around the house

Day 57: Math, Mowing, Painting, and the Missionary Society

Monday 11 May 2020

Math

The Boy was having trouble this morning with three-digit subtraction, things like 352-178. He was thinking a little too much, mixing prior knowledge with current practice. For example, in the number above, he would know he had to borrow a 10 from the 10s place in order to subtract 8 properly, but then that would leave him with 4. Instead of writing 4 above the crossed-out 5, he wrote 40. Which is technically correct. But the be was subtracting 7 from 40 and coming up with 33, and before long, he was subtracting one three-digit number from another three-digit number and coming up with a six-digit answer.

I remember the frustration of borrowing numbers in subtraction. I, too, experienced it in second grade: I just couldn't figure out how those numbers were shifting around, 5 becoming 4 so I could subtract something from the 1s place. Everyone tried explaining it to me: my teacher, mom, dad, the girl who babysat me from time to time. It just didn't make any sense to me no matter how often and how many different ways it was explained.

So I understood the Boy's frustration this morning. I sat with him a while, taking a break from my own work, and tried to help him through it.

"Yes, but Daddy, that's the 10s place, so it's not just 4, it's 40."

"Technically, you're correct, but..."

"What do you mean 'technically'? What does that even mean?!"

It was another moment that I found myself in awe of elementary school teachers. I don't teach many new skills: I mainly take existing skills and improve them. The kids can write when they come to me; I just help them write better. They can read when they come to me; I just give them tricks for comprehending more challenging texts: things like "make sure you keep track of your pronouns' antecedents -- you need to know who 'he' is when the author uses that pronoun," or "determine the part of speech of that unknown word -- that will help you a lot in inferring a possible meaning." But just taking a kid who doesn't know at all how to read and turning her into a reader? I haven't got the slightest clue how to do that. I know it's just a matter of training: I minored in education in college, but in secondary education -- not primary. An entirely different field of study.

Still, having experienced that frustration myself, I had a certain patience and understanding of his frustration.

This is why some feel that teachers who teach subjects they were always good at isn't as effective as alternatives. We -- for I was always good at literature and decent at writing -- know how to do these skills seemingly instinctively. It's hard to teach someone how to do something that you can do, relative to the struggling student, without thinking. It's better to teach something that you yourself have struggled with, goes the thinking. But the problem with that: where's the passion? I don't teach English just because I want to teach and happened to choose English. I teach it because I myself enjoy writing; I teach it because I love reading. I teach it because I have a certain excitement about certain books, certain poems, even certain reading skills that I love to share with students. I struggled with math, and the only passion I feel about it is a certain kind of revulsion.

Mowing and Painting

The Boy loves working in the yard. We bought a battery-powered weed eater just so he could help (which is now out of trim line, which we don't have). Today, after scolding me a little bit about still not having the right line, he asked if he could help mow.

When we first started doing this, I would let him do the little flat, straight portion in the front yard just between the flower bed and the crape myrtles. Today, I let him tackle some of the more challenging areas.

"Make sure you keep the line of uncut grass just on the inside edge of your outside wheel," I explained, demonstrating just what I meant.

He tried, poor fellow, but he just couldn't stop drifting inward, leaving slivers of uncut grass with every row.

Still, I can't help but be pleased that he's still willing to help. At some point, the job will be his entirely.

Saturday in the Yard

The Girl finished up the afternoon with a little more painting: the swing I'd started Saturday for K's Mother's Day gift is nearing completion.

The Missionary Society Meeting

It's always a chapter that confuses students: the 24th chapter in To Kill a Mockingbird feels like someone took a chapter out of a completely different novel, changed a few names to match a few characters' names in Mockingbird, and just slipped it into the stream of the story. The only connection it seems to have with the rest of the book is the news of the death of Tom Robinson toward the end of the chapter. I contend that in many ways it's one of the most important chapters in the book as it fully develops one of the book's major themes: the hypocrisy of Southern white Christians.

Most of the chapter centers around Aunt Alexandra's hosting the Maycomb Alabama Methodist Episcopal Church South Missionary Society meeting. Scout attends as "a part of [Alexandra's] campaign to teach [Scout] to be a lady." Poor Scout is lost from the beginning: she asks about what they studied and gets confused immediately:

“Oh child, those poor Mrunas,” [Mrs. Merriweather] said, and was off. Few other questions would be necessary.

