Tag: coronavirus

In which we’re gonna need a bigger boat

On By Luther M. SilerIn life, Politics, Teaching12 Comments

I’ll get to the graphic in a minute; this is gonna be another grab-baggy sort of post. Bear with me.

I just finished mowing the back yard, just in time for it to start pouring outside, so I’m sure all the grass will be regrown in a day or two. I have shared my distaste for lawn work many times before; in fact, bitching about my lawn was one of my first posts around here. My wife, who is more fond of working outdoors than I am, generally handles it; my job is to remove snow, and we collaborate on leaves. You may recall that she broke her foot a couple of weeks ago, which coincided with the weather being nice enough that the grass came back to life; to her credit, she waited for me to figure it out myself that I was going to have to mow the fucking yard and didn’t bring it up until I’d ruined my own day. Having mowed the full mess over the last two days, I have realized something: I feel basically the same way about yard work as I do about writing fiction. I absolutely hate doing it, but the feeling of being done with it is absolutely stellar. I love looking at a freshly-mowed yard. I just don’t want to have to create the conditions to be able to do that. If I ever figure out how to enjoy writing as much as I enjoy being done with writing I will be at Seanan McGuire levels of productivity in six months.

Speaking of mowing: I don’t wear headphones all that often, so it was already kind of weird that I shelled out so much money for the AirPods Pro that I bought a bit ago– but holy shit, am I impressed by how good noise cancelling works. I wasn’t even listening to music for a good part of mowing the yard; I just had the headphones in with the noise cancelling on and I could barely hear anything. Cue someone hopping into comments to tell me that’s going to kill my ears, of course.

Regarding yesterday’s addendum to yesterday’s first post: I think, based on comments, that it is clear that 1) I don’t know anything about Great Britain or their money; and 2) It is absolutely the way people write about their money that is bullshit, thus Option Two wins. I don’t feel like it is unreasonable to suggest that if you are going to spend a fair amount of your time in a book talking about people’s income levels and how much things cost, and the people you are talking about use a monetary system that is no longer in use and is not exactly intuitive, maybe put a chart somewhere explaining how it works? I’m willing to be accused of shocking ignorance on this, that’s fine, there are lots of things I don’t know, but part of the reason I was able to not realize that the shilling got phased out however many years ago was that nobody ever explains what the fuck a shilling is in history books. They just assume you know there are 3.2 shillings in a Cumberbatch and move the fuck on with the narrative. Put a damn chart in there somewhere!

The feasibility study has been returned, and it turns out I’m not actually able to watch the Snowpiercer TV series without spending additional money. I had heard it was showing up on Hulu, but apparently that’s only true if you pony up for some sort of “Live TV” add-on, and … nah.

I will, nonetheless, bow to the will of the interwebs and watch this program as soon as I can do so without spending money for it. That may take a while, however. In the meantime, Avatar: the Last Airbender is on Netflix and I somehow haven’t finished Season 5 of She-Ra yet so I need to up my TV-watching time as a percentage of my day.

I have seen a couple of different variations of the graphic at the top of this post floating around on the internet recently, as well as a couple of different NO NO THIS IS THE INTERNET BEING STUPID types of counter-posts. Folks, the official CDC “considerations” are right here; feel free to look at them yourself and compare them to whatever version of the graphic you’ve seen recently. The paraphrasing is essentially accurate, and the fact that the CDC, whether they’re calling them “guidelines” or “considerations”, doesn’t actually have the power to make their thoughts law doesn’t really matter. The point is, the fucking Center for Disease Control has effectively said that there is no way to safely open schools. Because these “guidelines” or “considerations” or whatever the fuck you want to call them are impossible, and every teacher and other adult who has ever spent any time in schools knows that. I am done for the year, effectively, and my son’s last day was yesterday (I still have some PD stuff over the next couple of weeks, and grades have to be finalized, but there is no further e-learning this year) and there is a lot of time for things to change one way or another between now and August, but the way things stand right now we are not going to be able to reopen schools this fall. Not safely, at least. I know the person in the White House doesn’t give a damn; that’s perfectly clear, but so far the governors have been more reasonable.

