The View from the Hermitage, Day 215

The Professor and I didn't go to bed until 9:00 last night, but we spent the hour from 8:00 to 9:00 watching an old rerun of Perry Mason rather than either town hall. We did read various reports about the town halls over breakfast this morning. The winner was the columnist who noted that changing the channel from the Orange Foolius's town hall to Uncle Joe's was like switching from Ancient Aliens to PBS NewsHour. Most reports were complimentary of the way Savannah Guthrie handled the Orage Foolius town hall. One said she was better than either moderator of the two earlier debates.

I find it interesting that even though the case numbers now are, in many cases, higher or almost as high as they were in March, when the pandemic was first declared, people seem to be so much more lackadaisical about it now than they were then. Instead of picking up restaurant food or having it delivered, too many people now want to eat inside the restaurant. Even with tables widely spaced, there's likely a nontrivial risk. And I cannot at all imagine going to a gym right now. I know that the looming cooler or cold weather will be a deterrent to working out outside for many people. Even with exercise-induced asthma made worse by working out outdoors, I still prefer that to a gym right now. I walked just over eight miles this morning, or 96 laps of the small indoor track at the gym I was going to most frequently. Ninety-six laps? Fuhgeddabout it!

As for schools being virtual or in-person, I can see both sides there, at least a little. Most kids would, I imagine, learn better in person than online. Both Sons did several online classes that counted toward their middle or high school graduations, but then the Sons are, shall we say, a bit different. The courses they took were also designed to be delivered online, which I am sure had a real impact on the quality of the finished product. Given my hermitting, I have not spoken with any neighbors who have school-aged kids about how their kids are doing. This morning, Son #1 and I watched a school bus deliver a large ziploc bag of materials to a neighbor's child who is, I think, in first grade. I did not know the schools were doing that, but I like it.

The Sons did sign up for a 2021 ultra-marathon. It's in mid-March and is the last one they ran before everything shut down in 2020. As Son #1 said, if this one ends up cancelled, we're going to be in pretty deep shit then. The advantage of ultra-marathoning is that the runners naturally separate into solo runners or very small clusters. It's not like the local Ten Miler that has a gazillion entrants meaning that it's pretty much a steady stream of runners the whole way. There are also few spectators lining an ultra-marathon course, unlike a road race in a city. 

 I'm not working as an election official this year, but The Professor is. As such, he was sent a link to a map showing potential absentee ballot action across the state, by precinct. At the local precinct, 37 percent of voters have returned or requested absentee ballots. There are several local precincts over 50 percent. It is shaping up to be a totally new type of election. The Professor said he might have a slow day; they've extended the hours the polls are open from 6:00 am to 7:00 pm to 6:00 am to 8:00 pm. They've also made election day a state holiday which may or may not affect turnout. I expect that The Professor's face when he walks in the door will tell me how things went in our home precinct. The totals he would see, though, are only for the people voting on election day at the precinct. Absentee ballots get counted as if they are a separate precinct, the Central Absentee precinct. 

The Orange Foolius has refused disaster aid for California's 1.9 million acres of wildfires that destroyed over 3,300 homes, and killed at least three people. I'm willing to bet that if the governor of California were a Republican, aid would have been forthcoming quickly. The Orange Foolius at one point blamed the wildfires on Governor Newsom. I can feel my blood pressure rising as I type that. How do people vote for the Foolius? Do they see him as a god who can do no wrong? I do not understand it. 

Given the eight miles I walked this morning, tomorrow and Sunday will be recovery days. I will walk both days, but I will not be compulsive about how far or how fast. I earned that right this morning.

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 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.