hrj

So this past week I've been dealing with my second bout of covid. At the beginning of last weekend, I thought I was having a bad hay fever attack where I'd missed the window to stave it off with Claritin: stuffy sinuses and headache, serious post-nasal-drip sore throat. Then Monday morning I logged a 100F fever and took a covid test that was bright and solidly positive.

Conveniently, this week I'd scheduled Thursday and Friday off for the online version of the Nebulas conference (glad I hadn't sprung for hotel and plane!) so I more or less took Mon-Wed off sick (which: working from home means I don't really take "off" because I log in for the staff meeting, the all-hands meeting, the interview I had scheduled for an investigation, and did enough work on my investigations to keep everything moving).

So I spent about half of Mon-Wed in bed (as I had on Sunday because my response to a serious allergy attack is the same as being sick). Sore throat was gone by Tuesday. I felt able to stop the OTC cold medicine on Wednesday and the sinuses were ok. Follow-up test was negative on Friday. I still have very occasional, minimal productive coughing, but haven't had any serious coughing other than that. So all in all, a mild case with trivial inconvenience.

Best guess is that I picked it up during my work anniversary lunch out the previous Wednesday, though no one else in the department has come down sick. Another possibility would be the folks who were replacing my water heater on Thursday, though we didn't really get up close and personal. Much less likely (based on timing) would be interacting with vendor reps at work on Friday.

I still mask routinely in stores, but not when I'm on-site at work and now when outdoors in public. This information provided for risk estimation purposes only and is not intended to prescribe or judge others' behavior. But I'm quite confident that if I weren't still masking routinely, I'd be on more than episode #2. In particular, I'm quite certain that consistent masking when traveling has been highly effective.

This past Thursday was my "2 weeks after 2 jabs" day and I'm starting to negotiate my return to public exposure. I've stopped wearing a mask for my daily bike ride, though technically since that was outdoors and well-distanced it's been optional for a while. (There's some temptation to continue masking for bike riding -- it prevents the accidental swallowing of bugs! Also, I think it provides some protection against allergy exposure, though I have drugs to help with that as long as I pay attention to the first sneeze.)

This morning, my "long weekend ride" was to downtown Walnut Creek and I had brunch at a cafe. Inside, even! (I told the waitress that it was my first return-to-restaurant event and we bonded a little over that. I tipped extra.) Later today will be a local party with friends. Tomorrow is hosting Dad & the brothers for BBQ. Tuesday I have a massage appointment. Wednesday is a delayed PAP smear. After the first rush of things, I have a delayed mammogram on the calendar, plan to make a haircut appointment, and am trying to make an optometry appointment (which is evidently rather backed up).

My sympathies to all those who haven't been able to get access to vaccinations yet. Despite what you may see in social media, the distribution problems aren't all about greedy industries. mRNA vaccines are a new technology and very few plants had the existing capacity to make them. There's a lot of activity going on under the surface to create new manufacturing capacity and expertise, but it takes time. Once that capacity is established, however, retooling for different applications will be faster and easier.

Cut tag, because not everyone wants to read about other people's vaccine experiences.
( Read more... )

1. Are you an Essential Worker?

Sort of? My employer makes an essential pharmaceutical and my job is essential in getting the product out the door to the market. My worksite has “essential business” authorization to continue in-person operations (and even to continue with construction activities to support future operations). I’m also a “100% WFH” worker. Discussing this with others, it seems to me that people are falling into roughly three groups: the WFH-privileged who are basically continuing with their job as normal without significant risk of exposure; the frontline-essential people who are authorized/able/required to continue working, but whose jobs require a physical presence and therefore put them at risk (which covers everyone from medical personnel to essential service workers to delivery people and so forth); and the work-excluded who had jobs that needed to be done in person but where the jobs are not considered essential enough to balance the exposure risk.

2. How many drinks have you had since the quarantine has started?

Who’s counting? Honestly, I haven’t been drinking alcohol at a different rate than I usually do. But my usual is a couple drinks a week.

3. If you have kids... Are they driving you nuts?

No kids.

4. What new hobby have you taken up during this?

You see, this is the thing that keeps slamming me in the present situation. I don’t really have any more “free time” than I did before. I’m still working a full time job. I’m still doing my blog and podcast. The time that I previously spent commuting is now spent doing yardwork and cooking, but those aren’t “new” hobbies. If anything, I’m feeling over-extended simply continuing with my existing hobbies. The closest I’ve come to anything new is that I’m succumbing to the sourdough cult and am being sent a culture to adopt and care for.

5. How many grocery runs have you done?

I’d have to go back and count up (since I’ve tracked them in my running contact-trace comments). Less than one a week. Normally I do “just in time” shopping, with generally 2-3 stops at a store per week.

6. What are you spending your stimulus check on?

I’m not getting one. My income is above the threshold. Before that information was available, I’d already pledged to distribute my stimulus check to worthy causes. So far I’ve distributed about half of what the stimulus check would have been and I’m still keeping my eyes open for things to support.

7. Do you have any special occasions that you will miss during this quarantine?

Not particularly special, though a number of SFF conventions are either cancelled/postponed/gone-online. I probably won’t be able to do my usual June post-birthday party, but it’s not a big deal.

8. Are you keeping your housework done?

A little more than usual. The kitchen is being kept more in order (because I’m using it more). I’ve run the vacuum a bit more often than usual. But most of my “work around the house” energy is going into the yard, which is usually way behind schedule this time of year.

9a. What movie have you watched during this quarantine?

I’m part of a regular co-watching club via zoom on Tuesday evenings. So far we’ve watched Emma (the new one), Amelie, and Clueless.

9b. What are you reading right now?

Feminine Masculinities by J. Halberstam (for the LHMP blog). I read Don’t You Know There’s a War On? by Janet Todd in preparation for an interview last week. Otherwise, my reading is broken at the moment.

9c. What video game are you playing?

I don’t do video games. No time.

10. What are you streaming with?

I don’t do streaming. No time.

11. 9 months from now is there any chance of you having a baby?

LOL. No.

12. What's your go-to quarantine meal?

I’ve been enjoying getting back to regular, creative cooking. In the Before Times, I almost never cooked on weekdays. I don’t have any specific go-to meal (except maybe breakfast skillets?). I’ve been making a program of working through some of the meat-share beef and lamb that’s been in my chest freezer for a rather long time. At the start of quarantine, I made a game of including some element fro The Produce Of My Estates in every meal, but dropped that when it started feeling like a burden rather than a fun challenge.

13. Is this whole situation making you paranoid?

My go-to defense against existential despair has always been pragmatic preparation combined with a large heaping of denial. I’m most anxious about the national-scale consequences rather than the personal ones. I want us to come out of this having learned some important lessons and having pledged to make this a better, more equitable, more just nation (and having determined to throw the right-wing bastards out permanently). But I’m paranoid that instead the 1% will leverage the pandemic as a means of becoming even more entrenched in power and finding ways to profit even more off of everyone else’s disaster.

