This. We had a few weeks of "nonessential" business closures, but little support for them, so a lot of businesses scrambled to get re-classified as essential. It's a catch-22: if you close down, you're gonna get "scooped" by someone with fewer scruples than you, but if you stay wide open, the pandemic just keeps on going.
And there are politicians (one in my state but not my district) actively working to BAN municipalities from on their own setting up mask mandates. I am not sure why someone, especially someone in favor of small and decentralized government, would want to do that. If you're opposed, sure, speak out against them, but don't hamstring mayors of towns that might experience a surge from doing the few things they can to limit it.
Here, mask compliance is piss-poor. Which means people who have concerns (my asthmatic ass) wind up staying home more strictly than we might otherwise. Then again: I wouldn't want to make the teenager working for minimum wage wiping down carts at the grocery store have to be the person to tell some one who is going to be a jerk about it to mask up.
There is no good solution.
Also, in re: California. I would 100% be not-surprised to learn the new, more-infectious mutant strain identified in the UK was there, and was a driving factor behind the spikes.
Frankly, I don't have a lot of expectations of life returning to normal any time soon. Maybe not any time ever. I don't mean "not back to normal" in the sense of "people have the option to WFH if they want" but "not back to normal" in the sense of "I still can't travel, it's still not really safe to do 'nonessential' trips out" The news of the truly Keystone Kops roll out of the vaccine (coupled with criminal mischief on the part of some) has me discouraged again.
As for this weekend? Another blank, like so many weekends have been. Nowhere to go, nothing to do. I could clean house, I could read, I could knit. But I've done all that so many weekends. I would like something different but the weather will be too crappy even to go for a walk.
I will probably have to sleep late on Saturday, or else try to nap in the afternoon. This is my first New Year's Eve in the South (every other year I was up in Illinois, or before that, Ohio) and people had told me "oh people shoot off fireworks" and I was thinking bottle rockets but holy heck, it sounds like they've got mining explosives out there. I didn't SEE any fireworks stands open (then again, I am not driving around much these days) so I don't know where they got them unless someone robbed a construction site or somesuch.
I have sensitive ears and I startle easy, so I guess I don't get to sleep until they knock it off. Which probably won't be until after midnight. The only mercy is it's raining hard so I don't have to worry about stray fireworks starting a grass fire.
I know I'm a stick in the mud, wet blanket, but I don't get the fascination with loud dangerous things that go boom and scare the literal crap out of people's dogs.
I love the - is it a poem? A short story? When I was in high school, Vincent Dowling (who was then director of the Great Lakes Shakespeare Festival) came to our school for a period of time as an "artist in residence" and apparently he was impressed enough that he gave the school tickets for (all? I think?) the students to go see the production of it.
It was my first exposure to it - I was about 14 - and I've loved it since. I have a recording of Thomas himself reading it and I used to listen to it every Christmas (somehow I lost that tradition along the way). Such great sentences; I have used "Oh, easy for *Leonardo!*" occasionally as a comment and always delight when someone recognizes it.
I also loved the idea of "Useful Gifts" vs. "Useless Gifts," and the young boy's implication that the so-called Useless Gifts were the actually-desirable ones. (And in fact, someone worked up a nosewarmer pattern, though they don't reference the pattern).
While I grew up in a very different time and place (and we did not have epic snowball fights, nor drunken aunts singing in the living room), there are things about the poem that resonate very much with me....
The claim now is he worked at an assisted-living facility and another worker has also tested positive.
I would not be AT ALL surprised to learn the strain was already widespread; it could be what's driving the California surge. This would seem to suggested against opening college campuses for in-person learning come January. As much as I hate teaching all online....maybe it's for the best right now.
I don't have Disney+ but maybe I need to get it, at least long enough to watch this. I have been dealing with feelings of "I wasted my life because I have never done anything meaningful" which existed even before the pandemic, but has been made a great deal worse by pandemic isolation.
Not sure. Took most of this week off from work which feels odd in a year when I can't travel or even really go shopping. Stocked up on groceries earlier this week so I don't even need to do that. Might make potato soup this weekend. Zoom knit group is tomorrow so there's that - and yes, the person hosting it is holding it even though it's the day after Christmas.
Probably next week I will go back in to campus (unless they are chasing us away, there are two separate reasons they might do that) and work on a manuscript, seeing as I got all the data collected and partially crunched last week, this is the fun part. (Revising is the not-fun part but I can put that off for a little while if I at least get a decent draft written)
I got a lot of new books for Christmas so I will probably spend part of the weekend reading. I also finished one of the ones I was reading on so that frees up a slot for another.
