Still alive! I got my haircut this week. The salon was taking lots of precautions -- only a few people in the space at a time, everyone wears masks, taking temperatures, etc.
Now I need to decide if I should go to an old friend's art exhibit opening tonight.
Also still alive. About to nope out on doing my own taxes. I think Form 5471 Schedule J has defeated me.
2: Victory! Still undefeated!
Controlled foreign corporations are people too!
And if you choose to convert them into disregarded entities, they actually subsume you. People are corporations, too.
Still alive. Nobody has figured out that I'm a total imposter, faking my way through life yet, so that's good.
Still alive and well, but Surly Teen's birthday and the driversLlicense testing remains closed. Not ridiculous for a job that requires getting in and out of other people's cars all day. Now there're saying maybe June 29, but there will be more than a 3 month backlog so who knows when she gets in.
My mother, in assisted living in New Jersey's hardest-hit county Jersey, tested negative. the extreme quarantine there worked -- 14 cases early on, including 7 deaths, but they only found 2 cases (out of 80 or so residents) in the recent round of testing everyone. They are allowing people to eat in the dining hall and walk around a little bit again. The next dilemma: She has some symptoms of glaucoma, and the nurse there recommends seeing a specialist, but this can't be done by Telehealth and if she leaves the grounds to go to a doctor she goes back to 14 days o isolation. Putting it off for a few weeks for now.
This morning on our walk around the marina I asked Pola if she'd like to come over to my place and look at my etchings watch a movie tomorrow and she said yes. I've cleaned up my apartment in anticipation and even had my housekeeper over to give her money to tide her over for the week, though this time I had her do the floors while I kept my distance rather than just hand her cash at the door.
It's the height of the summer hear, close to 5 pm and around 111 F out.
And the beard is now a pornstache. The wild ass Dutch burger goatee, biker horseshoe and Wild West/Mexican styles all looked bad ass on me but the mustache far from looking like Tom Selleck makes me look at best like Mr. Kotter and, at worst, the vice principal of a high school who's got a ton of child porn on his computer. It comes off tonight.
7.last: None of us have seen mom in except through a window since March, but she's allowed to go with my sister to her medical appointment for a non-essential test. I don't know if that's a change or not.
8.last hear s/b here. Stupid brain.
8: Let me be the first to suggest "Biodome".
6: I've proven who I am so many times
The magnetic strip's worn thin
And each time I was someone else
And every one was taken in
1: Me too. It's amazing what a difference a small thing like a haircut can make. It feels like a significant step back towards normal.
I have seen my mother in the flesh, from a 2 metre distance, and she seems pretty OK.
Also, an extremely cute bear has been spotted in the arse end of nowhere, Sweden, Europe.
I haven't seen anyone at all except some doctors and nurses and one visit with my friend and her kid since the beginning of March.
My sister is doing ok, as far as it goes. She has an infected bedsore for which the treatment is very painful, but my niece came down from Wisconsin to visit this past weekend, so that was good.
Things are pretty much back to normal on my block from what I can see. Work says some people might be coming back in a phased transition period from July to September, but it is unlikely that I personally will have to go back that soon.
How about that crazy stock market?
Remember how I was happy about Mara finishing physical therapy so we wouldn't have to be at the hospital every week? Yeah, we were back for urgent care Tuesday night because of pain in her side. They decided it might be GI stuff, either new or related to her known gastroparesis related to her genetic muscle problems. Except the recommended Miralax flush is doing what it's supposed to but her pain is both worsening and staying in the same place. So now we've also been to the primary care doctor and are now about to head to a different hospital for an ultrasound to look for ovarian cysts. If that doesn't get us answers, we got back to yet another location in two weeks for a PET scan, which would be the first time anyone in the family has needed one of those. Other than that, though, we're healthy and avoiding obvious sources of infection. Nia turns 14 tomorrow and is very sad about not being able to see friends, so we've sort of overdone it on gifts to compensate.
It didn't seem worth bitching about this in the world-historical villainy thread, but: I'm aware that my explanations to my daughter of why she can't see her two best friends in person for the foreseeable future sound pretty hollow. Immediate answer is that now that we have this isolation pod, all additional contacts have to be agreed to by the whole pod, and no one wants the headache of adding arbitrary fourth and fifth people when having a pod at all is a headache. Even if we were game, the friends' families probably aren't (in one case the mom jokingly said "We'll be the last family in California to come out of quarantine"). So the question is, why are we in this endless clampdown when young adults in Texas are going to nightclubs? And the shitty answer is: the more selfish other people are, the longer our altruism (effectively; we do benefit slightly by probably not getting sick, but whatever) will have to persist.