14. Has your internet gone out on you during this time?

It did briefly for one afternoon early in the shutdown, but rebooting the modem fixed it.

15. What month do you predict this all ends?

I’m not even going to speculate on that. It also depends on what you mean by “ends”. When can we be entirely back to normal? When we have an effective vaccine, a better understanding of long-term epidemiology of this thing, and solid control over treatment of critical cases. As to when the quarantine ends...that’s going to happen in dribs and drabs, depending on the local political wisdom, depending on local conditions, depending on local disease dynamics. I expect that my employer will continue to take a conservative approach (just as they did at the beginning) and that my own specific job may continue to be remote for quite a while.

16. First thing you're gonna do when you get off quarantine?

When I feel it’s absolutely safe to do so? Spend a Saturday morning sitting at Peet’s coffee working on my laptop. When the international situation is under control? I was really looking forward to going to New Zealand for Worldcon. Maybe I’ll do a tour of NZ and Australia just because I’ve never done it.

17. Where do you wish you were right now?

About 15 feet away sitting in my garden, not feeling guilty for blogging rather than doing my dayjob.

18. What free-from-quarantine activity are you missing the most?

Hanging out in coffee shops, just passively being part of a crowd.

19. Have you run out of toilet paper and hand sanitizer?

Not even close. I’d just picked up a 24 pack of TP before all this came down, and switched to using a “squirt-bottle bidet” technique for #1 when took TP usage down to about one roll per week. (Is this TMI?) Immediately before shutdown, I’d mixed up a batch of home-made hand sanitizer (aloe vera + everclear) to make available at FOG Con, and the remainder of that batch could easily see me through the end of the year. (I keep a pump bottle in my car, but at home I wash rather than sanitize.)

20. Do you have enough food to last a month?

I think I could last 2 months with what I have on hand, if necessary. But I’d run out of things like fresh veg and cream for my coffee very early on.

21. Anything else?

I’m trapped in a cycle of feeling overwhelmed by all the online quarantine activities people are making available and promoting, feeling left out that I don’t have time to participate in much of any of them, and then feeling guilty for feeling left out because it’s a privilege to be able to continue in my regular job uninterrupted. While I don’t feel direct personal anxiety about getting sick (see: denial; also, I don’t tend to get badly sick when I do get sick) I do feel the same overwhelming looming sense of doom that nearly paralyzed me when Trump was elected (and for much the same reason). This would be a bad enough situation if we had someone intelligent, sane, competent, and compassionate in charge. I keep flashing back to that SNL skit with the actor playing Hilary Clinton holding up a sign to the woman answering the door that says, “He’s going to kill us all.”

...is I kind of forget what I did yesterday? I think I can reconstruct things. Started out with recording an interview for the podcast with someone in a European time zone. Great show. I love guests who have lots of interesting things to say.

I had a check to deposit and since I don't have that "take a picture with an app" thing going, I drove into Berkeley to my credit union only to find out that their ATM wasn't working (and they aren't doing face-to-face business. The deposit can wait, I just don't like hanging onto checks. It messes up the sender's accounting. Stopped by Peet's Coffee to pick up a mobile order of beans. They have a good set-up with both their doors organized with a service table across the entrance: one to take orders, the other to hand things out. Stopped by Safeway for the rest of the list and even though they were metering people going in, it wasn't a long wait. More milk and a few fresh veggies. I should have checked for half-and-half again but I hadn't get cracked into the "fat free half-and-half" and realized just how unacceptable it is. Look, folks, it's milk. Just milk. With artificial additives. If you don't want to put all the fat of cream into your coffee, just use regular milk, ok?

It's been raining fairly steadily all weekend (yay rain!) which was ok since the green can is already full, but it meant I didn't get my yard-exercise in. I honestly have no idea what I did yesterday afternoon, but after dinner I decided I need to accomplish something fairly brainless so I put Jane Austen videos on and tackled the taxes. That means (as it has for the last couple years) I started by tackling entering all the receipts since this time last year. They I enter and scan in all the bills. Then I reconcile the checking and credit card statements. *Then* -- with all the tax-relevant stuff flagged in the finance database -- I start assembling the tax data spreadsheet. Last year I got so furious at the way TurboTax is gouging for anything more complex than an EZ form and swore I'd do the free online tax forms this year (having bookmarked the site where TurboTax hides them while officially "making them available"). It means I have to do my own arithmetic (horrors! not) but since the pattern of what I'm entering is identical to the last several years, I'm ok with not having the leading-by-the-hand aspect of TurboTax.

Today started with more podcast interview stuff, then the regular Sunday DISTAFF chat, for which I actually pulled out some handwork to do while chatting. (Which opened another can of worms for sifting and reorganization: my sewing cabinet.) The rest of the day will be more Austen videos and data entry. And then it'll be Monday again. And how's *your* confinement holding up?

I keep struggling with the feeling that I should be being more productive in my WFH time. I mean, other than being blazingly productive on my day job. And honestly, I'm not being *less* productive in any way. I'm chugging away through Female Masculinity for the blog (which is a fascinating book and has me developing a number of new mental models). I'm doing yard work every day. I'm cooking up a storm. What I'm not doing is writing fiction. It's the only thing I'm not doing that I feel like I ought to be doing, so of course I'm obsessing about it.

I made a pan of lasagna today. I'd meant to make it yesterday, but didn't get started early enough so when I "left the office" I was too hungry to wait the couple hours it would take to prepare. Today I had the better plan of using the prep for stretch breaks to get away from my desk for a few moments. (WFH means I'm not moving around as much in the course of work--no trips to the copier to print or scan, no popping into someone's office to chat.) When I did my first Quest For Groceries I included the necessary lasagna ingredients because I'd found the box of noodles while doing the cabinet re-org and figured that was a good an excuse as any. They were "no boil" noodles -- you make up the lasagna with runnier sauce than usual and let it sit to soak a bit before putting it in the oven to bake. I can't say it was wildly successful as great lasagna, but it was ok. I'm debating whether to simply have lasagna for my next three dinners or to freeze a couple of the servings. There's a paranoid part of my brain that whispers that if, by bad luck, I get sick, it would be good to have a bunch of zapable meals handy. (And I do already. I've got about eight containers of soup stock, and another half dozen boxes of soup. Plus other things.

