Still here. The kid has been home with us all week instead of at the pod due to illness. Just a cough and runny nose. We have no reason to suspect anything serious. If these were normal times, we probably would have kept her home Monday, maybe even Tuesday, taken half-days, and sent her to school later in the week. I might have felt a bit bad about that because she still has some symptoms, but time off isn't infinite, right? And she's as perky and energetic as ever, just a bit sniffly.
Since these aren't normal times, we didn't take any time off this week, we just juggled work and distance learning. It was only really a problem when we both had meetings and she had class at the same time. We also took her to the doctor's yesterday and got her a covid test. I held her down with the help of one nurse while a second nurse stuck the swab up her nose. I saw a little blood on the swab. At 5, she's big enough to really put up a fight when she tries, but not emotionally mature enough to listen when we tell her that this really is needed and the fighting makes it much worse. Or maybe I should be better at explaining things to her, somehow? Or maybe I should respect her wishes and not make her get the test, and explain to her the tradeoffs that would go with it? Or maybe this is just how things work these days.
But speaking of tradeoffs, we also took her to playgrounds several times this week even though we technically had a kid with possible covid. We kept to ourselves as much as possible and had masks on whenever we couldn't but I realize we shouldn't have gone out even that much. But we'd all go stir-crazy otherwise.
I had a variation on that this week, but we went with a rapid test in order to send them all back to school again.
I am really, really dreading the uptick of numbers and having to decide when to actually pull them out of school again...
Our positive rate is going down again and it looks like we'll be back below 3%. We seem to have settled into a pattern of oscillating between 2 and 3%.
New record number of cases yesterday: 932 positive on 4,800 tests. Fatalities have ticked up quite a bit this month -- it's a bit more than 1% of all cases, but since more than a third of cases are ongoing, I suppose the better stat is the ratio of deaths (278) to recoveries (16,200) which is more like 1.7%. Something over 2% of the population has tested positive so far.
It's been way worse in particular areas, and we're not exactly winning right now in this county. It's going to be cold this weekend -- below 0F in a lot of places -- so I guess we'll see what happens from that in November.
It's getting worse here. The campaign is going to make it worse. Biden is doing it socially distanced, so I think I'll be fine from that, but the Trump campaign is going to push the area to higher levels of infection than we've had ever before.
I'm going to Wisconsin for the election to be a roving poll observer and see my family. I'm kind of distressed over it. Not terribly worried about plane or airports, also not too worried about the initial three days with family; more about Election Day exposure risk and how much strict quarantine I should put my kid through afterwards (this would involve missing a lot of her outdoor enrichment classes, which would honestly be demoralizing). Plan for Tuesday night is to stay in a hotel near the airport, leave a colossal tip for housekeeping, and just hope my protective measures are enough to minimize the threat to those around me. My highly conscientious family is completely overjoyed and not sharing any of my qualms.
I'm still sad about Jesus McQueen.
A 3yo in my pod/bubble/whatever just tested positive so we are all on isolation quarantine now. But unless I get sick (unlikely; my exposure was short and pretty safe) it will make almost no difference in my day to day life, which is a little weird to think about.
Take care. We've still not had a known exposure here.
7: Good luck. I wouldn't worry about exposing housekeeping at the hotel if the windows open.
OMG. I'm zooming into a very high up mucky-muck meeting. Almost none of the in-person muckies are wearing masks, and they're all indoors and they're all old enough to be gray haired mucky-mucks! WTF!
My back hair is mostly gray now, so I call myself a silverback. But my head is still almost all brown hair.
Also, delightful weather forecast for this weekend:
Extremely risky fire weather is expected this weekend, frighteningly reminiscent of the conditions that have caused some of the worst blazes Northern California has seen in recent years to leap over hills and send people fleeing for their lives. [...] Will Pi, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service, said the North and East Bay hills could see winds of 80 to 100 mph. In the valleys and along the coast, winds could reach 30 to 50 mph, he said.
