We're fine but some concerns with friends and family. My brother's company closed for good so now he's unemployed not just furloughed and his skills are pretty specific to his industry which has basically been completely destroyed. It sounds like his family is trying to figure out how to cut expenses on things like groceries. Should I offer to lend him money if he needs it or would that be insulting?
Also a former colleague/friend doesn't seem to be doing too well. Last time I called him he sounded down about some things with work and family. I texted him to see if he wanted to have a beer in the yard and he said yes he'd let me know when then he never got back to me at all which is not like him, if he couldn't make it he'd normally at least say so. Not sure how to check on him- invite him again next weekend or ask more directly if he's doing ok?
Going to repost my comment earlier from the other check in thread because of the time difference I'm always a little miffed to miss the new check in thread:
I went into work for the first time since mid-March. I see that my acting director is one of those wears the mask under the nose type dudes. I had to tell him the mask goes over the nose while he was speaking with me. He complied.
IT also did something to Outlook or the server that caused everyone's Outlook to malfunction. They have to fix it on an individual basis. Of course they didn't pick up the phone the few times I called them because everyone must be calling at once. A few weeks ago they updated our cataloging software resulting in the loss of thousands of records, information bibliographic and item records to be lost and/or be merged together, creation of dummy item records, etc. Just completely munged it up. The competence that inspires confidence.
Jesus is it hot out there.
And in other bigger personal news, Pola is taking the job back in Poland and she submitted her resignation today. I am crestfallen.
1.1: Maybe just offer broadly to help anyway you can?
1.2 Get back in touch with your friend and make the same offer but with a specific date and place in mind.
5 And maybe have two or three backup dates/places in mind if he doesn't commit to the first one.
It sounds like they're going to reclose the bars and the restaurants for indoor dining. Probably a good idea. My impression is that the ones that were doing it safely couldn't have been making enough money to be worth it, and some places weren't doing it safely.
On my way to pick up some take out this weekend, I passed by a place that I used to go to when it had different ownership. It's small with no airflow from the outside, and it was packed with people talking loudly without masks. Basically exactly the situation we've been told for months to avoid.
Maybe with the reclosing we can finally get below 4.5%.
I went into a food store yesterday for the first time since March. Definitely felt nervous about it. I have the problem that since I didn't really reason my way into avoiding grocery stores, I am have a hard time deciding what makes it safe or unsafe to go back in.
I notice that case numbers in London are starting to creep back up. Last time I checked and we discussed it a couple of weeks ago, it was approx 20 new cases per day. It's over 50 now. In terms of cases per head of population, it's still not high, but it's definitely rising.
We're in the 300s for the past few days now. It's looking pretty good. Though a cow-orker shared my suspicions of the numbers as they announced the phased re-opening here with hard set dates before the numbers trended downward. A few days after the announcement they started going down.
After basically cooking for myself* since mid-March when I usually got takeout I stopped at my favorite falafel place for some falafels, hummus, and stuffed grape leaves. There were 12-15 guys working there, they have minimal English so it's always been a great place to practice my Arabic, but only 2 of them were wearing their masks correctly with the rest doing the mask under the nose or even under the chin deal and more than a few with no mask at all. I won't be going back there anytime soon.
*Counting everything from various pasta dishes to heating up frozen pizza.
Also, we're doing some long-neglected estate planning stuff, and this has brought us to considering "what should happen to our kid if we both end up hospitalized with COVID?" Since in that circumstance he needs somewhere to be but is almost certainly exposed or infected himself.
10: cases per day in England as a whole don't look great either. They have been stubbornly between 500 and 600 per day since the start of this month with no trend downwards. I think you're wrong about London, though - average cases per day (the case numbers bounce around a lot day to day so average is best) never got as low as 20. It's high forties now, right where it's been for weeks.
https://coronavirus-staging.data.gov.uk/cases?areaType=region&areaName=London
re: 14
That's odd. I very distinctly remember (we discussed it at the time) looking at: https://data.london.gov.uk/dataset/coronavirus--covid-19--cases
and the average numbers were in the 20s per day. They must have been retrospectively revised up with slow to come in data.