Today's yard work was starting to take the hedge clippers to the parking strip. I love having rosemary and lavender there because they don't require watering and they stand up to people getting out of cars on top of them. But they stand up a little too well. The rosemary is almost three foot tall in places and I only wanted it to *survive* people stepping on it, I didn't want it to barricade them in their cars. I'm thinking I should replace it with the ground-hugging trailing variety. Some of the lavender is getting scraggly and woody, which presents similar problems, so I should probably start rotating it out for younger plants as well. The main problem with the parking strip (other than people's tendency to leave trash scattered through the plantings) is dealing with the volunteer weeds. When I first cleared it out and planted the rosemary and lavender, I put down a layer of landscaping cloth that suppressed the weeds. But that degrades over time, and you get sediment on top of it and the weeds go ahead and sprout in that anyway. I go at it with the weed whacker a few times a year, but it needs it more often in the spring if I have any hope of keeping it presentable.

You know how I used to complain that the most exciting thing I could usually think of to do on a Friday evening was go to bed early? Well, every night is like that now. Since I've gone back to my early alarm (and am getting my blog reading and writing done in the mornings), my target bedtime is back to 9pm. So here I am getting on to quarter of nine and thinking: well, might as well pack it in for the day.

In commenting about my "ritual" for intake of take-out food, I was reminded of this poem I wrote back in the mid-80s when I was working in a biocontainment lab (level = "P3"). People might find some gallows humor in it. The particular organisms we had in that lab were bubonic plague (Yersinia pestis), Creutzfeld-Jakob Disease (CJD, a relative of mad cow), and Valley Fever (coccidioidomycosis, cocci for short).

Sonnet for the P3 Lab

With ritual do I protect myself

Protect myself from demons of the air

From vap'rous spirits that would steal my health,

All things I cannot see, but know are there,

So for my work I carefully prepare,

My circle, not inscribed with blade of steel,

But signs of "Biohazard" and "Beware"

Contains those I would summon to my will

Now do I don the ritual attire

The robe, the gloves, the mask, and other things

Well purified by water and by fire

Since last I wore them here within the ring

My implements for sorcery I bring,

And step by step I work the spell I've planned

Invoking Pasteur's name I chant and sing

As ancient dusty tomes of lore command

Now summon I the demons, each by name,

Yersinia pestis, cocci, CJD,

I call them up safe knowing I can tame

These evil spirits by my sorcery

But should I fail what ritual decrees,

One step misplaced, forgotten, or ill-done

One opportunity the wraiths can seize,

My circle broken, all my charms undone

Then shall the demons here escape my will

And, as their nature is, then shall they kill.

I don't know if it was genuine network overload or just the vagaries of trying to do video calls to other continents. Usually when I'm recording podcast interviews, I opt for voice-only if it's overseas. And now that I'm using Zencastr rather than Skype, it's voice only by nature. But I had a Skype chat set up with

hawkwing_lb and her lovely wife and since the whole purpose was socializing as to be "face to face" we opted for video...and managed more time with frozen connections than actually chatting. We're going for zoom next time. There may be a whole compare-and-contrast with different channels eventually. Though distance is hardly the only factor. I had freeze-up and lag problems chatting with

threadwalker on Google hangouts and we're practically spitting distance of each other. (But don't spit; that's not good social distancing!)

I think I've gotten bored with posting detailed food updates. And I found myself starting to be oppressed by the target of having an Estates ingredient in every meal. Life is hard enough at the moment without making up new rules that stop being fun. I may mention special meals, but today I did my Civic Duty and ordered Chinese takeout from GrubHub, which will last me a couple of dinners.

Today was supposed to be the memorial service for my dragonboat club's founder and lead coach. He'd scheduled and planned the day during his last weeks (stomach cancer). The in-person memorial has, of course, been postponed, but my email was full of people posting pictures and memories. What a rough time for his family with all the rest of this on top of losing him. And of course the international dragonboat meet that many of the club were planing to go to has been cancelled. I'm not part of the group that goes to races so I haven't paid attention to whether there are plans to postpone with the same sponsors and participating clubs. Like Worldcon, the hosting group changes every year so it may simply mean starting the qualifying process again from scratch for the next venue.

I finished sorting through the clutter from the top of the computer desk finally. Much got thrown away. I have a small box of perfectly good accessories for devices I no longer have. I probably should just throw most of it, too. Power packs for iPhone connections that got phased out two formats ago. My favorite style of iPhone case--still in the original packaging--for a previous model, because I liked the case so much I bought two. Touch-screen-sensitive gloves to keep your hands warm while you're working you're texting...hah! Not like you can have any sort of precision that way. I didn't take the time to check whether the Wacom tablet can still talk to my Mac, just put it away for later consideration. And I didn't deal with the contents of the three drawers full of connecting cables and charge packs and external storage devices I can't talk to any more. I have my limits.

I started the next stage of sorting out the spices: opening each bottle and sniffing to see if I could tell what it was. (Some labels are legible, some aren't.) If I couldn't tell, it gets thrown. That may cut things down to a manageable level, though then I'll have lots of color-coded jars all clean and washed and empty. I have something of a container fetish. I love having neatly organized little identical containers. I need to get over it.

Schroedinger (the "shy" cat) decided to get really loving this morning while I was sitting in the recliner. I almost thought she was going to settle into my lap at one point, but the closest she came (after lots and lots of head-butting) was to sit beside me on the extended foot-rest.

Don't worry, I have not been consumed with fever and been eaten by my cats. I just somehow forgot to blog yesterday. I wasn't particularly busy or distracted, I just...forgot.

Fridays at work are always a bit of a scramble because our deadlines are based on "calendar days" not "work days". So if there's a random distribution of due dates, Fridays get three times as many things falling due. We try to anticipate that and pack some of the work into the earlier part of the week, but...there you are. Most of my current investigations are spiraling toward the drain, which means it *looks* like I'm not actively working on them, but at any moment there maybe comments that need to be addressed and turned around immediately.

I have two new investigations, one of which I volunteered for because it happened as part of the same process as the other and since I was in the middle of immersing myself in the background, it seemed most efficient for me to do both. The first one involves some of the sort of document-history detective work I love doing. Where you trace back the problematic bit of the Standard Operating Procedure and discover that several years and multiple revisions ago, someone made a peculiar error that has never been caught and now you have to sort it out and ask how they were managing to perform the procedure correctly if they were actually using the SOP for guidance. And seemingly unrelated issues pop up in the mean time. Here's the basic issue: We have a procedure for shipping Object X from Location A to External Storage. We have a procedure for transferring Object X from Location A to Location B. We do not have a procedure for transferring Object X from Location B to Location A, nor do we have a procedure for shipping Object X from Location B to External Storage. Location B is full and we need to move some of the contents to External Storage. How do we do that? (Or rather, given that we *are* doing it, how do I deal with that because our procedure clearly doesn't allow for it.)

