There is a global pandemic right now so I’m getting my car inspected. You know, like you do.
I went to a supermarket… a little one two towns away. It was not terribly busy, but a lot of the shelves were empty. No eggs, no milk, but plenty of English muffins and peanut butter. Win.
The question is…. do I go to Guitar Center next?
Well, that’s all of us. My step son’s school district has shut down for two weeks. They are going to take a couple of days to try and setup some remote learning systems and start having online classes on Wednesday.
So Harry has high school classes at home, Bellana has college classes at home, Jen has work from home, and ol’ Robbie has work from home. All for at least the next two weeks.
It’s going to be tough having all of us trying to work at the same time. We’re going to get in each other’s way and we’re going to get on each other’s nerves, and if everything works out the way we want we will look back on this and see it as a successful waste of time. A little sacrifice today will lead to an easier time for our health care professionals in the coming weeks. That’s the goal at least.
We’re all in this shit show together, and we are up to the challenge.
Lots of changes from yesterday. Scroll down to see the post I made with yesterday’s map.
Go here to see the CDC’s interactive map. This post is just a screen shot.
The president is supposed to address the nation and declare a state of emergency. He should have done that at least a week ago. Instead he was trying to stop cruise ships from docking in US ports because he didn’t want the number of infected people to go up. That’s the kind of cunt he is.
He gave a speech the other night where he detailed some new policies. The White House immediately followed that speech with corrections to the policies he had announced just minutes before. The ban on air travel to Europe wasn’t across the board like he said it was. It doesn’t effect citizens and permanent residents. Insurance companies did not agree to waive copays for treatment as he said, only for testing. Little things like that.
If he gives another speech what will he get wrong this time? It’s fun to speculate. It’s also fucking terrifying to speculate. This man is so insanely stupid that he can’t even read a speech off of a teleprompter. Worse, he can’t hire staff who will fact check his speeches before he gives them in front of the entire globe.
Fuck that guy. I mean really, just fuck that guy.
We’re still waiting on word for how my step son’s school system is going to respond to this global pandemic. They sent out a statement today saying they were looking into it. You know, they were doing things that the rest of the region did a week ago. Way to stay ahead of the curve there.
Why do we have to be surrounded by such stupidity in a time of crisis?
It’s been a quiet day at work today. I hope it continues. We were told that we have to clean off our desks so that the operations staff can spend the next couple of weeks disinfecting the shit out of the office. I really don’t have that much stuff to hide, but I also don’t have many places to hide it. We were told we could take our desktop computers home with us to ease the telecommuting pains. I normally remote connect to my desktop from home, but it will be nice to not have to do that. I still have to figure out how to setup the VPN, and I will need to…
Shit.
I connect to the network at work via an Ethernet connection. I just spent some time with the Google to figure out how to tell if my PC can connect to a wifi network…
It can’t.
Shit.
Looks like I’ll be visiting Best Buy for a USB wifi thingie. Crap.
Telecommuting five days a week might sound like fun on paper, but I am pretty sure that by Tuesday I’m going to be sick of it. Every minor hiccup in the system is going to be magnified a million times based on the fact that I can’t over hear other people talking about it.
I had something else I was going to write about but I got distracted by the wifi thing and now I forget.
In closing: Wash your hands.
We start our extended work from home on Monday. Today is supposed to be our last day in the office. This is what the basement of the garage looked like when I arrived.
Okay, full disclosure. I was about 30 minutes earlier than usual, and a lot of people normally work from home on Fridays. Still…
We were just informed that during our (estimated) two weeks out of the office the operations staff are planning on disinfecting the holy hell out of the whole building. We were told to not leave anything on our desks. I can do that.
Disney World is closed. Closed.
As in, not open. As in, not accessible. As in, you can’t come here. As in, the Mouse has left the theme park.
Holy crap, did we ever pick the right week to go on our vacation! We completely nailed it, corona virally speaking, of course.
The NHL is expected to suspend the regular season today. The commish has a call with the ownership group at 1:00pm Eastern (they are probably all on the call as I type this). After the shit show in the NBA last night*, it is expected he will temporarily pull the plug.
I was sincerely hoping this would not happen*. David Pastrnak is sitting on 48 goals for the season. I was really hoping the league would keep operating long enough for him to score two more. When was the last time the Boston Bruins had a 50 goal scorer? According to this article, the last time was when Cam Neely did it in ’93/’94. I was really hoping Pasta would tick this box before things went bad for the league. The Bruins have a game tomorrow in Buffalo. Couldn’t Commissioner Bettman give him one more game to see if he can pot two more goals?
Oh well. They are telling teams to look into booking games through July. I just hope Pasta doesn’t cool off during this unfortunate break in the season.
In closing, here is a list of Boston Bruins 50 goal scorers:
*Unlike the NHL, the NBA has confirmed players have COVID-19. The first, NBA patient zero, if you will, was joking about the virus just a couple of days ago. During a press conference the rocket scientist made a show of touching all of the microphones, effectively guaranteeing that all of his teammates who were interviewed after him caught the virus that he was already carrying.
*This is sarcasm. Like, #sarcasm. Everyone in North America knew this was coming and it’s not a bad thing.
The CDC has an interactive map showing the number of cases by state. Click the link to see the actual map. This image you’re seeing here (assuming the Google share works) is just a screen shot. I’ll update this as things change.
The telecommuting call for my company has been made. It will be for at least two weeks and it will start Monday. That’s actually good as there is something I need to do at my desk tomorrow.
In our house, Jen is already telecommuting. Bellana will start remote classes on Wednesday. I will start telecommuting on Monday. All we have left is Harry’s high school. What’s it gonna be, high school? Are you going to jump on the resource management bandwagon or are you going to keep insisting you know better than all of the experts who actually study how to handle this sort of situation? Are you going to make a small sacrifice that might make life easier on our soon-to-be-overtaxed health care industry, or are you going to keep letting large groups of people meet and contribute to the infection spike which will potentially put our soon-to-be-overtaxed health care industry into a state where there are more patients than beds and supplies? What’s it gonna be?
I doubled the number of songs with guitars recorded tonight. I had three, now I have six. They all suck and my attempts at keeping things low-fi are making them suck even more. What can you do, right? Two of the songs are in 7/8 time because prog, and two are in 3/4 time because… I don’t know, waltz maybe?
So… COVID-19. WHO has declared it a pandemic. Duh. It is pretty global now so, yeah. Pandemic. Dig it?
I’m seeing all sorts of people calling the responses so far “panic”. They don’t seem to get it. It’s not panic, it’s resource management. Every single infectious disease expert is telling us to put “social distance” into practice. Why? Resource management. There are going to be x number of infections, based on the data we have from China, and y percent of those infections will require hospital care. Finally, we only have z number of hospital beds available at any given time. y is less than x, but y is greater than z. Dig? Statistically speaking there will be more infections requiring hospital care than there are hospital beds to put them in. If we put “social distance” (I fucking LOVE that term and I’ve been practicing it since I was about four years old) into place then we spread out the infections over time, thus reducing the number of cases requiring hospital care at any one time so that suddenly y is less than z. Boom. Problem if not solved then partially alleviated. Statistics, babie. Stats for the win.
Read this from the New York Times: Flattening the Coronavirus Curve
Read this from WBUR: Harvard Global Health Expert: Mass. Hospitals Face Capacity Problem If Coronavirus Cases Spike Quickly
Inside the Red Head's Head 