Mrs. Merriweather’s large brown eyes always filled with tears when she considered the oppressed. “Living in that jungle with nobody but J. Grimes Everett,” she said. “Not a white person’ll go near ‘em but that saintly J. Grimes Everett.”

Mrs. Merriweather played her voice like an organ; every word she said received its full measure: “The poverty... the darkness... the immorality—nobody but J. Grimes Everett knows. You know, when the church gave me that trip to the camp grounds J. Grimes Everett said to me—”

“Was he there, ma’am? I thought—”

“Home on leave. J. Grimes Everett said to me, he said, ‘Mrs. Merriweather, you have no conception, no conception of what we are fighting over there.’ That’s what he said to me.”

“Yes ma’am.”

“I said to him, ‘Mr. Everett,’ I said, ‘the ladies of the Maycomb Alabama Methodist Episcopal Church South are behind you one hundred percent.’ That’s what I said to him. And you know, right then and there I made a pledge in my heart. I said to myself, when I go home I’m going to give a course on the Mrunas and bring J. Grimes Everett’s message to Maycomb and that’s just what I’m doing.”

A skilled reader with a moderate amount of background knowledge immediately understands: this J. Grimes Everett is a missionary to the Mrunas, who, in turn, are clearly an African tribe ("Not a white person’ll go near ‘em but that saintly J. Grimes Everett").

The reason the author includes the Mrunas is clear only toward the end of the missionary society meeting, when Mrs. Merriweather begins talking about Atticus's decision to represent Tom:

Mrs. Merriweather nodded wisely. Her voice soared over the clink of coffee cups and the soft bovine sounds of the ladies munching their dainties. “Gertrude,” she said, “I tell you there are some good but misguided people in this town. Good, but misguided. Folks in this town who think they’re doing right, I mean. Now far be it from me to say who, but some of ‘em in this town thought they were doing the right thing a while back, but all they did was stir ’em up. That’s all they did. Might’ve looked like the right thing to do at the time, I’m sure I don’t know, I’m not read in that field, but sulky... dissatisfied... I tell you if my Sophy’d kept it up another day I’d have let her go. It’s never entered that wool of hers that the only reason I keep her is because this depression’s on and she needs her dollar and a quarter every week she can get it.”

“His food doesn’t stick going down, does it?”

Miss Maudie said it. Two tight lines had appeared at the corners of her mouth. She had been sitting silently beside me, her coffee cup balanced on one knee. I had lost the thread of conversation long ago, when they quit talking about Tom Robinson’s wife, and had contented myself with thinking of Finch’s Landing and the river. Aunt Alexandra had got it backwards: the business part of the meeting was blood-curdling, the social hour was dreary.

“Maudie, I’m sure I don’t know what you mean,” said Mrs. Merriweather.

“I’m sure you do,” Miss Maudie said shortly.

Yet this is where students really get lost. In typical Southern gentile fashion, Mrs. Merriweather won't deign to gossip about anyone -- how uncivilized -- so she simply makes talks about Atticus in the third-person plural. And everyone in the room knows exactly who she's talking about -- everyone but Scout. And our young readers.

Today, my English I students started the adventure of figuring out this marvelous chapter. I always read the relevant passage aloud in class. It's one of the most enjoyable things I do all year. I lay on the Southern accent, dropping final rs ("squalor" becomes "squala") and altering the cadence and tone of my reading. How to do that when in lock-down? Simple: record it. My favorite part -- that passage above.

Day 55: The Swing, the Dog House, and the Bench

Saturday 09 May 2020

I don't know how it inevitably happens, but projects with me just seem to swell completely out of proportion from my original estimates. Sometimes it's simply that my estimates are wrong. No, that's most of the time. I tend to underestimate the time required because I tend to overestimate my skills. Today, though, my estimation of the time required to make K's Mother's Day present was just about dead on. True, it took me longer in the end, but that's because I decided to pull out the router and round over every edge. Why? Because I have a router and quite honestly don't have that many opportunities to use it.

I also decided as I was working to countersink all the screws and go back with wood filler and hide them all. That added a bit of additional time. But the raw building itself took just about as long as I anticipated.

