I almost forgot to post this! My best-seller threads.

Now I'm off to a protest for prisoners at our local jail, which has a significant covid outbreak going on. This is like the easiest activism ever - I'm supposed to drive around the county commission building and honk my horn for an hour during the county meeting.

1: Is there going to be a whole bunch of you? Will it look like just bunch of very impatient people stuck in a traffic jam?

At least Carl Reiner didn't live to see this. Or the ending of this.

3 One of the last of an era. A giant.

I made it through my five days of antibiotics but still haven't gotten my COVID swab results, should today. My breathing did improve (though lethargy didn't much) and so I feel pretty good about the bronchitis diagnosis. The girls are being helpful about letting me rest. No major changes here otherwise, though there's a lot of stressful stuff just over the horizon that isn't helping my mood.

Reposting my comment from the other check-in thread because I'm still very pissed. English is not this guy's native language, and his English, frankly, sucks.

So we're reopening the library in stages. HR sent out timetables and other information to all staff and this is what was written for one of them for my subunit of my department:
"More flexibility for staff with health issues (including being pathologically scared)"

That comes from our acting director who is an asshole but that should never have gotten past HR. I'm over 50, an ex-smoker with asthma who gets respiratory infections at the drop of a hat. I'm really pissed off.

6 is outrageous, but I'd roll with it. Whatever keeps you home. Given that it's written policy, the bright side is you probably don't need a doctor's note assessing you as higher risk to continue to work from home. So, one less trip, one less admin hurdle.

Alive and well. Saturday, I did drive down and game in person for the first time since lockdown, and it was a wonderful memory of normalcy. We did a potluck, to avoid breaking and visiting a restaurant, which meant it was delicious too. I stripped and showered on my way back into the house; it was an easy enough mitigation. And my wife really appreciated an evening alone in the house-- it'd been months, since even hour long walks weren't long enough to give her the mental "sprawl on the couch and relax" feeling she'd been missing.

Of course, the timing's not the best; infections are beginning to spiral upward locally. From a relatively steady baseline, but we just had our bar openings rolled back. Mask compliance continues to be too political a fight; hopefully Cheney and McConnell's push toward masks will dent the anti-mask zealot faction. If our one anti-mask council member took their cue, it might substantially cool local divisions on masks.

Somebody on NextDoor is reporting a lost tortoise. I'm wondering if it's a tortoiseshell cat or a reptile.

If the latter it couldn't have gotten far.

49 cases statewide today, second highest total ever. 20 of them are here, so we're definitely in a bigger wave this time.

Still only 12 people hospitalized, statewide, out of 300 actives cases.

But that this is a wave can't be denied. In Msla, half of all cases are active right now. Statewide, just over 30% of all cases are active now. No one thinks numbers will be going down in the next week at least.

Still doing fine here. I think I fucked up my pinkie doing all that sanding, so I'm going to the doctor tomorrow to get it checked out. The weather is supposed to be nice for the next few days, though, so hopefully we can get the staining done.

The doctor will know if the sanding was good enough to go ahead and use stain.

Just got out a a comprehensive exam where we ended up failing the student, which is always kind of depressing.

We might be seeing the beginning of an upswing in Maryland. Hospitalizations have stopped going down for the first time in weeks. At least the positive rate isn't rising and is still below 5%.

Since I don't think of Baltimorians as being particularly civic minded, I'm surprised at how totally not-an-issue mask wearing has been around here. No businesses will let you inside without one, and on the normal city streets where people pass close to each other (as opposed to parks or boardwalks), masks are basically universal.

"I'm sorry but you'll have to try for a job where you stand some chance at being well-paid."

Oh, I guess news is that Mara has stopped complaining about pain in her side and now claims it's gone completely, which I hope is true. That would mean her GI doctor was right about what was going on and that we'll have a treatment that will work if it ever recurs. She's super moody in the aftermath of a month of constant significant pain, which I expected, but that should lift fairly soon. Nia's foot is apparently still hurting, but she's not a reliable witness because she knows that going to see a doctor is pretty much the only break from regular life she gets. Today she's excited because we're getting hand-me-down kitchen equipment including a stand mixer from my grandmother, who at 98 finally moved into assisted living with some help from my mom and more from the aunt who lives near her. (She had to pass a TB test but no ones said anything about COVID, so I don't know the details. She did have a several-day quarantine before being able to access the dining room or therapeutic pool.)

