My hip hurts. Probably not from Covid.
Alive and fine still. The smoke has been tapering off, and our local wildfire (the Creek Fire) is up to 18% contained... so not very, but a lot better than the 6% of a week ago.
I worked the store's garage sale on Saturday, mostly running the bookkeeping for items sold, etc., but also doing the zoom walk through of the room a couple of times. Being people's hands and eyes is tough. It was odd to talk with customers again; it really pointed out how cloistered I've been for the last six months. It was good to work alongside the employees; not as good as a real social gathering, but good to interact and work with a common purpose again.
Some veggies were getting a bit old, so I roasted them up yesterday. It turned out that Opo [a squash variety] requires peeling, and should have been diced smaller; I'll probably pan fry the leftovers and see how they do. Peanuts were tasty, but they didn't keep much of the flavoring I applied at the beginning -- I suspect that they'll either need to have their paper skins removed too, or maybe even soak in the flavoring solution like a marinade. Or maybe they just won't take in advance, so I should season after the roasting? But Okra with a dusting of chilli powder was the real star; it roasted up in 20 minutes and was delicious!
We're approaching decision day for whether to keep the kids home when schools reopen in October. I'm finding this insanely stressful. Jammies wants to keep the kids home, although he'll definitely be F2F at the high school. I wish that they were struggling less with being remote.
We sent our son in. It was clearly becoming worse for him without peer contact and clear that winter is going to see everyone sent home again. Things are bad, but this appears to be the window to develop some cushion before they get really bad.
Hope and joy have returned to the heart of the heart of it all. There will be football this fall!
6: A shorter season, and no fans allowed at the games, so this is a lesser life -- but, at least, a life!
Our positive rate is going back down after creeping up for a week.
First remote exam went off with no disasters.
On the down side, Baltimore has just had 45 shootings, 11 fatal, in a single week.
After a dip in late August our case numbers have continued to climb for reasons that are unclear. The past couple days have had lower case counts so it's possible that this wave is peaking or leveling off, but it's too early to tell.
Late August was like two weeks ago.
Anyway, the positivity rate here is still below 10 percent, usually. And probably lower than that by a fair bit if you don't count Pitt.
I've def been noticing the smoke in the air here in central New England. There was a very red sun yesterday.
Our positivity rate has been hovering around 2% for months. One thing we do seem to be getting right is doing lots of testing.
Our case rate has declined to 5.5/100,000 and test positivity to 3.4%. Combined with our high testing rate of 250/100,000, if we just hold at this level for 2 more weeks, we'll move from Tier 1, "widespread", down to Tier 2, "substantial", and more businesses can do some indoor activities (not bars).
I'm of mixed feelings. The state's standards got stricter a few weeks ago, all the counties are rated consistently now with I think no waivers, but I hope those standards are enough to get on a European trajectory of precautions being enough to prevent future spikes, or at least preventing spikes from being big enough to undo most of our progress.
We also have one of the lowest death rates, probably in part because the population is so young. Check out the top graph here; the age distribution of Alaska COVID-19 cases is disproportionately young even compared to the state's overall demographics, which skew quite young to start with.
After the past two month decline I am seeing very small ticks upward in the 7 day moving average at the county level, state level, and national level.
I am so heavily invested into reading the tea leaves and trying to figure out what to do that I'm fixated on these three tiny reversals of trends. Are we headed for a real increase again? Or is this just the small fluctuation associated with opening schools and Labor Day? Please tell me what the tea leaves reveal.
Our 7 day average positive rate almost dropped below 3% in August. Then it started to creep up and maxed out at 3.7% and now we're back down to 3.3%. The downward trend started about 3 days ago.
Then again, the bars were full of people yelling on the Ravens opening day a few days ago, so we'll see if there's another spike.
Texas has announced they're changing the way they compute the positivity rate to take into account the day in which the test was administered. In other words, we're no longer dividing # of positive tests that came back on Sept. 17th by the number of total tests administered on Sept 17th.
