of people going back out into the world again and BOOM, everyone's sick
I'm feeling better this afternoon but still have the muscle aches from coughing.
I'm going to be recovering from this monster cold. First cold I've had in almost two years. I forgot what a cold felt like and freaked out at first and thought I had breakthrough 'rona and was sitting at home gaming out "how do I manage a 10 day enforced time of no coming in to campus given that I have none of my textbooks at home and my home Zoom set up absolutely sucks for teaching biostats (which really needs a whiteboard better than the virtual kind)"
Fortunately, a rapid test conducted curbside by the campus nurse concluded: you have a cold.
But still, I coughed and sneezed hard enough with this to pull all my upper back muscles and it's very hard to find a comfy sleeping position. Tylenol helps a little, heat helps a little more but I think I just have to wait it out.
yeah I realized I'm almost due for one, I got a TdaP booster shortly after my niece was born (before I went to see her) because the advice now for adults is to be sure your pertussis immunity is topped up before seeing an infant too young to be vaccinated. And my niece just turned 9
I got my flu shot a couple weeks back, a week before doing the intensive weekend fieldwork. And a good thing, because flu's already shown up in my state.
i *think* (have not decided yet, will depend on the weather) a trip out to the next-nearest city that actually has interesting and distinctive shops, in order to get a start on Christmas shopping. (Yes I know the "supply chain is failing!" stories are mainly hype, but as I actually SEE my brother and his family on Thanksgiving, I want to bring their presents to them then, to avoid the mail snafu of last year, where I mailed the presents a month early and they got them a month and a half late)
I am going to try to buy local-made/artist made stuff if possible.
Also I need to start easing myself into public more; after a year plus of mostly isolating I find crowds make me anxious, the rudeness of some fellow drivers torques me off a little, and I just go a bit nuts staring at the four walls of my house.
also I forgot to get a few things on my recent grocery trip so maybe I run to the Albertson's near the little downtown there (oooo a new and different store!)
So it's not "I'm needy and emotional because I'm a Pisces," it's "I'm needy and emotional because my mom was starved of sunlight for a bunch of the time she was carrying me."
It's still woo, but it's more PLAUSIBLE woo....
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On “Weekend Plans Post: Beginning the Silly Part of the Season”
I'll confess: one of the reasons I went into academia, and one of the things that has stayed my hand from LEAVING it when times got bad in it, was that I was done for Christmas by mid December, and didn't have to be back until after New Year's. (Granted, maybe at R1s there's cultural pressure for folks to work on research all through their breaks, but I'm at a teaching school with several people in my department whose attitude is "F it, they aren't paying us to come in when classes aren't in session" [actually they are over Christmas, but....we put in enough extra unpaid hours the rest of the semester])
So this weekend is me gearing up to go on break - I have to do a little house cleaning, a little mouseproofing (it's that time of year again), did all the laundry last night and will just do one last load before I leave.
I'm skipping the in-person graduation: they did not require faculty to be present like they did in the before times, and I thought: well, I live in a mask-phobic and vaxx-phobic place, I'm traveling to visit my mom (vaccinated, but in her 80s) and several friends who are similar, and I have to affirm to Amtrak that I am neither sick nor have I been exposed....so sitting in the basketball arena surrounded by thousands of people is a risk not worth whatever reward it might bring.
Today, I have to go in and turn in final grades, and deal with one small unpleasant assessment task, but then I'm done
On “Weekend Plans Post: The Chauffeur’s Domino Mask”
yeah but given the low quality of animation of the day, I'd probably be more likely to interpret it as driving goggles....or that the guy just had a really late night the night before. Or even it's a shadow from the brim of the cap
On “American Sandwich Project: The Progressive Triumph of the Latke”
Good article, much enjoyed. One of my favorite "vintage" cookbooks is my circa-1950s version of The Settlement Cook Book, and I knew the Mrs. Kander story. (I got interested in the cookbook because my mom had a copy, not sure if it was a wedding present like many of her other cookbooks or one bought later). I love that there are like fifteen different variations on pancakes in them. And yes, you can learn a lot of "home history" of the US by examining the foods cooked.
