COVID-19 quarantine

Monday After

Monday 29 November 2021

Our first day back after the break, and we had quite a change: for the first time since March 2020 we ate lunch in the cafeteria. By “we” I mean our team, which constitutes one-third of the eighth-grade students. And it’s a one-day-a-week gig only: we can’t get everyone in there and maintain social distance, so we get Mondays.

Such a strange thing to return to what was a taken-for-granted reality for so long after such an extended break.

Back home, though, it was a return to familiar routines that paused a little during the extended break: a small dinner (barszcz ukrainski — the first time in ages that we’ve had that wonder of the culinary world), a bit of reading, an early bedtime.

The End of Masks and the GOP

Friday 14 May 2021

On May 11, Governor McMaster issued an Executive Order to provide a mask opt-out process for families, and this in conflict with pandemic recommendations from the South Carolina Department of Health and Environmental Control (SCDHEC), the CDC, as well as state and local medical health systems. In other words, our Republican governor, an attorney by training, has decided that he knows better than agencies filled with pulmonologists, epidemiologists, virologists, and other public health experts. It's a fairly typical Republican, science-doubting response, I think. If Republican scientific ignorance and skepticism doesn't kill us one way, it will kill us another.

This all happened at the same time the GOP removed Liz Cheney from her leadership position because she had the audacity to recognize reality regarding the 2020 election and the January 6 attack on the Capitol. In doing so, the GOP essentially ceased to exist and the GQP took its place, substituting Qanon conspiracy theories for common sense and trading fealty to a narcissist for the rule of law.

These two events make it clear: the Republican party, as it currently exists today, is in fact an existential danger to our republic. They are not only willing but eager to welcome back into the highest office a man who encouraged a seditious attack against his own country. They have chosen fealty to a man who puts himself above the common good of the country time and time again over the constitution and the rule of law. They have chosen to rally around a man who could, without much hyperbole, be labeled a traitor to his country.

It's at this point that the parallels to Hitler actually start to come into shocking focus.

After leading a violent attempt to overthrow the government, he not only retained his leadership roll but in fact rallied many people around him. The antecedent of "he" in that sentence is, of course, Trump, but it is an equally accurate description of Adolf Hitler's rise to power. The only difference: at least Hitler did nine months' time in prison.

First Day Maskless

Thursday 13 May 2021

How many kids would come to school with the required parental consent form and no mask? It was the question on my mind the whole way to school. The answer:

Eighty students out of 655 enrolled in person. That's about 15%, which is the district average:

With 87 schools reporting, 7,877 students have opted out of the mask requirement, Waller said. That’s 15% of all Greenville County students. (Source)

And then today, the CDC says that vaccinated individuals can, it seems, go back to business as usual.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says people who are fully vaccinated against COVID-19 can forgo their masks and social distancing in many indoor situations.

"Today, CDC is updating our guidance for fully vaccinated people," CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky said Thursday at a White House COVID-19 briefing. "Anyone who is fully vaccinated, can participate in indoor and outdoor activities, large or small, without wearing a mask or physical distancing. If you are fully vaccinated, you can start doing the things that you had stopped doing because of the pandemic."

It makes me wonder -- will teachers be able to go back to maskless normalcy soon? And how exactly do I feel about that? I was fussing this morning to a colleague that our governor seemed to say "CDC be damned -- we're going our own way."

"I will do what the CDC recommends," I said.

And then today, the CDC relaxes the guidelines.

Full Circle

Thursday 18 March 2021

A year after the first day of school in quarantine, I got my first dose of the vaccine. A local hospital and the county school system partnered in an impressively well-organized effort to get all teachers who wanted the vaccine vaccinated. The school system had a single-day e-learning break and transformed two high schools into mass-vaccination sites.

But the important part of the day was after everything was done, and the Boy and I headed out for some exploring.

Trim

Monday 17 August 2020

The beard was getting out of hand.

I'd sworn that I wouldn't trim the thing until we went back to school, back to school for good, not in some awkward, inefficient once-a-week/elearning hybrid. Real school.

When I put on a mask, it looked absolutely horrible.

And it left this awful wrinkle in the beard, a little curl that forced the lower part of the beard to shoot straight out, away from my face like a cowlick from hell.

So there was only one thing to do: let L do what she's been begging to do for some time now. "When you trim it, let's put the mask on and the cut around it.

The results, after the initial trim, weren't that promising. I went in and cleaned it up but never got a real "after" picture.

But she enjoyed doing it, and the Boy enjoyed photographing the adventure.

New New Year

Tuesday 04 August 2020

We had our first staff meeting of the 2020/2021 school year this afternoon -- via Zoom. I think that's fairly indicative of what the year will be like.

What do we know now? We know what our various schedules will look like. We have four possibilities:

Remote learning 100% -- no days in the school.
In-person learning 25% of the time -- every kid comes to school one day a week, with the other days being online-only. (Reduces class sizes to about 7 per period.)
In-person learning 50% of the time -- every kid comes to school twice a week, with the other days being online-only.
Full-time in-person learning.