What got me off track was not the time it took to make the bench but rather the time it took to gather the needed materials. The wood was the real trick.

I went to Lowe's expecting to be back fairly quickly. All I needed was a bit of additional chain for the swing, a few hooks to connect the swing to the chain, and some 2x4s for the framing of the swing. The chain took quite some time -- probably more than twenty minutes -- because I pressed the "Press here for assistance" button and no one came for what seemed like an eternity.

Finally, I was ready to pick up the lumber and haul it back to the in-store sawing station to have them cut the 96" studs down to 48" pieces that would fit in K's Rogue. The first trick was to find a lumber cart. I finally gave up looking for one, went to the cashier, paid for the hardware, took it out to the car, and returned with a lumber cart from the parking lot. I loaded my six 2x4s and headed to the cut station. Where I found a sign that read, "Saw not functioning."

I felt like I was in the film Nie Lubię Poniedzialku except that I was in Greenville not Warsaw and it was Saturday not Sunday.

I just left the cart there with the lumber on it. It was a somewhat crummy thing to do -- I could have at least taken the lumber back.

After dropping off the hardware at the house (because it was on the way), I headed to Home Depot. The saw there was completely functional. The studs I picked out, though, were not 96" but only 93". So when I told the shop assistant to cut them at 48", adding "I just need them in half-size pieces," he did just that: he put one end of the board on 48" and cut. And the resulting pieces were of a significantly different length. That's when I measured and saw they weren't 96". I could have checked. I didn't. I just sighed.

While all of this was going on, the Boy alternated between helping me and helping the Girl, who was painting the dog house and the bench.

In the evening, we watched Nie Lubię Poniedzialku. We've been trying to expose the kids to some of the classics, and we decided it was time for Poniedzialku. I love that film. It's probably my second-favorite Polish film, right behind Miś. The story, such as it is, is charming: we all laugh at the horrid Monday everyone is having even though none of their trials rise above irritation. There's no shadow of any real tragedy -- just the annoyance of plans going awry.

What I really love about the film, though, is the views of the Warsaw of the early 1970s. Just a quarter of a century after the Second World War, much of the city is still under construction, and what has been completed has the look of 60s communist architecture that was still prevalent in Warsaw when I arrived in 1996.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1M2386VX0Po

Papa decided he'd watch the film with us. "There are no subtitles," we warned him, but he wasn't fazed. We explained critical dialogue, but most of it really didn't require a whole lot of explaining.

The Boy disagreed. "I don't get any of the funny parts, even when you explain them," he fussed.

Perhaps he'll find the next one we've planned a little more enjoyable: the classic Sami Swoi. We found it on Netflix DVDs, which means it will have subtitles. "Kargul, podejdź no do płota!"

Day 48: Scarlet Projects

Saturday 02 May 2020

This morning I had a little epiphany that I should have had months ago: "I'll bet there are lots of audiobooks on Spotify." I know -- an obvious thought I should have had long ago, but I am sometimes a little slow on the up-take. I did a quick search and discovered that almost any classic one could imagine is there. Shouldn't have been a surprise.

A month or so ago, I'd pulled from the bookshelf a novel I've been wanting on and off to re-read since college, The Scarlet Letter. I hadn't really liked it a lot then, and I liked it even less in high school, but I reasoned that, being twenty-five years older than when I'd last read it, I might see something more in it.

For one thing, it's been a different read because I finally made it through the opening section, "The Custom House." When we read it in college, we were supposed to read that seemingly disconnected introduction but I didn't. Today, I listened to it while I worked on our broken smoke, cleaning off the base blocks before screwing down the barrel that serves as the body of the smoker and then covering all the base in concrete. The job took about an hour and a half because I spent some time trying to pry off the leaking quick-connector on the hose before mixing the concrete, to no avail; the intro itself took considerably longer to complete.

And what of "The Custom House"? It's a fictionalized attempt at making the story seem authentic by making it something of a found-footage type novel (mixing media there, I know). Was that novel (no pun in intended)? I really don't know.