The pool is really something.

Continuing drama with playdates and the potential, tantalizing, but troublesome opening of a couple of weeks of a summer-camp-like-thing. Maybe there will be better payoff some day but right now trying to manage what the child-activity options are is consuming at least as much should-be-working time as just having the kid around (Ignoring that it's probably better for him to be doing some activity than to be lounging at home playing Minecraft or whatever).

We have our housecleaners back, right this minute in fact. They're masked, windows are all open, and we're hiding out in the attic (where we work anyway) until they're gone, and probably for a while later. I convinced myself that it was safe enough but it still feels transgressive.

Our positivity rate is nudging upward here and cases are climbing. The governor has floated a statewide mask rule, and I sure hope he does it. We have hospital capacity now but daily new cases are going up which means we'll be seeing a crunch in a couple of weeks.

I have already both called and emailed the governor in support of the mask thing. Should I call and email again? I feel like I've called the governor and left some relatively panicky unhinged-for-a-grown-up-who-votes messages over the course of this thing and fear turning into a crank, but on the other hand I really want a mask order.

I need something new to read - I've read all the Barbara Pym, all the Dodie Smith, all the Nancy Mitford I want to read and a bunch of other stuff of that general type and desperately need more light and not too acidic stories of mid-century British women.

Made a clafoutis and the old-fashioned kind of calzone that you slice up, ordered yard waste bags online, set up a mini elliptical with a very short stride that requires a strong sense of balance to use.

I am accumulating quite the shelf of supplements, all of them, I tell myself, at least sorta kinda peer reviewed and all geared toward endothelial support because clotting is, to me, the biggest worry. Found out I have type A blood which boosts my chances of hospitalization by 50%, hooray.

I may need to go to the dentist - I'm sitting tight for a bit to see if it's just TMD pain which I also have.

Occasional bouts of depersonalization which is actually pretty helpful and will hopefully increase over time.

Frowner - I don't have book recommendations, but I hear you on not wanting to sound like a crank and yet being anxious as hell. Stay safe.

Frowner, have you read the Diary of a Provincial Lady (E. M. Delafield) or The Towers of Trebizond? I'm rereading the former right now, among many other books that aren't soothing at all.

I just responded to the school district's survey about whether and how to reopen. I hope the other parents and guardians who do so will be as paranoid as I am. It sounds like the online school may not work for Nia because she needs too much assistance from teachers (which she wasn't getting during non-traditional instruction anyway) and might not accept Mara either if she doesn't seem self-motivated. I haven't heard about kids being turned down, but the principal didn't sound encouraging. I'm still thinking about it I guess.

Where are you on Margaret Drabble and her sister A S Byatt? They're both more of a downer than what you've been reading, but still in that quotidian UK vein.

That was me.

All the Mapp and Lucia books?

Sadly I have read almost all the Margaret Drabble already - she was maybe my favorite writer when I was in college. I bogged down badly in Diary of a Provincial Lady, not because it wasn't funny but because I am useless and distracted and it's so episodic. The Towers of Trebizond looks promising, though. I have a copy of MacCauley's The World My Wilderness but haven't read it yet.

Mara's read-aloud story now is E. Nesbit's The Phoenix and the Carpet and I was surprised that the gender-neutral pronoun used routinely for one member of a mixed-gender sibling group is "it" so "each of the four children shut its eyes very tight and reached out its hand and grabbed something." It feels shocking now and I don't have any sense of how it would have come across in 1904, but I'm curious. I know there was a biography of E. Nesbit a few years ago and maybe I should look that up.

Not British but Dawn Powell's lighter stuff is midcentury cutting and light. Locusts Have No King.

Outdoor masks maybe 20% here, indoor 98%, but I've mostly been on bike routes, not much in pedestrian areas. Apparently the DE beaches have had an outbreak this last week, hard to tabulate because people come for a weekend or a week and then leave again; a few lifeguards, dozens of residents, and more visitors developed symptoms the same day. Kids going to parties.

I think 'it' as an ungendered pronoun for a person got shocking very recently -- I think before, maybe, not much more than a decade ago, someone feeling around for an option might have very plausibly come down on 'it' with no intended hostility or depersonalization. I'm sure of at least one example from 90s SF, and I think if I looked I could find more.