I have an artificial tree, because in normal years I travel for Christmas but also want a tree. (And here, it's harder to come by real trees that aren't red cedar, and those things would set off my allergies).
One thing I find myself doing these past couple years is trolling the vintage shops on Etsy in the months before Christmas, looking for ornaments similar to ones we had when I was a kid - this year I found a set of fairy skaters identical to ones we had, and for not very much money.
I know it won't bring back the good old times (most of my family Christmases were happy when I was a kid) but it makes remembering them easier. It's become more important to me since the loss of my father.
My mom used to be a hardcore live-tree enthusiast, but this year, with me not there to help her put it up, she wound up buying a small artificial one. I don't know if that will be what we have in Christmas 2021 (please God let it be safe to travel then and let both her and me be this side of the dirt), but for now it seems a reasonable replacement.
this is hands-down one of my favorite Christmas hymns, because of the acknowledgement of our imperfect (or sometimes downright cursed-seeming) reality, but then that last verse. It was a favorite even in the before-times, when life seemed easier to me than it does now.
This has been a hard year for many of us, and while of course there are reasons to hope, I find I prefer songs this year that don't purely paste a happy face over everything.
I know a number of hymns that are based on the work of the so-called "Fireside Poets," Whittier is another whose verses have lent themselves to hymn-texts
I'm slightly annoyed because Elf on the Shelf is based on a vintage "pixie elf." My grandma had one, I remember it fondly. She just hung it up on the wall at Christmas, no secrecy, no surveillance, just another fun Christmas thing.
After she died, some of the stuff she had owned was stolen out of her house before family could divvy it up, including the Christmas decorations. Some years later I found a similar but not identical elf in an antique shop and bought it for old times, and then "Elf on the Shelf" hit, and....well, it feels kind of like the Michael Bolton bit from "Office Space." I haven't put my elf out for a few years because of it (despite not having children who might be freaked out)
at least in the way it was presented to me as a kid: that Santa is this being that loves you, and wants you to do what's right, but even if you don't, hey, he loves you, so you still get toys.
I am quite sure my parents' faith (a sort of Progressive-Christianity Protestantism) informed how they presented Santa.
I know some people have argued with me about snow days (which are a precious memory from my childhood): "What do kids with single parents who have to work do? What about families where they have no access to the outside?" and on, and on.
I dunno. I remember snow days happily. I also remember a year or two when we had a real turkey of a superintendant whose goal was Zero Snow Days and we had the spectacle of small children trying to wade through 3' of snow (this was northern Ohio in the 1970s).
My mom was a stay-at-home mom back in those days so a snow day was a real snow day for us. In fact, when the weather was REALLY bad, my dad would get a call from his university's phone tree that they were shut down and weren't expecting faculty or admins to come in.
I also remember the "Blizzard of '78" pretty well, everything shut down then.
"Rebooting the elf," so they are surveillance devices and not actual little beings?
I would have found that far creepier when I was a kid than the idea of some kind of rodent-sized humanoid just hanging out in the house.
(I dunno. My childhood experience with Santa was....different, I guess. The Santa my parents presented WANTED us to be good, but also recognized we weren't perfect. Not that we shouldn't TRY but the fact that we failed didn't necessarily result in coal or even fewer presents.)
I don't have any plans for the weekend. This was a pretty awful week, between finding out a friend has cancer, my brother and sister in law having a near-miss COVID exposure (for about a day we thought they had been exposed to someone who is now sick, but the timing was such that they weren't close to that person after THEY got exposed) and issues at work where it was implied I had Not Been Sufficiently Caring towards a student who was claiming they deserved a higher grade than they actually earned. In normal times I'd go antiquing or something but "normal" is unrecognizable now so I guess I'll clean house instead?
I was thinking about this today, in re: an incident with a student trying (unsuccessfully; they had no grounds) to grieve a grade by looping in an administrator who really wasn't in the chain of command but of whom they were a favorite: Some people are so damn used to seeing the rules bent or broken for them when the rules are "silly" things, that when it's a matter of literal life and death, they still expect that bending.
meanwhile, chumps like me realize that we are neither downtrodden enough to get a pass on the grounds of "they're too privileged" nor am I "special" enough (powerful or connected) to get a pass.