Nia was supposed to spend some masked/distanced time outdoors with friends that turned out to be none of the above and around more people than planned (she thought if she stayed away that was good enough; the whole thing has been annoying and I should have prevented it) and so we're more locked down than usual, which was already more than the norm here. I'm having sinus problems that seem maybe slightly different from the bronchitis I've been having. This sure was an awful year to have really bad air quality for people with allergies! If I show any meaningful symptoms or if my lymph node pain gets worse, I'll go back to the doctor to get tested and probably treated for something or referred to an ENT this time. Chronic bronchitis is in fact a thing, google tells me, and I guess it's probably MY thing but I don't want that either.
Meanwhile the basement backed up with sewage and I'm really hoping insurance will cover some of the cost of getting everything stored down there moved out to a dumpster and the floor sanitized, but that's happening now because the plumbers cleared the ancient drain line yesterday. And I should hear more about the school opening plans tomorrow, but the options are online-only, hybrid (students go either Monday-Tuesday or Thursday-Friday with Wednesday as a cleaning day), or fully in-person. It sounds to me like the district is setting it up that way to make the last option dramatic enough it won't be chosen given that we're not even six weeks out and teachers are still meeting online. Actually as I was writing this I got the call about which option I prefer for my kids and I said virtual for all. I have no idea how much parental input matters.
re: 14
Looking at that, there's a definite increase at the end of June, and yeah, no dip since.
And Barry, I'm sorry you're losing a connection like this. I know your walks with her have been meaningful for you as well as useful in their own right.
Sewers are the worst. Sorry you have to deal with that.
Still here, regretting that my protesting days are over - the last one I went to was in the Before Time, and it was heartening to see so many people caring about caged children. There was one protester who had been interned in an American concentration camp during World War II, was there with family to object to the treatment of immigrants.
re 1: 4 and 5 offer good advice. Persist!
Thanks all. Things were taking a decidedly romantic turn of late too. I always suspected she had a bit of a crush on me, a few years ago she asked me to travel with her and other things but I was dating Chani at the time and was just too late to pick this up again.
That is sad, Barry.
Your pleasure at spending time with Pola was obvious.
That's sad. Aren't you supposed to go to the airport as she's leaving and sing a song or something to convince her that she's making the wrong choice?
No, she made the right decision. They really screwed her over here. She was acting head of a department for the better part of a year and did a great job of it. Then they gave the job to an under qualified local without even offering her the opportunity of an interview. Just real contempt. There's no future here and I don't blame her in the least.
Now commencing to drown my sorrows in some of the Jameson she picked up for me at the pork and liquor store the other week.
Doing okay here in Fresno personally, but our big hospital's ICU is overflowing, reservists are helping at the hospital, and they're activating the emergency treatment center in the convention center. Basically everything non-Covid has been shoved away from Community to other hospitals, and they're converting non-ICU areas to care for Covid patients.
Got a full stress dump from my wife last night, and took a project completely off her plate to help going forward. The stressors are much harder than the one project, of course -- can the business survive even a few more slow months? How many people will we have to layoff and how soon if things continue on the current terrible trends? Can we get some kind of forbearance for circumstances for our store landlord, or has he already been as generous as he's willing to be?
One thing that we did figure out is that the reason that SO MANY people still need remedial education about masks, proper wearing, etc., is that the numbers she sees are proportionally inflated-- most mask wearers have heard our local hospital updates and have decided to isolate again, so clueless jerks are a much larger fraction of those willing to enter stores for non-essential goods.
I've been waiting for two packages for weeks now. One has apparently been sitting at the USPS distribution center in my city since July 9, and the other since July 14. No changes in status since those dates. This would be a bummer at any time, but receiving packages in the mail is one of the only joyous events we have left in these dark days.
Dang, Barry, that sucks.
Re: cases in London, I still think we have everything set up for a resurgence. At least we'll start wearing masks in stores. On Friday. But I dunno how much that'll help if people are going to pubs. I'm glad they're keeping the Nightingale Hospitals open over the winter, but of course it's worrying that they think it's necessary.