Goes on to quote Daniel Swain on Twitter etc. Blech. Our tar & gravel roof is being removed as I type this; looking at the sticky tar deposits on the debris outside, I feel more warmly towards the incoming shingles. (Gentle slope, not flat.)
Lurid, I was just reading that it's sitting on the plane while it's at the gate that's the bad thing. So, board last, and try to sit near the front so you can get out early.
Bad numbers again today. 860 positives on 8,100 tests. The county is also bad, and we're going to get new restrictions next week. Apparently, covid isn't just for young people any more, but over 20% of cases here locally are people 60 and up.
14: thanks... we'll see.
Commenting volume seems way, way down this month, even compared to earlier "where is everyone?" episodes.
Numbers here are getting steadily worse. I assume there is no plan to do anything because there is no Federal relief in sight and state budgets can't handle it, so we're in for a long winter of badness.
Honestly, as much as I like this blog, there's no way I would argue the federal government should pay to improve the number of commenters.
20: Alive and well. I got my first Covid swab today -- drive through, through the driver's window. It wasn't pleasant, but was much less bad than I'd been expecting. Today's swab is to clear me for GI scoping next week... while I'm not enthusiastic, I certainly don't want to go through prep twice. Theoretically the results should be uploaded tomorrow. Just doing my part to drive down local positivity percentages, I hope.
Our positivity is down to 3.3%... that's about half of what it was a month ago. Whew. Maybe all this cautious reopening locally isn't as crazy as it first appeared.
18: But what if, instead of a Universal Basic Income, the government paid people for their contributions to social media?
20: Or, I could click correctly... Statewide is down to 3.3%, go us. Fresno's 5.2%, which is down a percent or two, but not half. Our "health equity quartile rate" is almost 8%... which makes me think that we're not getting poor people tested. I know that we were supposed to be getting some state aid for messaging to non-English speakers; evidently the word's still slow in the community.
To each according to their needs. From each according to their memes.
Also, the murder hornets are back in the news. I suppose the cold will keep them away from here.
17: I almost want to get a test even though I'm barely out, but I think I have allergies. I still can't figure out where I am supposed to go and if I'd have to bill insurance or my employer's occupational health would cover it. I kind of want to go back to the doctor to have her look at my ear again, but I think my itchy throat is close enough to a sore throat that I shouldn't.
We need to close all the bars and restaurants and try to get them relief. it's just not safe.
I'd comment more, but it would only be on the lines of "Jesus Christ, how can houses cost so much to fix?" Perhaps the mistake was not building it of cob.
I'm zooming into a very high up mucky-muck meeting. Almost none of the in-person muckies are wearing masks
Are they at least all wearing pants?
16: A lot of people are just holding their breath, which interferes with commenting when you pass out.
Well, if anyone is reading this, tell me: should we all be calling our senators every damn day asking them to pass a relief bill, or is it hopeless? Because the numbers are really, really alarming, and I don't see how any action is possible on any level without another bailout. Am I wrong?
So: our numbers are going up, and the EU has officially removed Canada from its permissible travel list, due to rising COVID-19 cases in Canuckistan.
It's going to be a long, hard, cold, and lonely winter.
My state has been doing free drive-through mouth-swab testing, with results coming in one or two days, and it's such a relief to have that option.
29 I don't think calling them is going to have any impact before the election.
It's so clear that we should close restaurants and bars for the rest of the year, and have a fully funded federal program to make everyone whole. You can't do this on a state level, because it requires deficit spending.
Conservative assholes like to say let's open everything, and only protect the vulnerable. What's their plan for protecting the vulnerable? Nothing.
Found out that it's unlikely M/tch and I will get to work the polls on Election Day because so many people have applied. It's a good problem to have, but there goes my plan for too busy to think on Election Day. I've signed up for election protection instead, which will be useful (and safer) but include too much time for doom scrolling downtime.
This is kind of reassuring, right?