So I abide by the "rules," and rage at things like people eating fancy dinners in fancy restaurants when I know it will be 2023 at least (if she's still alive even then) before my mom and I can go out to a restaurant.
And I'm just....I'm tired. I'm sick of it all. I am continuing to mask/distance/stay home because I know it's how I keep *me* safe (because I am the only one who gives enough of a fish about me to do that) and because my brother and sister in law had a near-miss with some of their "bubble buddies" (said buddies got exposed and tested positive, and one got sick, but mercifully the exposure was AFTER my brother and sister in law saw them last).
But I also know that what I'm doing, all the sacrifices, do not matter in the grand scheme, they don't "flatten the curve" at all. I'm just one person. My sacrifices are to keep me safe, they won't do any more than that. And maybe? Maybe just FISH the other people then, the ones with their parties and their fancy dinners. I'll eat my mac and cheese at home forever.
But I'm tired. And I'm lonesome. And I'm bored. And I find myself ruminating a lot more on Terrible Things because I am alone so much and thoughts (like a friend with a new cancer diagnosis) bounce around in my head like an old-skool screen saver because I don't have enough to distract myself and no one to remind me that there's more to life than the bad things happening.
I want this to be over so badly. And then I go to the grocery store and see people wearing masks as chinstraps, and I hear some of the conspiracy theories being spread, and I feel like: It ain't ever gonna be over, kid, get used to your new live as a crazy hermit because this is what you got, through no fault of your own.
I hope reincarnation is a thing, and in my next life I get to make up for all the missed opportunities in this one.
I have one more round of final exams to grade (tomorrow, they come due over night) and then I am turning off my campus e-mail notifications for at least a week. Well, I will be going in next week to work on research (provided I am permitted, we might be chased off campus for various reasons).
Then this weekend I am doing Christmas stuff - getting out any cards I don't write tonight or tomorrow night, watching Christmas movies on tv, knitting (though this will be on stuff for me; got my holiday gifts done and sent out this week). Probably a grocery run? Maybe?
I also have by every-other-week Zoom knitting group Saturday which has kind of been a lifeline in all of this.
But mostly it's going to be recuperating from what was the most hellish semester I've ever taught. (In the before-times, Saturday would be graduation, but now they just have a "virtual celebration of graduates")
It seems that "no" is the answer, as long as the person is blocked from getting sick (and especially transmitting it, which is still a big unanswered question, sadly).
I suspect most of us won't have a choice; it'll be "what's available where you are when you can get vaccinated" though possibly if some of the vaccines cause a higher likelihood of adverse reactions in some groups, maybe the less-reaction-causing ones will be held back and used on people in those groups. Though I'm not even sure how they could DO that logistically, short of telling people in those groups "okay you have to go to Hospital X in Big City Y if you want that particular vaccine, otherwise, good luck and God bless"
I admit I am slightly anxiousified by the "severe allergic reaction" news though I don't know how much of this is "oh crap" and how much it's the news reporting trying to get us all to collectively say "oh crap."
I have never had a bad reaction to a vaccine (worst I ever had was a seriously sore arm after an inexperienced person gave me a TDap int he wrong place) but I am allergic to nearly everything else, though not to the level of anaphylaxis (peanuts are questionable though; cut them out of my diet before I had a severe reaction).
However - as long as I can find someone to sit with me for an hour or so after the vaccine and who is smart enough to call an ambulance if I start wheezing, I'm still getting the shot, because this locked-in thing I am doing now is no life, and some days I've said a fairly quick death of anaphylaxis (which I know is unpleasant, but still) is preferable to a lingering death from loneliness and loss-of-purpose.
I just wish there weren't an abundance of people ready and prepared to rain on everyone's parade and make the vaccine sound less safe than it most likely is.
I wonder if there's an element of "times changing" to it, too? I've found I can't watch "Scrooged" any more, and I have to take the National Lampoon outing in small doses and in the right frame of mind. There's too much, it's too cynical, and yeah, these are people who have a lot to be grateful for.
I also can't watch a couple older movies I used to love - "The Man Who Came To Dinner" (again: too much meanness, and there's just SO MUCH going on) and "Christmas in Connecticut" (I find the deceptions and near-miss being-found-out too uncomfortable any more). But I realize those objections are more a "me" thing than a "this movie is bad" thing.
Or maybe times haven't changed as much as I am: I am a lot more beaten-down by life than I was even five years ago.