Last week the wife and I drove to a beach, but in the interest of finding the most isolated one we could we drove all the way to Suffolk. Drearily beautiful, and the eroded cliffs were something to see. Just so exhilarating to be out of the city and to be able to look miles down the beach without seeing anyone else. First time I drove stick-shift on the left, which was exhaustively fun.
Still doing fine here personally, but the local case numbers keep going up. The latest jump has been driven partly by a couple of big outbreaks among seafood workers, who are being tested frequently and are mostly isolated from the local communities, so the actual risk may be a little lower than the overall numbers make it seem. The resident numbers are still pretty bad though.
27: Yeah, and it's evidently a not unexpected side effect of his new Postmaster General.
The USPS is facing huge problems under Louis DeJoy, a big Trump donor who was recently appointed postmaster general. DeJoy supposedly wants it to run more like a business, and has implemented structural changes that have fouled up deliveries.
DeJoy is pushing a lot of business consultant mumbo-jumbo on the agency. He has limited overtime, instructed mail carriers to leave mail behind that will slow down their delivery routes, and required that they park no more than four times along their delivery routes.
(My first read on this was a few twitter stories by postal employees in the last week or two.)
The Republican Speaker of the House in Ohio just got arrested.
Maybe he could wear a mask to hide his shame?
My building at the university officially reopens on Friday and we are having a Home Office inspection the same day to get approval to reopen our animal unit, so I might actually get to do experiments again before 2021. This is great news in the abstract although I'm feeling a bit nervous about it because my work habits have fallen off a cliff between the construction and pandemic closures. I realised last week as I started coming into lab in preparation for reopening that I've lost any contextual association between my lab space and working. Now when I come in I'm just tired (it's an hour's+ walk from home) and confused about what to actually do with myself and so often default to low-priority busywork.
The covid safety measures in place for the reopening are causing some friction -- even though we are blessed with enough space that every single member of lab could come sit in a room alone all day without seeing another soul, we are being held to a 25% attendance restriction that's been adopted by the department. It accomplishes nothing for us safety-wise, and makes it impossible for anyone to spend enough time at lab to prep for and run experiments without having to resort to night/weekend shifts. There's also no plausible mechanism for the department to enforce this rule, so my suggestion was, "why don't we just fuckin' come in when we want?" after the last 2 lab meetings devolved into bickering about who gets what rooms which hours and how are we going to deal with shifts, etc. But noooooooo, that would be AGAINST THE RULES. English people, I love you, but the rulesiness thing can be exasperating.
I feel like I'm seeing more and more stuff like 1.last in my own social life, coming from both myself and friends. We started out doing great with the online drinks and whatnot, but now it's a big chore to get anything arranged with anybody. It's like the constant difficulty of keeping track of time is accumulating and wearing everybody out. My mental state has certainly gotten shakier over time; the day-to-day sameness of everything I see and do is beginning to drive me nuts. Spent most of the last 2 weekends drunk and progress on all those home fixit projects I was going to knock out has slowed to a crawl.
But. Still employed, and might even be working soon, so.
Sorry Barry.
Oh also, I saw Hamilton finally, and I ... really hated it. I had listened to bits of the soundtrack before and so I kinda knew what to expect wrt the Frozen-type songs and the kids-tv-style rapping, but even so I was surprised by how much I disliked it, on every level. Maybe I could appreciate it more if I had kids and the musical was their entrypoint into getting excited about American history. But even then the ahistoricity and the problematic politics (like the insistence that Hamilton was in any meaningful way an "immigrant" because he had moved from one British colony to another, and the way the play deliberately confuses the colonists' fight for freedom with some kind of antislavery stance) is awful.
On London case numbers it's probably worth looking at this map: https://www.arcgis.com/apps/webappviewer/index.html?id=47574f7a6e454dc6a42c5f6912ed7076
34: Musicals are supposed to suck. Being less sucky than Cats is a win.