Oh the hostility is quite intentional.

I'm having trouble coming up with an example that fits 28.

"It rubs the lotion on its skin or else it gets the hose again"?

Frowner:
Elizabeth Jane Howard - "something in disguise", perhaps.
I like Elizabeth Buchan, contemporary but with a certain bite.

I've been reading E Nesbit to my mother. She is astonishingly good. I agree about "It" but you don't notice it after a while. And it's only applied to children, especially the little ones. You can get her complete works on Kindle for more or less nothing -- there is a whole series of short stories about dragons of various types.

I don't remember whether it was here or at the other place on a non-blog-friend's wall where I learned that "it" seemed to be a common pronoun for a young child. A friend, I think: the context was letters from young women who were abandoning their babies or young children on church doors steps. It is a good girl; please take it in.

"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times"?

28: Are you thinking of the Miles Vorkosigan books? She used it for the--and here's another probably deprecated word, but it's the word she used and I don't have anything better--hermaphrodites, who collectively chose it as their own pronoun. Of course, their voices were given by a probably cis, maybe het author. It feels very quaint now--either she thought that was the more radical choice, or else found using a grammatical plural more unpleasant.

Now that I think about it, I'm pretty sure KSR used "hermaphrodite" in 2312 (published 2012), but said characters were also binary.

That was the example I was thinking of (although she uses it for not only 'hermaphrodites' but also genetically engineered genderless people in another book). I'm pretty sure Bujold is cis and het, but I also think any time after, say 2010, she wouldn't have used 'it' and if she had people would have kicked up a fuss because it would have come across as insulting and hostile.

I think norms just hadn't settled down to 'they' as the obvious choice at all; I don't think 'it' was more radical or anything, it was just where she landed.

I think she still used it in some of the later books, but I read them all in a binge. But retconning is awkward at best. And no judgment on her for picking it*, obviously a different time and the books are progressive (she pulls the neat trick of having them make a statement, yet still be fun).

* It tickles me pink that my use of "it" has referent "it." Quarantine madness.

Now what are people going to compare the Pirates too?

">https://www.newsweek.com/bar-lives-matter-protesters-descend-texas-capitol-oppose-closures-1514538> Bar Lives Matter' Protesters Descend on Texas Capitol to Oppose Closures. Wtffffffffff

oh goddamn it.

It may seem selfish but don't forget that it's also short-sighted.

Ada Palmer used "it" under similar circumstances to Bujold, a lot more recently than 2010. Though in her case it can plausibly be read as coming from an unreliable narrator who bears a grudge against the person in question.

I only remember there being mild grumblings about it at the time (though maybe this just means I'm not reading the right people).

All fine here. I'm somewhat nervous about more regular in-person interaction with friends and associated risks, but not nervous enough to return to more locked down behaviour.

Work is intermittently interesting, and always busy.

||
VENT TIME!

I have an employee -- matrix management scheme, so in some senses I'm their boss, and in other senses, I'm not -- that suffers from stress/anxiety and has been consistently unproductive for a long time. Certainly since before CV-19, but it has gotten much much worse since then, to the point that I don't think they've really done anything since February, and their total output in the past 9 months is, being charitable, about what I'd do in about 2 weeks. The problem is, we keep giving them work, they keep failing to do it, and then it keeps getting given* to me to do in a mad panic. I want to handle this tactfully, and sympathetically, but I also want to not be doing my job and their job concurrently. I'm also not that sympathetic as one of the times this happened, I ended up working late nights and weekends, right before Christmas, while they fucked off out drinking with their significant other.

"Sorry ttaM, I know I didn't finish that thing I've had on my desk for a couple of weeks. I know the deadline is tomorrow and I'm telling you this at 7pm the day before. But I have to go, I have a date. I'll see you in two weeks."

* as in, "Fuck, this has to be done by the end of tomorrow or project X is going to run even more late and over budget, and project Y is looming. Shit. I'll have to do it."**
** this is a common pattern for people at a certain level of seniority, in lots of industries, I think. Experienced enough that you can do basically everything quicker and more efficiently than anyone that works for you, but not so senior that you are entirely management and no longer able to do the day to day work.***
*** Also why I am quite unsympathetic to devs and sysadmins who complain about "management". I do 200% of the workload of basically all of the people I manage and know vastly more about literally everything they do than they do. Yet, I'm still occasionally on the side of conversations in which those people have the usual pro forma "the man (people like me), doesn't know anything" gripes.