When the novel began, I was back in familiar territory. I'd initially forgotten about that opening, with the rose outside the jail door, but once that portion began, it was like hearing a long-forgotten-but-once-loved song again after twenty years:

[O]n one side of the portal, and rooted almost at the threshold, was a wild rose-bush, covered, in this month of June, with its delicate gems, which might be imagined to offer their fragrance and fragile beauty to the prisoner as he went in, and to the condemned criminal as he came forth to his doom, in token that the deep heart of Nature could pity and be kind to him.

This rose-bush, by a strange chance, has been kept alive in history; but whether it had merely survived out of the stern old wilderness, so long after the fall of the gigantic pines and oaks that originally overshadowed it,—or whether, as there is fair authority for believing, it had sprung up under the footsteps of the sainted Ann Hutchinson, as she entered the prison-door,—we shall not take upon us to determine. Finding it so directly on the threshold of our narrative, which is now about to[53] issue from that inauspicious portal, we could hardly do otherwise than pluck one of its flowers, and present it to the reader. It may serve, let us hope, to symbolize some sweet moral blossom, that may be found along the track, or relieve the darkening close of a tale of human frailty and sorrow.

While I was working on the smoker, the Boy was working to remove the last bit of flaking paint from the bench we brought from Nana's and Papa's to use by our firepit.

I went inside to get the drill and impact driver and by the time I came back out, he'd disappeared.

"It's too hard!" he exclaimed. I think he understood that I expected him to get all the paint off.

By the time I was ready to work on the next project of the day, the novel was introducing its heroine, Hester Prynne.

The young woman was tall, with a figure of perfect elegance on a large scale. She had dark and abundant hair, so glossy that it threw off the sunshine with a gleam, and a face which, besides being beautiful from regularity of feature and richness of complexion, had the impressiveness belonging to a marked brow and deep black eyes. She was lady-like, too, after the manner of the feminine gentility of those days; characterized by a certain state and dignity, rather than by the delicate, evanescent, and indescribable grace, which is now recognized as its indication. And never had Hester Prynne appeared more lady-like, in the antique interpretation of the term, than as she issued from the prison. Those who had before known her, and had expected to behold her dimmed and obscured by a disastrous cloud, were astonished, and even startled, to perceive how her beauty shone out, and made a halo of the misfortune and ignominy in which she was enveloped. It may be true, that, to a sensitive observer, there was something exquisitely painful in it. Her attire, which, indeed, she had wrought for the occasion, in prison, and had modelled much after her own fancy, seemed to express the attitude of her spirit, the desperate recklessness of her mood, by its wild and picturesque peculiarity. But the point which drew all eyes, and, as it were, transfigured the wearer,—so that both men and women, who had been familiarly acquainted with Hester Prynne, were now impressed as if they beheld her for the first time,—was that Scarlet Letter, so fantastically embroidered and illuminated upon her bosom. It had the effect of a spell, taking her out of the ordinary relations with humanity, and enclosing her in a sphere by herself.

The scarlet letter is a double symbol: it is a symbol to the characters in the novel of Hester's sin and depravity as well as a symbol for Hester herself of her resistance. For readers, it's both these things, but it also represents the hypocrisy of Puritans, among other things.

At this point, I'm about halfway through the novel, though completely through the day's projects (as is L). More thoughts coming later, I'm sure.

Day 41: Cleaning

Saturday 25 April 2020

Day 34: The Edge

Saturday 18 April 2020

I read somewhere recently that sanitation workers are struggling to keep up with the amount of trash people are putting out during the quarantine. We're all cleaning out our houses, I guess, because what else are we going to do with so much time on our hands?

We've been doing a little in the house but mostly in the yard. Today, for instance, I used the edger (we have an edger now -- like a router, one tool I've always wanted to have) to clean up the stepping stones in our front yard.

Why?

Well, I woke up this morning and thought, "What can I do in the yard today? It's an April Saturday -- one must work in the yard." But I'd already mowed for the week. And I'd already moved the composter. And I'd already cleaned out the weeds in our jasmine. And I'd already cleaned out the briars in the corner of our lot. And I'd already moved the elderberry bushes. And I'd already enlarged our mulched flower garden. And I'd already mulched everything. "What can I do?"

Saturday has its own rhythm, and even in these strange times, K and I try to keep all our rhythms and rituals as sustained as possible. We've introduced some new rituals (our almost-nightly family walks, lots more family board and card game playing, more family movies), but Saturday is Saturday -- it must be spent outside.