I feel like I'm in those lane-merging scenarios on the freeway, where people zoom along in the disappearing lane as long as possible, then signal to cut in front of all the cars that politely vacated the lane and packed themselves into the merged lane. Every time, I merge early and wait, and every time I think: there is no fucking reason for me to do this. There's no incentive for anyone to do this. The line-cutters never get blocked. Does sorting into cheaters and rule-followers actually optimize traffic flow? Maybe it does!
While I agree with your completely about quarantine, last-minute zipper-merging is the best way of handling the driving situation you describe. If everyone merges early, you've just created a much longer bottleneck and slowed things down.
Well, I don't drive home through the Caldecott Tunnel like a barbarian. The very idea.
Actually I think I see the source of my confusion. On my freeway commute home from points south, two exit lanes are briefly added to the freeway, then disappear again when traffic exits. Some cars, naturally, zoom around the right-lane traffic in these exit lanes, particularly the longer one, then merge back in before the exit and continue driving north. But this does nothing to relieve the bottleneck: they're just pulling out of the line, running forward, and slowing everyone down to pull back in. It's purely zero sum. The lane-loss scenario plays a bit differently, right? (My exit directly follows the Asshole Re-Merger Exit, so I'm always stuck in the right lane getting blocked by these people; on the other hand, I don't want them riding my rear bumper the whole time either, so I suppose it's okay.)
Oh, yeah, people exploiting exit lanes to get ahead are the worst.
Still here, still slowly negotiating for my kid to maybe have an in-person playdate buddy in our quasi-bubble (quoting one of the adults in the discussion, "I feel like I'm 19 and getting up the courage to say 'we should get tested and think about no protection'"). Despairing of said kid cooperating with anything videochat that isn't purely play with one or two other kids - so nothing remotely academic - because all he wants to do is be totally goofy and screenshot himself into his own background and try pasting each and every emoji into the chat boxes. Even social chats with grandparents fail that way.
So it turns out that my father-in-law (recap: his wife - my wife's stepmother - died about a month into the lockdown) had COVID but was completely asymptomatic, which is kind of amazing given that he's 80 years old, asthmatic, and has some kind of weird form of anemia that the doctors haven't figured out yet.
Anyway, that's a huge relief for us - he was probably the one family member we've been most worried about.
We're still doing fine. We're taking care of a dog for what was initially supposed to be a few days but is now apparently going to be six weeks at least. Luckily it's a very easy, well-behaved dog.
The weather has been nice so I've been able to do some sanding, but it'll still be at least another week or so before it's done.
So Tatsu flew back from Charn this afternoon and we got to see how quarantine is supposed to work here.
The theory is that he self-isolates for 14 days after his return. There were no checks or questions about where he would stay and if anyone turns up physically to do so in the next fortnight I will be astonished. He was asked with whom he would be staying and said Ume. He did not mention me. No one is going to check this. The police have said it is a job for Public Health England, and PHE is, one is led to understand, quite busy with other things at the moment.
Leaving the airport, he climbs into a small car with his mother. Neither is masked and they sit in close proximity for two hours. Since he is a 19-year-old boy he may well not have embraced her, but weaker minded people may well have done.
There is no official guidance about her or other members of the household self-isolating now he's here. To be exact, the guidance is this:
The people you're staying with do not need to stay at home, unless they travelled with you.
The whole thing would be completely fucking farcical were it not for one small fact : there is hardly anywhere in the world from which he could travel tothe UK without raising hos own risk of catching the disease.
15: Glad to hear that, NW. Were you inside the home or looking in through a window?
It has a small enclosed garden backing onto the staff car park and opening into the downstairs lounge. So she was wheeled into the garden and I sat at the table; the second time was cold and miserable, so we talked through the open door.
18. You're supposed to zipper-merge (i.e., take turns). This is alleged to happen in some imaginary states, but in real life everyone merges early except assholes and pedants ("Damn it, it's more efficient if everyone does it that way!!")
Here in MA, people use the breakdown lane to get around traffic jams. To be fair, driving in the breakdown lane was legal on some highways here until recently.