>

ttaM and Barry will no doubt be delighted to hear that UK libraries are about to come over all Dan Dare:

"We have the capacity for 20 people at a time," says Rachel Braithwaite, project development manager at the Archibald Corbett Library in south London, which will, unlike many other libraries, be opening its doors from 4 July and restarting at least some former activities. "There will be a space marshal and hand sanitiser at the door.

A space marshal. A SPACE MARSHAL! (Smaller libraries may have to make do with a Space Vice-Marshal or Space Commodore.)

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2020/jul/01/uk-libraries-reopen-not-as-we-know-them

There's "tactful and sympathetic" and then there's doing something about it. Firing someone properly takes a long time, but it sounds as if you should be starting to document egregious failures to get assigned work done, in whatever way you need to do to build a case to get rid of them.

re: 46

Yeah, I think there's processes in train for that and some of those are in motion. The people I work for are generally nice people, and when people have had "difficulties" (stress, mental health, financial, whatever) they've generally been quite sympathetic and flexible about coming up with solutions for them. Although in the short term, the solution is "offload all the work onto ttaM." In the longer term, I think they need get their shit together** or be fired, because it's not sustainable.

** will never happen.

"Firing someone properly takes a long time,"
This is interesting. Everywhere I've worked has been "at-will" yet everywhere I've worked has also had this feature. Is it about potential lawsuits?

33 If you've seen pictures of my library it certainly looks like it might have a space marshal.
Also I wonder how this affects the BL, we have a major project with them that's been more than a bit on hold since this all started.

48: ttaM doesn't work in the US.

50- Yes, but the process in the US in also quite long everywhere I've been (white collar jobs) despite being at-will. Documenting poor performance, multiple warnings, improvement plans.

The other thing I'd think of, from where you're standing, is being thoughtful about covering for them. This might not be practical, but are there categories of work that will be a problem for you and your department specifically if they don't get done, and categories of work that will be a problem for someone else? Because being 'unable' to pick up the dropped work, if leaving it undone won't turn into a disaster that you personally have to deal with, might bring the problem to a head a little faster.

49.2 I've just had an email from the BL, they'll start to reopen to the public on the 22nd.

ttaM, do y'all do stories and sprints? If so, and assuming there's any hope here at all, one thing that might help is making the stories this person is assigned very, very small. One of the teams I was on broke things down as "should take about an hour", "should take a few hours", "might take a day" and if it was any larger than that, we'd break it down more. This can be kind of cumbersome sometimes, but if the deadline for something is literally "later today," it can bring a lot of clarity to what's getting done (or not done) (it's also a pretty effective cudgel).

What's wrong with tradition? Just ask for status reports by email every couple of hours using passively aggressive remarks.

I opted to teach "reduced face-to-face" in the fall, on the premise that, since the kids and Jammies are in the k-12 system, I might as well have at least a little F2F contact with my own students.

It looks like the three classrooms I'll be teaching in are all basement classrooms with 1 door. Two classes are consecutive 1 hour classes, and the third is a 2 hour class.

I don't know how to feel about these classrooms. I was hoping for something with a window or two doors. I thought I could bring in a box fan or something. How do you improve ventilation in this situation?

I think the best you can do is to make the students line up against the wall furthest from you.

Has there been any evidence that those ionizing air purifiers work? Or maybe a standard HEPA air purifier is good enough.

56: A sledge hammer?

I think maybe moving around the same air, as opposed to pulling in outdoor air, might make things worse.

Show me round your school cage...

re: 54

Depends on the project/client. But yeah, mix of Agile/Scrum and/or Kanban.

I could start assigning them 1 pointers (story points)* and micro-managing them. That'll definitely make their stress/anxiety worse, but it might be the only way to get anything at all out of them. I would be spending a decent chunk of every day writing stories and tasks for them, and checking they were getting done, though. That's one of the common management problems, in all industries, though. In order to get any work out of shirker-X, you need to micro-manage them, which makes shirker-X miserable, and makes even more work for manager-Y.

At some point, this person should probably realise that they should be working for a university or public institution where the stress level will be much lower, and they won't have to do much work. A consultancy/agency is not the place to be if you suffer from anxiety issues and get overwhelmed by work.