I'm also familiar with Dr. Alice Hamilton; I know her as one of the founders of industrial hygiene. I make a little bit of a deal about her (along with Jane Addams and some of the others) in my Environmental Policy class, as sort of one-half of the trains of thought that lead to some of the environmental (work and home as well as "out in nature" environmental) legislation. I also admit I talk her up because I have a number of our Industrial Hygiene majors in that class, it's a major that leans VERY heavily male, and in the past I've tangled with a few guys from that major who seem to believe that they don't need to pay attention to the person teaching them if she's a woman, and I hope I blow a few minds by reminding them that one of the founders of their discipline was a woman.
as for latkes, I've only made them once or twice in my life. Not really part of my heritage (I'm more likely to make Eccles Cakes this time of year) and I am often not good at panfrying things (get distracted and tend to burn them)
On “Weekend Plans Post: The Chauffeur’s Domino Mask”
my plans are to mentally stick my fingers in the ears of my anxiety-about-omicron and scream "la la la can't hear you" and go to the yarn shop that's about 45 minutes away from me for the first time since February 2020. (So that's what, 21 months? 21 years? I forget). (I've been boostered and will mask and will avoid crowds, but still). Might stop by the Ulta, I don't know, will see how crowded it looks when I get near it. This is life for me now, I guess.
Classes will be done for the semester; next week is finals. I feel less triumphant and more flattened than I remember being before - this semester does NOT feel like a success and I'm afraid a lot of my intro students will be repeating the class through some combo platter of my teaching being less good than it was in the past, their own pandemic stress, and study skills that have atrophied during the last 2 years of "virtual" high school for most of them (this is the freshman level class). I wish this semester felt more like a W than an L, but it is what it is.
11 days before I go to see my mom for Christmas; hoping and praying I don't have to decide "you know, it's not worth the risk of stepping on an Amtrak sleeper car just to see her" and spend another Christmas alone. I'm more sanguine about the possibility of "what if things blow up so much it's not safe to travel back home in January" because I have plans to deal with that.
On “Mini-Throughput: Omicron Edition”
If it takes a booster every six weeks for me to be able to teach in-person with safety for myself and my students, then I'll do it. Like I said on twitter: get me a loyalty card so I get a Slushie or something for free after 10 boosters.
And I got a day's fever and two days hives and swollen armpit lymph nodes after this booster
On “What’s Normal After COVID?”
Ending awards for "good attendance" which means that kids with chronic conditions can never win, and there's a slight incentive for the "gunners" to go to school sick so they don't lose the award.
I don't LOVE the idea of always doing the dang camera thing (ESPECIALLY since instead of there just being already set up cameras and mikes in the room I have to do it myself) but yeah, for people with some kind of longer term illness it probably helps. However, I'm also seeing students who are most likely NOT sick using the "I can Zoom in" as a way of not being present in person, and based on some of their exam grades, I think they're half-listening to class and doing something else during lecture time.
I suppose it means I have to work in in-class "clicker" questions, which means I will have to learn the "clicker" utility and be sure all my students have a device that will do that. I haven't had the energy or bandwidth for that yet, I keep hoping it will get to the point where I DON'T have 1/3-1/2 the class joining online.
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I've given up on ever being able to go out in public unmasked again. I don't feel comfortable walking into the walmart IN A MASK, and I'm not sure I ever will again.
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Enjoyed the article. Some disconnected thoughts:
1. Someone somewhere made the joke that "Movies advertising themselves as 'only in theaters!' now sounds more like a threat than an enticement," and, yeah.
2. I remember March and April 2020. And May and June and July. My university closed in March and I tried to teach online for the remaining month and a half. It didn't go well, we had very little support and I didn't know what I was doing. I still don't. One thing this past year of semi-distanced classes (in person, but with distancing and an online component for those who must isolate) has taught me is *I am actually not as good a teacher as I thought* and that's really hard, because so much of my identity came from my work. I've had some very hard lessons about myself during this time
3. there were weeks in summer 2020 where the only person I spoke to was my mother, on the phone. I am not sure I am going to ever be the level of cheerfulness and positivity that I was before the pandemic, and even then, I was closer to Eeyore than to Tigger on most days.
