The View from the Hermitage, Day 23

Snippets of what's going on right now:

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson has been moved to intensive care. They say his condition has worsened but he is not on a ventilator. He first went to hospital Sunday when his symptoms "worsened." This reminds me of Donald Trump's Saturday trip to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center to "begin portions of his routine annual physical exam." Unscheduled? On a Saturday? Johnson's going to hospital on a Sunday evening suggests that "worsened" may be more extreme than one might think.

I know multiple quilters or sewists who are making cloth masks or surgical caps for whoever needs or wants them. One woman in my quilt guild has made over 200 masks and has “orders” for over 100 more. She and her daughter basically assembly line the things. The daughter cuts out the fabric and folds and pins the pleats while the mom does the actual sewing. I will admit that I suffered a minute or two of guilt pains telling myself that I should be making masks or caps rather than quilting a quilt that I first conceived more than five years ago. Then I remembered what the masks I made for the family looked like, and I know people are better off without any masks I might make. 

President Trump has been promoting hydroxychloroquine as a treatment for covid-19 despite the lack of testing it has undergone in terms of the current coronavirus. One such test, in Sweden, was halted after the drug's side effects were too severe. I looked at hydroxychloroquine years ago  as an anti-malarial for a trip to Cambodia. My primary care doc warned me against using it. At the time, I was having regular migraines, and the doc was worried about neurological side effects. Needless to say, I went for a different anti-malarial, and I would not want the drug were I to have covid-19, even as a last resort.

Turkmenistan, one of the countries we would have visited on our cancelled Silk Road trip, so far reports no coronavirus cases. The autocrat (aka dictator) running things has also banned use of the word "coronavirus." That's one place I would not want to be theses days. There are actually lots of places I would not want to be, but Turkmenistan would be near the top of the list.

And so the days somewhat run together. The numbers go higher each day, expressed with the caution that there are many cases and deaths not counted. Reports come from other countries; some are viewed as more truthful than others. Each day there are reports of, usually, elderly people of note (musicians, actors, authors, and the like) who have passed due to complications from covid-19. Each day I wonder more and more just where this is going and how it might end. The trite answer is that we shall see.

And as I close this, the BBC reports Boris Johnson is "stable in hospital and not on ventilator."

The View from the Hermitage, Day 22

My email inbox this morning contained a message from Amazon.com reminding me of all the things I can get for free using Amazon Prime. I don't need more books to read, and I can listen to just about any music I want, but it occurred to me that a movie might be a good way to pass some evening time, so I clicked that list.

As I scrolled through the various movie genres, it hit me that I was actively not looking at any comedies. And when I thought about it, I actually felt repulsed by the idea of watching a comedy. I would have thought that the dire situation in which we find ourselves, especially this week which they say could be the worst, would lend itself to something laughable. After all, I have no problem laughing with the husband and/or older son about life situations or, in the case of the husband, a funny Facebook post or cartoon. I laugh at Tom Toles's editorial cartoon in The Washington Post, but that laugh is tempered by the immediate realization that what is funny is what should not be happening. A movie-length comedy is more laughter than I can take right now.

So many things that should be funny just aren't any longer. 

The View from the Hermitage, Day 21

The husband, older son, and I took the family dog to the park again. She does love her weekly car-car rides. I pointed out that even though the park would likely not be very crowded, we would be out in public and should wear masks. Older son and I had one of those Homer Simpson "doh!" moments after getting out of the car with our travel mugs of coffee in one hand. It's not that easy to drink coffee as one walks while being masked. None of the people we saw there were wearing masks. They did not look askance at our masks, though. Except for a few folks jogging, everyone we saw was practicing social distancing.

In other news of the day, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson has been admitted to hospital since his covid-19 symptoms have not improved in the ten days since he was diagnosed. While I certainly don't want it to happen, would his death serve as a slap on the face of other world leaders who might still be downplaying the ferocity of SARS-CoV-2? How many degrees of separation might be required to wake some people up?

Staying on the other side of the pond, the Queen gave a short talk. "Speech" seems too formal a word since it was more analogous to FDR's fireside chats than a state of the union address. It was short and sweet and made some very good points. She's a tough old broad, that queen. When the husband learned there was a talk scheduled, he worried that perhaps Prince Philip had died in the last couple of days, and the talk was for the Queen to break the news to the country. I'm glad it was a pep talk instead of a death notice.