I also spent a fair amount of work time coaching my trainee (who, in theory, is fully qualified but that's different from being completely independent). I forget if I blogged about the investigation last week where, at the last minute, my reviewer required a whole slew of documentation on potential impact that was utterly unrelated to the actual failure I was investigating. Anyway, my trainee has an investigation for a similar part of the process being reviewed by the same reviewed and was told, "Provide me with this laundry list of documentation. Heather can help you because she did it for her recent investigation." Never mind that I explicitly said, "I'm giving up and I'll give you The Things because we need to get this closed, but I don't want this to be a precedent that these requests are reasonable or necessary and (to my manager) this is an official escalation that we need to address the question of irrelevant documentation requests." So the idea that my grudging capitulation is being used as precedent to require the same in another investigation is galling. (I told my trainee to talk to our manager and ask him to push back on her behalf.)

Yesterday I gamified part of my kitchen reorganization. The problem: I have a lot of coffee mugs. Far more than I need (especially given that I've got a full set of coffee cups as part of my china pattern). And I want to free up some cabinet space. (Currently one entire cabinet shelf is coffee mugs.) So every day I'll be using and posting a picture of a different coffee mug and asking facebook whether I should keep it. So far, the answer is: the vertebra-shaped novelty mug should be kept as a pencil cup on my desk, but removed from the cabinet, but the squat wide-bottomed "travel mug" should be ditched.

I had decided that, on my lunch bike ride, I was going to formally introduce myself to the regular I think of as "purple leash lady". (She has a very long, purple nylon webbing leash for her dog to let him run. Which means that any time someone is passing her and she needs closer control, she has to loop up 50 feet or so of leash. Which she does, but it's a bit funny to watch.) I've already spoken to her a few times (including apologizing for my initial comment, "you think the leash is long enough" because I realized that she's undoubtedly heard that joke entirely too many times before). But we missed each other's schedules because I was a bit late getting away from my desk, so I didn't see her.

To decompress over dinner, I've started getting caught up with some of the tv shows I've bought off of iTunes. I've been working my way through Versailles, but though it's a gorgeous show, I can't say I entirely *like* it. In part, it dwells too lovingly on physical nastiness (one of my squicks is body horror and it does a fair amount of that). But in part, I get restless because of how male-centered it is. Not that there aren't female characters, but with the exception of doctor-lady, their stories all revolve around the men. It gets tedious.

I'm having a bit more fun with Wolf Hall, though it's still a very male-centered story. I keep mentally comparing it with my memories of A Man for All Seasons and thinking about how entirely different stories can be told of the same events from different perspectives. Even as the viewpoint character in Wolf Hall, it's inescapable that Thomas Cromwell's story is that of a villain in some ways. And yet we're inescapably drawn into understanding the events from his point of view and seeing why every thing he does makes perfect sense.

I'm definitely getting starved for one-on-one social interactions, so I've set up a Skype call that I need to sign off here for soon. So I'll quickly summarize the food: breakfast - savory oatmeal with some of the lamb minced up and some of the lamb drippings mixed in. (I'm a big fan of savory oatmeal.) Lunch - lamb sandwich with apple chutney, lemon shortbread with mashed fresh raspberries. Dinner - hmm, trying to remember. Oh yes, the last of the lamb, reheated with some leftover steamed potatoes.

I was given a 5-question meme by

ursula :

1. Tell us about a spice you had forgotten you owned.

Looking over the bottles (which I'm still working on reorganizing, I found a baggie stuffed inside one of the jars with a folded recipe rubber-banded to the outside reading "Lamb Tagine". The recipe may tell me who it came from, once I open it up. Since Lamb is one of the things I have a fair amount of in my freezer, I should try it. Even the spices that I can't really imagine using, I usually remember how and why I got them. Perhaps the oldest (and therefore least likely to be used) are some jars that are more in the incense range than spice (though they could be used in some medieval recipes: sandalwood, myrrh. Cynara gave those to me, I think when she was packing up to move to Virginia, which would be back the year after the SCA's 20th anniversary event (where she met the reason she moved to Virginia).

2. What was your favorite book when you were ten?

It may not have been exactly ten, and I don't know if it was my favorite, but the most memorable book from that era was Alexander Key's The Forgotten Door. There's a bit of a story around me reading it. Sometimes at my grade school they'd rearrange the classes temporarily for special subjects and we'd find ourselves sitting at someone else's desk for an hour or two a day for a week. I forget what the special subject was, but I was bored with it and was looking around in my temporary desk and found a copy of that book. I desperately read it during all the sessions I was sitting at that desk because I didn't know if I could ever find it again if I didn't finish it. That book convinced me that I really was an alien child from another continuum and all I needed was to find the door that would let me go home again.

3. Tell us about a personal experience with fencing, archery, or another martial sport.

Let's stick with when I was in grade school. My older brother and I were always coming up with imaginative play in our suburban back yard (also on camping trips), cobbling the props together out of whatever we could find. Once we made bows and arrows out of old curtain rods and bamboo garden stakes and practiced shooting by rolling a bicycle tire across the yard and trying to shoot through it.

4. What's a fictional trope that consistently intrigues you?

Intrigues or haunts? I'm a sucker for the misunderstood loner who some persistent person breaks through and befriends. (What can I say?) I used to fixate on "noble vampire" types for that reason until I had a surfeit of the type and pretty much stopped reading them entirely.

5. What's something you are anticipating in the garden right now?

The summer crops are too far away to really anticipate yet, so I'll have to say I'm anticipating the blooming of the gallica roses that are planted at the corners of my herb garden. This year I think I'd like to try doing something other than admire them. Maybe sugared rose petals.

* * *

And now for the usual daily update. I'm starting to recognize some of the "regulars" on my lunchtime bike ride, especially since I generally see the walkers twice: once going and once coming back. Yesterday I was joking with one pair of women about which of us was stalking the other. Today I said hello to Woman With Very Long Purple Leash For Her Dog on the way out. On my way back, she was heading down a side lane to one of the apartment complexes and waved and I said "See you tomorrow."

My evening yard work was to finish the weed-wacking of the back yard. That's the first time in years I've finished the First Mow before the foxtails appeared. One of my back-fence neighbors was working near where I was and we chatted over the fence a bit. I occasionally meet one of the neighbors from the private lane behind my property, but there's so much turnover I rarely meet them twice. He's a heavy equipment operator in San Francisco (didn't specify what type of equipment) and still going to work. Not exactly a job one can do from home. Perhaps in a vital industry, so I won't judge.

My boss dropped a mention in the group teamroom this afternoon that our department has a new employee--since several days ago! (I believe we're about to hire one of our contractors permanently too, but that's not official yet.) I can't imagine trying to learn the investigation job remotely without a mentor beside you. But maybe he's done this type of work before somewhere.

Breakfast: oatmeal with plum puree* and yogurt. Lunch: boxed mac & cheese made up with yogurt rather than milk (tangier that way) and extra cheese. No Estates ingredient, unless you count the lemon* shortbread snack as part of lunch. Dinner was sorrel* soup made up with some of the lamb broth, plus toasted cheese and bacon sandwiches.