I don't think I'll ever stop loving "It's a Wonderful Life," though, even if it's maybe not a great way to fun a lending institution? I think for me the whole movie is about a world that might be more forgiving and gracious than our own (note that Mr. Potter never pays for the "crime" of not returning the money stupid old Cousin Billy mistakenly handed him) and even though I recognize the world doesn't work like the movie does (Oh to know that I actually had a positive impact on people's lives! Then I think I could be happy), it's still....a NICE world to contemplate.
Just as long as we don't turn out being like cows (or deer, or sport-fish) to the aliens, though I could imagine that happening. ("It's a COOKBOOK!")
I always figured life on other planets would be like bacteria or similar - pretty simple. I mean, most of the life here is bacteria and fungi. We're kind of the oddball outlier, and generally evolution doesn't "need" for life to be intelligent to survive.
Though I admit the angel idea is intriguing....what if they found an alien, and it was all eyes and wings, and yet could communicate with us, and started out every conversation with "fear not!"
I guess I will be making my mom's "light fruitcake" recipe this weekend, given that my order of candied fruit and currants arrived from nuts. com
Other than that, I don't know. I'm worn out and today I am having a bad "grief ball" day (reference) because someone I know from church who, before he became so ill, was an important part of the congregation died last week and his memorial service (such as we can do with distancing) is today.
Also, I scrubbed whatever plans I had to go "big shopping" in North Texas any time soon; the places I would go to are in counties that have gone back to strictly restricting occupancy (because hospitals are full) and I don't want to wind up standing waiting outside the JoAnn's or something. And no, there is literally nowhere else I could drive to within a couple hours of me.
I'm telling myself this is the worst and darkest part and it will get better soon but I am also having a hard time convincing myself.
Next week is distanced exam week, and I am expecting to deal with lots of computer problems from people; some places here the internet isn't exactly stable. I don't like being more of a tech support person than I am a teacher but this is just life now.
Honestly I am just mad that evolution took the ability to hibernate from humans; it would be a lot easier this year to just tank up on some big meals and then sleep until March.
Oh, my goodness. I remember the whole paraffin mess. My mom used to use it on the peach jam she made (loaded up, yes, with lemon juice.) I remember the jars were kept in the basement, which is not as cold as a fridge but was pretty close. And the icky sound of shlorping the paraffin seal off when you opened the jam.
Her peach jam was really good; she put a maraschino cherry and a single whole clove in it for flavor. I've never been able to find a commercial peach jam that compared, and peaches are so expensive where i live that I'm not gonna buy them to turn them into jam. But growing up, friends of the family had peach trees and many years we could get peaches free for the picking.
She also canned tomato sauce and homemade chili sauce and some weird thing called pickalilly that I think was derived from the British "Branston pickle" (Her family was of British extraction, though several generations gone). And mustard pickle, which I thought was gross and wouldn't eat but my dad loved it...
At one time in the 70s they belonged to a food co-op and my mom even pressure-canned stuff that was lower acid. I guess pressure canners are like the home version of an autoclave, or at least they seem to operate on a similar principle....I wonder if in an emergency they could be used to sterilize things like medical instruments....
I'm hoping the small grocery near me that seems to cater to an older demographic will have the fruit needed for fruitcake. The slightly larger grocery I normally patronize does not have it in , and I am not going to wal-mart during the pandemic because that's where the zombies go.
Failing that, I may try to make a quick Kroger's run to the next nearest city. But on a weekday morning during Exam Week to avoid people. Yes, that's late to make fruitcake, but at least it's not the kind that has to age in booze for a month - it's my mom's recipe, derived from something called Dundee Cake.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “PM Boris Johnson Announces UK Lockdown”
This. We had a few weeks of "nonessential" business closures, but little support for them, so a lot of businesses scrambled to get re-classified as essential. It's a catch-22: if you close down, you're gonna get "scooped" by someone with fewer scruples than you, but if you stay wide open, the pandemic just keeps on going.
And there are politicians (one in my state but not my district) actively working to BAN municipalities from on their own setting up mask mandates. I am not sure why someone, especially someone in favor of small and decentralized government, would want to do that. If you're opposed, sure, speak out against them, but don't hamstring mayors of towns that might experience a surge from doing the few things they can to limit it.
Here, mask compliance is piss-poor. Which means people who have concerns (my asthmatic ass) wind up staying home more strictly than we might otherwise. Then again: I wouldn't want to make the teenager working for minimum wage wiping down carts at the grocery store have to be the person to tell some one who is going to be a jerk about it to mask up.