* typically we'd do some kind of Fibonacci sizing in the initial estimation and break down anything bigger than a 13. Story point fanatics insist that story points don't translate into measurements of time.** I think those people are generally kidding themselves as every single person just translates them into time in their head. For most of my team, I think, a 13 would mean something that one person, or a two person team on less than 100% allocation, could easily deliver in a single sprint. 1 pointer would be somewhere between an hour and a half day.
** blah blah velocity burn down, etc.

I'm so glad nobody I work with communicates that way.

re: 52

Yeah, if I still worked in a university I'd do something like that. Get them transferred to another team, or allocated work where I wasn't the ultimate owner. In this case, in almost every scenario in which the shit hits the fan, I'd be the person cleaning the shit off the fan, or building a new fan, so to speak.

re: 63

Most of the time I don't either. But I can talk the talk if required.

Heebie needs a fan, if you're already building one.

If there's shit on the fan, does that heighten transmission?

Ironically, the stress and anxiety is probably due to constantly committing firing-level acts of procrastination. But yeah, ttaM, you should have a serious talk with this person that somehow ends with the person having psychological incentives to work, rather than an "oh shit oh shit I completely fucked it up and they CAUGHT ME" panic meltdown. No, I'm not sure how that works. Is there anything the person likes to do? Anything they're good at? Could you slip them ADHD meds privately?

I sometimes wonder if getting fired would be good for me. Usually the conclusion is that the cost to my family would negate any possible benefits.

I think most people would take it poorly if you suggested they try to take some Dexedrine which you just happen to have some extra.

ttaM, can they be partnered with someone else to get jobs done? (Right now, you are their default partner.) I'm a terrible procrastinator and will fuck myself over, but I won't fuck over a partner.

The woman I work best with is absolutely brusque about managing projects and she, without any awareness that it could be awkward, will just walk over to me and ask me where the work product is over and over. It works because she is utterly unselfconscious about it, and also not blaming. (For the record, she also thinks we have a brilliant partnership because I can whip out text that would stymie her for weeks.)

Hire a despicable inept smelly mouth breather, Bluto. Mock the shirker by saying that work will be reassigned to Bluto, who can do it better. Or maybe there's a humane productive way.

There's a great depiction of a nightmare boss in the fun action film Furie (Vietnamese one) who does this.

Frowner, have you read any Deanna Raybourne or Anna Lee Huber?

58 and 60: my dentist sent an e-mail with her protocols. They sound pretty good. You have to wait outside until they call you and wear a mask until you're in the chair. But I think they were requiring gloves which seemed dumb, and they had bought some kind of air purifying system, and I wonder if it isn't for show.

73: My friend the dentist says the air system is useful for cleaning a room between patients, but not for things like crowded occupied rooms.

73 was me.

They are putting one of these in each room and following the Mass Dental Association's guidelines.

https://surgicallycleanair.com/jade/

The marketing people seem silly; they compare it to the air of the Canadian Rockies, but that doesn't mean it's bad.

Have you looked at Denver in the winter? It looks like the air in a bar in 1978.

I am grappling with the fact that local provisional school reopening plans look better than I'd feared, and I keep thinking I will somehow jinx it. We squeak into the-young-enough-to-get-4-days-of-school category and live close enough to walk and avoid the bus mess.

They should train the bus not to mess near the sidewalk.

Our county has never gotten past the high we set back on June 18. If you looked at our numbers, it would seem like it is starting to trend downward. But today at the top of the county web page is a big announcement, "Due to backlogs at labs statewide, the Texas Division of Emergency Management will begin using [some other method]" so I think that means our numbers are highly unreliable. Two weeks of backlogs is basically everything since June 18th.

And Texas blew past its old record (5996 new cases) yesterday, with 6975 new cases, and then again today, with 8076 new cases. So I have no conclusion. But I do hear that lots of doctors are sending presumptive positive cases back home again without testing them, because the tests take so long to come back.

I heard a rumor that Abbott is considering shutting down Texas, so that it will be suppressed enough to open all the schools on time in the fall. This is actually my worst nightmare. I've been consoling myself that at least this current surge is happening early enough that it will affect fall planning. My worst fear is that we shut the state down again, squander another lockdown without acquiring tests or mandating masks, and then open up the schools on schedule, and have those be the new nightclubs, so to speak.