We're doing fine here. Iberian Fury is going in to the institute once a week, which seems to be working, daycare for the Infanta is great, she's doing great in general, I finally handed in my last overdue paper from last spring, and this semester's classes for the teaching degree should be less stressful (because mostly computer science problem sets, not a paper I'll procrastinate on).
We're about to make an offer on a different apartment, after the one we thought we had in the spring got away at the last minute.
16: my theory is that people are busy with campaign involvement and trying to keep friends and family safe while still doing some modified socializing which involves a lot of planning - got together with friends in a park to celebrate a birthday, everyone was masked up and brought chairs and and tables and sanitary this that and the other and it was a lot of work.
Anyway at all times my m.o. is to lurk. Am leaving in a day to go into the wild, to a cabin where there is no internet and no cell service unless you go up a ridge and the wind is in the right quarter; there is very little covid19 where I live or where I'm going and I really feel for people - like Dr. H-B - who live in red spaces and have kids. My nephew is in Coeur d'Alene, has two little munchkins, and it is a hotbed of pestilence. His mother's anxiety is off the charts.
I'm pretty much always more tired than I would have been on the same amount of sleep in the before times. Ignoring or working around stress leaves me exhausted in a way that is noticable but distinct from other types of exhaustion. I can't remember if it started with Covid or later with the more open threats to democracy. But I think the latter.
It's like racing to rescue hobbits when an evil wizard is focused on capturing them.
39: That exact phenomenon is the thing that'll be alleviated if/when Trump is out of office. We're in a low point, having suffered the barrage of horribleness for so long and the dread of the election and lame duck period. But even if Biden pursues moderate bullshit, I think that exact piece of despair (that your own government is doing awful things and reveling in them and hates you and wants you to know and will not change) will be gone. That change alone will be worth quite a bit of wellbeing.
That said, I still expect everyone to fall apart next year, even if there's change for the better. Like getting the flu after finals or on coming back from traveling. The relaxation from all the compartmentalizing and being in non-stop fight-or-flight will mean a period where it all feels worse before getting better. That'll be February.
Then there'll be a slow climb out, as better government helps contain COVID and a vaccine starts to happen and the days get longer and people slowly lose their dread of the daily news and maybe it seems reasonable to send kids to school.
Rest of Oct: dread, despair, afraid to hope
Nov: best outcome: exultation, then dread of Trump fuckery; bad outcome: confusion, then hyperalert and news consumption and outrage and dread
Dec: same
Jan: same, then probably huge relief and celebration
Feb: very fragile emotional states, dawning realization of how bad it all was, physical illness (not COVID, necessarily. Just collapse.)
March and April: recovery, return to physical wellness, days get longer
May: start to trust stability and feel freer
Well, after 7+ months of very serious caution, I pretty much blew it last night -- had to take a friend to the ER with cardiac issues and ended up sitting with her there for seven hours.
Everyone was masked, they did their best to maintain social distancing, the single ER room she was in for most of the time had updated ventilation...but still. I already had to cancel this weekend's trip to see my toddler nephew (outdoors, in a park, with masks, 6' away) because it would have required riding in a car with my senior-citizen father.
So now I'm locked down in extreme isolation the next 10-14 days until I can be sure I didn't pick up any hospital-acquired infections. And hoping my friend is OK. (She was negative for all heart attack and stroke items, so it may have been severe stress or something else. She's going to see her cardiologist to get more tests.)
I'm hoping that if I'm symptom-free for the 9 days, my sister will let me get a rapid test so I can come over and cook with my niece on Election Day as planned. I really need to be able to stress-bake.
In happier news, I got my dognephew some Puggle Nose Butter on Etsy. I DON'T CARE that I paid $11 for a dog salve. It's adorable and will be a delightful gift.
Found out that it's unlikely M/tch and I will get to work the polls on Election Day because so many people have applied. It's a good problem to have,
But it's a partially manufactured problem because we've made it illegal to work the polls outside of the county that you're registered in.
42: We should dig out where I made you give me monthly predictions back in March and see how well it held up. (I remember that I found it immensely reassuring even if we've since deviated from the plan.)
