Coronavirus Part 6

My last coronavirus post was back in mid-October, in that post I predicted that we were still 6 months away from widely available vaccines. I'll give myself a point for that prediction.

In my second coronavirus post I wrote about my debate on whether to call it COVID-19 or Coronavirus and wondered which name would ultimately go down as the commonly used name. It turns out COVID was the winner, but I'm keeping the naming convention in these post titles, but I'll start calling it COVID in the post itself.

Today marks the one year anniversary of the day everything shut down. In the past year 530K Americans have died of COVID, which equates to about 1 death per minute. The good news is that it's the beginning of the end. Three vaccines are available today and they appear to be effective against even the more contagious variants of COVID that have popped up. Cases are way down and about 20% of Californians have been vaccinated. When things opened back up in the summer and the fall it felt too soon but now it feels like it's the right time. There are only 10-20 new cases a day in our county with 220,000 residents. 

As for us, Carly and I have both been vaccinated. Nearly all of the adults in her family near us have been too. Last weekend for my birthday we were able to have what would seem to be a pretty normal birthday party with us all sharing pizza and brownies & ice-cream. I'm now thinking about getting my first real haircut in over a year, though I still regret cutting off my mullet.

There is talk of being able to send the kids back to school soon, and we've started planning a trip to meet up with some friends on the Oregon coast for 4th of July on the assumption that all the adults will likely be vaccinated by then. We're still keeping our social interactions to a minimum but have started to think about opening the aperture (like for a haircut). While I'm excited to get back out to public places, if I've learned anything from the past year it's that I'm a bit of a homebody these days - especially with small children.

It's hard to say when we'll finally be able to declare victory over COVID. That's probably a ways away until kids can be vaccinated, but even then I'm sure there will be pockets of cases in the news for a long time to come. It'll be interesting to see what the long term impact of this will be on American society. Part of me thinks things will spring back to normal and people will carry on as they always have, but I also wonder if this will result in some major changes in how we value in-person events and activities like traveling to weddings or attending work conferences. Only time will tell.

Birthday Post #11

I really only care about social media 1 day a year. Just one day each year I indulge my vanity by counting how many people wish me happy birthday by text, e-mail and various social media sites. Well this year, that one day just happens to be the same day as National Unplugging Day, where you are supposed to put down the phone and not wish your favorite blogger happy birthday. What a cruel irony.

Despite the unplugging day, I still had pretty good birthday numbers, so thanks everyone for ignoring national unplugging day just so you could wish me happy birthday. On to the chart:

I wasn't expecting a full Rachel Morgan meter or a Ray Smith, but I was a bit surprised I didn't get called Fartface after getting one 7 of the last 8 years.  Everything else seems pretty much in-line with what I would expect.

Thanks again for the true friends of the blog who continue to wish me a happy birthday just for the stats.

Do Pizza Chains Veer Male?

As most fans of the blog know, I like pizza. 

Tonight I was getting into a 1/2 and 1/2 BBQ Chicken/Tuscan Chicken pie from a local chain out here called Mary's Pizza Shack when I realized how rare it was to see a pizza chain with a feminine name.

So I looked up the Wikipedia page on US Pizza chains and went through the 50 pizza chains with more than 50 locations. To my bemusement there are 12 pizza chains with "male" names, 38 with ungendered names, and exactly 0 with "female" names.

If it was just an Italian name I wasn't immediately sure of (Imo's pizza, Saprino's Pizzeria, Monical's Pizza) I gave it a pass.

Here are the 12 that were for sure male:

Hunt Brothers Pizza

Little Caesars *(While I knew Caesar is a dude, I also relied on the fact that the mascot has substantial chest hair)

Papa John's Pizza

Papa Murphy's

Marco's Pizza

Chuck E. Cheese

Godfather's Pizza

Hungry Howie's Pizza

Mountain Mike's Pizza

Peter Piper Pizza

Papa Gino's

Lou Malnati's Pizzeria

It got me thinking if there were other food types that were as gendered. It seems that baking mixes are mostly female (Sarah Lee, Betty Crocker), but you also have Duncan Hines and (while missing genitalia) the Pillsbury Doughboy. Given the large number of pizza chains, I would argue that pizza brands are more heavily associated with male names than any other foodtype brands.

I wonder why that is. Essentially making pizza is more akin to baking (with it's host of female brands) than anything else. So why are there no large female pizza chains? Is it some Italian heritage where the men make the pizza and that's held over for a century in the minds of the public that would scoff at the idea of eating a pizza with a women's name on the box? Are more dudes working in pizzerias and therefore more likely to start their own chain of pizzerias?

Who really knows, but I can tell you Mary's Pizza Shack was excellent, and I'd say it's second best of the 8 "male" pizza places on the list that I've tried.

 

Movin' to the country

After 7 fantastic years in San Diego we decided to move to Davis, CA. We loved living in San Diego where we had a wonderful house in a wonderful neighborhood. But with 2 kids we were starting to outgrow our house and after 9 months of teleworking I was able to convince my bosses that I could do my job remotely. So we decided to sell our house and move.

It really was a bit of a perfect situation. Carly and her brother co-own the property she grew up on, and her brother's family was living in the house (the one she grew up in), but they had decided to move into town, and so the house was available for us to live in. So a few days after they moved out, we moved in. 

The new view from my office

We're now living on 29 acres just a few miles south of Davis and we're planning to spend the rest of our lives here. The property has a horse stable and an orchard with lots of fruit and nut trees. There are 4 barns and plenty of old cars and trucks on the property that I'm dying to get back into working order. But with so many projects and so little time, I'm not sure when I'll be able to do any of them. We also have dreams of building a new house that suits us on the property and possibly starting a wedding venue on the site someday (we had our wedding here).

It was a dream that was a long time coming to move back here. There is a sense of security knowing that you're where you want to be long term. In San Diego we always had in the back of our minds that we would eventually sell our house and so many things we did were for the impact to the "resale value". But it's freeing to know that anything we do here, we do for ourselves and not a potential buyer.

Carly collecting pecans out in the Orchard

Blogging might be light in the future (happy 14th b-day to the blog btw) with the amount of work we need to do, but it feels like were finally chasing a dream we've had and that feeling is terrifically breathtaking. It's hard to describe the feeling of looking out across a big field and knowing that it's yours and the only limitation that you have is your imagination and willingness to work hard to make it what you want it to be.

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.