I woke up to the notification that Worldcon has decided to implement a virtual convention rather than either canceling, postponing, or crossing their fingers and hoping the plague goes away. I have mixed feelings, but mostly from a baseline of "everything is awful so let's see what sort of lemonade we can make from these lemons." Honestly, I'm a bit excited to see what can be done with a virtual Worldcon. Of all the conventions I attend regularly, it's the one where somewhat leveling the playing field in terms of ability to attend and participate would reap the greatest benefits. There are things you can't get without the face-to-face interactions, but there's a chance that remote participation will increase the international character of the convention in positive ways.

Also re: lemons -- I made some lemon* shortbread as a treat today and shared it virtually with my twitter friends and physically when I went over to Denise's for dinner. Yes, I transgressed strict distancing, but we did a lot of handwashing and didn't touch and I was getting really starved for peopling. I learned a new tabletop game and beat her three times. We'll need rematches.

So far this week, I've officially turned in three major investigations for review and expect to turn in two minor ones before the week is out. I'm not being quite as productive as that sounds, it's just that all the dominoes were ready to fall. It'll make my manager happy.

They sent out the payslips for our annual bonuses today and I'm feeling a wave of...not guilt, but awareness of inequities. I'm still working almost like nothing's happened, I have every support from my employer you could imagine, *and* I get a bonus. It's not that I think I don't deserve it, it's that I think everyone does. I plan to do some tactical shopping from small businesses and such to assuage my conscience.

Breakfast was bacon and french toast, topped with various jellies* and preserves*. Lunch was the solids from making the lamb broth with herbs* from the garden. Dinner was salad with tomatoes, surimi, canned artichoke hearts, and dill pickles*. Plus lemon* shortbread.

(* = produce of my estates)

There sure are a lot more people posting regularly in the last week! (Myself included.) My work day started with me being rather snappish in some email responses to my "we can't agree on a corrective action--we can't even agree whether to have a corrective action" group. Nobody got very huffy with me in response, although one person did say that he agreed with everything I'd said *except* for characterizing his position as "I'm fine with the status quo and having other people do pointless make-work because of it." On the other hand, I officially submitted two investigations for final review today, which are my two oldest.

Today's promised rain started just when I opened up the garage door to take my bike out at lunch. I never, ever complain about the rain. (Not even in Spain or on the plain.) But I'm glad I was 15 minutes late in taking lunch and didn't get hit with it halfway out on my loop. It was solidly drenching by the time my work day was done, so no yard work, but no needing to water the new plants either. I got some LHMP reading done over lunch instead. In theory I'm going to do some more as soon as I finish posting this, but I may read the new Decameron Project story instead.

Breakfast was the last English muffin with bacon-quince jam*, a slice of bacon, and a tomato-cheese omelette with some of the lamb drippings to temper the egg. Lunch was salad with surimi, tomatoes, dill pickles*, and a sprinkling of shredded orange peel*. Dinner was lentils cooked in chicken broth, with the Estates requirement being fulfilled by the herbs* in the broth. I also baked a couple of ready-to-bake chocolate chip cookies as an afternoon snack, but had the usual problem with temperature regulation in my toaster oven and the result was only passable. I guess if I want afternoon cookies I need to do a full batch in the regular oven and simply be self-controled about consuming them. (Ha!) I also carved the rest of the lamb off the bone for later use and set the bones simmering with onions and herbs* to make more broth. I have an atavistic fondness for making soup from scratch that way.

*Produce of My Estates

The mail included my recent impulse buy of Nimatnama (15th c recipes from India), which for some unaccountable reason had been wrapped in 5 separate layers of bubble-mailing-envelope. Well, at least it arrived in perfect condition!

Helped a friend track down connections in relation to a recording made at an early Darkovercon over the course of a couple fb conversations, once again proving the power of the internet. (Though he also pointed out that the chain of logic I used for identifying the most likely information source sounded a lot like my description of what I do for a living. He's not wrong.)

I've been watching all my planned trips and events for the next couple months disappear from the calendar and thinking, "When I said I wanted to take some vacation this year that didn't involve going anywhere or doing anything, this wasn't exactly what I had in mind." But I'm thinking that when the end of May rolls around, I should take some vacation time even if I am just staying home. Who knows what we'll all be doing at the end of May.

I've been thinking about Sunday's chat with the DISTAFF crew and thinking it would be nice to set up some more online video chats, just to avoid stewing in my own juices too much. Online life tends to be unsynchronized, so it's hard to know where to start.

Today I’m trying the whole “get up earlier and be creative before work” thing. It worked, although since Monday is LHMP blog day, the writing was all for the intro to the article.

Every time I look in the mirror, I wonder what my hair is going to look like by the next time I get it cut. It was just at the point where I usually cut it at the start of the SIP (shelter in place, though at work that acronym stands for “steam in place” for sanitizing large equipment). I sometimes think about trying a new hair style but you need to start out with more hair to do any truly different from your usual. Maybe this time...

Dayjob was frustrating again today, with stakeholders offering ambiguous and contradictory answers to a request for alignment. Closed one investigation and have about four more ready to drop as soon as one last thing falls in place. Once more it feels like I do nothing but nag other people to do their jobs. Except finishing my deliverables is never their primary job, it’s always something piled on top of their primary job. When they come through, it can be magic. I spent an hour this morning drawing up a list of people who rose above the call of duty for a recent problem that I’m going to recommend for a corporate attaboy.

It was too cold to do yard work this evening, so I settled for watering the new plants, just to tide them over until tomorrow’s promised rain. It’s probably time to run tests on the irrigation system, replace the batteries, and start it going on the spring schedule. I love the programmable irrigation channels that run off the regular hose, but I really, really need to get someone in to do some hard-piping instead. Sometime when all this *waves hands vaguely* is over.

I decided to take a break from home cooking and ordered in from one of my favorite sushi restaurants through GrubHub. Too expensive to do often, but I don’t begrudge supporting the supply chain when I do. I opted for a hands-off porch delivery, but when I went out to pick it up, I called after the delivery guy, “Stay safe!” He asked me to include him in my blessings. May all the gig-working delivery people stay safe and healthy and able to support themselves.

So I broke the Estates requirement for dinner, but breakfast was steel-cut oats with plum puree* and yogurt. Lunch was a roast lamb sandwich made with apple chutney* and some miracle whip that’s been sitting in the door of the fridge for about four years. I’m not sure that it’s actually food--it looked the same as the day it was bought. I broke open another of the Bingley’s teas varieties for my afternoon tea, “Mr. Darcy”. And I'm keeping a bag of dried apple* slices by my desk for nibbling. Somehow in last year's crop I managed the perfect dried apple. Although they only seem normally dried when I bag them up and pop them in the freezer, they must get something of a freeze-dry effect because now they're perfectly crisp and crunchy. (If I keep the bag well sealed, they stay that was for weeks out of the freezer, though they're still good if they go limp.) The current bag is one of the cinnamon-sprinkled variants. I may try even more flavorings next season. A powder douce flavor would be nice.