Finally, The New York Times ran an article on something I have been pondering recently, that is, how many deaths in February or early March may have been due to undiagnosed covid-19. Some covid-19-related deaths early on might have been misdiagnosed as influenza or pneumonia. An accurate count of deaths can better convey to the public the seriousness of an outbreak. It can also assist in the allocation of needed resources, for example, making sure the correct number of ventilators goes to the hospitals that need them.

Not a terribly exciting day news-wise, but at this point in time, that's what we should hope for.

The View from the Hermitage, Day 20

Just about three weeks in, I am finally feeling a bit of routine here. I have almost stopped writing myself a nightly list of tasks to take care of the following day. There is nothing, really, that needs to be done on a given day save to put the trash and/or recycling at the top of the driveway Tuesday mornings. And whereas I used to feel discomfort on the rare day for which I had no list, I feel just fine without one now. Perhaps the novelty of the new normal is wearing off.

The lack of things on a list seems to be making me calmer. The husband has described me as a light switch--two extremes, on or off, when it comes to my reactions. I appear to be moving toward rheostat mode. After three or so days of mask-making, I cleared the mask materials up and picked up the quilt I had been quilting before the mask intervention. The quilt is basically one large piece of fabric over another. My quilting is following lines in the the top fabric. The fabric is a beige shade, a faintly yellow white. After cleaning up the mask detritus, I switched Xena (Xena, the warrior Bernina) to her walking foot, picked up the thread in the little catch-all to the right of Xena, and commenced quilting. As I was picking things up to go upstairs for lunch, my eye caught the fact that  I was using an ever-so-slightly different shade of thread. The difference did not really show up on the front, but it was evident, at least to my eye, on the back. I found the correct spool of thread to Xena's left. You can imagine the profane thoughts accompanying this discovery.

While lunching and reading some of the morning papers, I went back and forth as to whether I should take out the quilting I had done and replace it using the correct thread. And that's what I did after lunch. I descended to the sewing room/studio and picked out the off-color quilting. I then folded the quilt up with the proper colored spool of thread in the middle, and postponed additional quilting until a new day. No fuss. No muss. No profanity uttered out loud. I knew what I needed to do and did it.

Is the sheltering, quarantining, or hermitting making me more mellow? That appears to be the case. I wonder if that is because there is so much less in my life now that I can really control that I don't feel as bad when I screw something up. I let older son know what we need from a store; I choose what to wear each day; I decide what to make for meals; etc. I can control my own little world within the hermitage, but view the outside world as one in which what will be will be. Whether this state of mind will persist post-pandemic, I have no idea. That would be nice, though.

The View from the Hermitage, Day 19

The local paper had a report this morning about a long-term care facility in Richmond that had tested all its residents and staff for covid-19. The results were sobering. Approximately two-thirds of the tests came back positive. Perhaps more troubling, of the residents who tested positive, 58% were "asymptomatic carriers showing no signs of being ill." The administrator of the facility said the results were consistent with other mass testing studies. The virus has also been found in at least five other long-term care facilities in the greater Richmond area.

My mother is in a long-term care facility here. It is not one of the three local facilities that have reported cases, but looking at the Richmond results suggests there probably are some cases at her facility. The facility has not let family or non-medical people visit for several weeks. The residents no longer eat together in the dining room. There are no organized activities such as chair yoga, bingo, or book club. While residents can still get together in a common area to chat, Mom says no one seems to be doing that any longer.They do take the temperature of each resident daily and ask about symptoms. If they plan on testing everyone, they haven't told the families yet.

The generations have flipped. I feel like a parent with a kid on a school trip abroad (younger son did two such trips in high school) knowing that there's nothing I can do except trust other adults to watch over and out for him. I can work to control my own little world; I just hope they're doing the same for my mother.

The View from the Hermitage, Day 18

Word on the streets and in the paper suggests that the CDC and other authorities will soon add wearing a mask to the list of mitigation measures. The menfolk tasked me with sewing some. Let me start out by noting that I am not a good sewist (you wouldn't expect me to call myself a sewer, would you?). Even in my quilting, my sewing lacks the finesse I see in others' work. Seams that should match sometimes don't. Seams that should be ironed in one direction get flipped to the other as I sew.