I worry that by the time the pandemic ends, lots of people are going to be agoraphobic. Also, the pandemic has been fantastic for people with controlling instincts, because they have the perfect threat to back them up. (It reminds me of feeling blackmailed when I was pregnant, because any contemplation of doing something risky was met with "can't, FOR THE BABY", which I intensely hated.) I still don't think it is a mentally healthy way to live, and turning that up to eleven for all these months isn't going to make those people any more resilient when the pandemic ends.
37: Agorophobia? Heh, just the reverse, I'd love some wide-open spaces. The term for fear of crowds is enochlophobia.
Angoraphobia is fear of fuzzy sweaters.
My local school just decided to go virtual for the fall. My university, as yet, has not, and I'm supposed to be teaching face to face in 5 weeks or so. At the moment I have no viable plan for taking care of the six year old while I teach. The university will no doubt shut down partway through the semester, but I can't exactly plan on that. Ugh.
I may just dutifully isolate awaiting test results every time he complains of a sore throat. Though I don't know if they've thought yet to actually ban family members, except for students during move-in.
Our school district has decided masks, no distancing.
At this point, all of the available options are bad.
I wonder if we're going to hit 150,000 deaths this week.
45: new hovertext? I'm pretty sure everyone in America could say that, except people who own online school software companies.
25: Can you learn Polish and move? Only half joking.
48 If our relationship were much further along I would seriously consider it.
I am profoundly depressed. Just feel a big weight on my chest.
So sorry, Barry. That's rough.
46: I should organize an office pool! I wonder what source is considered authoritative on this. This one says we're just under 145,000. This one puts us at 142K. I'm too lazy to figure out the reason for the discrepancy. Maybe one is more up-to-date?
The folks at IMHE, whose projections were at one time ridiculously over-optimistic, put us at 224K on Nov. 1, assuming no easing of mandates.
Our school district announced delaying the start of school by 3 weeks for an extra 3 weeks of teacher PD. Then the first four weeks will be online. That may be extended, but the plan right now is to resume F2F in October.
The current policy is that teachers have to teach remotely from their classrooms. This was a very contentious point during the school board meeting on Monday, so maybe it will change. When asked about teachers with children who will themselves be learning remotely, the answer was that teachers can bring their own children to their classroom, while the teacher teaches their own class remotely.
(We are currently pairing with another family to try to find a babysitter to cover at least some of this. And we may in fact send some kids to the high school with Jammies, if he's required to teach remotely from his classroom. It will somehow work out.)
Sympathies, Barry.
[tangentially, I just learned that Rex Stout's wife was named Pola and was an accomplished designer.]
Oh, Barry, just catching up. What a blow to your happiness and quality of life. I am so sorry.
52: Teaching remotely from classrooms is nuts; with luck that will change. If they're allowing kids to come, it can't even be about not multi-tasking. So I can't imagine the rationale.
After a plaintive facebook post, I now have coverage for DURING my classes. One way or another this will work. But this year can end now.
Thanks all. She won't be leaving for at least another two months though I think she's planning on taking some annual leave to go back to Poland for a bit before she finally departs Arrakis. The weird thing is I told her a couple of weeks ago how I felt about her and I feel a lot worse that she's leaving than if she'd shot me down.
56: The rationale is:
1. Taxpayers don't want to waste money on lazy teachers, and can we really trust them to "work" "from" "home"?
2. Custodians and staff involved in food distribution have had to come onto campus all summer long, so it wouldn't be fair for teachers to work remotely.
3. Some bullshit about putting on a professional face for the community, which is the fig leaf for 1.
The obvious solution is to have the custodians clean the teachers' homes and they can report on the work habits while doing so
Its been enlightening to watch a certain set of my more privileged, nominally Democratic acquaintances bitch about teachers unions.
Although, while I fear for the teachers, its the school bus drivers I'm terrified for.
The municipal bus people used to be getting covid here, but I haven't seen a news story in a while.
re: 58.1
Obviously this policy is bullshit.
But ... xelA's teacher has, as far as I can tell, basically not been working since March. We get a single group email once a week, with her suggestions for the learning activities the kids should be doing that week, which would take at most about an hour or so to put together. She's phoned twice in 4 months for a 5 minute "check in". The class Outlook email* has had nothing sent since April.