I didn’t quite manage to compete yesterday’s to-dos, since I didn’t do any LHMP reading. (I can count working on taxes because my to-do was to *think* about working on taxes.) I did make significant progress on organizing the desk, so one of today’s to-dos will be to move my dayjob workstation over there.

I have decisions to make about all sorts of computer peripherals, cords, etc. Once upon a time, I backed up my laptop on a series of rotating external drives. Now that I have Time Machine with most of the writing project data also backed up via Dropbox storage (as well as being far more data than any of those drives could handle) I have no real use for those drives. Besides which, the last time I went to use them I discovered that they no longer talk to my Mac. And it wasn’t worth the trouble to sort it out. But I don’t want to give them away randomly because not being able to talk to them means I can’t wipe my old backups. And I hate to just throw them out because...because.

I also have peripherals that I used at some point then stopped using for some reason. A Wacom drawing tablet. Maybe I could still get it to talk to the laptop? Maybe not. It may be too old to be supported by current OS.

I have a LiveScribe pen and several associated unused notebooks. This is a device where you write on the special paper and it records and interprets your writing and then Bluetooths it over to your computer. For a while I was using it to do the LHMP note taking. It worked ok, though not great. But uploading the data to the computer used Evernote as an interface and I got tired of Evernote’s awkwardness and dropped it. So I’d have to figure out how to sync it. It also requires writing very precisely -- sort of like stylus writing on a Treo was back in the day. And when I moved back to note taking on actual post-its, I didn’t have to simultaneously juggle a book I was reading and a notebook I was writing in. Tech is not always the solution.

Anyway, more stuff like that.

Most of the paperwork that was piled on the desk is irrelevant. (No, I’m not going to carefully file the business cards of people I met at conventions. My brain just doesn’t work that way.) At any rate, the desk itself is now empty and clean. I need to pull it out so I can vacuum behind it before loading it up with equipment again and threading all the cords into out-of-the-way places.

Breakfast today was fresh raspberries (not Estates -- we aren’t anywhere near berries yet) and yogurt, with a drizzle of Seville orange syrup to check the Estates box. (I don’t usually sweeten my fruit & yogurt.) Lunch was a light tea (literally) with home baked bread and marmalade while on a Zoom chat with some DISTAFF friends (the dress/textile research group that are my Kalamazoo peeps). The main meal will be something with more of yesterday’s roast lamb, but I haven’t decided yet. I may make a mint-sorrel sauce this time for the Estates touch.

The other thing I need to do today is plant the plants I bought yesterday which means doing some more weeding and tidying in the herb garden. (Bermuda grass is the devil.) The green can is already full so I don’t need to worry about large-scale work.

One of the peculiar features of how my virtual community is dealing with self-isolation is realizing just how isolated I am under ordinary conditions. Here are the regular things I do that I’m not doing: physically appear at work, go to coffee shops, ride public transit, have Wednesday dinner with Denise, go to the gym. (I don’t include “shopping” because although I’ve greatly reduced it, I’ve still done some.) All the people out there who are scrambling to set up ways to interact socially without physical proximity? That’s my normal life. Not saying I prefer it that way, not saying I don’t; just that it’s normal for me.

I’m also not scrambling to find ways to occupy my time and be productive. This is directly related to my joke about trying to have three full-time jobs (the dayjob, the blog/podcast, the fiction). And I’m still doing all of those. What I *am* having time for (and not having to scramble for) is yardwork and cooking -- which, incidentally, are among the top items I’ve said I’m looking forward to having time to do in retirement. (Assuming the stock market recovers enough so that I *can* retire.)

Go out to a movie with friends? I rarely mange to find the intersection of available/interested when there’s something I want to see. Just hang out and socialize? Honestly, I’ve never really figured out how that works. I’m on some regular invite lists for specific things and prioritize saying yes, but random casual socializing? Can’t miss it if I’ve never really done it. I regularly try to get in the habit of inviting people over for dinner, but the coordination is stressful. I don’t know whether I’d have developed different patterns if I hadn’t spent all those decades when the SCA was my automatic casual-socializing context. Possibly not, since that’s where I met most of the people I’m likely to socialize with now.

[Later] Well I got all the plants into the ground, which meant tearing at some of the bermuda grass that infiltrates everything. I took a brain break in the late afternoon doing keyword searches in JSTOR for LHMP-relevant articles and cross-checking against what I already have in my database. (I can’t download from JSTOR since my alumna library access doesn’t include off-campus access, but it isn’t like I have any lack of publications to be processing in the near future.) When I was heating up the lamb for dinner, it occurred to me that surely I must have some mint jelly in the fridge somewhere. Sure enough I still had a jar from 1997, when I was growing a dozen different types of mint and did some experiments to see if they produced noticeably different flavors of mint jelly. For that batch, the apples weren’t home-grown, but the mint was, so it counts. This particular jar is pineapple mint. Fairly mild in flavor, but it’s the thought that counts.

On pondering schedules, I think I’m going to return to setting the early alarm (5:30 am) and scheduling writing time before I “go to the office”, just like the old days. My brain gets tired by the evening, especially after a hard day at the office, and while I can do physical things then, I need to do creative things in the morning.

This realization is brought to you by having gone to bed by 9pm last night with half a sleeping pill and waking up (rested) at 6am. No later than that. But a little online surfing brought the information that even with reduced hours, my local Safeway was already open, and I figured it was my best opportunity for some shopping. (And, as CJ pointed out on fb, even if they’re reserving early shopping for “at risk” individuals, being 61 counts for that category. I don’t *feel* “at risk” but I don’t feel particularly invulnerable either.)

I’d been thinking of doing my stop-gap shopping at Trader Joe’s, but that would have been a mistake (see below). Safeway had everything on my list (mostly fresh dairy, plus baking supplies, which I don’t tend to keep stocked). I added in a few treats, like a large box of “lunchbox sized” chips, cheetos, etc. and some frozen cookie dough. I also figured I’d pick up some freezable meat in varieties I don’t have in the chest freezer, so I have a bit of pork and a dismembered chicken, now frozen in single serving units. The only thing I wasn’t able to get was half-and-half for my coffee, so I gritted my teeth and picked up a jug of non-dairy creamer. (I found some canned evaporated milk, but the shelf noted it was WIC approved, so I figured I should leave it for someone else.)