Speaking of governors, I had this conversation with my wife earlier:

For context, Woody Whoever’s last name is not Whoever and he is running for Governor as a Democrat, and he is running such a low-key, bullshit campaign that I literally didn’t know that there even was a gubernatorial race this year until seeing his name on my primary ballot. I do not at this time remember his last name and I’m not about to look it up. I did some quick research before I marked his name on the primary ballot (not that it would have mattered, as he was the only candidate) and he seems basically competent, but Gov. Holcomb is one of the few Republicans I’m aware of who I would also describe as “basically competent.” He’s shit on education, but so is everyone else in the damn world. Obama was shit on education. I’ve voted for one candidate who was good on education policy in the last fifteen years or so and she turned out to be a shitty politician and got voted right out again after her first term. It just doesn’t happen that damn often.

Regarding the headline to this post: when I initially wrote it I had plans to tie it into one of the parts of the post, and it was going to make sense and be at least moderately funny in the way my post titles occasionally are, and I have completely forgotten what the hell I was going to tie it into or how– something about classroom size, maybe?– but I’m not going to change it. “I am an idiot” is definitely a theme of this post so we may as well run that shit straight into the ground while we still can.

3:24 PM, Friday, May 22: 1,590,349 confirmed cases and 95,490 Americans dead.

In which we’re all gonna die

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy1 Comment

The Wonder Woman Funko POP on the far left is brand new as of today; do I keep her with the other Wonder Woman or move her with the other three Funkos on the desk?

These are the questions that keep me up at night.

I have left the house more in this last week than in the six weeks prior to it, mostly because I have to drive my wife to and from work, which is automatically two trips a day, and I went and got groceries yesterday and picked up the grill and blah blah blah. I had a couple more errands that needed running today, unfortunately, but other than work runs I shouldn’t really need to go anywhere for most of next week. When I’m out, I’m wearing a bandana over my face, and I have a friend who is a seamstress making a few proper masks for us. Witness:

We are under a state order right now to wear masks when in “enclosed public spaces,” and the county health department has released a bunch of recommendations as well. What this has led to is a bunch of businesses posting prominent signs outside that you need to have a mask on to be inside … and a bunch of people inside without masks on. One of the errands I had to run was to the pet store, and I was in and out in under five minutes, and less than half of the customers I saw while I was in there were wearing masks. Indiana has had 1400 Covid-related deaths, and St. Joseph county is closing in on its thousandth confirmed case.

This is not fucking complicated, God damn it. It blows my mind that, three years and some change into this person’s administration, the GOP is still finding new ways to be venal and cruel and stupid, and then it blows my mind that I’m still capable of being surprised by these people. Wear a mask so that you don’t get sick! Wear a mask so that you don’t get other people sick! Why is this difficult? Why is “stop being a fucking asshole” a partisan statement?

My Google-fu has failed me, but I saw a clip of a comedian a bit back where he explained that he’s figured out the equation for this administration, which is (surprised x disappointed)2, because if you multiply it properly, first you’re surprised that you’re surprised, then you’re surprised that you’re disappointed, then you’re disappointed that you’re surprised, then you’re disappointed that you’re disappointed. Or something close to that, anyway. I can’t find it.

The other thing I want to bitch about is that on three different occasions today I have either read or heard people speculating about the “second wave” of this disaster that’s coming this fall. Y’all, this shit hasn’t slowed down yet. If anything, we’ve plateaued. There are a few specific localities in America that have bent the curve a bit but they’re about to be overwhelmed by the states that are all opening too fast– probably about another week from now, if past experience is worth anything. We can’t have a fucking second wave if the first wave never stops. And the way things are going, this isn’t going to get any better anytime soon. We have an entire fucking political party openly fucking dedicated to making it worse. We’re fucked for as long as any of these people hold any power, damn it.