However, this also means that on September 17th, it looks like your positivity rate is 0. Then between Sept 17th and October, the 9/17 positivity rate slowly grows, as test results trickle in and get reported up the chain of command.
They have not yet revealed how they're going to communicate this in a non-misleading way. It's more accurate, but it sure is ripe to communicate things VERY misleadingly.
I put a link about that in the last update thread.
liiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiink.
Had an argument today (that went perfectly fine).
Last night, however, I dreamed that the sleeve on my dress tore as I was getting ready for the argument. I figured my jacket would cover the tear and wasn't worried. Until a septic system of some sort burst and covered my suit in waste. I frantically pulled together a new, maginally appropriate outfit, then got lost trying to find the court. I finally arrived as my argument was ending, the client having had to make the argument.
Fortunately, the only part that came true was the getting lost part. But I made it in plenty of time and my suit remained clean and intact.
26.1: I eventually understood what it meant to have an argument go perfectly fine.
I work in a law firm. It's amazing they haven't fired me yet.
I just lose arguments and then do whatever I want regardless.
Except now because going to the bar is a bad idea.
I had a minion kick ass earlier this week -- opposing counsel got a TRO without notice by lying to the judge, and my dude got it lifted on a conference call with the court. He's a gentle, calm kind of guy and I was worried he was going to get trampled, but he gently and calmly made all his points. I was very pleased with him.
He should try to get the other lawyer disbarred or sprayed with the contents of a septic system.
Following lurid keyaki's request I'll check in.
I haven't said much in the check-in threads, because (like many people) this year has been okay, but just moderately bad most of the time. As one of my friends said (explaining why he has been a poor correspondent and not responding to e-mail), "We have all the tings we need to survive and little of the things we need to thrive."
This week has been particularly hard because I'm staying inside because of the smoke* and I miss being able to just get outside and go for a walk when I'm feeling frustrated.
But, the smoke is starting to clear and I'm doing okay, just unhappy.
* I thought this was a good slideshow: https://komonews.com/amp/weather/scotts-weather-blog/15-shades-of-seattle-smoke-photographer-captures-the-changing-smoky-skyline
The insane peak in our town is down to merely incredibly high, so we now only have about 1 new cases a day per thousand people. But the cases AT THE UNIVERSITY have gone down since they went online and shut down half the dorms, so they are trumpeting declining numbers that are true but hugely misleading--- apparently the surge from 5 cases a day to 50+ daily that they caused in the town doesn't count. So it looks a lot like they are going to try to reopen. And I cannot begin to express how angry I am, though the k-12 schools wisely have stayed online for the duration. So my life is relatively ok for now, but my employer sucks.
On the good side, the six-year-old's online school is going better than I imagined was possible. Which isn't to say good. But probably sustainable.
I'm still alive, more out of a sense of obligation to the DE's cats than any real enthusiasm for being old. I'm being careful about masks and distancing but not fanatical. What's the condition short of an existential crisis called? Existential malaise?
I know you can catch depression from cat poop, but I don't know about malaise.
"Jeopardy!"'s new season has begun! Trebek's voice is weaker, the lecterns are farther apart, and all the contestants have been from California, but otherwise it's in good shape.
The school system here was ridiculously bad for deaf kids, already, and this year is SUCH a shit show. Kids are in school 2 days a week, no one can observe classrooms, super unclear what is happening in terms of language or communication. So I have teamed up with two families to do mini ASL school a few times a week at home.
One family has a deaf 5 year old and a deaf 3 year old. The other family has 5 year old twins, one deaf, and a hearing 3 year old. So I take the 5 year olds for an hour while the 3 year olds play with the moms, and then we trade. It is going okay. The deaf twin and the deaf 3yo are both being catastrophically underserved by the system and it's unclear whether or not my interventions will be in time, or enough, to get them back on the rails. Overall, it is mostly adding to my stress level rather than being lighthearted fun, although it is also very fun and interesting at least some of the time.
