The View from the Hermitage, Day 169

Thirty-nine days and forty nights to go, and we'll regret not building an ark. It has been raining solidly all day, including when I walked six miles this morning. It actually felt nice then. When I worked out outside with SEAL Team Physical Training, I used to love rainy workouts. I never did understand why attendance always seemed to be down on those days. I felt the same way about snowy or bitterly cold days. Attendance was down on those days as well.

Needless to say, an assortment of rain songs constituted my train of thought for a good bit of the walk. "Rainy Days and Mondays," though I am not at all sure why that one popped up. NOT. "Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head," "Who'll Stop the Rain," "I Wish It Would Rain," "Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain," "Rainy Night in Georgia," "It Never Rains in Southern California." There's also the wider- reaching "Stormy Weather." 

Book sorting continues. I have amassed a too-high stack of books I'd like to read. However, I am also boxing up books for each son, either books they left behind or books I think they'd really like. We took down a couple of small bookshelves that we likely will not put back up, meaning some books will need to go somewhere. 

The restoring the house goal of the week is to get rugs chosen for the living room and dining room. I don't want to order curtains until the rugs are in. We had a couple of accent walls put in when the house was repainted. The  rug we had in the living room would go okay with the accent wall there, but it's somewhat worn. The rug under the dining table does not coordinate with the accent wall there, to it's gotta go. We had dark blue or maroon curtains up before, but I want to go more neutral this time.

Just over 100 new covid-19 cases were reported in the regional health district since Friday. Ninety of those were in the local city or county, probably fueled by the students living off-campus trickling back. Students are supposed to submit results of a covid-19 test before setting foot on campus. So far, 17,090 results of pre-arrival tests have been submitted, of which only 51 were positive. That's a good sign, though most of those students were likely living at home over the summer and more apt not to go out for a good time than they will once they are here. I can always hope, though.

The Kentucky Derby will be run next weekend but without spectators. There was an article in The Washington Post today about a man who has attended every Derby since 1947, when he was nine years old. I read the article hoping that whoever decides such things could let him in. If they did that, though, I'm sure any number of other people would plead extenuating circumstances. Televised sports look very different with no gallery lining the fairways or surrounding the greens or sitting in the stands behind one team or the other. Evidently in basketball, the lack of a crowd drastically affects the acoustics of players commenting positively or not or hands or arms being slapped on fouls. There will probably be less of an effect for something such as golf or the US Open tennis tournament that started today. In both tennis and golf, the crowd/gallery is expected to watch quietly at certain times; that should lessen the effect of no crowds in those sports.

And I just received a text from the assisted living facility in which my mom lives. All the covid-19 tests done last Wednesday came back negative. They will do another round of testing this upcoming Wednesday. If all those come back negative, they may be able to let residents eat together at least in small groups with social distancing or enjoy some small group activities. And those would be good things.

The View from the Hermitage, Day 168

Another week down, the 24th. I would say that we're six months in using the 

                4 weeks = 1 month

 standard, but will instead use what seems like a more correctstandard

                1 year = 52 weeks; therefore, 6 months = 26 weeks.

Either way, we've been at this pretty damn long.

I am not sure that the university administration realizes the toll teaching online is taking on some faculty members, including the husband. In a field such as history or literature, there aren't as many visuals as in a field such as physics. Syncing the slides up with the lecture is taking a couple of hours for each 50-minute lecture. (I asked the husband if things took this long prepping an in-person lecture, and he said it took virtually no extra time for an in-person class.) As a result, the husband worked all day yesterday which was, of course, a Saturday, on the lecture he taped last night. The lengthy prep for the lectures cuts into the other work he's supposed to be doing such as his research or service to his department. He's on the undergraduate teaching committee and also assigns all the teaching assistants and graders. As we were brushing teeth yesterday evening, he sighed that he was ready for the pandemic to be over. My thought? Aren't we all.

His care in syncing everything up is not for naught. After the first class, he got an email from one of the students saying that being able to see the slide on one half of the screen and the husband talking on the other was very helpful and made it easier to follow the lecture than in some of his other online classes. So the extra time seems well worth it ... at least as long as the student remembers to note this fact on the end-of-course faculty evaluation form.

I went to high school and undergraduate college in a smallish town in Southwest Virginia, Radford. It seems as if the Radford University students returned and the town suddenly became tenth in the country on a New York Times ranking of the highest number of cases per resident. That fact was known when the local university made their decision to go ahead with having undergraduates come or come back. Word on the street has it that the university originally planned to make the announcement at 10:00 a.m. on Friday and was still considering options the night before. Something in that consideration caused enough indecision that the announcement didn't come out until 4:51 p.m.

In a related matter that really could and should have been handled better, the university followed the announcement by emailing students assigned to live in three dorms, including a language house and a residential college, and informed them that those buildings were going to be used for isolation and quarantine, so they would need to move to other dorms. If the "new" dorm cost more than the original one, they would not be charged with the difference. It did not appear, though, as if they would get a refund if the new dorm were cheaper. One would think that some warning might have been given earlier even if it were just an FYI type of message.