Since I was going out, I figured I might as well drop by my credit union to deposit a couple of checks since I didn’t want them hanging out uncashed until the quarantine is over. That meant driving over to Berkeley on nearly-empty roads. And since I was on that side of the tunnel, I thought I’d drive by the Arizmendi bakery and pick up some baked goods to support them, but they were closed I didn’t stop to read the sign on the door, but it looked like they’ve simply shut down for the interim. They’d just barely opened for business again after the repair/remodel so I hope they’ll do ok.

On getting back to Concord, I swung by TJ’s thinking I could see if they had half-and-half and maybe I could pick up some potted basil, but there was a line running all the way down the block (though some of the length was because of spacing) so I figure they were metering how many people could enter at a time. (Safeway was lightly inhabited, but then, it was 7am.) But with basil on my mind, I went a couple blocks over to Home Depot and picked up some plants (blackberries to fill in one of the planters that crapped out a couple years ago, plus some more strawberries to plant under them, an assortment of herbs, some radish and lettuce seeds). I’m not ready to do the tomato planting yet and they didn’t have much variety in started tomatoes anyway. But that will give me something to do in the backyard today.

Breakfast waited until I got home from errands: sage* omelette filled with scallions* and tomatoes, bacon, home baked toast with bacon-quince jam*, coffee with the last of the real half-and-half (sob). *= Produce of My Estates

I decided to thaw out the leg of lamb from the lamb-share in my freezer and will roast it later. For the first meal from it, I’ll probably serve it with apple chutney* and maybe some minty* potatoes. I also have the spine & wings of the dismembered chicken being turned into soup in the crock pot. It’s fascinating how hunkering down and having the time and access to cook has made me so fixated on food. I mean, it’s not like I’m going to starve while isolating. It’s not like I’m even going to be reduced to eating ramen three meals a day. But there’s something atavistic about planning meals and striving for balance and variety, to say nothing of the whole Estates aspect which--while I don’t have any illusions about living off the land--contributes to the fixation.

Today’s to-dos will be doing some gardening, taking notes from a couple more chapters of Female Masculinity, tackling either the spice reorganization or the desk reorganization, and maybe starting to think about working on my taxes. I know from past experience that I can compete my accounts and taxes from a zero to finished in a single weekend, so I haven’t been fussing yet, but even though the news says they’re going to push back the filing deadline, I’d rather get it done. And it’s an excuse to put on some DVDs and chill.

Last night’s cheeseburger-with-condiments-from-my-estates was delicious, though I probably should have had something with it on the side since I woke up with a grumbling stomach again in the wee hours. It’s definitely “I didn’t eat enough” grumbling and I’m pretty sure I’m doing the stress-undereating thing. I should probably throw some rice in the rice cooker so I have filler on hand without much work. Today I was poking around in the freezer (the regular below-the fridge-freezer) and found one last bag from my last batch of wild mushroom risotto, so that’s tonight settled.

When I got the frozen pumpernickel out for the cheeseburger (I keep wanting to type “cheezburger” LOL) there was only the heel of the bread left, so that got flagged for today's breakfast and a recipe I often use for semi-stale ends of bread: savory bread pudding. Tear or cut the bread into small pieces. Mince a rasher of bacon, mince half an onion, saute the onion while cooking the bacon. Because I needed to add something from The Estate, I picked a dozen leaves of sorrel and chopped them and added them to the pan. When everything’s cooked, add some broth (I had the end of a box of chicken broth needing to be used) and any additional seasonings (I added some tamarind soup base powder) and heat to boiling. Shred a bit of cheese over the bread and toss to mix well. Pour the hot mixture over it all. Top with a bit of plain yogurt and stir together. The sorrel really works as an additive! My sorrel is very energetic and generous (I have two clusters) as long as it gets enough water. I love making sorrel sauce for fish and other mild meats.

The tree guys arrived a little before 8am this morning (poor neighbors!) so I was able to get them sorted out before “going to the office.” I’d already been planning to see if I could use the WFH time to get some contractor projects done, though with the official lock-down I think I would have let it pass except for my neighbor consulting me about the possibility of removing the messy tree on our property line. Since I was doing that tree anyway, I had the tree guys do all the other annual jobs that often get skipped. (Safety-trimming the large walnut, pollarding the mulberry, tidying up the palm trees.) Plus, they hauled away the rotted picket fence that's been sitting in the side yard since I took it out last summer.

The tree guys were still at it during my lunch break, so no bike ride the, but I did make a bike excursion after I "left the office" to play lemon-fairy for Denise.

Tonight's dinner is the mushroom risotto with a sauce made of the last of the package of hamburger, sauted up with half an onion and more of the Seville orange peel cut into tiny strips. When the onions were limp, I added some water, a bit of beef bouillion, and a dash of flour to thicken. I suppose I could have grabbed some herbs instead of the orange peel, but I felt like experimenting. Of course, I could have just picked a lemon and sliced it into a gin and tonic, but I haven't decided if I'm having a drink tonight.

I already posted about my story, "All is Silence" being published today as part of the Decameron Project. It's kind of daunting to have my work sandwiched between Max Gladstone and Robert Silverberg. The Decameron Project patron has over a hundred subscribers now. It'll be interesting to see how much it grows by the end. We're all assuming there will *be* an end...

As a “siege cooking” challenge, I’ve decided that every meal should include at least one ingredient from My Estates. The herb garden will make this trivially easy for dinners, but for breakfast today I used up my last little can of Pillsbury crescent roll dough and made chocolate-orange-walnut pinwheels, with the candied orange peel, orange syrup, and walnuts all from the Estate. I’m pondering the question of whether culturing my own yogurt (from store-bought milk) would count as home-grown.

Lunch was something I usually have as a work breakfast: yogurt and plum puree with raw rolled oats (actually 5-grain cereal) mixed in. I think dinner is going to be an old fashioned hamburger (since I have the meat thawed) with house-made dill pickles and tomato relish. I have some pumpernickel in the freezer for a bun. I’m working towards baking some bread by doing viability testing of the outdated yeast packets I found in the fridge.

In addition to all the preserved things, what do I have fresh on the estate currently? There are lemons aplenty, plus a couple remaining Seville oranges that were still green when I did the main harvest. The herb garden has savory, sage, marjoram, oregano, peppermint, fennel, and a few non-edibles like rue. Elsewhere in the yard I have rosemary and laurel. Since I don’t use pesticides on my roses, I could hypothetically use them in cooking as well. The gallica roses aren’t blooming yet but there are two bourbon roses that are going strong currently and quite fragrant. I should sort through my leftover seeds and see if I have leaf lettuce and radishes. Nothing else would produce in the near future.

I’m being virtuous in my social distancing: Denise and I had our regular Wednesday dinner via Google hangouts (with various technical glitches). The tree guy has confirmed he’s coming to do the work tomorrow, but that can be managed maintaining the prescribed 6-ft distance easily.