On Monday, the hearing 5yo tried to tell a joke to the non-twin 5yo and it was a dumpster fire that was a joy to behold. She was trying to tell the knock knock joke about banana, banana, banana, orange you glad I didn't say banana again. In ASL, to a deaf kid who didn't know what a knock knock joke was.
The joke recipient was very polite and increasingly baffled. For one thing, the joke-teller started out with the wrong fruit and then kept switching randomly between oranges and bananas. (Her grasp on the knock knock joke concept was more than a little wobbly as well.) For another thing, this joke makes no sense at all in ASL even if you tell it correctly. "But, who IS it?" the poor kid kept asking, and then it would all derail into instructions about "No, you have to say "who's THERE" and confusing arguments about whether or not this was part of the joke or instructions about how to do the joke.
We (the adults) probably could have helped out to some sort of benefit but we just laughed/cried instead.
Then I made them all play a card game about handshapes and lots of education was had by all.
I still don't have cancer, so far.
Up at a quarter to 3 am for a last trip to the beach up north with Pola and another friend.
30 delights me. 31 kind of excites me.
30 delights me. 31 kind of excites me.
37: Doesn't he have metastatic pancreatic cancer or something? Usually people with that go quickly. I'm amazed he's still doing the show.
41: He did so well! I'm new in this supervisory role just since the beginning of the pandemic, and I'm still feeling out what my people are good at.
He's terrible at blowing his own horn, though. I told him to copy the bureau chief on the email to the client explaining the success, and he forgot. I had to loop the BC in with a reply-all email with some additional praise and perspective on the hearing.
I posted an IMO interesting article about Jeopardy in the Remoralizing thread: http://www.unfogged.com/archives/comments_17399.html#2090146
44: All baby lawyers should have a supervisor like you!
Our third grade pod school is going reasonably well, eight days in, and I'm trying not to be smug as i hear about how the local district's online efforts go, starting tomorrow. There are apparently some folks in the town who are trying to ream out our (generally well-liked, if somewhat showboating) mayor for being overly conservative with school-reopening efforts. Which gets into the politics of the teachers' union, which was not where I wanted to spend my brain cycles.
38 is an awesome story. Thanks.
We have an inch of water in our living room. This happened only once in 25 years until my employer and neighbor built a giant parking lot that now drains into our yard, essentially, and now our living room has flooded 5 times in 6 years. Thanks, employer. But at this point we handle it quickly and routinely - move furniture up (It's only the one room that's low), roll up the rug leaving just the slab floor, wait for the water to go down, dry the walls with fans. If this kills my blueberry patch for a second time though, just as the new bushes got established, I am going to be either pissed or sad, probably the latter.
But nobody has covid yet.
That still sounds suboptimal. Maybe they could install proper drainage?
Wish i had some witticism to reply, but the truth is the ditch that is supposed to carry the water has been neglected for so long the oldest trees in it are 15 years old. Which seems suboptimal. I have pointed this out. They say "we'll send someone to look at it." And it ends there.
"They" being the employer/neighbor/campus.
Is somebody who doesn't work for them also affected? They can probably have a lawyer send the letter without other consequences.
My children are both going in to the physical high school tomorrow for the first time since March. I feel pretty ok about it. I think everyone around here is being reasonably safe.
We've formed an anti-racist activist group here in our leafy suburb, which was once a sundown town and in many ways still is. I think the opposition to us is organized.
In the last six months I have massively reprioritized my family and social justice work over the things they actually pay me to do.
moby, thinking three steps ahead! The other yards flood, but only our house gets water inside. I should get back in organizing mode and bug the college more or get a neighbor to threaten (except who knows what legal responsibility the college has for water drainage). Takes too much effort right now on top of the other 2020 stuff. We bought flood insurance, though.
38: I am now so curious about what, if any, knock-knock jokes you can tell in ASL. This one reminds me of the non-native English speaker who got told the Abelian grape joke ("wait, what's a grape?") and then loved it once it was explained to him and told it repeatedly to others ("What's purple and commutes? An Abelian fig! Ha ha ha ha ha!"). I can't find the original of this anecdote anywhere online now, but it's written in my heart.