28.last: I think the risk is the airplane/port, not the starting or stopping place.
The real risk is the person sitting in 12A.
The real contagion is the friends we make along the way.
I'm spending a lot more time today than I had expected arguing about traffic in my head.
31.last- isn't it still legal on 3 south below Braintree and on 93 south north of Woburn?
I just read a short story from the point of view of a white woman who thinks of herself as being not racist, but gets caught on video being racist, and it goes viral, and jesus that is such an uncomfortable read. The only way to distance myself from the narrator is to think defensive thoughts about how I'm not like that, but thinking defensive thoughts is precisely what the narrator would do, and so you just have to lay open and sit with a version (of myself) who is unpleasant and racist in microaggression ways.
Oh, I think I read that a while back, and did want to quibble with it. The racist thing she did was to ask a table of black people in a bar to leave the room where a private party was going on, because she knew they weren't guests, except she was wrong because the party had only rented the room for a limited time and it was over?
Still here, still pretty quiet. I'm looking forward to movies & speakerphone w/ my wife's friend -- it's become a good lockdown tradition. I've been mostly showing up and watching, but threw out some ideas for movies tonight when the principles stalled.
My wife's getting pretty tired of the expanding backsliders on masks; she continues to pretend that it's an "oops, you forgot", which generally works. Yesterday, though, she had her first group just turn around and leave when she reminded a group of 3 that the city ordinance requires masks within businesses.
In two weeks the next big release for the Magic card game comes out; we're not hosting events (usually a highlight for the players, who show up excited to try out the brand new stuff on day 1), but of course other stores in town are. How they'll play while maintaining 6' clear and trying to read each other's cards across the table... yeah, they're just going to skirt the rules like always.
It's probably a rough time for women who are actually named "Karen".
39: Exactly. Enough ambiguous details that you're invited to try to see it as not racist, and then you have to check that impulse in yourself, because it's never a good idea to start arguing that something the 40ish privileged lady did isn't racist.
18 et seq: my father and I used to debate this issue every single day in the traffic outside the Caldecott Tunnel. It ends up coming down to the nature of authority.
If it's the one I'm thinking of, it makes a narrative move that I think is kind of bullshit to make the reader more uncomfortable. That is, it's a first person narration, so you know what's in the narrator's mind. And in the narrator's mind, which is presumably depicted accurately, she was correct that the table of people in the bar weren't guests at the private party, and she was honestly mistaken about whether the time the room was rented for was over. If she'd been right, and polite about it, she wouldn't have been in the wrong at all.
So the uncomfortable bit is that she's getting dragged virally all over the internet when she has genuinely only made a mistake about the length of the rental of a private room, rather than having racist intentions. This is an excuse that sounds like bullshit, so you know you're not supposed to sympathize with her -- if you heard it in real life you'd think she was lying. But you're reading the story from inside her head, so you know she's not lying and you do sympathize, but the setup of the story makes you know you're not supposed to, so you're uncomfortable.
The whole thing seemed like an artificial setup to me. In the real world, when people do racist stuff, if you could look inside their minds it would generally not be due to a completely innocent misunderstanding. Bringing the innocent misunderstanding that you know is true from the structure of the story into play manipulates the reader into feeling complicit.
42: That crossed with yours, but IIRC, there really isn't any ambiguity about the core incident, because you have access to her interior monologue about it. She's also written as kind of trying too hard awkwardly about interacting with black people in general, it would be believable for her to have done something racist, but in that incident she didn't.
So the story sets you up to know with certainty that she didn't do the wrong thing she's being blamed for, and then feel guilty for knowing it because it seems like making excuses.
I accept the correctness of a zip merge, despite being naturally a lineupper. It's hard.
A similar but different case that I dunno if we'd agree on: a frequent situation on the Pennsylvania Turnpike, a mostly two-lanes-per-direction highway with frequent curves and hills, is a line of cars trying to pass a slower truck. (You might say the correct choice is not passing the truck at all, but this will surely mean an extended period of slow, low-visibility driving surrounded by faster traffic.) At some point, somebody in this line of cars had to go quite slowly, so most of the cars are going faster than the truck but barely. Sometimes they may for a little while only be matching speed with the truck: hills and curves can rapidly change the situation.