It was bright and sunny for the noon bike ride today, but now the clouds are moving in again, though no more rain is predicted until Sunday. I was hoping it might be warm enough to have dinner on the patio, but alas, probably not.

How is it that I have this extra time (no commute, not leaving the house on errands) and I still feel like I'm not getting much done? I skipped doing my LHMP reading yesterday, not on purpose, but because it was bedtime and I hadn't done it yet. On the other hand, I did a lot of in-box clearing, so there's that. And I"m making progress on getting the back yard into shape. The nice thing about a "puttering" routine is that I don't do some much of any one activity that I'm wrecked the next day. So I've been taking the weed-whacker to the grass in manageable swathes. (The back yard is too ... complicated to use a lawn mower.) And I've cleared the grass and weeds out of two of the raised beds along the fence that I didn't grow anything in last year. I think I'm going to put the tomatoes there this year. I like shifting things around. Not sure if I'm going to get yard work in today. Just as my work day ended, it started raining. But now it's sunny again. So maybe I should strike while the sun shines. (Or make hay while the iron is hot?)

Yesterday's dinner was somewhat minimalist: the remaining Sri Lankhan style lentils with a quarter of a broiled eel (sushi-style) for flavor but not much substance. Today I thawed out a package of hamburger that I plan to split into three dishes, plus some homemade tomato sauce. I'm planning a pasta sauce with fresh herbs from the garden. I don't have any regular pasta (except for lasagna that I'm saving for when I've picked up the right cheeses) but I've got two bags of soba noodles which I actually prefer.

I've been doing some impulse shopping to support small businesses promoted by friends. On Monday I ordered some Jane Austen inspired tea blends from Bingley's Teas and the arrived today already! So I know what I'm having for tomorrow's afternoon tea. For similar reasons I ordered ... ok, don't laugh. Because I'm in the middle of this big "sorting through my spices and reorganizing them" project. But I wanted to buy something from Penzey's Spices and what tickled my fancy was four different varietal cinnamons. When I'm back to socializing with other people, I think it might be fun to do a cinnamon bun taste-test comparison.

A random TP-shortage tip. (I'm not short, but I did calculate that what with staying at home all the time, that 24-pack I started with isn't as surplus as it might seem.) For those of us without fully external equipment (trying not to be gender-essentialist here), a hiking tip I learned in extremis is that if you have a squeeze bottle of water, you can just wash yourself with a couple good squirts after urination, then pat dry with a launderable towel. If you're squeemish, I advise dedicating the squeeze bottle to this purpose and not re-using for drinking, though since there's no contact, that's more of a "ritual uncleanness" thing.

Ok, so I'm only joking that I was tempted to break quarantine to seek out a co-worker and strangle them. It's much more frustrating to have someone decline to get the point of what you're saying when they can just sit there and ignore you. The other WFH frustration was that my internet started going in and out in mid-afternoon. I started thinking of my previous days long outages with dread. But after an hour Skype meeting on my iPhone (and rebooting the router) it was back. Can we have truly reliable internet infrastructure as an essential utility please?

While I will never give up my morning coffee, even before WFH I'd started getting in the habit of moving to tea after the first cup. I've been enjoying getting some use out of my lovely Portmeirion teapot. And then today, after seeing a comment from Ursula Vernon on twitter about "crafty folks, it's time to break out the Good Supplies" I got in the spirit by getting out one of the LaForge silver teapots.

One of the things I've noticed with WFH is that I'm generally eating less. But last night when I woke in the middle of the night with my stomach grumbling it occurred to me that this was mostly due to anxiety and not necessarily getting in touch with better eating habits. Yesterday I finished off the plum-braised chuck roast with brown rice. Not sure what I'm going to have for dinner tonight. I'm pondering the risks of ordering delivery. On the one hand: yay for supporting local businesses. On the other hand: there's still some contact risk from the people doing the prep and the people doing the delivery. Since I don't *have* to order in, perhaps better not?

In a similar abundance of caution, Denise and I have agreed to do our Wednesday evening thing electronically tomorrow, given that she was off gallivanting around the country this past weekend. It's not so much that I'm in an older age bracket and therefore higher risk, but that it's the accumulation of lots of people thinking "this once won't hurt" that can undermine The Plan.

On my lunchtime bike ride, I noticed a couple of construction jobs going on, so people are clearly doing their own calculations about "essential work." I'm going to let the tree guy make the call on our job. It can be done with essentially no close contact between us, and I can sanitize the heck before writing the check.

And now I'm going to move on to my other daily routines and get in some yard work, then do a chapter in Female Masculinity, and finish with desk organization. Still figuring out where to fit the writing session into the schedule. Normally pre-work was writing time, but that would mean setting alarm #1 (the 5:30 alarm) rather than alarm #2 (the 6:30 alarm).

The six core Bay Area counties (including mine) are now under a “shelter in place” order. “People in the six counties will still be able to go shopping for items such as food and household supplies, and seek medical care. They will be able to go outside for walks or exercise as long as they keep six feet away from anyone they don’t already live with.” Though there’s some ambiguity because elsewhere the article says “In the six Bay Area counties, non-essential gatherings of any size are now banned, along with non-essential travel “on foot, bicycle, scooter, automobile or public transit.”” which suggests that “go outside for exercise” has tenuous status. Presumably some more detailed guidance will be forthcoming. Or not.

I’ll see what the tree guy thinks about it. We can get the work done without close contact, but it will depend on how he’s interpreting things regarding his crew. It'll be his call.

Today I had the first signs of getting twitchy about the isolation. Part of it was the combination of a lack of general chatter from the co-workers online, plus some annoyingly irrelevant requests from my QA reviewer on one of my investigations, which ordinarily I could have worked off via an informal bitch session.

But the rain let up enough that I could do a lunchtime bike ride, and now that the workday is over, I can get in some yard work. Then I've assigned myself taking notes from one chapter of Halberstam's Female Masculinity for the LHMP, then starting to declutter the computer desk (the one I never use for actual computer work because it's too cluttered). I should assign myself some fiction writing as well. Maybe I should make a wall chart and give myself gold stars for categories of tasks.

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Entries tagged with covid-19

Something Other Than Books

15 months in...and out

A Moderna Woman

Pandemic Meme Time!

The problem with posting the next day...

Is this the real life? Is this just fantasy?

Bonus Post: Sonnet for the P3 Lab

Network Overload

Oops, missed a day!

For a Change

Making things from lemons

Has Covid-19 revitalized Dreamwidth?

Stay safe, sushi guy

An Organizing Homebody

In which our heroine ventures out to forage for food...

Wherein I Stretch the Limits of No Contact

A new Produce of My Estates challenge

Still not getting all the to-dos to-done

Getting in the Rhythm of This

One or more misty moisty mornings