There is no good solution.
Also, in re: California. I would 100% be not-surprised to learn the new, more-infectious mutant strain identified in the UK was there, and was a driving factor behind the spikes.
On “Weekend Plans Post: First Weekend of 2021”
Frankly, I don't have a lot of expectations of life returning to normal any time soon. Maybe not any time ever. I don't mean "not back to normal" in the sense of "people have the option to WFH if they want" but "not back to normal" in the sense of "I still can't travel, it's still not really safe to do 'nonessential' trips out" The news of the truly Keystone Kops roll out of the vaccine (coupled with criminal mischief on the part of some) has me discouraged again.
As for this weekend? Another blank, like so many weekends have been. Nowhere to go, nothing to do. I could clean house, I could read, I could knit. But I've done all that so many weekends. I would like something different but the weather will be too crappy even to go for a walk.
I will probably have to sleep late on Saturday, or else try to nap in the afternoon. This is my first New Year's Eve in the South (every other year I was up in Illinois, or before that, Ohio) and people had told me "oh people shoot off fireworks" and I was thinking bottle rockets but holy heck, it sounds like they've got mining explosives out there. I didn't SEE any fireworks stands open (then again, I am not driving around much these days) so I don't know where they got them unless someone robbed a construction site or somesuch.
I have sensitive ears and I startle easy, so I guess I don't get to sleep until they knock it off. Which probably won't be until after midnight. The only mercy is it's raining hard so I don't have to worry about stray fireworks starting a grass fire.
I know I'm a stick in the mud, wet blanket, but I don't get the fascination with loud dangerous things that go boom and scare the literal crap out of people's dogs.
On “Tradition & Memory: A Child’s Christmas In Wales”
I love the - is it a poem? A short story? When I was in high school, Vincent Dowling (who was then director of the Great Lakes Shakespeare Festival) came to our school for a period of time as an "artist in residence" and apparently he was impressed enough that he gave the school tickets for (all? I think?) the students to go see the production of it.
It was my first exposure to it - I was about 14 - and I've loved it since. I have a recording of Thomas himself reading it and I used to listen to it every Christmas (somehow I lost that tradition along the way). Such great sentences; I have used "Oh, easy for *Leonardo!*" occasionally as a comment and always delight when someone recognizes it.
I also loved the idea of "Useful Gifts" vs. "Useless Gifts," and the young boy's implication that the so-called Useless Gifts were the actually-desirable ones. (And in fact, someone worked up a nosewarmer pattern, though they don't reference the pattern).
While I grew up in a very different time and place (and we did not have epic snowball fights, nor drunken aunts singing in the living room), there are things about the poem that resonate very much with me....
On “Colorado Man Has First Known US Case of “UK Variant” Coronavirus”
The claim now is he worked at an assisted-living facility and another worker has also tested positive.
I would not be AT ALL surprised to learn the strain was already widespread; it could be what's driving the California surge. This would seem to suggested against opening college campuses for in-person learning come January. As much as I hate teaching all online....maybe it's for the best right now.
On “To Thine Own Soul be Authentic”
I don't have Disney+ but maybe I need to get it, at least long enough to watch this. I have been dealing with feelings of "I wasted my life because I have never done anything meaningful" which existed even before the pandemic, but has been made a great deal worse by pandemic isolation.
On “Weekend Plans Post: ‘Twas the night before Christmas”
Not sure. Took most of this week off from work which feels odd in a year when I can't travel or even really go shopping. Stocked up on groceries earlier this week so I don't even need to do that. Might make potato soup this weekend. Zoom knit group is tomorrow so there's that - and yes, the person hosting it is holding it even though it's the day after Christmas.
Probably next week I will go back in to campus (unless they are chasing us away, there are two separate reasons they might do that) and work on a manuscript, seeing as I got all the data collected and partially crunched last week, this is the fun part. (Revising is the not-fun part but I can put that off for a little while if I at least get a decent draft written)
I got a lot of new books for Christmas so I will probably spend part of the weekend reading. I also finished one of the ones I was reading on so that frees up a slot for another.
On “O (Fake) Christmas Tree”
I have an artificial tree, because in normal years I travel for Christmas but also want a tree. (And here, it's harder to come by real trees that aren't red cedar, and those things would set off my allergies).
