The View from the Hermitage, Day 184

The covid-19 case numbers for the local university won't be posted until around 4:00 pm. Still, the husband received an email this morning from the chair of the undergraduate teaching committee in his department. She noted that she'd had a fair number of students with covid-19 in her classes and wondered if anyone else was seeing the same. The husband has not had any student tell him they had tested positive, but since he teaches virtually he can't really say if anyone in his class isn't there for a week or two or looks under the weather. I'll have to ask him if there's any sort of follow-up email. 

I mentioned that the local university's football game with its rival school had been postponed due to covid-19 "issues." The issue is or was that there were so many covid-19 cases the school could not have fielded a team this weekend. I do not know how many players total are on a college team, but they must have had a lot of cases. To cap it off, the players were fine until the rest of the student body returned. That's when football-team cases started to appear and over a couple of weeks to rise.

As for the charger to this laptop, my guess is that there is something loose inside it. It charged the computer overnight, and there is still current coming from the wall to the laptop. I'm not going to chance moving it before the new charger arrives on Thursday. I will keep an eye on the task bar just in case the cord icon disappears and the number on the battery icon starts to decrease. 

As I walked this morning, I was thinking again about how a memoir of 2020 would end or at least lead into the ending from the penultimate page. Those thoughts led to a listing of events by month. When I asked the Google about events by month in 2020, the first site listed was a very detailed list from CNN. Each month started by listing the number of  covid-19 deaths in the US and in the entire world. I did not find it hard to believe that CNN was listing events I did not remember. There have been so many newsworthy happenings overshadowed by the pandemic, the upcoming election, the wildfires, that it's hard to think of the lesser ones. 

The second round of covid-19 tests at my mom's assisted living facility yielded no positives. As a result, they're starting up some group gatherings with a maximum attendance of 10. They're also going to start letting residents eat together, though distance must be maintained. Given that I wear a variety of hearing aid, I can imagine two people, both hard of hearing, sitting six, eight, or ten feet away from each other and neither can distinctly hear what the other one is saying. It might make a good scene in a situation comedy.

Early voting starts here on Friday. That's also the date on which they will mail absentee ballots. Pre-pandemic, I had volunteered to be one of the officials working at early voting sessions. Needless to say, that's not happening now. It will be interesting to see the stats on how many people vote early, vote by mail, or vote at the polls on Election Day. The state legislature this year made Election Day a state holiday and extended the hours the polls would be open from 13 (6:00 am to 7:00 pm) to 14 (6:00 am to 8:00 pm). I told the husband I wondered how many people would show up to vote during that last hour. I may be surprised, but I'm thinking not many will. Maybe I should say that I hope I will be surprised by there being a nontrivial number of voters in that last hour. It remains to be seen whether the pay will be adjusted for that extra hour. Many people leave after voting thanking us for volunteering. Technically, we aren't volunteers in that we do get paid. On an hourly basis, that pay does exceed minimum wage, but there's no overtime for hours nine through 14.

HWSNBN held an indoor rally in Nevada, a state limiting indoor events to a maximum attendance of 50. Older son said that HWSNBN can get around such restrictions by saying it is not a rally but a peaceful protest. When asked about the lack of masks or social distance in the crowd, HWSNBN remarked that the lack of masks and distance was not a problem; he was a very safe distance from the crowd and had no one standing near him. Yes, it really is all about him. 

The World Health Organization yesterday reported a record one-day rise in the number of new covid-19 cases, 306,857. The biggest contributors to that total were India, the US, and Brazil. Make America great? Hey, we're up in the top three here. There were also more than 5,500 deaths, taking the global total to 917,417. How soon will we hit one million? Too soon, I suspect, too soon.