By the time I was finished working on the stepping stones, each had a clean edge cut around it, several of the stones that had settled were elevated with a bit of gravel under them, and the last few stones that weren't in line with the rest of them were shifted back into place.

As I worked, I listened to podcasts on cults: Heaven's Gate, the Manson Family, the Branch Davidians, a couple I'd never heard of. They all make the little sect I grew up in seem fairly tame in comparison, but they all have one thing in common: a narcissistic man at the helm whom everyone views as being somehow a step above the rest of humanity.

An attempt at protecting our blueberries

Then there are the members and the obvious question: how do people allow themselves to be sucked into such groups? Take Heaven's Gate, for example: their beliefs were so morbidly ridiculous that it's difficult to imagine anyone taking them seriously. And members of that cult (and many others) left families behind in order to join them. They gave up everything for beliefs that sound like some sixth-grader's science fiction story for his fifth-period creative writing class. Yet all religions have their little absurdities: Islam has Mohammed flying off on a magic stallion into heaven. Judaism has talking snakes and donkeys and a man surviving in the digestive system of a marine creature. Christianity has zombies immediately after Jesus's death on the cross:

And when Jesus had cried out again in a loud voice, he gave up his spirit. At that moment the curtain of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom. The earth shook, the rocks split and the tombs broke open. The bodies of many holy people who had died were raised to life. They came out of the tombs after Jesus’ resurrection and went into the holy city and appeared to many people. When the centurion and those with him who were guarding Jesus saw the earthquake and all that had happened, they were terrified, and exclaimed, “Surely he was the Son of God!" (Matthew 27.50-54)

Hinduism has Hanuman the monkey god -- all religions have elements that just seem silly. The difference, comedian Bill Burr points out, is that most of us grew up with those more traditional religious stories and heard them all our lives: they're party of the fabric of our childhood. These cults, though, we encounter as adults, more capable of critical thinking.

In the past, I'd probably write next that I found myself thinking about these things when I put the Boy to bed, thinking about possible lives we could have given him if we believed this or that, but I didn't. I didn't even think about it until now. Don't know what to make of that, if anything.

Day 32: Changes

Thursday 16 April 2020

We pulled out that hideously overgrown ornamental tree by our front door earlier this week (or technically last week, I guess, but everything's mushing together like a cheap blended scotch), so we had to replace it with something. Well, K felt we had to replace it with something. I was rather okay with just leaving it, but I was also okay with replacing it -- I was just okay with it. Today, I headed out to get the replacement and a few flowers.

The plan was simple: go to Home Depot for the replacement battery for my drill and a few other things, then head over to South Pleasantburg Nursery for the tree.

"Take a picture of what's there and show the man what was there," K said. "He'll help you pick something out that will fill that space."

L's "Franken-cooking" from a couple of nights ago

L went with me. "Take L -- she'll pick out nice flowers," K suggested.

Home Depot took much longer than expected. Ridiculously long.

Then we head over to the nursery only to discover it's closed: order-by-phone only. So it was back to Home Depot.

Their tree selection is not stellar, let me tell you.

We decided on a relatively mature Japanese maple, but there was no price tag, only a bar code. The Home Depot app, hastily installed, couldn't find the price, so I photographed the bar code and went into buy it. "How much could it cost?" I asked myself.

The answer: $170.

"Um, no, I don't think we want that tree," I managed to stammer out. We went back and found a less mature specimen that was only $95.

The question is, why does a tree cost $170? Or $95? Or any given price? I understand Home Depot's mark up is fairly predictable, but what about their purchase price?

K and I talked about it this evening. Somehow that price must take into account the salaries of the nursery employees, the resources (food, water, electricity) applied to the sapling or necessary for the nursery itself, the taxes and other expenses the nursery pays -- all that compounded over the amount of time necessary for the sapling to reach its desired height and divided by the number of saplings that reach that marketable state at the same time.

"Whatever the expenses, it's a rip-off," K laughed in conclusion.

Back home, K planted the tree while I embarked on a second project: moving the composter we got for free when friends moved north. It's current location was much closer to the house, but the barrel had somehow gotten off the gears that turn the whole contraption, and that was simply because it was no longer level, thanks in large part, I think, to the dog's digging.