Anyway, somebody in a fast car comes up and, upon seeing this situation, gets into the right/slow lane and maintains speed, hoping to line cut. In some cases they may accelerate. The relative speed differences are usually small, but are fast enough to make a dicey situation worse.
I think this lacks one of the important qualities of a zip merge: a proper zip merge is done at low speed, with ample care. That's impossible here. If you're cutting in front of a half dozen drivers in what might be a white knuckle situation, you're asking for an accident and might force them to slam on their breaks. This is the one case where I drop into the "vigilante" behavior: I clamp up any space and hope they realize that this genuinely is a situation where everyone is doing their best and need time to focus, and that they need to decelerate and get at the end of the line.
I took it to be that after they corrected her on her honest mistake, she got huffy and defensive and dug the hole a little deeper with intonations/mannerisms. But it's definitely supposed to make you think she's operating out of implicit bias, and no conscious malice.
I think the solution there is to let the bad driver get away with it. That is, the line of cars shouldn't be blocking the left lane. One or two cars should get over, pass the truck, and then get back over to the right, then the next car or two passes, and so on. This will mean that someone driving fast in the left lane gets to go without waiting, but that doesn't do much harm overall, and everyone's safer than if you tried to enforce good behavior.
47: Even implicit bias, as an explanation for the incident, seems like an overstatement. As I recall the story, there's no reason from inside her head to think she asked them to leave because they were black -- she asked them to leave because she accurately knew they weren't guests and mistakenly believed the room was still private.
That's true. Mostly she's using all sorts of race-based reasoning - "Are you guests of the one black couple at the party?" and yet she's so uncomfortable with race that the whole thing is incredibly cringey.
48:That doesn't prevent this. Let's say you do this, and decide not to pass until you get a chance. So you wait behind the truck, and only pass when traffic is completely clear--sometimes this is minutes--and then you get over. Well, dang, now you're not going very quickly, because you're accelerating from the speed the truck was going, and you're on a hill or whatever. Somebody comes up fast behind you in the left lane, and they have to slow down for you. Now you've just made a new chain of slow vehicles, moving, on average, at the speed of the slowest vehicle.
And to be clear--on average, the line of cars is not (in my opinion) blocking the left lane. On average (but not necessarily all cars at all moments), they're moving faster than the truck. That's just passing. Sometimes passing takes a while. They're probably even speeding. Speeders need to accept that in a highway with N lanes, you can only have N-1 simultaneous passes and that's going to bound the maximum speed, even if everyone is sorting appropriately.
The thing that seemed so off, there, is that in the real world someone telling a table full of black people to leave their table a bar would be very unlikely to be doing it out of an innocent mistake -- if that kind of thing happened for real, everyone would be completely justified in assuming it was caused by racism. So the story makes you swallow a massive implausibility that's definitely true within the story, and then makes you uncomfortable for believing it.
Also: holy shit. So, on Wednesday our cumulative 3 month total of cases was around 490. Yesterday we had a staggering 82 cases. Today they had 99 more! So our new total is around 670, and over 1/4 of that in two days.
It's almost like the nightclubs are a bad idea.
It's not zip merge once people ahead of you have starting lining up on the lane that will remain. You might wish that zip merge was an option, but it isn't. Now you just have to decide whether to be the asshole.
The racism thing, as described here, sounds like an Elaine, or maybe Jerry, Seinfeld plotline.
54: I guess if you're willing to slow down to just barely over the speed of the people lined up, and do it gradually enough to get people behind you to also slow down, you could at least make it a space-efficient merge. And you've equalized the speed of the lanes, which is what's most important, so if they speed up at the same rate, it'll turn into a proper zip merge.
53: Oof. It looks like the sunbelt as a whole is starting to get hammered, although Texas doesn't seem to be as bad as others. (PA given as a benchmark of a Northeastern state that got pretty hard, but not nearly NY hard, which makes the graphs unreadable.)
55.1 is actually a good way of putting it.
47/48
In this case, I really hate to leave those people over. That person could tell long before they got there that everyone was in line just trying to pass the truck. Wait your turn like everyone else.
The turnpike is what brings you out of lurking?
Appeantly. I just totally resonated with the turnpike truck scenario.
I'm not sure I've driven every single way to get across the hills from Orinda or Moraga without going through the tunnel, but I'm not sure I haven't either.
For a couple of quarters, I was driving the plastic MGTD kit car my brother had made most every day from my folks' house in Lafayette to Cal, and I really did not like the way that light little thing handled in the tunnels.
