Re: Semi-Weekly Check Ins, Reassurances, and Concerns, 6/16

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I guess I have to get things going again. So much emotional labor....

Anyway, I did wind up going to the art opening on Friday night. Everyone wore masks, and kept a good distance. Still I felt anxious being indoors in a fairly small space with a bunch of other people. But probably nothing bad happened.

Otherwise, my nephew changed the venue of his wedding. He's getting married Labor Day weekend in Michigan -- and now it's going to be an outdoor wedding.


Posted by: peep | Link to this comment | 06-16-20 9:00 AM
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Alive and well in Fresno.

I had a discussion with my wife about either buying clippers or getting a haircut; I'd assumed that we'd fall on the clippers side and I'd appreciate working from home as mistakes grew out. She was pretty blase about it; since we'll both be masked and men's haircuts are pretty quick (mine are usually 15 minutes, though with the extra Corona hair length it might be a few minutes longer), she suggested that I call for an appointment. She's similarly dismayed by her hair's current status, but is considering no more than a trim -- even though before the virus she was getting full color (a vibrant purple last time)-- to keep contact time down.

She reports that unmasked and rude when a lack of masks is pointed out behavior continues to increase among customers. She's also been pleased -- the last week of sales has been almost pre-COVID strong, with a number of new customers finding us after her "struggles to operate a business in Coronavirus laden times" interview on local TV news a little over a week ago.


Posted by: Mooseking | Link to this comment | 06-16-20 10:16 AM
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The haircut my wife gave me is still holding up. My son still refuses to get one from her or a barber.


Posted by: Moby Hick | Link to this comment | 06-16-20 10:28 AM
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Newt hasn't had a haircut since well before the pandemic, and has gone full Viking/Prince Valiant. 6'3", angular face, and flowing golden locks. It's quite the dramatic look.


Posted by: LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 06-16-20 10:31 AM
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I'm afraid a Fleetwood Mac cover band is going to steal my son.


Posted by: Moby Hick | Link to this comment | 06-16-20 10:39 AM
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If he could grow a beard.


Posted by: Moby Hick | Link to this comment | 06-16-20 10:39 AM
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Still doing fine here. The dog's owner ended up taking her back sooner than we expected, so we'll see how things go with that. She may well need us to take her again either temporarily or permanently at some point.


Posted by: teofilo | Link to this comment | 06-16-20 10:41 AM
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Other than that, it's just sanding.


Posted by: teofilo | Link to this comment | 06-16-20 10:41 AM
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6: Also not something Newt can manage. Clean shaven and standing up straight, the look is Prince Valiant. Four or five days of stubble and slouching, all he needs is a Great Dane to be a perfect Shaggy from Scooby Doo.


Posted by: LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 06-16-20 10:45 AM
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I am also continuing to read up on past epidemics in preparation for doing some blogging. There's some fascinating stuff there. Cotton Mather was a major and highly influential proponent of smallpox inoculation after learning about it from a slave he owned.


Posted by: teofilo | Link to this comment | 06-16-20 10:46 AM
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There's no way my son's hair would be flat enough for Prince Valiant. No curls, but the waves are not to be combed away.


Posted by: Moby Hick | Link to this comment | 06-16-20 10:52 AM
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Went to a dinner party on Saturday. 8 people. Everyone had masks, but no one (including us) wore them. We sat far apart, no one knowingly sick. Odds are pretty damn good, but I'm not sure we shouldn't have behaved better. Average age was probably 7 or 8 years older than me.

2 new cases in the county today. Brings us up to 3 active. I don't know if anyone is in the hospitals here -- 8 of the 60 current statewide cases are in a hospital, which tracks with the 79 total of the 614 confirmed cases we've had statewide. So, we've definitely not had the hospitals overrun, but the fatality rate is close to 5% of all cases and 7% of those hospitalized.


Posted by: CharleyCarp | Link to this comment | 06-16-20 10:52 AM
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(Had to schedule my 5 year anniversary colonoscopy today. Requirements: strict quarantine 7 days before, covid test 5 days before. I guess I wasn't planning anything for the July 4th weekend anyway.)