It didn't. The first three months happened in the right order, but took about a day each. I certainly did not predict it would go on like this.
I think the timeline of 42 is a little off, because I think hitting the year anniversary of lockdowns is going to be a major bummer, and everyone will have severe senioritis during the couple months when senior citizens and first responders are getting the vaccine but the rest of us are twiddling our thumbs. So I think March/April/May will seem grueling on the Covid fatigue front.
But when there's a solid plan for a nationwide vaccine, due to having a grown up in chief, and the vast majority of us actually get vaccinated, I think then the skies will actually seem a little clearer and we will feel like we can breathe a bit easier.
There's going to be a lot of funerals this winter, and spring will have a lot of memorial services that were delayed because it wasn't safe to hold a big funeral.
I think the real relief will be the cessation of the wave of garbage pushed out of the White House. People keep underestimating what lifting that burden will feel like. Even without good things happening, ceasing a bad thing will help quite a bit.
44: Speaking of counties, not sure if you saw this in the other thread, heebie.
Per the recent thread from heebie re: Texas and local early voting:
From Dave Wasserman who does alot of vote tracking:
Interesting: Hays County, TX just south of Austin is poised to be the first in the U.S. to surpass its 2016 total votes cast. So far, 65,819 voters have cast ballots, vs. 72,164 in all of '16.
It's also the likeliest county in TX to flip from Trump '16 to Biden '20.
FWIW, this is a function of population growth as much as increased interest. Hays's population has boomed more than 50% in the past decade - and most new voters aren't Republicans.
I think Megan's right about the letdown. We'll need to steel ourselves to hold Congress in the midterms, despite lots of people going around saying the Biden hasn't done enough to end late stage capitalism (and to punish Bill Barr and Ivanka Trump).
That's if Biden wins. If Trump wins -- and he totally still can -- that it'll be awful as far as the eye can see.
38 Yeah CdA is totally fucked up. On our side of the line, Whitefish made the LA Times today, but really only because there's some degree of pushback by sane people. https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2020-10-24/whitefish-montana-coronavirus-outbreak I lived there in the late 70s early 80s, and it was a terrific place to be. (Including the Halloween thing, which was just getting going in those years.) The Flathead was always what we now call redder -- Christians in the Valley, honest-to-God toothless hillbillies in the Canyon -- but it's gotten unrecognizably bad since the 90s. Mostly it's migration of the wrong sorts of people, in my opinion. People for whom the deaths of a dozen people in an old folks home is someone else's problem.
Same thing in North Idaho, I'm sure. (The county health dept where CdA is just took a similarly bad vote.)
42, 48: while I realise you aren't specifically guessing about the time until a vaccine exists, those comments made me curious, so I Googled a bit. It's not encouraging. This says a 50 percent chance of a vaccine existing by April 2021. For worldwide distribution, the time is measured in years.
I want to distinguish "letdown" from disappointment. Even if we aren't disappointed by a new administration, I think the relaxation itself (of being braced against Trump horribleness) will bring up a lot of suppressed badness from these past four years. Also consider that the news has been outrage after outrage. That is a ton of stimulation. If the news becomes routine again, or even good, it is going to feel boring. So I expect a period of feeling pretty crappy, even if the administration is doing fine.
42, 48: while I realise you aren't specifically guessing about the time until a vaccine exists, those comments made me curious, so I Googled a bit. It's not encouraging. This says a 50 percent chance of a vaccine existing by April 2021. For worldwide distribution, the time is measured in years.
Yes, I understood you to be talking about the former. I think it'll be aggravated somewhat by the latter.
So, we got 8-10 inches of snow last night. Turns out the new battery powered snowblower the wife just bought -- our first, a recognition that we are actually getting old -- can't handle that much, especially with the high water content. The silver lining is thinking about all those people who just moved here from LA, way overpaying for houses sight unseen. It's a La Nina year folks, this is just the beginning!
Anyone here near the Colorado fires? Last update I saw was the fire in Rocky Mountain National Park was two miles west of our condo with 50 mph gusts blowing right at us. We evacuated Thursday.