One thing I find myself doing these past couple years is trolling the vintage shops on Etsy in the months before Christmas, looking for ornaments similar to ones we had when I was a kid - this year I found a set of fairy skaters identical to ones we had, and for not very much money.
I know it won't bring back the good old times (most of my family Christmases were happy when I was a kid) but it makes remembering them easier. It's become more important to me since the loss of my father.
My mom used to be a hardcore live-tree enthusiast, but this year, with me not there to help her put it up, she wound up buying a small artificial one. I don't know if that will be what we have in Christmas 2021 (please God let it be safe to travel then and let both her and me be this side of the dirt), but for now it seems a reasonable replacement.
On “Sunday Morning! “The Bells of Christmas” by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow”
this is hands-down one of my favorite Christmas hymns, because of the acknowledgement of our imperfect (or sometimes downright cursed-seeming) reality, but then that last verse. It was a favorite even in the before-times, when life seemed easier to me than it does now.
This has been a hard year for many of us, and while of course there are reasons to hope, I find I prefer songs this year that don't purely paste a happy face over everything.
I know a number of hymns that are based on the work of the so-called "Fireside Poets," Whittier is another whose verses have lent themselves to hymn-texts
On “Weekend Plans Post: Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in”
I'm slightly annoyed because Elf on the Shelf is based on a vintage "pixie elf." My grandma had one, I remember it fondly. She just hung it up on the wall at Christmas, no secrecy, no surveillance, just another fun Christmas thing.
After she died, some of the stuff she had owned was stolen out of her house before family could divvy it up, including the Christmas decorations. Some years later I found a similar but not identical elf in an antique shop and bought it for old times, and then "Elf on the Shelf" hit, and....well, it feels kind of like the Michael Bolton bit from "Office Space." I haven't put my elf out for a few years because of it (despite not having children who might be freaked out)
On “Working Like Everything”
this HAD to be a shortly-before-Christmas-comes cartoon.
Kids today* are not that different
(*Well, FSVO "today" - I remember my brother and me being like that in the late 70s)
On “Weekend Plans Post: Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in”
Has Mr. Waffles ever done a stint in the waffle iron? That's what I'd have been tempted to do as a tween
"
Santa is a Platonic Ideal.
at least in the way it was presented to me as a kid: that Santa is this being that loves you, and wants you to do what's right, but even if you don't, hey, he loves you, so you still get toys.
I am quite sure my parents' faith (a sort of Progressive-Christianity Protestantism) informed how they presented Santa.
"
I am sadly not that little of a being. And while I may see things, it takes a lot for me to be arsed to report it to authorities these days
On “The First Big Snow Is Upon Us”
I know some people have argued with me about snow days (which are a precious memory from my childhood): "What do kids with single parents who have to work do? What about families where they have no access to the outside?" and on, and on.
I dunno. I remember snow days happily. I also remember a year or two when we had a real turkey of a superintendant whose goal was Zero Snow Days and we had the spectacle of small children trying to wade through 3' of snow (this was northern Ohio in the 1970s).
My mom was a stay-at-home mom back in those days so a snow day was a real snow day for us. In fact, when the weather was REALLY bad, my dad would get a call from his university's phone tree that they were shut down and weren't expecting faculty or admins to come in.
I also remember the "Blizzard of '78" pretty well, everything shut down then.
On “Weekend Plans Post: Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in”
"Rebooting the elf," so they are surveillance devices and not actual little beings?
I would have found that far creepier when I was a kid than the idea of some kind of rodent-sized humanoid just hanging out in the house.
(I dunno. My childhood experience with Santa was....different, I guess. The Santa my parents presented WANTED us to be good, but also recognized we weren't perfect. Not that we shouldn't TRY but the fact that we failed didn't necessarily result in coal or even fewer presents.)
I don't have any plans for the weekend. This was a pretty awful week, between finding out a friend has cancer, my brother and sister in law having a near-miss COVID exposure (for about a day we thought they had been exposed to someone who is now sick, but the timing was such that they weren't close to that person after THEY got exposed) and issues at work where it was implied I had Not Been Sufficiently Caring towards a student who was claiming they deserved a higher grade than they actually earned. In normal times I'd go antiquing or something but "normal" is unrecognizable now so I guess I'll clean house instead?