The lighting is different if nothing else.

re: 68.1

"Ironically, the stress and anxiety is probably due to constantly committing firing-level acts of procrastination."

That is exactly right.

re: 70

I sort of am their formal partner, in the sense that they are supposed to shadow and deputise for me, and anything I'm too busy to do, or which is relatively quick/easy, so doesn't _need_ me, is meant to be theirs. Which obviously is not at all what's happening, since I am doing most of their work, and mine. I manage more than just them, but they are the individual assigned as my shadow.

I am not, especially, a domineering sort of person in a work environment. Or rather, I will be the big alpha silverback in the room when what's required is a show of skill/knowledge, and I'm quite happy to get into confrontations with clients and/or my bosses. I'll aggressively defend myself and my team against unreasonable interference from on high or from outside. What I'm less good at is kicking the arse of people on our team how deserve their arse kicked. I can be quite a soft touch that way.

Worse, in the case, though, I am at the point where I _am_ happy to do this, but am being restrained from doing so by other kinder people who want to give them a chance to get over their stress/anxiety and get it together, and who feel that being monstered by me, Lee Ermey style, is not going to help them.

72: I found Anna Lee Huber was fine. Better was Simone St. James (post WWI romances, supernatural element). Even better was Cat Sebastian (romance, often gay).

I found all of these through Smart Bitches, Trashy Books and will repeat that their rating system is solid. All of their A-rated books are good enough.

What I'm less good at is kicking the arse of people on our team how deserve their arse kicked. I can be quite a soft touch that way.

One thing that I have learned about myself is that I'm a good co-worker, but not a good boss, because I'm absolutely terrible at micro-managing somebody even when that's the right thing to do.

I will be helpful, I will explain things, I can provide good examples or clear guidance on how to approach a problem, but walking somebody through something step-by-step is just exhausting and frustrating for me.

I have one person that, from an org chart perspective, I should be managing, but I've negotiated some help for that because that uses up my productivity quickly.

I just don't like paying attention to other people, supervisor or supervisees.

Seldom have I been more disappointed by a paper than by this one -- I suppose the stupid IRB wouldn't let them knife fight for real, or they weren't offering the TAs enough to do it, although my understanding of academic life is that this would simply be a dramatisation and speeding up of what already happens.

re: 84

Yeah. I've been managing people off and on since 1996. I'm fine with all of the logistical and technical tasks of managing the sorts of projects I work on. I'm fine with persuading people that the work we are doing is important and/or interesting. But I tend to expect that in the doing of that work people will be reasonably conscientious, reasonably hard working, and reasonably honest.*

If they aren't, I genuinely think the best thing to do is just to fucking fire them. I don't have time to try to train someone into not being a shitty lazy person. If guilt about the fact that you are shitting on your co-workers isn't enough to get you moving, you should just be gone.

I sometimes wonder if modern working practice, with a lot of working from home, or solo working in which tasks are broken up and assigned to a single individual, doesn't help. If you are genuinely working in a team, in which your work is visible, your co-workers will know that you are a lazy shit, and you'll maybe feel guilty enough to get stuff done, or your co-workers will call you out on it, or ostracise you. I suspect, though, that people like this person get away with it, because people like me semi-conceal from the rest of the team, in the interest of harmony, exactly how little they do.

* everyone has off-days, or periods when things aren't going well for them professionally, or personally. "Reasonably" has quite a bit of flexibility.

Using this for non-virus complaining, I woke to find a flooded basement because our hot water heater had leaked all night. The good news is I got paid yesterday. The bad news is fml. (A plumber is coming probably this afternoon. It will be better to have a good new one! But argh.)

First you get the money, then you get the plumber, then you get the women.

I just got into an argument about policies for our university exercise center: should masks be required for indoors treadmills and ellipticals? I said fuck yes, and otherwise those machines need to be removed. No one else agreed, so I imagine the policy will be that you have to wear masks while lifting weights, but not on the ellipticals and treadmills.

I don't know if this is something where I should really go to the mat or not over it. I sure as hell won't step foot in that building.

We're talking a very few number of machines - probably 10 in normal times, reduced and spread out? Maybe 4 total? In a room that's about the size of, hmm, it's hard to think of a standard unit of measurement for rooms. The room is probably the size of 4 combined normal classrooms. (Like a 20-30 person classroom.)