I would feel so much better if there were halfway decent outpatient treatments. So that one you have a vaccine, if you still get it there's something like Tamiflu or Relenza that keeps you from winding up in the hospital.
51: I've been preening about that all day! One of us sent me that.
58: Yes. Best wishes for your place and stay safe.
The fire seems to have stalled out which I find hard to believe with the winds they are getting. It was burning almost 9000 acres (about 13 square miles) an hour overnight Wednesday. Even if it doesn't burn, the power is off and the temperature is supposed to be close zero the next two nights so I suppose the pipes will freeze then break and flood the place.
That's a mess. Hope the insulation holds.
Well, the cold should really mess with the fire. Can you sneak back in and turn the water off?
Every road is shut down and I am a thousand miles away in Oregon tonight.
Out West: wow! Please stay safe.
Wow, hoping for the best for you, Out West. Is Colorado your primary home? All those HOA dues should really pay for one vigilante water-shutoff escapade inside an evacuation zone for the whole development, IMO.
Extreme reactions to fire risk are in progress here: parks closing, extra strike teams, tons of planned power outages, etc. I will probably pack a suitcase and leave the car in the driveway tomorrow night JUST IN CASE, for umbrella/rain reasons. Our new roof was just completed this afternoon.
Tell me reassuring things about Florida.
69: a sinkhole opened up across the street from my good friend's house, in the middle of a neighborhood in the middle of Gainesville.
OT: It turns out that when baking a cake, greasing and flouring the baking pans is not the place to go into half-assing.
I remember walking to the bottom of the Devil's Millhopper. Honestly, better than Epcot.
70: Is it going to vote? Which way do they lean?
69.last: Young folks turning out in droves?
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/ElDwGNMXEAAax4k.jpg
74 is very encouraging news indeed.
Stay safe Out West, best wishes on your home.
52: Coeur d'Alene is strange, pockets of blue (my nephew and his wife and their friends) in a sea of red, a man named Rambo shooting up the 4th of July celebration last year - it's a shame, because the country out your way has so much natural beauty.
Whitefish sounds interesting - for certain values of.
64: Had a flooding disaster in ski cabin from that very situation: power went off, temps dropped below freezing, pipes froze, burst, came the thaw before anyone could get out there to shut off the water, and the whole place flooded. For DAYS. One of the reasons I am going out there to make sure water is shut off at the street and that the fireplace flue is closed.
Where in Oregon are you? Our cabin is in Camp Sherman.
Having had an honest to goodness cold, the sort that empties a box of kleenex in a day, last week, I now have a nagging sore throat, very mild and in normal times one would totally ignore it. If it were possible to get a test I would do so but it isn't. See earlier comments on the government.
But I took my sister to visit our mother yesterday and am feeling guilty stressed and worried even more than usual. We were masked, handwashed, distanced, but still.
The worst of it is that mother quite clearly wants to die, and says so. No one can hug her or even touch her in the pandemic; she can't really see; her memory is shot to hell; she spends most of her time with her eyes shut, even with us, to blot out the world; the staff, who are kind and conscientious, none the less are also overworked and feed her without sympathy.
If she does die. when she does die, I will of course be miserable but will also know it was what she by now wants most.
I still don't want her to have caught the virus from us, and I really don't want to introduce it to a home full of vulnerable people.
Oh Charles, I'm so sorry. What an awful spot for you and your mother to be in.
78 is so sad. I'm sorry, Charles.
I'm sorry Charles. This is an very bad time for something that's already difficult.
77 Our place in Oregon is in the northeast part of the state. We just bought the condo on the west side of Estes Park two years ago because M always wanted to live there with a view of the mountains and now that M is retired and I am sort of, kind of, supposed to be retiring the plan was to sell the Oregon place.
I just got a notice this morning that due to the lull in the fire due to low temperatures, a change in wind direction, and snow, we are allowed to run in today and winterize then leave immediately. A lot of good that is going to do me. The fire might start up again later in the week when the temperature rises and the wind picks up again.