Posted by: CharleyCarp | Link to this comment | 06-16-20 11:21 AM
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my 5 year anniversary colonoscopy
People celebrate relationships in the weirdest ways.


Posted by: SP | Link to this comment | 06-16-20 11:26 AM
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I look forward to works of science fiction where someone time travels to this moment of history without preparation and scares a random person by getting too close.


Posted by: Minivet | Link to this comment | 06-16-20 11:31 AM
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People scare easily during medical procedures.


Posted by: Moby Hick | Link to this comment | 06-16-20 11:34 AM
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5% fatality probably means you're missing at least half of the cases. So likely 100-200 actual cases in the state?


Posted by: Unfoggetarian: "Pause endlessly, then go in" (9) | Link to this comment | 06-16-20 11:35 AM
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There's a bear in a city park. Some tool is flying a drone over it.


Posted by: Moby Hick | Link to this comment | 06-16-20 11:47 AM
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This is the last week of official school. We do not yet have things planned for next week or after, which feels like doom. We did hear that one day camp in the area, surprisingly, is still operating - it's not totally clear why they think they're OK but the one we signed up for didn't. More room? Being situated in a more right-leaning suburb? (By local standards. Trump got 24% there in 2016, as compared with 10% here). Put ourselves on the waiting list just in case, though I dunno if it would really be OK.

Frankly, one of our failings as parents is that we've almost always outsourced organized activity - organizing one birthday party and a single-digit number of playdates seems to be about our limit in normal circumstances - and this has really come back to bite us now.


Posted by: Nathan Williams | Link to this comment | 06-16-20 11:53 AM
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A bear antagonized by a drone bites somebody else.


Posted by: Moby Hick | Link to this comment | 06-16-20 12:03 PM
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Our plan to visit the USA collided with the impossibility of getting travel health insurance for a visit there. My mother might join us in Portugal instead, but she's understandably worried about flying. Otherwise things are fine. La Infanta has started to take some steps unaided.


Posted by: X. Trapnel | Link to this comment | 06-16-20 12:24 PM
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America is a great place to visit. You can drink the water (mostly) but don't breathe the air.


Posted by: Moby Hick | Link to this comment | 06-16-20 12:38 PM
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17 You're probably right.

They're doing a lot of testing -- today's 5 new cases were from 2,600 tests -- but it's not random. I don't think asymptomatic people with no connections to existing cases and no upcoming medical procedures are being tested. There have been news reports about looking at the sewage treatment plants to see just how much coronavirus there is out here.

One of our two new cases is seemingly unrelated to travel or to any other case. When we had one of those two weeks ago, they re-tested, and it was a false positive.

Truth be told, I'm a lot more worried about a mid-30ish friend who had a kid by emergency c-section nearly 2 weeks ago. Normally very online, but completely dark. Her inlaws, also friends, and also very online, haven't put anything on social media about their first grandchild. I'm not in the top 125 people whose concerns she needs to care about, so . . .


Posted by: CharleyCarp | Link to this comment | 06-16-20 1:28 PM
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Nia is struggling with summer school. I'm struggling to find three hours a day to work on math and be patient with her whining. Mara is still in pain. It's not appendix or an ovarian cyst, so tomorrow we get to see a GI specialist and she still has a PET scan scheduled for the week after. I just got hit in the head again and am having postconcussion regression nonsense, but we're going to skip doing a psych admission this time and hope I've been scary enough to avoid pulling the trigger on my "next time" threat. I'm also actively arguing with the head of special ed because I'm tired of bullshit excuses. There's no way wealthy districts are like this. Um, I'm also grumpy.


Posted by: Thorn | Link to this comment | 06-16-20 2:05 PM
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Yikes; that sounds rough, Thorn.


Posted by: | Link to this comment | 06-16-20 3:19 PM
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24: Half of that would be plenty to make me more than irritable! Hope the nonsense and everything else gets solved.


Posted by: Mooseking | Link to this comment | 06-16-20 4:44 PM
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Good grumping, Thorn.