We've all been there. I just tell myself that regardless of what happens, I'm much more likely to die on the Schuylkill Expressway than some stupid hill before Breezewood.
Up again at 3 am for my walk with Pola. JFC it's already 93F out.
I made my son go for a run with me. He's much faster, because I'm well past the age when Danny Glover said that he was getting too old for this shit, but he doesn't like exercise so I'll catch up and have to tell him to keep moving. Today I almost yelled at an adult stranger for slacking on his run.
In conclusion, lots of people have blue shorts with three white stripes on the side and I have bad vision.
Is there any equivalent of the zipper merge when three lanes drop to one? I had a long summer's commutes full of that in Yolo County and I never came up with a system that didn't require even more knowledge and planning on the part of the drivers than a zipper does. Also, I think if you went three lanes to two and then two to one in two zippers you'd need a really long time between them not to have a massive speed differential between lanes.
No one zipper merges here. Half the time when I'm driving here I find myself yelling "zipper! zipper! zipper! motherfucker!" the other half I'm yelling the c-word because I hang out with a lot of Brits.
I forget which one it is, but there is an eastbound lane you can get in on the Bay Bridge that puts you through the Caldecott tunnel without changing lanes the whole way. Or at least there was such a lane in the 70s and 80s, things may have changed.
And back again, 4.6 miles. My fucking check engine light came on again on the way there and I just got it back from the mechanic on Thursday.
Sometimes they forget to hit a reset thing when the work on the car.
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"I was quite surprised at how many of these animals were left-handed, considering how shrunken and useless their forepaws are,"|>
Swapping left for right, the long overtaking lines for trucks lorries on two lane roads over hills is exactly how the M11 south of Cambridge works and once the queue has formed in the overtaking lane, zipping is completely impossible. Everything slows to the speed of the second-slowest vehicle on the road, which is itself overtaking the slowest, and the inside lane has no cars in it at all for miles.
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When men reached the scene of a fire, their ropes came down and they snared the first calf, yearling, or small steer they could "dab it on". Somebody immediately shot the animal in the head or cut its throat if a gun was not handy. They cut off its head with their pocket knives, so that it would not flop around, skinned one side of the animal from belly to back, and left the hide in place. Then, tying to the lower fore and hind legs, two men took off, dragging the beef by the horns of their saddle. One took the grassy side, the other the side of the fire, and by straddling the path of the flame, they dragged the beef directly along it with the loose, wet hide flopping out behind and men on foot to finish the job.|>
I forget which one it is, but there is an eastbound lane you can get in on the Bay Bridge that puts you through the Caldecott tunnel without changing lanes the whole way.
I know by physical memory the exact such lane that goes from I-95 over the Delaware Memorial Bridge to the New Jersey Turnpike. Lanes come in and drop off left and right. But one goes through.
73: I've done that drive southbound to the M25, but I don't particularly remember that aspect of it. But it's a general phenomenon and I don't see how it can really be deal with. The worst part is, once you pass one truck/lorry, your reward is another one a mile or less down the road.
As for the Yolo triple merge (which is clearly a YOLO situation), that sounds awful. I agree that having two spaced-apart two lane merges sounds better; I think that's how I'd usually see it in PA. Situations that require drivers to pay attention to two lanes over are always dangerous, and traffic engineers should try to minimize them. Even avoiding that, there's still a question of traffic density. Going from three lanes to one is asking for a backup.
Heartened to know that I'm not the only person fascinated by lane continuity. I think there's a magic lane to get through Harrisburg with minimum nonsense. More generally, if you get on I376 west in Squirrel Hill and forget to change lanes, I think you eventually end up in Erie.
I am blessedly and smugly free of driving. But, being me, I spend each commute optimizing meter by meter my virtual footborne lane.
Having just looked it up, I'm sort of surprised that Roc Island drives on the right side of the road. I would've thought Japanese colonialism would've made it go the other way. Then again, Korea drives on the right, too.
I miss driving, but not having to do it is nice. Walking optimization is mostly to keep a distance from other people now, which is pretty tiring.
37. Breakdown lane driving is apparently still allowed (as of 2019) on a few stretches of I-93, during morning rush hour. For the moment, there is no morning rush hour to speak of, though, so it may be moot.