We've sent in work for her to review, scanned photos of xelA's writing, etc. Zero reply. Nothing. At least one other parent we know, who is herself a teacher of similar age school children, has been vocally furious about it.
* where the kids can email each other, and she can email them.
Sorry, Barry.
Although we were 'permanent,' my daughter went to a school made up mostly of the children of expats. She lost more than one best friend to parental reassignment -- one in particular was a particularly devastating blow, and came just at the beginning of high school, which was really not a good time for that sort of thing. I guess this is more or less baked into expat life . . .
No consolation in that, obviously.
When does school let out for summer, anyway? I didn't realize your schedule was quite so different from ours.
One local district teachers' union (which affects a few of the commentariat) earlier this week very loudly called for full remote to start the year. I imagine it would be very difficult for them to back down from such a strong stance.
The Infanta face-planted on the tiled kitchen floor this morning -- she was really, really upset, but the bleeding stopped pretty quickly, so I didn't think it was much to worry about. But then, 4 hours later, Iberian Fury got a look inside her mouth, and she has a really deep cut in her tongue, so now we're in the pediatric ER waiting room because the nearby urgent care center doesn't do tongue stitches. Ugh.
At least we got the travel medical insurance with the $1 million coverage ceiling, and fairly low deductible.
re: 65
Some schools finished yesterday. Some finished end of last week. xelA is finished now. He was physically in school last week for half a day to do the transition to the new school year, meet his new teacher, get a chance to see where his classroom will be, and so on.
The long war between babies and floors has another casualty. Hope things get better soon.
We are looking at going to my Dad's cabin (no internet) in the Sierras for all of Sept and Oct. It isn't directly fleeing the pandemic as much as the pandemic lets it happen (mostly because remote schooling looks so dreadful that I don't care if Steadfast misses it, and I can take the E-FMLA).
Strangely, the pieces are falling into place really conveniently. The thing that I am in deep denial about is that I would then be parenting my kid all day with no internet. Also, the fire risk. I'm trying to recruit other families, but they all say they are going to try to attend school. Maybe they'll change their minds after the first week and come join us then.
Just been laid off. Fortunately what I do have is two very particular sets of skills. Skills I have acquired over two moderately long careers. What I will do is find a job.
Some day babies started the war, some say it was the floors. Me, I've learned to keep my opinion to myself as nobody likes to hear "both sides are to blame."
Poor Infanta! Hope she feels better soon.
That's terrible -- good luck finding a new gig.
Oh bloody hell: I hope that both ajay and Barry rebound as surely the infanta will.
So, Pittsburgh is not going to allow the Toronto Blue Jays to play here because not even Covid is reason enough to risk having a home team that doesn't suck.
All sports teams should play their respective seasons in the corresponding e-sports game. Which would actually be quite entertaining as players are usually pretty good gamers too.
The Pirates mostly don't need the "too".
71: Good luck, ajay! I trust that soon you will once again be a nightmare for people like me.
As far as blog design goes, I think keeping things in a single thread goes along way to keep individual smaller subthreads from devolving into Reddit.
Oh, I'll be fine. I've got three months notice and a big wedge of redundancy payment coming, and I should have no problem finding another post. I'm an over educated journalist with a private school education; maybe I'll be Chancellor.
Fortunately what I do have is two very particular sets of skills.
I wouldn't be so optimistic. Now that lockdown makes it so much easier, there's going to be way more competition in the high-class assassin market. Good luck, though.
The Infanta didn't even need stitches, whew.
OT: I went into the my spam folder to look for something I missed an found a message from an extortionist threatening to release videos of something I know doesn't exist. But, the extortionist did know my commonly-used throw-away password and my main email. Does that mean I need to go around and re-secure a bunch of accounts?
86: If you're worried about your account with any of those websites being compromised, then yes. If not, enh, it's probably fine. Your data is probably in one of those big database hacks; you may want to sign up to haveibeenpwned. I got hit with this same scam years ago due to the last.fm hack.
