I don’t have a lot to say because the past week I have been so focused on work. Other than migraines and allergies, I am fine and Sandy is okay, although he has gotten to the point that he lives for food. He says that he thinks about it all the time now, and he makes bad choices. My choices have not been great either, but I do manage to get in fruit and vegetables in between the York peppermint patties.
Boredom can be dangerous.
We went grocery shopping at Deep Roots Market on Wednesday night. It seemed to be a good time with few shoppers in the aisles or at the checkout. All masked, all observant of good practices.
As far as work goes, I have been scheduled to take care of the office on Fridays. Even 90% of our face-to-face classes meet online on Fridays, and I can answer the phone from my office down the hall and hang a sign on the History office where to find me. The only thing that I worry about is the bathroom, but there shouldn’t be many people in the building.
I ran into my first maskless student this week. He was waiting for the elevator to go to the third floor for an appointment. I told him to put his mask on and he said he forgot it. I was firm and said he could not be in the building without a mask. He said that he would go up and see if they had masks there. I told him – I didn’t ask – not to get on the elevator, to follow me up the stairs to my office and I gave him a disposable mask.
He was not hostile at all, just clueless. Which baffles me. There are dozens of signs on every wall and door of the building saying that masks are required. Many emails have gone out to students that state that the rules will be enforced – no exceptions for medical excuses, no excuses at all, because if you can’t wear a mask, you will take classes online. I guess he must have come from a community where no one has followed the mask mandate. We will see more students like this, and some of them will be hostile.
Next week will be awful. The way the university has managed the Banner schedule to make it “clear” for hybrid class students to know where to go on what day is very, very confusing. Even our faculty can’t figure it out. I can, because I have stared at it for so long every day for weeks. I am glad that I won’t be there in person.
It would have been better for the faculty to have handled it for each class, but since I have been working here (since 2004) control of everything has increasingly gone to a bloated administration who has embraced technology, automation, and making blanket policies that affect many very different fields. I would not be surprised if they go to a central academic department staffing scheme if the pandemic disrupts us for more than a year. That was floated a couple of years ago anyway.
Even though I am complaining here, I know that it is a difficult monster to wrestle and we didn’t have any choice in whether to open the campus, just how we make it safe as possible.
Vote BLUE no matter who in November. We have to survive this mess before we do anything else, and that means getting Trump and his fascists out of office and out of the state and local offices also. Think of it this way – the world is on fire, literally and figuratively. We have to deal with climate change now, although we are past the tipping point. But everybody has to help put the fire out right now instead of sitting back bitching and arguing about how we will rebuild after the fire is put out. The fire comes first. We can work on rebuilding after we survive the fire.
I was so sleep deprived by the end of the week that I took a nap when I got home yesterday, then slept for ten hours last night/this morning. Tornado dreams, mask anxiety dreams, but also a good recurring dream also about a condo complex that we move into that is older and awesome – really more like an intentional community.
I picked up The Luminaries again and once I got to around page 450 I got interested and I think that I will finish it now. That first half was a heavy slog though. I love a good character novel but I’m not sure that having this many characters helped in this one.
slowly she turned 