On the evergreen subject of deaf people not getting what they need: my cousin's older daughter H. is a senior in high school this year, and partially deaf; she can use hearing aids for now, but the prognosis is for her hearing to be lost entirely over time. I basically have no relationship with the cousin, her daughter, or my aunt, but my mother occasionally catches me up on H.'s life in rural Wisconsin absent any support or understanding of her disability, and at those times I regret not building enough of a relationship with these family members over time that I could do much to help her now. It's a tense situation for reasons I can't really expound here, with family dynamics and my mom being The Social Worker and so on. My mom is emotionally close to H. and has loved her all her life, and has tried to be there for her; but I think H.'s need to find a modus vivendi in the world she's stuck in, and her yearning to please others and win approval, makes interventions tricky. It's sad and I worry about her facing adulthood with all these challenges: in a family and community where apparently no one bothered to learn ASL to talk to her, and where it really seems like no one takes her disability seriously. But I also feel like I'm an enhanced version of the family caricature of my mom seeing problems rather than people.
I am really obsessed with timeliness right now. All these moments needing to be caught, everywhere I look, and then all this drag around me.
I am really obsessed with timeliness right now. All these moments needing to be caught, everywhere I look, and then all this drag around me.
I'm feeling this very keenly.
Last night, however, I dreamed that the sleeve on my dress tore as I was getting ready for the argument.
I assume this was a "caught it on the door" thing but I am choosing to imagine it as more of a "RAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHH!" thing.
57: What is someone with a value on trait that is unusually far from the value others have in a sample or population?
Last night's update from the county air quality people:
Tomorrow, the high pressure ridge will start to move eastward, but the forecasts I've seen are still expecting strong inversions and stable conditions in our area. Expect a smoky night, a smoky morning and a smoky day. The main excitement will be finding how which state's smoke plumes will hit us before the big weather change arrives later in the weekend. Will it be Idaho? California? Or will we sit here, holding tight to our familiar Oregon smoke? Time will tell!
what, if any, knock-knock jokes you can tell in ASL
The Interrupting Cow cannot be bounded by language or modality. Otherwise you are correct that it is a pun-heavy genre, and that puns that work in both English and ASL are not common.
That is a rough situation, for H, and tragically common.
***
Charley, did they say HOW time would tell? Like, is it just based on drift patterns, or can they tell where the smoke came from based on some quality of the smoke?
The beauty of puns is that little joy is lost in telling them even when nobody gets them.
57 took me far too long to get. But then I laughed.
I'm starting to ramp up the election panic. I have pretty much no idea how things are coming together at the moment. I am a huge mess
I know a knock-knock joke that I think will work in ASL.
Joker: Hey, I know a great knock knock joke. Interested?
Straight-person: Yes, that sounds fun.
Joker: Ok. You start.
Straight-person: Uh, well, ok, 'Knock knock'
Joker: Who's there?
Straight-person: . . . !! [laughs]
* * *
62 last -- I believe that it's a matter of interpretation of satellite photography. Although there is a distance component, I think, to the composition of the smoke cloud.
That's what they call a granddad joke.
Heading up to Scotland tomorrow. We should be well isolated while we're there, but I'm a bit worried about the drive up. It's too far to do in one day. We originally had booked a hotel stay in Glasgow, but they're in lockdown so we're going to spend a night outside Edinburgh instead. Bit worried that either while we're in transit or while we're up there they'll put the whole nation on lockdown again. Cases nationwide have been climbing rapidly.
As long as you're endangering children, you can drive during a shutdown over there.
61: Oregon is paying you back for all the smoke you sent us a couple years ago.
Oh hey dalriata, can you drop me a line? I have a question for you. No rush.