On “Saints, Sinners, and the Limits of Public Policy”
I was thinking about this today, in re: an incident with a student trying (unsuccessfully; they had no grounds) to grieve a grade by looping in an administrator who really wasn't in the chain of command but of whom they were a favorite: Some people are so damn used to seeing the rules bent or broken for them when the rules are "silly" things, that when it's a matter of literal life and death, they still expect that bending.
meanwhile, chumps like me realize that we are neither downtrodden enough to get a pass on the grounds of "they're too privileged" nor am I "special" enough (powerful or connected) to get a pass.
So I abide by the "rules," and rage at things like people eating fancy dinners in fancy restaurants when I know it will be 2023 at least (if she's still alive even then) before my mom and I can go out to a restaurant.
And I'm just....I'm tired. I'm sick of it all. I am continuing to mask/distance/stay home because I know it's how I keep *me* safe (because I am the only one who gives enough of a fish about me to do that) and because my brother and sister in law had a near-miss with some of their "bubble buddies" (said buddies got exposed and tested positive, and one got sick, but mercifully the exposure was AFTER my brother and sister in law saw them last).
But I also know that what I'm doing, all the sacrifices, do not matter in the grand scheme, they don't "flatten the curve" at all. I'm just one person. My sacrifices are to keep me safe, they won't do any more than that. And maybe? Maybe just FISH the other people then, the ones with their parties and their fancy dinners. I'll eat my mac and cheese at home forever.
But I'm tired. And I'm lonesome. And I'm bored. And I find myself ruminating a lot more on Terrible Things because I am alone so much and thoughts (like a friend with a new cancer diagnosis) bounce around in my head like an old-skool screen saver because I don't have enough to distract myself and no one to remind me that there's more to life than the bad things happening.
I want this to be over so badly. And then I go to the grocery store and see people wearing masks as chinstraps, and I hear some of the conspiracy theories being spread, and I feel like: It ain't ever gonna be over, kid, get used to your new live as a crazy hermit because this is what you got, through no fault of your own.
I hope reincarnation is a thing, and in my next life I get to make up for all the missed opportunities in this one.
On “Weekend Plans Post: It’s Out”
I have one more round of final exams to grade (tomorrow, they come due over night) and then I am turning off my campus e-mail notifications for at least a week. Well, I will be going in next week to work on research (provided I am permitted, we might be chased off campus for various reasons).
Then this weekend I am doing Christmas stuff - getting out any cards I don't write tonight or tomorrow night, watching Christmas movies on tv, knitting (though this will be on stuff for me; got my holiday gifts done and sent out this week). Probably a grocery run? Maybe?
I also have by every-other-week Zoom knitting group Saturday which has kind of been a lifeline in all of this.
But mostly it's going to be recuperating from what was the most hellish semester I've ever taught. (In the before-times, Saturday would be graduation, but now they just have a "virtual celebration of graduates")
On “Mini-Throughput: The Reality of a Vaccine”
It seems that "no" is the answer, as long as the person is blocked from getting sick (and especially transmitting it, which is still a big unanswered question, sadly).
I suspect most of us won't have a choice; it'll be "what's available where you are when you can get vaccinated" though possibly if some of the vaccines cause a higher likelihood of adverse reactions in some groups, maybe the less-reaction-causing ones will be held back and used on people in those groups. Though I'm not even sure how they could DO that logistically, short of telling people in those groups "okay you have to go to Hospital X in Big City Y if you want that particular vaccine, otherwise, good luck and God bless"
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I admit I am slightly anxiousified by the "severe allergic reaction" news though I don't know how much of this is "oh crap" and how much it's the news reporting trying to get us all to collectively say "oh crap."
I have never had a bad reaction to a vaccine (worst I ever had was a seriously sore arm after an inexperienced person gave me a TDap int he wrong place) but I am allergic to nearly everything else, though not to the level of anaphylaxis (peanuts are questionable though; cut them out of my diet before I had a severe reaction).
However - as long as I can find someone to sit with me for an hour or so after the vaccine and who is smart enough to call an ambulance if I start wheezing, I'm still getting the shot, because this locked-in thing I am doing now is no life, and some days I've said a fairly quick death of anaphylaxis (which I know is unpleasant, but still) is preferable to a lingering death from loneliness and loss-of-purpose.
I just wish there weren't an abundance of people ready and prepared to rain on everyone's parade and make the vaccine sound less safe than it most likely is.
On “Stop Ruining Christmas”
"Merry Christmas! S***ter was full!"
which seems an appropriate 2020 greeting...
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I wonder if there's an element of "times changing" to it, too? I've found I can't watch "Scrooged" any more, and I have to take the National Lampoon outing in small doses and in the right frame of mind. There's too much, it's too cynical, and yeah, these are people who have a lot to be grateful for.
