Coronavirus Part 5

I really don't have much new to report over the last few months.

We did take a trip up to Davis, CA to visit my wife's family. It was nice to get away for a bit and visit the ranch my wife grew up on. It's very pretty and serene up there. Also, our youngest daughter turned one, and I did cut off my mullet. But other than than that we haven't been up to much. We've been trying to get out to the beach more since that's a pretty safe and fun activity.

I think like most people it's getting harder to stay vigilant. We've increased the number of interactions we have with other people, but I think we're still doing a pretty good job of staying safe. At this point it seems like there is another fall spike coming and while our area is doing pretty good right now, that could change pretty quickly. At this point it seems like we're still at least 6 months away from likely having any widely available vaccine. So I think we're trying to come around to the idea of being mostly homebound for awhile still.

I'm still holding up okay. Like I've mentioned before, it's pretty easy to stay home when you have young kids that are hard to take anywhere as is. I don't think we're really missing out on too much besides some social interaction that my older daughter is likely missing out on. But that's they way it goes I guess.

Coronavirus Part 4

 Well, it's been another two months. It looks like we are still in this thing.

Normally each year we go on a couple of trips, and do at least one big project around the house. Luckily we took a vacation to Hawaii right at the end of February, but since then we haven't done any traveling besides a few nights out in Borrego Springs. I always make a New Years resolution to visit three places I haven't been before. My criteria for what constitutes a "new place" is somewhat malleable, but this year I may have to get creative. I still have plenty of use-or-lose leave, so we're thinking about doing some camping this fall.

I spent much of June and July building two shade structures in our backyard. This was something we had wanted to do since we moved in but it always seemed like there was a more pressing project to do. Having more shade in the backyard is great. Since the Big Ten announced that the fall football season has been cancelled, I think I'll have enough time this fall to wire the structures to put fans & lights under the shade structures.

There is shade now, but it's hard to see with the lighting.

I've also decided that since I'm working from home, I might as well let my hair grow out. I haven't had my hair this long since I was in high school, and it's fun change of pace to have long hair. The last thing I've done this year is start to play piano again on the the Children's keyboard we got for our kiddos a few years back. I'm not very good, but I like learning songs to play.I feel like this has been such a weird year that it's a good opportunity to try some new things that can be done within the bounds of our new lifestyle. For those who follow my Instagram, you may have seen the progression of my homemade pizza from from awful to excellent. I'm pretty proud of that, since I'm not much of a baker.

So when people ask what I did during 2020, I guess I'll say that I built a shade structure, mastered homemade pizza, grew a mullet and memorized a song on the piano. I guess that's not too bad for a year, and who knows what else I'll add in the remaining 4.5 months of the year, because it doesn't look like this pandemic is going away anytime soon.

Coronavirus Part 3

Well, it's been two months since my last coronavirus post. I thought I'd write about my current thoughts on the situation.

In mid-may things started reopening in California. First non-essential retail followed by beaches, dine-in restaurants and - just last weekend -  bars. It didn't make much sense to me, since I look at our case counts daily for San Diego County and our new cases numbers never really went down. Instead it just was a pretty straight line increase. But perhaps we did enough during the lockdown to prevent the curve from turning exponential, so they thought it was safe to reopen. In the past week the number of cases have started to increase here, but are still relatively low compared to other big cities.

Even though much most things are reopen, we've still playing it safe. We haven't been out to the beach, or gone out to eat. We limit our trips to the store and our contact with others. But like most people, we've relaxed a bit from what we were doing in April. We've had my sister visit from LA twice and have been a bit more willing to go outside the house. As I see the number of cases grow here, I'm glad I've been a bit skeptical of the governments rush to reopen things.

For us it continues to be good family time. I've been working from home for 3 months now and it's been terrific. All of our trips have been cancelled, so we took a little mini-vacation out to our friend's vacation house in the desert just to get away from San Diego for a few days. After three months of being confined to the house it was really nice, and now that we're back we've decided to do a home improvement project to help us get the most out of our house since we're spending a lot more time here. I'm planning to build some shade structures in the back yard to replace the umbrellas we have back there. It will be a fun project and give me something to do. We typically do one big house project each year, and this is something we've talked about doing since we've moved in 4 years ago. So I'm excited about that.

I think mentally most people are over COVID-19. But the way things are going right now, I don't see this going away anytime soon. As people start going back out to restaurants & bars I have a feeling that the worst is ahead of us. But hopefully if that comes we'll be more prepared to deal with it, and not writing it off because they've been fatigued from 3 months of restrictions. 

I really have trouble with the people saying that they can't be expected to continue following lockdown orders after so long or who are unwilling to wear a facemask in public. These things are so modest, and have been for such a short amount of time compared to the sacrifices Americans were asked to make during WWII. During WWII the government rationed food, gas and clothes along with increasing taxes and implementing wage controls - all without barely any protest. What people are being asked to now do by comparison seems so minimal, and yet there was so much public pressure after only 8 weeks to eliminate even those restrictions. Its hard for me not to compare the American public's willingness to win WWII to their willingness to beat COVID-19. It seems like there are plenty of people out there who just don't care that much about preventing the spread of COVID-19.