Check in. Had an endoscopic gastro procedure a few days ago. It didn't find more stones in the bile ducts. Too bad. But also good as that's off the table. So maybe the situation doesn't develop to great pain. If it does, then maybe something will be revealed. Previous MRI showed kidney, pancreas, and liver are good. That's always reassuring. General anesthesia was interesting. Just before losing consciousness the paralytic kicked in. Long enough to not be able to breathe, recognize it, and think: that's not a problem as the intubation is next. With anesthesia using the trachea and gastro using the esophagus, my throat was sore for a day plus. Covid precautions at the hospital were fine.
Bonsaisue, Noser, Rilee, and I are all doing fine. What a weird time. Online school seems like a joke. Noser (grade 7) is in a 4 person school pod, so at least he's not fully forgetting f2f life.
And with the town still a red zone, our university has announced that since identified student cases are down they will reopen the campus and in-person classes at the beginning of October. Because this time they'll get it right for sure. Ugh.
The "Red Zone" makes me think of how went the home team is inside the opponent's twenty yard line, the giant bottles of ketchup light up and "pour" down onto the jumbotron until it is all red.
Also, I'm not watching Big 10 football this year out of principle and not at all because I think Nebraska is going to continue to suck.
NPR reporting that the Supreme Court announced her death. This is awful.
2 of my best friends here, a married couple, have just tested positive for COVID and were whisked off to a 5 star quarantine hotel. They're young and healthy and symptoms are mild so far. We were making plans to get together this weekend.
Just had my last Korean archery lesson with Pola, she leaves Wednesday. I'll see her once more on Tuesday.
Did people know that Russell Crowe can't sing even they put him in a musical?
This is really interesting, but the singing is a bit much. Maybe somebody has made a novelization?
I guess Crowe is getting better as this goes on. But I'm still not buying a Thirty Odd Foot of Grunts album.
74. Thanks, Charley. I really wanted a definitive solution. But for now I can deal with it. It isn't even a matter of getting old either. This biliary colic has been an issue for decades. Having the gallbladder out should have solved it, likewise the procedure three years ago. Anyway, while we aren't in pandemic lockdown I'm trying to get medical stuff dealt with. This week I go back to urology to further a solution to a problem that is age related: BPH. I'd really like to pee less often and more easily. Also, visiting the dentist to get a bridge put in. Couldn't do an implant. Jeez, I am falling apart. But, we have the technology!
You're not getting older, md, you're just getting wiser, or at least more interesting!...
Best of luck with getting the medical stuff done.
In about a million years late in checking in, but realised this week that Unfogged could be a more interesting distraction activity than Merge Dragons. Although I can read books again now, that ability disappeared for about the first 6 months of the year.
I'm a community nurse these days, so clearly working as normal full time, and work is just awful. I partly manage a small team, and our management have given us so much more admin work to do this year that it's just ridiculous - give us a fucking break and postpone your latest spreadsheet until 2021 ffs! Covid-wise it's not as bad as being in a hospital, but in general our caseload has increased, our workload has increased, and our colleagues keep going off sick with "I'm so rundown" type ailments such as conjunctivitis and ear infections. Had a 1:1 yesterday and my manager and I teetered on the verge of tears for half of it. And flu/flu jab season is about to start, so on top of not having enough staff to be able to get our usual visits done, we will now lose more staff to the immunisation programme. It's all very depressing.
My kids are ok - Kid A had a break from uni, got officially diagnosed with ADHD, got medicated, graduated this year and is working as a teaching assistant in a primary school (all full on F2F no PPE). Loving it atm.
Kid B graduated this year too, is doing a masters this year - ummed and aahed about moving to uni city - did, as they were hoping for F2F teaching but this week it's all gone online.
Kid C is starting his second year of his degree, again pretty much all online. Think he had covid back in March, the rest of us have been fine.
Kid D has a year left at school, is supposed to be in person but I'm not sure how successful this is gong to be. She's only been in for 3 days out of 10 so far.
C is still working for the university that has the best known vaccine trial, so work has been ridiculously crazy this year for him.