Natter 76: Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Foaminess
Off-topic discussion. Wanna talk about corsets, duct tape, butt kicking, or physics? This is the place. Detailed discussion of any current-season TV must be whitefonted.
Aw, that is too bad!
It's one of those situations where everyone understands, and there are certainly no hard feelings, and it's better for the MoH's health to stay put -- but even understanding all that doesn't mitigate how disappointed the bride and groom and MoH are.
The groom has anxiety worse than me, and I spent 10 minutes calming him down tonight. What finally seemed to work was me saying, "You know better than almost anyone how bad my anxiety is, right? And *I* am telling you that it's all going to be fine. If *I'm* saying that, then everything IS going to work out, the wedding is going to happen tomorrow and be lovely and you are going to cry tears of joy and walk back up that aisle with a brand-new wife who happens to be the love of your life. I'm not freaking out at all over here, so you shouldn't."
Hopefully it'll get him through tomorrow.
The mother of the bride and the mother of the groom were drinking chocolate martinis at the rehearsal dinner and getting LIT. It was hilarious!
Yikes. This is all so nuts. (And stolen from someone else on the interwebs: "maybe tomorrow will be better, on (checks notes) ...Friday the 13th?!?"
I'm joining the WFH forces as of Monday morning. I've set up my VPN connection but have no idea how to actually draw info from the work servers, so now I'm debating whether I should call IT now and talk to whoever's working the night shift or wait until tomorrow morning to bring my laptop in to the in-person helpdesk guy who sits in our lobby all day every day (in-person hands-on feels more reliable, but OTOH *everyone's* getting the same directives so maybe I won't even be able to get near the helpdesk, and OTOOH,I hate the telephone).
The important things are that that I will not be even a potential disease factor, and that eventually I will be able to do my work with a pet in my lap.
My university has suspended all in-person classes for the next month. Everything will be taught online. I'm one of only a handful of people in my department who has significant experience teaching online, and I've been pulled in a million different directions the past few days trying to get everyone else set up so that they can do at least the basics of posting assignments. Also, teaching math online really requires a tablet and stylus, and the department has nowhere near enough of those to go around.
Also: this afternoon, we got a campus safety notice that there was an "emergency" on a particular street near campus, where a lot of the frat houses are, and that everyone was supposed to avoid the area. For the next hour or so, I could hear a bunch of sirens going back and forth, several times, on the road outside my office, which would be the fastest route between that street and the hospital. Then about an hour later, we got another notice saying that the emergency had been resolved. Nobody seems to know what happened. I'm halfway suspecting that we're going to hear that someone at one of those frats tested positive (which would then probably mean that a whole ton of other students are infected, too.)
I received and completed our 2020 census today!
Me too. I know that sounds like a weird thing to be happy about, but I guess it feels like one little cog in the machine is still turning, at least.
We have one more day on campus tomorrow to finish remote learning training and then start WFH on Monday for the next two weeks. The two weeks after that are spring break, so the first time classes on campus could start again is April 13. I'm just hoping that drastic action over the next month will flatten the curve.
NILLY! Hi. Nice to see your pixels. I'm sorry things are so stressful there right now.
And yeah, lots of other people I want to give a virtual hug to. I'm glad we still have this community during this challenging time.
Also, hi Nilly! Glad to see your pixels, even if the reason is quarantine.
remote learning training
We're not even getting that. We were pretty much just told to figure it out.
The Orthodox rabbinical council in the county where I grew up has closed all the synagogues, and put out a letter telling people that they should not organize prayer groups on their own, should not invite each other over for Shabbat meals, should not organize playdates for their kids, essentially should not interact with anybody outside their immediate family. All the kosher restaurants under that group's supervision have been told that, until further notice, they should only serve take-out and not seat anyone. The schools all closed within the past few weeks. The only exception is funerals -- religiously, you need ten Jewish men to say certain prayers at a funeral, so funerals can be immediate family plus as many additional people as needed to get to that ten, but no more. They're keeping the mikvahs open, and I can kind of understand their reasoning, but I also think it could backfire badly.