Coronavirus Part 2

As I wrote my initial coronavirus blog post nearly a month ago, I contemplated whether I should refer to it as the Coronavirus or COVID-19. Those seem to be the two official names that I see in use the most often, but I do wonder which will succeed as the legacy name of the virus that caused the world to stop in 2020. Maybe it doesn't matter, or maybe it's a sign that I've moved past the question of my last post about whether this will be a major or minor event in my lifetime.

As it stands today, it's definitely a major event, but whether it's a 6 month or 2 year event is still hard to say. It's not as bad as many predicted a month ago, but at the same time the death toll and economic toll has been substantial but not not to the point where cities are being wiped out of people and jobs.  At this point it seems that were on the other side of the initial hump, but there are quite a few more humps to go before this is over, and while this one was supposed to be the biggest one... who really knows?

On a personal front, it really hasn't been bad for us. So far we have no first degree connections that are infected. We've been following the stay-at-home order and limiting our contact outside the house. We've begun wearing masks on our trips outside the house, but the past 2 weeks have been overcast and rainy so we've mostly been inside. Besides a trip to the doctor for a 6 month check-up and a Costco run, we haven't really left much.

I've been working from home for the past 5 weeks. It's been really nice. I get to sleep in a bit more and eat lunch with the family. It's been nice to be able to help out and change a diaper or grab some fresh air in the backyard while I'm on a call. It's probably not a great thing for my health that I'm working at our breakfast nook with easy access to the pantry, but it's a good set-up.

We've been cooking more at home, and even making more food from scratch. We've been doing homemade pizza every Friday, and even made some homemade pasta. The other night we decided to do enchiladas but didn't have any enchilada sauce - so we looked up a recipe and it was super easy to make at home. We typically get takeout 1-2 times a week, and while most restaurants are still open for take-out, we've been trying to limit take-out to lower our risk. I've started thinking about what I want once we can go out to eat again. So far Chicken Wings, Sushi and BBQ are at the top of the cravings list. 

Our house and yard are about as clean as they've been since we've had kids. It's really nice getting to spend the weekends just hanging out and playing instead of being busy with projects and errands. So far we haven't been significantly negatively impacted by it. There are a few things we can't do that we would like to, but really we have all we need at our house and I'm not minding the isolation.

The Week Coronavirus Hit

There are decades where nothing happens, and then there are weeks where decades happen. 

-V.I. Lenin

At the beginning of 2020 I had a conversation with my wife about how I felt like we were overdue for a global/national calamity. I told her how it felt like we had been on a long run of peace and prosperity in the world and that I wondered if there would be some global economic downturn or world war in the 2020s. I didn't realize that the global calamity would happen sooner than I thought.

Despite it being in the news since early January, like most things Coronavirus happened gradually and then suddenly. I recall being in the Seoul airport in mid-January and reading about how the first cases in South Korea were thought to have passed through the airport just days before. Then we were in Hawaii in February and hearing about a Japanese tourist who spent a week in Waikiki before testing positive. Still more cases popped up in DC as I was there for a work trip in early March. Despite these little overlaps it seemed like something that very likely wouldn't impact my life.

As early March progressed into mid-March it started getting more and more attention -  from both the media and me. Then all of the sudden it exploded in a 24 hour period a week ago. It seems much has changed since then.

The day it all seemed to come to a head was Wednesday the 11th. Over the previous few days it became increasingly clear that the virus was spreading throughout the country, and spreading fast. That evening in the course of about 30 minutes the following happened: 1) The NBA postponed their season, 2) The president announced a travel ban on all personnel coming from Europe, 3) Tom Hanks announced he had tested positive. I think any of those things would have made it feel more real to me, but all three happening at once was a total shock.

The next day more universities cancelled classes, the NCAA Men's Basketball Tournament was cancelled and more and more companies announced they would be sending their employees home. That afternoon when I got home from work my wife went to Costco to stock up on some essentials. She reported that it was a madhouse and the biggest shortage was - oddly enough - Toilet Paper.

On Friday morning we got word that our daughter's school would be closing at the end of the day for three weeks. I prepared to begin teleworking starting the next week, and all of the sudden it seemed like every event was being cancelled.

During the weekend we made a few more runs to the store for more essentials (booze & spaghetti) and we planned for what we would do if we were stuck it our house for awhile. Our house guests for the following two weekends both cancelled their trips. Since then we've barely left the house besides for walks around the neighborhood. I've teleworked the past few days, and so far we've handled the isolation pretty well.

It feels a bit surreal. But we have no idea how long this might last, and while we've stocked up on food, the stores are still open and have plenty of food. Hell, we can still order a pizza for delivery. So it's not like things are dire by any means, but we're trying to be a cautious as we can. After all, I do have the ass-mar.

