The View from the Hermitage, Day 221

The final Presidential debate, airs tonight at 9:00. I hope to be asleep not long after 9:00 pm, though Son #1 has said he will phone if there is anything debate-related we should know before morning. The phone is on my side of the bed. I expect I will hear it ring even if I have my working ear pushed into the pillow. I expect that The Orange Foolius will react negatively to the fact that mics will be turned off during each candidate's opening statement. And if both mics are open while one or the other candidate is answering a question, I expect that The Foolius will again attempt to talk over both Uncle Joe and the debate moderator, Kristen Welker. I watched an unedited tape of the Foolius's interview with Leslie Stahl for this weekends 60 Minutes. The Foolius spent much of his time there talking over Stahl's questions before he ended the interview early. When given the five-minutes-remaining alert, The Orange Foolius said he thought enough had been done and rose to leave. I was more hoping for a rage quit, but that probably was too much to hope for. 

My attempt to save Halloween for the neighborhood kids is working! Only one family has specifically said they don't want to participate, and it's perfectly understandable. Their driveway is one of the longer in the subdivision, plus the female resident is recovering from a stroke and broken hip (she broke her hip when falling down during the stroke). The families that have been silent about having candy or not are older, retired people often with long driveways. 

As I typed that last sentence it hit me that I, too, am now among those retired and, yes, older folks. I guess because The Professor continues to profess and I hadn't worked full time in some 30 years, I don't really feel retired. It may be, too, that I've been too occupied with redoing the house to have the amount of free time most of the retirees I know have. While I am glad I'm not just sticking things back anywhere but trying to decorate as much as I ever have, it's taking a whole lot longer than it otherwise would have. 

I am wondering if there is a reason that the state covid-19 counts that are normally updated at 10:00 am have still not been updated. Was there something as simple as a date glitch, or are they trying to cover up anything? The local university's numbers have not been updated either, but the cutoff time there is 4:00 pm or not too long ago. 

Speaking of covid-19, the local university has announced its plans for the spring semester. Students on campus will go home on November 24 for Thanksgiving holidays. All exams will be given online only in early December. Students do not return to campus until February1, with classes as they are this semester, mostly online. The last day of classes is May 6. They will announce by March 15 whether there will be a graduation ceremony. The class of 2020 was supposed to get theirs a week after the class of 2021, but if one doesn't happen neither will the other one. The Professor is looking forward to the semester. He will teach two sections of the same subject but only online. This means that he tapes one lecture, but two separate classes watch it. His devilish chuckle when mentioning that to me should perhaps have been more disturbing than it was.

The university's covid-19 case numbers were just updated. Students showed half the number of new cases as yesterday, 8 to yesterday's 16. The daily average of new cases is still higher than last week's and scratching at the heels of the number from the week before last. I should see if I can find the number of students living on campus. Wait for it. Forgetting the percentage of students who live on campus (it's 39 percent of undergraduates), I just had a trip down memory lane on the website of the office from which I retired. Several things I was responsible for updating have not been updated, and we're not talking things delayed by the pandemic. Not my circus and not my monkeys. They're on their own now.