4. I don't think we're done. I don't think Omicron is the last bad variant. Given how mobile we are and how non-civically-minded, I expect COVID to drag on for years after this, maybe into the 2030s. I'm beginning to consider if I could just retire early from teaching, if my reduced pension would be enough, because I can't make it through eight more years of contact-tracing students, and plugging the damn camera and microphone into the classroom computer every morning and do the extended dance of logins to be able to broadcast class (which is much worse than being in person)
5. I recognize most of the "problems" I faced are minor compared to many people - I was able to be vaccinated early, I only lost two people I knew well to COVID and they were people I'd been somewhat out of touch with (one had been unwell for years). And yet, that doesn't make it any easier when I'm having a really bad day of it, when I just want to stomp on my webcam and run away and live in the forest forever.
6. I think people's mental health is going to be affected for years. Especially those in the medical fields who saw COVID patients die (I think of a friend's sister, who is a NICU nurse, who had a couple babies in the NICU who were taken early by Caesarian as their mothers were dying of COVID). But I think even those of us who were fairly comfortable in the pandemic will be affected - I find walking into a large store makes me nervous, even if it's not crowded, and I feel safer at the tiny neighborhood grocery than I do at the cavernous superstore, even though probably the superstore has a smaller density of people. The ONE time I ate in a restaurant since February 2020 (it was in October), I almost immediately after got a cold that was bad enough I went and got COVID tested, and so now I have an aversion to eating inside restaurants....
7. I do not foresee anything like the "roaring 20s" when this is "over" (or over enough that we're not having thousands of deaths worldwide). Maybe in some social strata? But a lot of us are just tired and are close to the burnout point and really all we want is to sleep and maybe go shoe-shopping without a mask on and without worrying about being close to people.
On “Covid-19 Variant Omicron Scrabbles Travel Restrictions”
My prediction: it's already in the US, it's maybe what's driving some of the northern surges we're seeing, but because our testing-for-strains is far, far, far worse than South Africa's, it's not been picked up yet and may not be until later this week.
Remains to be seen "how bad." I am holding out hope that at least vaccinated individuals will have SOME protection against severe disease; most in-the-know epidemiologists seem to say that complete immune escape is highly unlikely. But I don't like this at all. I am bracing to either hear "you can't travel back home after Christmas" (FINE, THEN I WILL TEACH ONLINE FROM MY MOM'S HOUSE) or I will get back here and be told we're going all online for spring. My only consolation is that the "don't travel interstate" advice will not come - if it winds up coming - until AFTER I have arrived at my mom's, about 2 1/2 weeks from now.
I don't know that anything could have made this better, I don't even know if high vaccine rates or "vaccine equity" or sending all the vaccines to the Global South while telling folks in the so-called developed world to wait on Dose 2 (let alone boosters) would make this better. I don't know if the whole vaccine/masking thing had not become an idiotic political football if things would be better. I know how I FEEL (that if people had just masked and assumed the epidemiologists knew what they were doing, things would be better), but there's no way to rewind the tape and run an "Earth 2" scenario.
I am just very discouraged right now and trying to acclimate myself to the idea that the life I lived for the roughly first 50 years of it is never coming back, and my reality now is "stay home as much as you possibly can, avoid other people, wear a mask in public, and teach half online for the students who wind up having to isolate" and I'm just angry at everything right now. I'll stop being so angry if omicron turns out to be a nothingburger but I don't think it's going to be a nothingburger, and who knows what's coming AFTER omicron?