I wonder how this will play out and how this is remembered. If the social distancing works and it fizzles out quickly will people look back on the stockpiling and TP hoarding as a major overreaction like we do with the people who built fallout shelters before Y2K or will these be days that future generations ask us about as they study it in school. If it's the latter, it's why I blog.

10 Years of Birthday Posts

I first started tracking my birthday facebook posts in 2011 due to a fluke. I was two years out of college and had moved across the country. Many of my facebook friends were from college and I was no longer seeing them regularly and I was starting to realize how much smaller my social circle was as a young professional in semi-rural Washington state than it was in Ann Arbor. Then my birthday rolled around and almost no one wished me a happy birthday on facebook (except my family) which only confirmed my suspicion that I went from being someone with lots of friends to someone with no friends.

What I didn't know when I created the initial post about how I was a friendless loser, was that I had inadvertently hidden my birthday on Facebook. The following year I was in DC for my birthday, and although I had gone out for drinks with some people from work, I found myself alone that evening and decided to blog about my birthday, but I didn't even include a chart that year (but that was the year that I started tracking my first non-FB post stat - Mr. Ray). What I failed to mention is that my numbers rebounded back to my average from college. Year three is when things really solidified into place for the annual birthday post tradition.

Year 5 was a big year. It's the first year I started tracking some of numbers-behind-the-numbers (total facebook friends, fartface, and double Rachel Morgans). In year 6 I started adding non-facebook messages received to the chart going back to 2014. Year 7 was my thirtieth birthday, so I added my total number of facebook friends line to the chart. Year 8 was bittersweet getting the coveted Double Rachel Morgan, but for the first (and last) time since meeting her I didn't get called a fartface by my friend Beth. Last year was year 9, and I totally revamped my chart for optimal tracking.

It's been a wild ride. So now here we are in 2020, my 10th birthday post and 15 years worth of facebook happy birthday data:

For those who may not remember:

- My friend Beth normally wishes me happy birthday fartface so there is an icon for that. 
- My goal of getting both former Rachel Morgans to wish me a happy birthday fell one Rachel Morgan short. A full Rachel Morgan meter is a very rare feat. Perhaps in 2021.
-Ray Smith is a guy who facebook friended my after we had a 20 minute conversation in 2008. He then wished my a happy birthday pretty regularly until he suddenly ceased in 2017. Since he was the first thing I really tracked I feel obligated to put him on the chart. I tried to use his face for the icon, but he has deleted his facebook account, which likely means no more happy birthday messages from Ray. So without his picture I was forced to use that of Ray Smith the Welsh actor who played the tough-talking police chief, Detective Superintendent Gordon Spikings from the British television series Dempsey and Makepeace.

As for the analysis, I'll keep it brief. My numbers are up this year, and the 6 year decline has ceased. I'm back at 2018 numbers. It's still a long ways to go, but my group texts continue to be a growth area for me.

Thank you for joining me on this journey of self-absorption and pettiness. I guess I'll keep on doing this every year until either I die or facebook ceases to exist.

Blogging in 3 Decades!

Hello blog readers!

It's my first post of 2020, which means this blog is now a teenager, and also means I've now been blogging across three decades!

So what's there to talk about so far in the year 2020? Donald Trump was impeached but will likely not be removed from office. We came pretty close to going to war with Iran. There is a deadly virus called the Coronavirus starting to spread across the world. The massive wildfires devastating Australia have been put out. Basketball great Kobe Bryant died in a helicopter accident yesterday. Billie Eilish and Lizzo took home plenty of awards at the Grammy's last night. Overall, not a great start to the new decade (with the exception of Lizzo winning awards). I say we check-in on these stories in 2030. 

Of all of them, the one we might be talking about the most in a decade, as a major turning point for world history, could be the climate change that brought about the wildfires in Australia. I suspect that this decade could bring about worse and worse natural disasters as a result of climate change. People may look back at those wildfires more than anything else and see them as the inflection point where climate change was truly perceived as a harbinger for more ruinous natural disasters.

With climate change in mind, I've recently grown more cognizant of the amount of waste I've personally been responsible for generating or that has been generated on my behalf. I've started taking some small steps to reduce the environmental impact I've had on the world. The tricky part is know what decision is best. Everyone knows disposable diapers are terrible for the environment, but what's the environmental impact of manufacturing reusable diapers and then the energy, soap and water it takes to clean them?

Other times it's hard to know if the scale of impact is even relevant. How many times would I have to chose to walk someplace instead of drive for it to counteract the carbon footprint of flying to Guam last week?

It's hard to know what is best sometimes, but other times it's pretty easy. I'm trying to avoid single use plastics whenever possible, and I no longer buy novelty things that I know are just going to end up in the trash in a week. I'm not sure the impact these changes will have, but I'm starting with the 'low-hanging fruit' as they say at work. I'd be willing to take some more drastic lifestyle changes if that's what is needed, but I'd want to know they will have a positive impact before I do.

I'm betting I find out in the next decade.