54. Right, but you're describing the case where the norm is to move left and make a slow lane. It's not a zipper merge because no one is doing it as a zipper merge. It's a prisoner's dilemma situation. Zipper merges are theoretically a great idea, but it requires that no one defect. No in this flawed world of ours, it's impractical.
67. No. A three-way zipper merge is not a thing, unless you want to call it "a trip to hell."
76.2. My experience is that if there is going to be a 3-to-1 merge, it's usually due to construction, and there are going to be cones and police to drop them one at a time. (Thinking of NJ Turnpike, I-84 in CT, and so on.) Any "permanent" merge like that is pretty nuts.
I speak as someone who filled his tank just before the lockdown started, and have driven my car less than 30 miles since then. The "range" number is over 500 miles.
We got an $11 rebate from our insurance company for not driving as much during the shutdown.
I forget how much, but we got the same. I've only filled up one car once since March.
This reminds me that I should probably take our old car and drive around for a half hour. It's been immobile for too long.
Over 1,800 new cases reported here today. Testing has finally gotten over 6,000. I can't believe they're going for this rushed re-opening plan here.
2097 statewide cases here today, 21K tests. Not accelerating quite as fast as our local numbers.
There are 11 new cases today in the county, 700 more in the state. Allegheny County is just under 10% of the state population.
84: Shit. That's crazy. Can anybody get tested? Maybe you and Pima can get tested before you have unprotected inside discourse.
87 That really takes me back. ] Pola came over my place today and I made her lunch and we watched a movie (Spike Lee's Da 5 Bloods, she didn't like it at all and it didn't really click for me but I'm wondering how much I was influenced by her reaction, all the critics I regularly read adore it).
Omg. 142 cases today.
So: as of Wednesday, 470 was our 3 month cumulative total. Thursday+Friday+Saturday = 320 new cases. Good lord.
(This is in the county, not the state.)
Our local doubling time is now 6 days.
15 new cases statewide; last time we had that many new was April 9. And the continental divide has been breached: 5 of the new cases are on the pacific slope -- 1 here, one in Ravalli to the south, 3 in Lake to our north. Lake County is mostly the CSKT Nation, so I think we can forget about boating/swimming those sweet sweet Mission Mountain lakes for the summer.
Of the 60 active cases in the state, 31 are in Gallatin. One hears that they are pretty serious about contact tracing over there: I wonder if they are testing asymptomatic people. Obviously, it's getting close enough to the start of the fall semester that students have to come get housing if there are going to be in person classes. Or even if classes are online, and students want some of that Bozone lifestyle. (My nephew is a senior at MSU -- and needs to do student teaching this year.)
Sammit -- I'm in the office, and the computer here has forgotten me, after 3 months absence.
re driving: work changes and wanting to avoid more flying have "forced" me to buy a car, having not had one for years. So weirdly I have been driving a lot more than usual. Partially because of the work stuff, and partially because I bought an impractical but fun to drive one, and the roads have been pretty empty, so I've been out having (a lot of) fun, too.
Our local doubling time is now 6 days.
That is frightening. Fingers crossed that slows down in the near future.
97: a relatively new toyota 86 (same base car as as a brz or FRS). So light cheap rear wheel drive that is properly set up and has good suspension and great, even steering. Underpowered enough to keep you out of trouble. Fun and impractical, but more practical than my bike. Drifts nicely.
I've done 55.2 before. It's very polarizing. Some people become EXTREMELY angry, and honk and tailgate and pass you on the left shoulder/ditch. Other people wave and smile and create space to merge in behind, etc.. It takes a lot of willingness to ignore angry people if you want to keep it up very long.
88: I guess I didn't know what that was before now.
So we've had two consecutive days of about 1,100 and change and 1,200 and change cases here. A few days ago it was 1,800+. Thing is with this rushed reopening plan they announced when cases were still routinely around 1,700 and up I don't know if I'm trusting these declining numbers. It's only two days in a row but we'll see...
Up at 3 am for a walk with Pola, going to the Corniche this time, just to mix it up.
Berlin seems to be getting about 50 new cases daily, out of a population of 3.7M. I think that's low enough to do actual contact tracing and isolation, though I do not want to find out by way of personal experience.
Returning to the office has been good for me, even though the work itself can in theory be done very well remotely. Social distance within the office is quite distant, even by German standards and was before the pandemic. Masks near universal on the commuter trains.