On “Weekend Plans Post: The Most Important Video You Will See This Year”
yeah, the supply chain issue here is happiness and personal motivation
though it's kind of a shame Hallmark doesn't do spooky romance movies for halloween
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I am decorating for Christmas. I don't CARE that it's too early and some people hate it; I travel for Thanksgiving and then when I get back it's a mad dash to the end of the semester so it won't be worth doing if I waited. I put up the (artificial) tree last night and got the lights on. If I can get the take-home exams graded this afternoon I will put the ornaments on tonight, if not, that's a Saturday thing.
it's been a Hell of a week - started off with the plumber finding an opossum in the crawlspace of the house, which had to be evicted (a live trap baited with Friskies' "Chicken and Liver Dinner" did the trick). He also replaced the old line to the shower that had cracked, which drained a decent amount out of my checking account. Then Wednesday I had three meetings - one acrimonious, one mercifully short, and the third not acrimonious but just long. Gave and graded an exam yesterday and now am questioning whether my students didn't study at all, or if I just have lost ANY ability to teach I once had. And today's been a comedy of errors of forgetting things or people needing things at the last minute.
*sigh* It's a good thing I'm not a drinking woman.
as it is, I am considering getting carry out pizza for dinner instead of going with some healthful option I'd have to cook myself.
On “Weekend Plans Post: Getting My Hour Back”
Even more than the hour back, I'll be happy not driving to work in the dark for a few months now. The butt-end and very start of DST are woeful for us early risers. And yeah, I remember Bush approving the 2007 tinkering with it, and being vaguely annoyed then.
I guess I'm cleaning house. A plumbing leak means my shower and tub are currently unusable. I've been promised a plumber Tuesday, earlier if there's a cancellation (I do not expect that). I've mostly cleared out my closet (where the pipe access is) but would like to do more cleaning in preparation for them, but also because my house just needs to be cleaned again. It seems very rude that houses keep on getting dirty no matter how often you clean....
On “Weekend Plans Post: The Last Piggybank”
I'm a "geriatric" X (born 1969) and 529s hit the scene a little late for them to be a thing for my college edumacation.
(I got monumentally lucky, though, in the lottery of life - my dads parents finished out their lives owning a very small set of rental cottages on Lake Michigan, which appreciated considerably in price before my dad and his brothers inherited them and decided to sell them and split the money three ways. And then we got lucky again with how he invested it - pulling it out to a more secure investment shortly before the crash of 1987. I paid for three years at an out-of-state Public Ivy on that, my brother paid for a couple years at a SLAC, and there was enough leftover for each of us to have help with downpayments on our houses....)
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Clearing out files in 2019 after my dad died, my mom found several hundreds of dollars in **UK** traveller's cheques that were leftover from a trip they took there in 2004.
I helped her do the online work to redeem them, and trust me, it was a friggin' JOURNEY. First to prove that she had a "right" to them (scanning in part of his will to attach) and second waiting for them to process 15 year old cheques, the original company which issued them apparently having gone bankrupt.
She eventually got the money for them but it was only after a chain of about 10 e-mails over perhaps five months....fortunately I think it got straightened out just before the pandemic got *really* bad.
I have some old, old treasury bonds in my safety deposit box I should probably look into cashing in....hm, maybe THAT'S where my new roof will come from
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I dunno what I'm doing. Online knitting group is tomorrow, I missed the last one because I needed to get out of town or I was gonna lose my stuff, so I might attend at least part of this one. I also want to get out to the small (very small) local gourmet shop to see if there are any other things I might want to get anyone as a holiday gift (yes I'm doing it obnoxiously early but I see certain relatives at Thanksgiving and it saves me having to mail the stuff later).
we're FINALLY getting seasonal weather so I am contemplating making a pot of the rather-involved bean soup I make a couple times a winter (recipe is from my vintage-1974 Winnie the Pooh cookbook (yes, really) that friends of the family gave me when I was a small child. The recipes are fairly sophisticated and I mostly didn't like them as a kid, but as an adult, I make the bean soup and also the creamed salmon fairly regularly
On “Tribulation: An Apocalypse of Liberty University’s Own Making”
honestly we need a "moneychangers in the Temple" moment in modern American Christianity. I'm a cradle Christian, have been a member of a church since I was born, and this past couple years have at times made me contemplate just leaving the faith because there are so many cheats and grifters in positions of power. I know it's not really possible to be a Christian all alone and I'd probably quickly lose what remaining faith I have if I left the church altogether, but behaviors like this appall me.