5:25 PM, Saturday May 9: the world crossed four million confirmed infections today, with 1,305,199 of those being in America; 78,469 Americans have died, and we’ll be over 80K by the end of the weekend. And y’all are too fucking manly to wear a mask. Fucking idiots.

OK Boomer

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy3 Comments

Our grill has shit the bed, so we ordered a new one from Lowe’s, finding it online and setting it up to be picked up curbside at the store. I dunno if you’ve done this or not, but the way it works (at least at our Lowe’s) is that you pull into one of about eight labeled parking spots, dial a phone number, put in an extension, and then tell the person who answers the phone your order number and the spot you’re in. It took me a few seconds longer than it might have because I didn’t immediately realize that you can dial a # extension pretty much any time I want (I was waiting for a “to dial a specific extension, press blabla” prompt) but somebody answered the phone and said they’d be outside with my grill in a few minutes.

Cool.

Five minutes or so later I hear the unmistakable sound of a grill being rolled across a parking lot, and I put on my mask and hopped out of the car, figuring social distancing or not there’s no way dude is going to get this thing in my trunk by himself. And I notice that the guy pushing my grill out to me is being followed, at quite a bit less than a six foot distance, by a mask-free woman (note that wearing a mask in any retail store is currently mandated by our governor) who is highly upset that he is bringing me a grill and not bringing her something. Apparently she belongs to the minivan a space over, and she tried to call the number but no one answered and apparently this massive sin is worth abusing this poor dude who had nothing to do with it.

Dude, to his credit, is doing an admirable job of not getting caught up in her shit, and when a moment later she looks over at me and snots that She will Never Use This Service Again, but it’s Good that You got HIS Stuff for Him, he actually rolled his eyes at me, correctly figuring out that I was as annoyed by her as he was.

So, uh, Karen, look here: you either don’t know how to use a cell phone or you don’t possess the awareness necessary to realize that, every once in a while, it’s possible that people in retail jobs are busy and maybe you call back in two or three minutes if your call isn’t instantly answered. You also don’t have the sense to realize that you do not need to involve me in your shit. I don’t want to be involved in your shit, I have no reason to be involved in your shit, and if you insist on me being involved in your shit, you will probably not like the way that I involve myself, which will be to mock you into the grave and back. Because I don’t give a fuck if you had to call these folks twice.

A moment later, while the gentleman and I were ignoring the shit out of her and putting my grill in my trunk, someone else came out with all of her mulch, so … what, you got through after all? Was that whole thing just bullshit? Who the fuck knows.

Please don’t try to involve me in your customer service drama, people. I am always on their side, even if they’re wrong. If I need to paint that on my fucking mask, I’m happy to.

OK I’m done now

On By Luther M. SilerIn life2 Comments

I made an attempt to leave the house today– we have something we need to pick up from the post office, and my wife is home today too so we’re not abandoning the boy to his own devices all day, and I thought I’d go ahead and take the hit and go pick up the thing at the post office and maybe hit up Target or something for some printer paper, which we also need to print out his thousands of e-learning assignments.

We have two aging N-95 masks in the house, and my wife has been wearing one of them during grocery trips. I checked out the other one and decided that the elastic didn’t seem likely to hold up for the duration of my trip, so I grabbed one of my bandanas, which, folded properly, makes an acceptable mask– I couldn’t blow any air through it, which, I understand, is the standard to look for for these things.

Turns out that the line at the post office was long, reaching to the door, which got me a dirty look from the dude who I came within six feet of while attempting to actually enter the lobby in the first place. Then I forgot the number for my damn PO Box (I need to write it on the key; this is not the first time this has happened) and while I was putting my key in the wrong box I got hit with a full-fledged nope nope nope nope nope get this thing off your face off off NOW panic attack.

So, no standing in line, no even finding the right box– I hightailed it back to the car and sat there for ten minutes or so, trying to get my heart rate back to something approximating normal and looking up my damn PO Box on my website (PO Box 2663, South Bend, IN 46618! Send me stuff! I’ll never actually pick it up!) and it never actually happened so eventually I just went home. It was a good 10 minutes after I got home that I started feeling normal, too.