Day 27: Holy Saturday 2020

Saturday 11 April 2020

For everyone in the local Polish community, Holy Saturday has meant one thing: a visible continuation of traditions from the Old Country -- the blessing of the Easter baskets. When we began the tradition, the parish pastor had no idea what it was. He quickly learned and just as quickly fell in love with the tradition.

This year, then, was the first Holy Saturday in a decade that we didn't have a basket blessing here in Greenville. In some ways, that made Holy Saturday wholly different. But some things were the same.

That tree in the front yard that I wanted to cut down yesterday? It's now gone, along with my back.

More similarities: there was baking, baking, baking. For whom? For our family. For friends. For our neighbors. For anyone who wanted it, I guess. The difference? The Girl was involved -- not just involved, but insisting on seeing the whole process through to the end alone. Well, almost alone -- moving it to the cake stand was a bit too scary for her.

What else was the same? The kitchen was a disaster area for most of the day.

An artist at work always leaves behind a mess. And one of our culinary artists is better at cleaning up the mess she leaves behind than the other, and I'm much more likely to jump in and help clean with one of the artists than I am with the other. Lessons to learn.

Previous Years

Basket Blessing 2019

Basket Blessing 2018

Baskets 2015

Blessing the Baskets

Day 26: Good Friday

Friday 10 April 2020

Good Friday is always a work-filled day among Poles, which I've always found somewhat ironic. In some ways, it's the most solemn day of the Catholic calendar, and you would think that devout Catholics -- of which in Poland, particularly rural Poland -- would spend the day in prayer. In my experience, they usually spend the day cleaning and cooking (often things they don't eat because it's a fast day, though Catholic fasting is hardly a discipline compared to some forms of fasting).

Today's job for me: take care of the leaves in the backyard. "After all, it is April," K smiled at breakfast. I wanted to cut down a topiary tree in the front yard that we've decided is dying and needs to come down. I've wanted to take it down for years, but I guess that's for tomorrow.

Day 20 in Two Parts: A View of the Day and a Rant

Saturday 04 April 2020

Part 1: The Day

Our weed eater -- I think that's a brand name but I could be wrong -- has been broken for some time. How long? Embarrassingly so. Today, we finally got a replacement, but we didn't get as sturdy a model as might be expected. The reason? Turning things over to the Boy.

A battery-powered, small trimmer that E can handle. His reaction? "I love, love, love this!" He's going to want to trim every day.

Part 2: Will This Change Anything?

K and I were talking a few nights ago about how this whole tragedy perhaps could have been significantly lessened if our inept president weren't the egomaniacal narcissist that he is when our talk turned to how this might affect the country. K suggested that it would be a turning point, that the fact that America -- the most powerful country in the world, the richest country in the world, the superlative-in-every-sense country in the world -- was brought to its knees like this will necessitate some change, a whole new way of looking at things.

I disagree.

What I fear is that instead of turning this country's populace into a science-first, technology-led country where politics and religion take a backseat to what science says (and if this were the case now, we might not be in the situation we're in), it will only reinforce the same backward thinking that continues to threaten us now. Instead of seeing it as a science problem, they'll see it as a religious problem. "God took his protection away from us because of X, Y, and Z" -- fill in your favorite liberal boogieman.

We really don't have to wait for that -- it's already happening. The amount of religious stupidity coming out of this is just mindblowing. Stuff like this.

One would think that given the evidence, anti-vaxxers would be shutting up about now:

The person credited with saving the most lives ever is Edward Jenner, inventor of the smallpox vaccine. The disease had a much higher mortality rate than the novel coronavirus that is confining many people to their homes right now; about 80% of children and 60% of adults who contracted smallpox died of it. In the 20th century alone, it killed more than 300 million people before the vaccine eradicated it worldwide in 1979.

The polio vaccine is estimated to have saved 10 million people from paralysis just since 1988, and prevented 500,000 deaths, according to the World Health Organization. A global vaccination campaign for measles that began in 2000 prevented an estimated 23 million deaths by 2018, the organization reported. (LA Times)

One would think -- but then again...

And this old nonsense about Bill Gates ushering in the apocalypse. (Money says he's using a Windows computer here...)