Posted by: Mossy Character | Link to this comment | 06-16-20 5:07 PM
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There are also good things; I shouldn't just use this place as my frustration dump. The new cat got his first checkup today and he's in great shape and shouldn't have passed his worms to anyone else. He and the dog are curled up at my feet now. Odile and I built an ikea bedframe so we now have a nice bed that's ours and before things got violent today I rearranged furniture to make the room cozier and let us watch tv together easily. I had to pressure Lee not to have a tv in the bedroom because it made me so miserable for her to have it on all the time, but I guess the problem wasn't the tv. My garden is mostly doing well. And my parents are going to watch the girls for part of tomorrow so I can rest my head and get some work done for a few hours. I got an hourlong break this past weekend, but I'm really looking forward to this even though I'll use it responsibly. Then I have to decide whether to keep the girls from going to my parents' again since their neighborhood seems to have given up on distancing for kids, which I'm still requiring at home. But now I'm already heading out of good things and I said I'd aim for that. We're okay and the girls understand that we have to work together as a family for safety. That's a start.


Posted by: Thorn | Link to this comment | 06-16-20 7:33 PM
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Just spent about $500 on groceries and had a fright when my card wouldn't read and when it finally did it was declined and I didn't bring enough cash with me to cover it. Thank god the other credit card worked as my debit card expired in May and I've yet to replace it.


Posted by: Barry Freed | Link to this comment | 06-17-20 12:21 AM
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I logged in to twitter for the first time in almost a decade and promptly got rickrolled by one of my old tweets.


Posted by: Eggplant | Link to this comment | 06-17-20 9:06 AM
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One of the kids in our pod (the one we've been with basically on a shared-homes basis since April; others have been outside-only interactions) just went home from our house with a fever, and took a Covid test this morning at the ER because the fever got significantly worse overnight. Latest as we wait for results: her pediatrician doesn't think it's Covid, but says that since people's bubbles have been expanding lately, kids are coming down with all sorts of shit, all at once -- there's a stomach bug going around and so on. Whatever this is, I hope it treats us okay. [Wincing emoji.]

Summer plans are now a bit up in the air, I guess, but little k. can keep binge-watching "Avatar: The Last Airbender" while we work for at least another few days.


Posted by: lurid keyaki | Link to this comment | 06-17-20 11:47 AM
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Up at 3 am again for another walk around the marina with Pola...


Posted by: Barry Freed | Link to this comment | 06-18-20 5:17 PM
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And back again, another 5 miler.


Posted by: Barry Freed | Link to this comment | 06-18-20 8:40 PM
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Have you reached your first 500 miles?


Posted by: Eggplant | Link to this comment | 06-18-20 9:45 PM
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Then I'd have to walk 500 more.

It's probably close to 200 by now.


Posted by: Barry Freed | Link to this comment | 06-19-20 12:15 AM
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BA DA DA DA


Posted by: Opinionated Proclaimers | Link to this comment | 06-19-20 3:34 AM
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It's interesting how much these things add up. Fitbit hand out "badges" for achieving certain distances. So, a while ago, I earned the "Monarch Migration" badge, which is 4023 kilometres, and I've also earned the one they hand out for 20,000 floors of vertical climb. In imperial, that's something like 42 miles a week (based on how long the 4000km took me), which isn't an enormous amount. Comparable to Barry's 5 miles a day, or so. Yet ... after a year, it's basically about as far as walking from London to Damascus.


Posted by: nattarGcM ttaM | Link to this comment | 06-19-20 4:50 AM
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Pokémon go tells me I've walked 261km with my buddy.


Posted by: SP | Link to this comment | 06-19-20 5:15 AM
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38: Is your buddy, Pikachu?


Posted by: peep | Link to this comment | 06-19-20 6:01 AM
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My Pokemon Go walking is at 6,200 km, and I don't have the thing turned on to give it permission to track you even if the game isn't running.


Posted by: Moby Hick | Link to this comment | 06-19-20 6:37 AM
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