I also can't watch a couple older movies I used to love - "The Man Who Came To Dinner" (again: too much meanness, and there's just SO MUCH going on) and "Christmas in Connecticut" (I find the deceptions and near-miss being-found-out too uncomfortable any more). But I realize those objections are more a "me" thing than a "this movie is bad" thing.
Or maybe times haven't changed as much as I am: I am a lot more beaten-down by life than I was even five years ago.
I don't think I'll ever stop loving "It's a Wonderful Life," though, even if it's maybe not a great way to fun a lending institution? I think for me the whole movie is about a world that might be more forgiving and gracious than our own (note that Mr. Potter never pays for the "crime" of not returning the money stupid old Cousin Billy mistakenly handed him) and even though I recognize the world doesn't work like the movie does (Oh to know that I actually had a positive impact on people's lives! Then I think I could be happy), it's still....a NICE world to contemplate.
On “From The Jerusalem Post: Former Israeli space security chief says aliens exist, humanity not ready”
Just as long as we don't turn out being like cows (or deer, or sport-fish) to the aliens, though I could imagine that happening. ("It's a COOKBOOK!")
I always figured life on other planets would be like bacteria or similar - pretty simple. I mean, most of the life here is bacteria and fungi. We're kind of the oddball outlier, and generally evolution doesn't "need" for life to be intelligent to survive.
Though I admit the angel idea is intriguing....what if they found an alien, and it was all eyes and wings, and yet could communicate with us, and started out every conversation with "fear not!"
On “Weekend Plans Post: The Last Normal Weekend For A While”
I guess I will be making my mom's "light fruitcake" recipe this weekend, given that my order of candied fruit and currants arrived from nuts. com
Other than that, I don't know. I'm worn out and today I am having a bad "grief ball" day (reference) because someone I know from church who, before he became so ill, was an important part of the congregation died last week and his memorial service (such as we can do with distancing) is today.
Also, I scrubbed whatever plans I had to go "big shopping" in North Texas any time soon; the places I would go to are in counties that have gone back to strictly restricting occupancy (because hospitals are full) and I don't want to wind up standing waiting outside the JoAnn's or something. And no, there is literally nowhere else I could drive to within a couple hours of me.
I'm telling myself this is the worst and darkest part and it will get better soon but I am also having a hard time convincing myself.
Next week is distanced exam week, and I am expecting to deal with lots of computer problems from people; some places here the internet isn't exactly stable. I don't like being more of a tech support person than I am a teacher but this is just life now.
Honestly I am just mad that evolution took the ability to hibernate from humans; it would be a lot easier this year to just tank up on some big meals and then sleep until March.
On “Non-Doomsday Prepping: In a Jam”
Oh, my goodness. I remember the whole paraffin mess. My mom used to use it on the peach jam she made (loaded up, yes, with lemon juice.) I remember the jars were kept in the basement, which is not as cold as a fridge but was pretty close. And the icky sound of shlorping the paraffin seal off when you opened the jam.
Her peach jam was really good; she put a maraschino cherry and a single whole clove in it for flavor. I've never been able to find a commercial peach jam that compared, and peaches are so expensive where i live that I'm not gonna buy them to turn them into jam. But growing up, friends of the family had peach trees and many years we could get peaches free for the picking.
She also canned tomato sauce and homemade chili sauce and some weird thing called pickalilly that I think was derived from the British "Branston pickle" (Her family was of British extraction, though several generations gone). And mustard pickle, which I thought was gross and wouldn't eat but my dad loved it...
At one time in the 70s they belonged to a food co-op and my mom even pressure-canned stuff that was lower acid. I guess pressure canners are like the home version of an autoclave, or at least they seem to operate on a similar principle....I wonder if in an emergency they could be used to sterilize things like medical instruments....
On “Weekend Plans Post: Thanksgiving Cocoon”
I'm hoping the small grocery near me that seems to cater to an older demographic will have the fruit needed for fruitcake. The slightly larger grocery I normally patronize does not have it in , and I am not going to wal-mart during the pandemic because that's where the zombies go.
Failing that, I may try to make a quick Kroger's run to the next nearest city. But on a weekday morning during Exam Week to avoid people. Yes, that's late to make fruitcake, but at least it's not the kind that has to age in booze for a month - it's my mom's recipe, derived from something called Dundee Cake.
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