Tuesday, May 5, 2020

The View from the Hermitage, Day 51

I think the husband is experiencing some frustration with teleworking, though "frustration" may not be the best word to describe it. I was emailing a friend today and mentioned that I thought Blaine was missing two things: being able to get up and take a walk of some length whether it would be to the bathroom or to the main office for his mail. I sense he may also miss a colleague's sticking his head in the office doorway and asking how things are going. Those little chats can offer a little break and divert one's mind from whatever they've been concentrating on. When I went upstairs earlier, I told him hi and asked how he was doing. He thought that very strange until I told him why I was doing it.

I like the number 51. Way back in the day, I worked for someone who was turning 51. He said his daughter had told him it was a prime number. Without pausing--and to this day I still shake my head at the fact that I did not consciously think about this at all--I told him it was 17 times 3 and therefore not at all prime. He shook his head and commented that that may explain why said daughter did not seem to be doing well in the stat class she'd been taking in grad school. I did not try to explain that knowing whether a number was prime was not really all that useful in statistics.

And I'm going to keep today another worry-free (carefree?) day by stopping here and not musing on the pandemic other than to offer that I find it interesting that newspapers don't call it a or the coronavirus. It is always the novel coronavirus. I would think that by now we would know it was new.

1 comment:

Janet said...

They should properly call it Covid-19 or SARS-Cov-2. Guess it's a "style" thing for them now, like the Oxford comma, or whether to hyphenate co-operate or use dieresis (coöperate, à la New Yorker).

DIL posted a facebook essay by a mother of five on having a teleconference with a child's teacher telling her a child wasn't doing as well as before on reading comprehension, and the mother trying to explain how the house sounds like Grand Central Station (on a busy day, not now, obviously] and that she was losing it. DIL only has two to corral but they're still a handful. I miss my opportunities to give her some space.