Granted, I am a slightly different stripe of Christian from Falwell and his ilk, but still.
so many things in the past few years have really soured me on humanity in general :(
On “We Need To Talk About The Dave Chappelle Netflix Thing, Like We Did The Last Dave Chappelle Thing”
It's all well and good until it's our ox that gets Tipper Gored.
other than that, I have no opinions. I don't generally find stand up funny and I don't have a Netflix subscription so I probably shouldn't even make the drive-by comment I did there.
On “Weekend Plans Post: The Smearing of Autumn”
Good! My (85 year old) mom is scheduled to get hers next week; I hope I can get mine soon. I decided that 2 weeks post booster, I will feel confident going unmasked to teach (unless I have a cold or some other transmissable thing) and once our cases drop below 20/100,000, I will start eating inside restaurants again and going unmasked in stores.
On “Remains of Brian Laundrie Found and Identified”
I assumed he was consumed at least in part my one of the many scavenger/predator species out there.
this is a sad story. I know there are a lot more missing people who don't get this level of attention (there was a graduate student who attended my grad-school alma mater who was apparently recently abducted and killed and some pretty horrifying details have got out). But it does seem the "pretty young white woman" is the type of missing person who makes the news stories.
On “Weekend Plans Post: The Smearing of Autumn”
OMG, half my one class was out sick today. They all e-mailed me and it's various complaints (so it's not that I gave them my cold on Monday - anyway I was masked then). Several cases of stomach bug (I had a v. mild version a few weeks back, so I believe it), one strep probably brought home from school by a kid.
it's like the Minor Illness Apocalypse this week, I think everyone was so stressed from 18 months of pandemic life their immune systems are at a low, coupled with lots of people going back out into the world again and BOOM, everyone's sick
I'm feeling better this afternoon but still have the muscle aches from coughing.
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it's still hot here, at least midday :(
I'm going to be recovering from this monster cold. First cold I've had in almost two years. I forgot what a cold felt like and freaked out at first and thought I had breakthrough 'rona and was sitting at home gaming out "how do I manage a 10 day enforced time of no coming in to campus given that I have none of my textbooks at home and my home Zoom set up absolutely sucks for teaching biostats (which really needs a whiteboard better than the virtual kind)"
Fortunately, a rapid test conducted curbside by the campus nurse concluded: you have a cold.
But still, I coughed and sneezed hard enough with this to pull all my upper back muscles and it's very hard to find a comfy sleeping position. Tylenol helps a little, heat helps a little more but I think I just have to wait it out.
On “Weekend Plans Post: On Slightly Delayed Spring Cleaning”
yeah I realized I'm almost due for one, I got a TdaP booster shortly after my niece was born (before I went to see her) because the advice now for adults is to be sure your pertussis immunity is topped up before seeing an infant too young to be vaccinated. And my niece just turned 9
I got my flu shot a couple weeks back, a week before doing the intensive weekend fieldwork. And a good thing, because flu's already shown up in my state.
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They were claiming on the weather this morning "ooooh you'll need a couple layers today!"
the high today? 75F
that's t-shirt weather.
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i *think* (have not decided yet, will depend on the weather) a trip out to the next-nearest city that actually has interesting and distinctive shops, in order to get a start on Christmas shopping. (Yes I know the "supply chain is failing!" stories are mainly hype, but as I actually SEE my brother and his family on Thanksgiving, I want to bring their presents to them then, to avoid the mail snafu of last year, where I mailed the presents a month early and they got them a month and a half late)
I am going to try to buy local-made/artist made stuff if possible.
Also I need to start easing myself into public more; after a year plus of mostly isolating I find crowds make me anxious, the rudeness of some fellow drivers torques me off a little, and I just go a bit nuts staring at the four walls of my house.
also I forgot to get a few things on my recent grocery trip so maybe I run to the Albertson's near the little downtown there (oooo a new and different store!)
On “Thursday Throughputs: Captains in Ships Columbus Edition”
So it's not "I'm needy and emotional because I'm a Pisces," it's "I'm needy and emotional because my mom was starved of sunlight for a bunch of the time she was carrying me."
It's still woo, but it's more PLAUSIBLE woo....
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