Put the machines outside under a canopy.

I am pretty sure the response would be that the humidity and rain would destroy the machines too quickly.

Put the free weights outside and spread out the machines more?

It's just hard to imagine that people should be doing cardio indoors, unmasked, period.

(In a group setting.)

Yes. I'm not going near a gym until Covid is over.

Shouldn't cardio result in a lot more breathing, and the air propelled farther?

That's my fear, yes.

90 is outrageous. Can you propose they sign some really horrific waiver?

That's the point.

This article is very thorough on how indoor sports should be handled, but surprisingly agnostic on masks.

101 to 98.

Iget that people behave poorly, but this story seems like another in the series of poorly-sourced reports allowing the smug middle aged to shake their heads about the things the kids are up to these day.

Record number of new cases today. The top 5 days for new cases are, in descending order, today, Monday, yesterday, Tuesday, March 26. I get tweets from Glacier, and the Sun Road, which is only open for a bit on the west side, gets closed multiple times every day for traffic and lack of parking at the end of it.

The Gov posted a set of pix on twitter with the not so subtle message: c'mon assholes, we routinely wear masks doing things we like to do. https://twitter.com/GovernorBullock/status/1278702305005588480

I just had a covid test for my upcoming colonoscopy. Throat swab, so at least there's that.

||

I realized that I miss hearing from Tia in the check-in threads. Her decision to take time away from unfogged seems sensible, but I am aware of it as an absence.

|>

Big One (with apologies to Judge Dread)

Have you heard the news that the President's dead?
It happened while Mike Pence was giving him

Biscuits and gravy and bacon and grits
It had been a month since he'd taken a

Interest in running the United States
He'd just yell at Fox News and then master

His tweeting, which he thought was smart,
But grunt as he might, he couldn't quite

Choose the best way to tease and to flick
The coif of blond hair that surrounded his

Orangey, pouty, ridiculous gob
The late Donald Trump had a mushroom-shaped

Tattoo he got out of spite
If you think he was dirty you're bloody well right!

Following the lead of other cities including Dayton and Bexley, Columbus Mayor Andrew J. Ginther on Thursday announced that wearing a mask in certain locations and circumstances would become required in Columbus to stop the accelerating contagion of coronavirus.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/columbus-mayor-ginther-orders-masks-in-public/ar-BB16gENx

108: probably no need to say that this is from your faithful correspondent in the heart of the heart of it all.

Things are still looking pretty encouraging in Maryland. New cases, hospitalizations and deaths are all still going down. It looked like the hospitalization rate had stopped dropping earlier this week, but apparently that was just a blip and it's going down again.

Yep, if we can build a wall west of Pennsylvania and block all bridges covering the Potomac, the Northeast should be in good shape this fall.

I have a new hot water heater! No word on when I get the women, but I'm genuinely happy with what I've got right now anyhow.

oh thank god, we just got a statewide mask order.

Great, but do you think they even considered the Constitution and how much a mask will smear makeup?

Don't worry, there's an exemption for churches and voting.

Anyway, I'm kind of shocked at how relieved I feel. I'm taking this to mean that k-12 schools will be able to effectively mandate masks as well. The whole thing just makes me feel so much better than we're not just going to let it grow unchecked forever.

You can't vote if you don't go to church.

106 Same. I've been regularly cow-orking with her which has been great but her presence is missed here.

Woke up at 1 am a bit hungover, it's now after 2 am. Going for a walk with Pola in about an hour, this time at one of the parks that just re-opened.

And back again, only three miles this time but much of it was on hilly terrain. It was also 90 f and 80% humidity out, I sweated so much after an hour it looked like I'd peed myself.

The pee of your brows?

The blue jeans were probably a bad idea, it really showed. Pola was cracking up. I joked that I should do a little gotta pee dance with my back turned to some people then turn around while letting out a sigh of relief.

I have a new hot water heater!

Oh, Thorn. It's a complete con. You don't need a hot water heater. Hot water is already hot. They just charged you $700 for an empty box with a pipe running in one side and out the other. You need to ask for a cold water heater.

See, in a stillsuit you can just let go mid-stride and no one notices.

Or in a swimming pool. Opposites from a full circle.

106: Me too.