In the interest of keeping my blood pressure under control, I'm choosing to omit any discussion of the upcoming elections at any level. Tomorrow being a Monday, it seems better to wait.

                

The View from the Hermitage, Day 167

Former hurricane and tropical storm Laura was pretty much of a bust here. It would have been nice if the rain had lasted a bit longer. I split my walk into two segments before and after dog care, and the rain that cooled me on the first walk ws gone for the second. I still managed seven miles over the two walks, but that end of the second one was rough. I would not have made it without the hydration vest older son gave me. 

The unpacking and sorting of books continues. I managed to get the cookbooks put on shelves today. I don't have as many as I thought. A few years back, I went through my cookbooks and kept those that I frequently or occasionally used and those I realistically thought I might use. The rest ended up on bookshelves in the basement. Besides the general cookbooks, I kept multiple vegetarian cookbooks, some instant pot cookbooks, all my pie cookbooks, and the bread cookbook I use the most often. I wrestled with whether to put my large three-ring binders of recipes in sheet protectors up for public view--they'd been kept on a shelf in the pantry--and decided to do so. They helped fill the empty space at the end of one shelf.

Europe is seeing a resurgence of covid-19 cases. Unlike the earlier wave of cases, this is affecting mainly younger people. This does not mean that the more elderly folks are safe, especially now that it is pretty clear people can become re-infected. Immunity doesn't last as long as one might hope. I wonder how that little fact might interact with how a vaccine would operate. We get flu shots every year, and they last for about six months. How often might we need covid-19 shots, and for how long would they last? A bit of food for thought I might ponder on tomorrow morning's walk.

On this morning's walk, I pondered the shelves in the new refrigerator and how one might be moved to put certain things more at eye level. It is nice that these days the produce bins all have clear front panels. Out of sight, out of mind used to be a killer when it came to my interaction with vegetables and fruits. Now I can see and be reminded that those foods are good for me, and better the fresher they are. The new refrigerator is working out nicely. The husband is going to see about unhooking the automatic ice maker to give a bit more room in the freezer. The refrigerator is across the kitchen from the sink, and we don't want to do the work necessary to get water to an ice maker or drink dispenser. Ice cube trays work just fine for me. 

HWSNBN has made some pretty outlandish claims in the past couple of days, but I'd rather keep my blood pressure down by not detailing them.

The View from the Hermitage, Day 166

 

All hail the shiny new functioning Samsung refrigerator! We managed to pull it together with a lot of luck. If I hadn't given the local Lowe's website one final look, we would have settled for ordering something that would not arrive until October at the earliest. It will take a while to figure out the optimal item arrangement, but that's part of the fun. It does have a door compartment tall enough for a wine bottle or two, and a shelf in the body that fits beer bottles. I have emailed older son a grocery list, and he will hit the local Wegman's before he comes out to run tomorrow morning. 

The university waited until 4:51 to send out the email announcing that they're going with in-person classes starting on September 8. Students can move into the dorms starting on September 3. The announcement email began:

 "Earlier this month, we delayed the opening of undergraduate residence halls and the start of in-person undergraduate classes by two weeks. We did that to assess the spread of the virus, which was concerning to us, and to resolve some difficulties with the testing supply chain. It also allowed us to observe the early experiences of other universities, which have been quite mixed."

So the early experiences of other universities have been quite mixed, eh? The only ones I've heard about are the ones with problems. If they say other universities have been successful in opening, I guess I have to believe them. I would think, though, that given all the problems, a school with no problems would be noteworthy. The other statement that caught my eye was

"If we were to go all online and close our dorms, we would not be addressing the challenges that we have seen on other campuses."

I'm likely reading too much into this, but it almost sounds like a we-can-do-it-you-couldn't statement. We can address the challenges the other schools could not. Classes will start on a Tuesday. Does that mean success will be making it to the next week or lasting for two full weeks? I'm not gonna go there.

To be clear, I would like to see the university succeed because there are a number of people, some on staff and some contract employees, who will lose their incomes if the dorms and dining halls are empty or emptier than they otherwise would be. I don't want to see that happen. So for all my cynicism and biting remarks, I don't want the university to have to go all online unless they allow at least some students to stay in the dorms and use the dining halls. 

As for positive cases, the husband got an email from his department chair noting that one person in the physics department has tested positive. That individual evidently had not had close enough contact with anyone else in the department for contagion to be likely, so no other people will need to isolate or quarantine themselves. I hope the person is not a high-risk case and recovers without sharing it with family members who might be at risk. 

The husband's class seems to be going well. The second lecture was today. He'll be taping the three for next week tomorrow or Sunday, but probably tomorrow. We're supposed to get rain all day tomorrow which means the planned lawn mowing will not take place. He can tape lectures while I continue to unpack and organize boxes of books. I'm finding books I did not know we had. My current reading is The Night the Mountain Fell: The Story of the Montana-Yelowstone Earthquake. Said earthquake happened in 1959, so while I was alive and living in Montana at the time, I remember nothing about this.

And now to go open the new addition to the family and find what I can for dinner. Tomorrow I may actually have to look behind things to see what's there. For now, though, the pickings are slim.