This has happened once before while trying to wear a mask– those of you who have been around a while and have really good memories might recall me trying to wear a faceless mirror mask for Halloween one year, and that was before I was actually on anti-anxiety meds.

I guess I’m just gonna stay on quarantine for a while longer, then.

2:28 PM, Monday April 20th: 766,212 confirmed infections and 40,905 deaths.

In which I cannot with these people

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy3 Comments

This is one of those days, y’all. Everyone and everything is on my nerves and it is getting harder and harder to deal with the fact that we are governed by the worst and stupidest people among us. Like, it’s fun to yammer on about fucking Darwin Awards and some shit– some of these dumb bastards are going to die because of their stupid little protests, and they’re going to make a whole bunch of other people who are fucking smarter than them sick along the way, and if the fucking virus was somehow able to only infect the motherfuckers who deserve it we’d be fine, but it’s a fucking virus and it doesn’t work like that. Because these ignorant assholes are going to get a lot of people killed, and it’s too bad that we can’t find a way to ensure that the people get killed are all them. “Dying of coronavirus to own the libs” is supposed to be sarcastic, you bumblefucks.

Stay the fuck inside.

If you don’t want to stay the fuck inside, stay the fuck inside anyway.

Enough of this shit.

7:40 PM, Saturday April 18: 732,197 and 38,664, and– guess what– the states that don’t have stay-at-home orders are all seeing spikes in infections. You stupid fucks.

Let’s be clear about something

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy, Politics2 Comments

I was gonna put this on Twitter, but suddenly I feel like putting it somewhere I can link to it later might be useful.

I have grown excessively tired of the (somehow, surprisingly) large number of people who are claiming that “no one could have predicted” COVID-19. In general, actually, I’m tired of the phrase “no one could have predicted” altogether, which generally means that plenty of people already did predict it and you just weren’t paying attention.

Y’all, damn near any educated person could have predicted this, and most of them have at some point or another. You don’t have to be an epidemiologist or even a doctor to realize that the most dangerous kind of virus for causing a pandemic is the type that 1) has a lengthy period where you are contagious but not symptomatic and 2) has a relatively high mortality rate once the symptomatic period begins. Literally everyone who has ever read The Stand or seen a movie about a disease could have put this together. Fucking Dan Brown predicted it in his last book, and he’s a damn idiot. It’s not that fucking complicated.

Furthermore, if the person currently running our country into the ground is able to fire something called a “pandemic response team” and if there is something called the Center for Disease Control whose budget he is able to cut … what that means is that yeah, people predicted this. There are entire fucking literal organizations composed of people whose actual fucking job was to predict exactly this and to notice it as early as possible when it (inevitably, because viruses evolve, which is also something no educated person is surprised by) does actually happen.

If something terrible were to happen and everyone were to look around and no one could figure out whose job it was to help fix that thing? That might be something that nobody predicted.

This? Everyfuckingbody predicted this was going to happen, sooner or later. Everybody who was paying the slightest bit of attention, at least.

Fucking stop it.

2:55 PM, Saturday April 11: 514,415 confirmed infections and 19,882 Americans dead.

In which nobody is kidding and this shit is real

On By Luther M. SilerIn Teaching4 Comments

There needs to be a word— there probably is one, in German at least, but I don’t know it– for simultaneously 1) recognizing how incredibly lucky you are compared to a whole lot of other people, and 2) feeling like you are completely unable to manage your own life. Because … holy shit, y’all. And also a word for I am complaining about this, but I am also not complaining about this because the thing I am complaining about is the right thing to do. That needs to be a word too. I assume y’all understand me.

(Cue absolutely everyone nodding.)

The governor closed down all schools in Indiana until May 1. May fucking 1st. And the mayor– the new one, not the dude who ran for president– put us under a travel advisory today. It’s an advisory only, mind you, meaning that there’s no real teeth to it, but it’s a sign that more may be coming. I am not going back to work for six weeks. And I have to figure out how to educate the proportion of my students who can be counted on to make themselves available for said education for those six weeks, and figure out what to do with the (probably over half) group of them who are not going to do anything at all during that time.