More than 500 new cases here today. It's going to be a long winter.
Have you tried making meatballs about it? That's what I'm doing.
We added 746 case on 1,577 tests. Are we winning yet?
I made a chocolate cake yesterday to feel better. It only kind of worked. The meatballs did the trick.
OT: Make no little plans. That's no way to find a fossilized dinosaur asshole.
That's no way to find a fossilized dinosaur asshole.
Is that any way to speak of Mitch McConnell?
(Well, yeah, of course it is...).
87: it's fairly unconventional to add meatballs to chocolate cake, but 2020 has been such a bastard I think you were right to try it.
Mother very daffy and depressed today by report. But the official history of GCHQ has just come out, which also covers her period at Bletchley Park, and -- prompted by a historian friend -- I checked the index.
She is there listed as one of the four women "ranking British female siginters of the war" and, it says "[her] superiors supported her when a male codebreaker grasped at credit for her success against Floradora, the leading German diplomatic system and the acme of Berkeley Street's success". [even fairly deep into her dementia, she would still spit feathers at the mention of that man's name.]
This may read like an obnoxious humblebrag but I just wanted to say that she really did once have a brain and -- oddly -- that's something to cling onto in the wreckage.
"My name is in the official history of people who made important contributions in beating the Nazis" is more than most have.
86: Oh no, that's such a bad ratio -- it sounds like the testing is a week behind the people it needs to test.
92: That is great; I hope that you're able to brag to her and that she's warmly reminded.
96.1 Today it's 622 cases on 10,718 tests. Our state dashboard has a bunch of cool bits of info (like the optional breakdowns in the lower right) but somehow a 7 day moving average of test positivity isn't one of them.
92: Aw, that's terrific. Hopefully she'll have another lucid enough day to hear about it.
She never mentioned or even hinted at any of this when we were growing up; not really subsequently, either. Only when the historian appeared, who is writing a biography of the extraordinary lesbian professor of German who recruited her, did any of the detail emerge. But my cousins knew a bit more about it, from transmitted family jealousies.
But kind words here much appreciated. Thank you
Oh, wow, this is news to you (or was in the recent past), not old familiar family stories? What an amazing thing to find out about your mother as an adult.
Even if she could have done it as a child, there wasn't a war yet.
It's a great story. She must be one of the last of her gang.
That's an amazing story! So cool.
I enjoyed hearing this podcast interview (scroll to Episode 222:https://guiltyfeminist.com/episodes/) with Pat and Jean Owtram. They are in their 90s now, but did all kinds of fascinating codebreaking and language translation work during WWII. (Book: https://www.lancashirelife.co.uk/people/lancashire-codebreaking-sisters-1-6621214)
I don't know why I'm not able to do links properly on this browser...grrrr.
Charles, I'd love to hear the full story sometime, and I'm so sorry about the care home situation.
But I'm mostly dropping in to tell all you LA people to stay safe.
This may read like an obnoxious humblebrag
Not at all! That is just an amazing thing to learn about your mother.
You're allowed to brag if one your parents helped beat Hitler.
I got to stop looking at Twitter even though it's where I learned the dinosaur-butthole thing.
It's not our imaginations: In the past 20 years, the Republicans truly have moved away from democratic norms shared by center-right parties in other industrialized countries, and toward autocracy. So says what looks like a reasonably good (I haven't read it) study from Sweden.
Also, per lk's link in 105, I'm now worrying about extended family in Yorba Linda. Yikes.
People live in Yorba Linda? I wish them safety from fires and ghost Nixon.
109: I thought that was the general consensus since Regan, basically?
Reagan was popular and they were trying to win election by attracting more voters. Unless you mean Ron Regan. Fuck him.
114: yes, typo. I mean that GOP in Reagan years bore the seeds of GOP today.
114: Don Regan was pretty bad.
James Watt was the one I remember as being the real shit.
92.2 is delightful.