You really should use different passwords on different sites, though. If doing that in a good way (password manager, or use a password system with a lot of entropy) is too annoying, do something silly but easy to remember like adding the first three letters of the site's name to the end of your generic password. Next time this happens, you'll know which site got hacked, and it won't be very damaging.
86. Almost certainly nothing to worry about. I've gotten a ton of those because I had a user/pw combo I used on multiple "don't care much" sites. They were swept up in a major breach (I forget which one) about a year ago. I knew immediately that it was fake because they claimed to have video from my computer's camera: it doesn't have a camera.
In short, they are sending you one of those fill-in-the-blanks form letters and hoping to hit paydirt.
I do use different passwords if there's money or something. But maybe ten years ago I wasn't so careful.
dalriata in 87- That's a great idea.
I don't suppose signing up the email address I got to write a paper for the fake journals that spam me would work at all?
The subject line is your insecure password and they claim to have webcam videos of you "haveing fun ... you know wat I meen"? That's been around for years, ignore it unless you still use that email/pwd combination at a meaningful site.
87: I was talking to somebody who got one of those threats. It was a password he had used with the bank, but it was 2 or 3 passwords ago.
It was such a good insecure password. Now I need to buy a new dog so I can get a new one.
You might as well tell us what it is. Maybe one of us can use it.
Sorry to hear that ajay. Good luck on the job hunt.
I knew immediately that it was fake because they claimed to have video from my computer's camera: it doesn't have a camera
Had the same thing happen. Sent to my work email which I don't use on my personal laptop and the work computer doesn't have a camera. The email didn't even have my password
I love how nobody says "I knew it was immediately fake because I don't engage in sex acts I find shameful in front of my computer." It's a pretty interesting future we've wandered into.
Update: I suspect it may actually be illegal for them to make me redundant this year. This will be an interesting conversation.
98 haha, I could have said that too. I mean that's what the mobile is for.
99 Good luck!
Bolsonaro has had COVID at least three times.
99: and they can hardly call security guards to throw you out of your front room with your stuff in a bin bag. What are they going to do, leave you out of a Zoom call?
"No! No! Don't deny me hours of pointless video conferencing!"
101: and he's been bitten by a rhea. This demonstrates the danger of letting rheas roam around the garden unrestrained. Fortunately they can be kept in one place using a simple electrical device called a rheastat.
So person woman man camera TV: there is absolutely zero chance those are the words used. They're not random enough, but maybe they're a reflection of something about Trump's thoughts. I took a test five years ago when I started some therapy and as an initial intake the psychologist did a cognitive test. I don't remember all five words at this point although I do partly remember the quick pnemonic I came up with to have them in one thought- something about a black car stopping at the mall. I wonder why no one is telling him he sounds like a complete fucking moron every time he claims "no one gets them all right."
Quick, name 5 things in front of your face
Yeah that's the most likely explanation. There's a family guy clip making a similar joke.
104: The unpleasant bit is that the polarisable insulator inside the device is a diarrhea.
Well, that was rather satisfying. Basically I listened to their explanation, redundancy terms etc and then politely said "I just want to flag up that you can't legally make me redundant at all this year because [details of terrifying ancestral curse omitted here for brevity]" and there was a startled pause and then they said "oh!" and said they'd have to go away and think about how they can make savings in a not-sacking-me sort of way. So, still uncertainty (not good) but things seem a little better than yesterday.
It must be so strange working in a country where workers have employment-related rights.
Can you be fired for cause if you use terms like "flag up"?
Reading the terms of my wife's employment has been edifying. Things are better here. It feels strange to have such rights.
Up before 3 am to go to a beach on the west side of Arrakis with Pola and another friend. It's already 91F with 67% humidity here but it should be a little cooler there.
Things here are going well aside from being stuck between two cities. I hired a couple of people this month and have three more offers out, feels good to be going against the current that way.
re: 110
I'd be curious re: the terrifying ancestral curse, given my wife has just been made redundant. Just in case there's anything we can use against her employer, or is it something specific to the terms of your employment?
Good news it sounds like, though.
Drop me an email and I'll send you details, but it's something pretty specific to my personal situation and not something you could use against your wife's employer. Sorry about that.