What I lack in talent, I make up for with questionable taste in fabric. Here, I am wearing the second mask I made. The first went to older son and looked very much like this one. I love the fabric (thanks, Carla). Getting the elastic sewn in was nothing short of a royal pain, and the pleats about killed me on the first mask. I had to call in an outside consultant with more engineering experience, the husband. He helped me get them folded systematically, and the result was not-so-bad pleats. The only problem, for me anyway, was that the elastic was painful around my ears. It also made my ears stick out.

 

It actually looked much better on the husband, so it became his mask to wear as needed.

If at first you don't succeed, keep on sucking ... I went back to the sewing room today, to try to make a mask that I would find comfortable. Older son has modified the mask I made him, connecting velcro to the elastic straps. The velcro pulled the elastic away from the back of the ear and hooked together on the back of his head. It kept the fit loose enough that he could wear it over one of the filter type masks he had been wearing. He brought various velcro and connectors he thought might inspire me.

I attached velcro the same way older son had. Given that I have more hair on the back of my head than older son has, the velcro was almost as painful as the elastic. I tried pinning fabric strips to the sides of the mask, to be tied at the back of my neck/head. This did not feel painful or awkward, so I decided to make a new mask with side strips as a prototype. I also wanted to try a nifty pleat-making diagram I had found online. Inserting the fabric strips was much easier than inserting the elastic had been. The pleat diagram actually did make making the pleats go more smoothly. With some help from the husband, I found out how long the straps should be to tie comfortably and not hang too far down my back. I tried the mask on--there are no photos of this because of how awesomely bad it looked. Comparing it to the earlier mask, I realized that the pleat diagram did not take up enough of the fabric length, which was why the mask was falling loosely over my chin. I managed to fit in one more pleat, giving this as the result.

The pleats are still a problem, but at least wearing this one doesn't hurt. There's room to put a filtered mask underneath. I noted that I made this as a prototype, but I don't expect I'll make another unless I have to.

And so passed a good bit of the 18th day of hermitting. A pandemic model from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington predicts Virginia will reach its viral peak on May 20. Interestingly, the predicted peaks for Maryland and the District of Columbia are in April. One factor in the model concerns businesses open or closed. So far, nonessential businesses in Virginia can be open as long as social distancing and the number of people in the establishment meet guidelines. I think our projected peak would be sooner if only essential businesses were allowed to stay open. But what do I know. Data science today goes far beyond the data science I did 40 years ago.

The View from the Hermitage, Day 17

Seventeen days since our retreat from the world began. Or at least 17 days that I have been writing this blog stream. I should have looked at the March page of the refrigerator calendar before I tossed it into the paper recycling. What did I do in the days leading up to March 16? Being an introvert, I likely did not do much. My ventures outside the now-hermitage-then-residence were more errands than social. I got my hair cut on March 13; I got nails done the day before that. I visited my mother on Wednesdays and Sundays when I picked up or dropped off her laundry. I saw my trainer on Mondays and Wednesdays. I guess the visits with my mom would count as social even with laundry as the errand component. The husband and I were scheduled for a social trip to lunch and a play on March 15. We'd already discussed cancelling that with the other couple going, and then the play was cancelled. That was the weekend that started the stay-at-home, don't potentially expose others especially the at-risk others mentality.

It's April 1 aka April Fools' Day. When will someone let us know that the pandemic has just been a long trick from a deity with a wicked sense of humor. "April Fools' Day, world population! Now get back to work!" The president said to continue social distancing precautions at least until April 30. The governor set June 10, some 71 days from now, as the endpoint. How many people might have killed their partner by then? Almost 90 days of enforced workday cohabitation might drive even an extrovert to homicide.

Being told not to go out into the world is heaven for us introverts. Being told to shelter in place with another person, even a beloved one, isn't, especially if that person is an extrovert who relishes the increased contact. Sheltering in place with a multiple-generation family unit would probably be even more stressful. I told older son the other morning that I can't imagine what it would have been like to do the isolation thing when he and his brother were, say, seven and five. He pointed out that it would probably have been worse when they were both teenagers. He then reminded me of some of what had gone on when they were teenagers, things such as his rappelling down from the upper deck with his brother's door strapped to his back, possibly the high point of the Doors War. There was also sledding down the stairs on a futon we were throwing out.

I'll try to keep in mind that all this would have been even harder with four people than it is with two the next time I have homicidal feelings toward the other guy.