Early voting statistics possible rabbit hole:
https://electproject.github.io/Early-Vote-2020G/index.html
112: Depends on what you're measuring. Certainly many things about the Republicans went downhill starting with Reagan -- and some others even earlier, with Nixon. But if I'm understanding this Swedish study properly, they're talking about things like overtly calling for violence against political opponents, demonizing members of the press, etc.
Su[reme Court in Wisconsin case is absurd and scary. Kavanaugh/Gorsuch concurrence (I think) is beyond scary. Kavanaugh disparages votes counted after Election Day.
Yes. Pennsylvania is going to lose its postmark rule because the Constitution says you can only contravene federalism to make things shittier.
Yeah, can we get a new thread on the SCOTUS situation?
Good luck to your family, Witt!
I saw earlier tonight that Pence changed his plans at the last minute and wouldn't be attending the vote. I started trying to figure out if this would mean anything for the vote. I felt optimistic for a few minutes. I should have known betteer.
119 what I'm thinking of is the beginning of a focus on disenfranchisement , redistricting, focusing on courts and committees. I guess that's when I thing the GOP decided metagaming was their best way forward. The things you mention I thing they would have done then if they felt they could get away with it ...
Ideologically, these Republicans are 1850s Democrats. They believe the most fundamental principle of America is their power may never be reduced below what they deem necessary to protect their rights, including the right to hold power over lesser Americans.
Yes. It's Rep. Brooks cheap-shooting and beating Sen. Sumner over the head with a cane for the crime of making a correct point that his cousin couldn't argue against.
107: Thank you. But I think that one of the reasons for her reticence was the feeling that so many more people paid a higher price for helping less. There was not much courage required to work at Bletchley, though the work was extremely gruelling.
One of her brothers, though, fought all through the Battle of Britain, and then in Malta and North Africa until he had a breakdown, and was flown home. The plane crashed on a beach in Wales and he broke his several vertebrae, but survived and flourished. The other brother worked as a trainee doctor through the blitz (no one bombed Milton Keynes, only partly because it didn't then exist) and then crossed the channel three times on D Day to treat the wounded on the beaches and see them home. He didn't tell me that until he was nearly dying, earlier this century. And there were all the untold unremembered merchant seamen who ran convoys across the North Atlantic in unarmed ships ... If you haven't got food and fuel it really doesn't matter how many codes are broken and by whom.
Wars are won by Sam Gamgee quite as much as by Aragorn.
||
Anyone have the link to Minivet's blog or specifically his recommendations for the California elections? I don't have the energy to exercise independent political judgement.
|>
Had a lovely farewell dinner for a good friend and cow-orker along with her husband and their daughter and another friend/cow-orker. She was also badly done by this place. Probably one of the most knowledgeable and talented people I know. All the best people are leaving.
On the plus side, it's going to be a lot of fun for archeologists in about a thousand years.
131: Did you hear anything about the job in Canada?
133 Not a peep. They said I would be informed one way or another. I've considered sending an email but an academic friend counseled that these things can take quite some time, e.g., maybe they offered it to someone else after deliberating for a month, that person says I need two weeks to think about it then turns them down....OTOH maybe they just forgot to tell me.
Further to 134 what would someone advise? It's been two months.
136: I don't know about contacting them or not, but definitely keep applying for anything that looks good.
136: I am in the same boat; the job that I thought was in the bag (based on the last interviewer saying "we'll put a job description together and send you an offer") turns out not to be quite so much in the bag as I thought. So six interviews and ten weeks later they still haven't decided. There is an alternative which would be more fun, and would be good on the CV, but is a) temporary b) not up north and c) potentially a bit risky; if I don't hear back on the first one today, I think I'll take it.
About to get a COVID test, because I had some congestion. On my way here, I noticed a headache. And now I'm wondering if Tim's diarrhea was COVID.
139 Your alternative sounds a lot like this and I would advise against it as fun as it might be.
My wife was talking to a nurse who was of the opinion that diarrhea was the overlooked early sign of Covid.