Now, this feels overwhelming, but balance the fact that I’m going to get paid to work from home for the next six weeks against that, and that my wife also has a job where she can relatively easily transition into working from home during that time if necessary, and that unlike a whole lot of people my job is not suddenly going to actually go away, and I really should be outside dancing in the streets at how lucky I am. Because my immediate family, at least, is (within the world of those of us who are not so rich that we don’t have to worry about it at all) basically as set up to weather this storm as we could possibly be.

In the meantime, though, and with that said, I’m trying to figure out how the hell any of this works on the ground, especially since the governor just de facto cancelled state testing, which is kinda legally mandated and has a whole lot of money attached to it, to say nothing of the fact that it’s supposed to be a factor in all of our performance reviews at the end of the year. And, like, school letter grades, which were already a massive mess. The entire window for testing was in April, y’all. That’s done now, and I don’t think anyone thinks we’re gonna bring these kids back on May 1

(we are not going to bring them back on May 1)

and immediately throw state testing at them. It’s just not going to happen. Also, like, every IEP in existence is getting violated right now, because as far as I know none of them are written in a way that acknowledges the possibility of six or seven weeks of e-learning. Those also are all legal documents that we can be sued for not following correctly.

It is, in short, one more huge mess in the thick of all the other huge messes that are taking place right now. The unprecedentedly, ridiculously huge pile of huge messes.

… and meanwhile, the number of COVID-19 confirmed cases in the US just crossed 10,000, mostly on the strength of New York State starting to take testing seriously and somehow getting a ton of kits from somewhere. Expect that to increase by a staggering amount over the next few days.

I’d say “take a deep breath,” but doing that might trigger another coughing fit, so I’m not gonna. Still sick, and still not with the ‘Rona, if anyone’s wondering.

Stay safe, y’all.

It’s not a toomah

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy2 Comments

Last night was miserable– hacking and coughing and snotting all night, and when I wasn’t keeping myself and my wife up the Great Old One was singing us the song of her people– and when I got up my wife insisted that I go to urgent care before this bullshit moves into my lungs. I don’t have the coronavirus, I swear— and the main reason I’ve been avoiding seeing a doctor is that I don’t want to get the coronavirus and I hear there are sick people in doctors’ offices. But enough is goddamned enough at this point.

Turns out my local urgent care lets you videoconference with a doctor, which is not a thing that I would have thought would be a thing. I took my own vitals and reported my symptoms and the doctor agreed with me that, yes, given the timing and the symptoms it was highly likely to be a really inconvenient case of sinusitis or something similar and agreed to prescribe a Z-pack for me. Super! Here’s my pharmacy information; I’ll go pick my drugs up in an hour or so.

Fast forward ten minutes, and my wife points out that my usual pharmacy is closed on Sundays.

Shit.

Blah blah blah lots of phone calls and sucking it up and swinging by the actual urgent care facility and it turns out that the only way to get the scrip switched to a pharmacy that is actually open today is to go through the entire online appointment process and pay for a second visit, which, yay for first world and middle-class privilege, because I can afford to do that, and my health savings account will reimburse me anyway so, really, who cares. So I’m waiting again; the first time I was in and out faster than I would have been for an actual doctor, but this time I started off with fifteen people ahead of me to see the doctor and I swear the number just jumped from eight to nine. Which is the wrong direction. But whatever, I don’t have anything else to do right now, and I figure getting started on antibiotics tonight rather than tomorrow is probably worth the $60 and however much longer it takes to wait.

I look forward to being healthy-ish for a day or two before I actually catch the Rona. I know I’m gonna get it, the only question is how long I can avoid it.

Whee!

(EDIT: Two hours later, and I’d been waiting for a bit when I wrote this, I’m still waiting. Now, granted, I’m not in a room with other sick people. I’m in my office watching Nioh 2 videos. But still. Graaaaah.)