And people trying to call judgment down on a virus as if it's an incorrigible child.

And when you mix in bat-feces crazy like Alex Jones and people who take him seriously, well...

When you see everything -- everything -- as part of some conspiracy that was foretold in a book written by Bronze Age soothsayers, no amount of science, logic, or critical thinking can penetrate your worldview.

It's not just a pessimistic sense that there's a problem: there's quantifiable data to show there's a problem. Google has begun compiling reports on the changes in people's mobility during this time.

As global communities respond to COVID-19, we've heard from public health officials that the same type of aggregated, anonymized insights we use in products such as Google Maps could be helpful as they make critical decisions to combat COVID-19.

These Community Mobility Reports aim to provide insights into what has changed in response to policies aimed at combating COVID-19. The reports chart movement trends over time by geography, across different categories of places such as retail and recreation, groceries and pharmacies, parks, transit stations, workplaces, and residential.

What do the data show? Well, as a disclaimer, Google warns about doing what I'm just about to do:

Location accuracy and the understanding of categorized places varies from region to region, so we don’t recommend using this data to compare changes between countries, or between regions with different characteristics (e.g. rural versus urban areas).

Still, data from three locations show the vast difference in national and local response.

Here's the data from our county:

Now, we made the news recently as being the most mobile county in the nation during this time, so our stubborn little county is an outlier, but it's where I live, so it's the data I'll use.

And here's the data from the administrative district in Poland where K grew up, where Babcia still lives, and where I spent seven years:

A randomly selected district in Italy.

Are these two countries faring better than America? I suppose in raw numbers, they are. The long term picture looks better there. Why? Because they don't have people going around saying, "I'm covered in the blood of Jesus -- I'm saved and safe" like we do here.

Of course, in Poland, some bishops and priests are desperately trying to get churches reopened on some kind of limited basis, but even there, they understand the risk and want to have limited attendance. These bloody American Evangelicals -- i.e., "covered in the blood of Jesus," which is itself a disturbing image, but the second, British meaning of "bloody" works as well -- want to have full, regular church services. The data makes their claims a little spurious, though:

And it's not as if this virus is enough: we as a species can't even go through this without some people turning it into a hell on Earth for those who are stuck with them:

In Hubei province, the heart of the initial coronavirus outbreak, domestic violence reports to police more than tripled in one county alone during the lockdown in February, from 47 last year to 162 this year, activists told local media.

“The epidemic has had a huge impact on domestic violence,” Wan Fei, a retired police officer who founded a charity campaigning against abuse, told Sixth Tone website. “According to our statistics, 90% of the causes of violence [in this period] are related to the Covid-19 epidemic.”

It is a pattern being repeated globally. In Brazil a state-run drop-in centre has already seen a surge in cases it attributes to coronavirus isolation, the Brazilian broadcaster Globo said.

“We think there has been a rise of 40% or 50%, and there was already really big demand,” said Adriana Mello, a Rio de Janeiro judge specialising in domestic violence. “We need to stay calm in order to tackle this difficulty we are now facing.” (Lockdowns around the world bring rise in domestic violence in the Guardian)

The virus is always teaching me something new:

The increased threat to women and children was a predictable side effect of the coronavirus lockdowns, said activists. Increased abuse is a pattern repeated in many emergencies, whether conflict, economic crisis or during disease outbreaks, although the quarantine rules pose a particularly grave challenge.

Predictable for some, that is. I hadn't even thought of this -- that's how privileged I am.

So, no, I don't think anything will change. At all.

Day 13: Landscaping

Saturday 28 March 2020

A house is a never-ending project, inside and out. There's always something to fix, move, repaint, replant, shorten, lengthen, reinforce, replace, recalibrate, nail, screw, fasten, dig, hoe, spread, gather, clean, spray, scrub, feed, kill, water, or simply do. Our yard has been part of this ever-growing project, with a couple of landscaping elements that weren't even there when we moved in and some that were there long gone, and some that we put in ourselves also long gone.

Our driveway planter has now grown and joined the original planter in the front yard that has changed very little since we moved in.

It also grew at the road end as well: the elderberries that were languishing in the backyard are now in the front yard, and we can't just plant elderberries in the yard and be done with it...

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