But we've known about these possibilities for weeks now. What exactly will we be doing? We're supposed to find out 10 August -- the first day teachers head back for in-school work days. If we go with option 1, which would be the sensible option given how awful our state if faring because of the high proportion of anti-maskers in our lovely red state, all our "getting rooms ready" time will be for nothing. No big deal -- more planning time.

Still, there's a lot more behind the scenes than I'd really thought about. What about kids who would otherwise be suspended? If we're in scenario 2, a three-day suspension would mean in reality three-week suspension. "We're just not going to do that if we can at all avoid it," our principal said. That was a scenario that I'd never considered, though.

I expect in the coming weeks, we'll be encountering much we didn't expect, no matter what our schooling looks like.

Masks Unmasked and Wheelies

Thursday 16 July 2020

Masks Unmasked

Two facts to begin with: fact one — the governor of Georgia, Brian Kemp, issued an executive order today prohibiting cities from mandating masks to combat the COVID-19 pandemic. Not only that, but he is suing Atlanta mayor Keisha Bottoms because she implemented such a mandate.

The lawsuit marks a stunning escalation in the brewing feud between Kemp and Bottoms after the Atlanta mayor introduced her mandatory mask ordinance. Under her order, not wearing a mask within Atlanta’s city limits was punishable by a fine and even up to six months in jail.

But the governor’s office has argued the mayor’s plan is not “legally enforceable” because Kemp signed an executive order that prohibits local action from being more prohibitive than the state’s requirements. (Source)

Fact two — of the states with the highest growth of cases in the US (Florida, South Carolina, Texas, Georgia, and California), four of the five have Republican governors. Florida, South Carolina, and Texas were among the last to shut down and among the first to open back up.

It leaves me wondering what in the hell Republicans think they’re doing. I get the feeling that most of the anti-science individuals and policies come from Republicans. They seem to have a positive fear of science.

Anti-vaxers? Usually Republican. Parents who reject the clear evidence for evolution and want creationism taught in school? Republican. Climate-change-deniers? Republican. Anti-maskers? Republican.

And it’s not just a feeling, not just a perception: there are data to back it up.

I think this pandemic is really highlighting an ugly truth about America that many of us sensed but couldn’t really prove: we can’t help but see it all around us now.

At the other extreme is New Zealand, where politicians let health professionals and scientists make decisions about how to deal with the pandemic. They now have zero active cases. Zero.

But it’s not just who’s making the decisions: it’s also the mentality of the populace. This pandemic is also showing the ugly side of American “freedom-at-all-costs” thinking.

As it stands, I think the rest of the world is now just looking at America and shaking its head. We elected someone who has no business working as a public servant to the highest office in the nation and rejected clear scientific findings regarding the pandemic, which lead us to have historic levels of infection — to the degree that the EU has banned Americans from traveling to Europe.

Wheelies

Today, as we went on our evening walk, the Boy was popping wheelies on his bike. Right now he’s just pulling his front tire off the ground for a fraction of a second. Soon enough he’ll be trying to ride wheelies for as long as he can.

I found myself trying to remember whether I could ride wheelies as a kid. Could I? I honestly can’t remember. It seems plausible and implausible at the same time.

Such is the fragile and unreliable nature of memories.

Stay-cation

Monday 13 July 2020

We were supposed to be leaving tomorrow for a small vacation with the family. It seems like a crazy idea to go out during a pandemic, but we were just going to the beach — easy enough to stay away from everyone, and since we were Airbnb-ing it, we wouldn’t even have to go inside restaurants or stores.

Then we realized K and I have chickenpox. How is it possible to have chickenpox during a pandemic that is forcing us to isolate ourselves? Well, we go to the store; K occasionally works with real estate clients; we have been going for hikes. During all of this, we take the appropriate CDC-recommended precautions.

Morning reading session

What’s more frustrating about it is that I’ve had them before. When my best friend came down with chickenpox our senior year, I was one of the friends who would drop by every day and tell him what he’d missed in school. I brought over R.E.M.’s newest release at the time (Out of Time). and we listened to it together.

Perhaps it was for the best, though — perhaps we were being idiots even for thinking about it. At any rate, the Airbnb host agreed to let us change the date and agreed to be very flexible about that new date, so we’ve theoretically lost nothing. Perhaps we gained more than we thought, though.

Composite play

Tease

Tuesday 16 June 2020

Nature is teasing our family. Perhaps mocking. But I’ll be magnanimous and say “Teasing.” We were supposed to leave for Poland today.

We should be on a journey that ends tomorrow with hugs, rosół, and views like this:

This post should not be possible. Yet nature made it possible by making the trip impossible.

And as if that were not enough, today was a perfect example of what polskie lato can be like: it never got above 60 degrees today.

The Refund

Sunday 14 June 2020

The flight was canceled. One would think getting a refund in such a case would be a fairly simple process. After all, a service paid for was never delivered. Still, we'd booked the flight through a middleman, so to speak, and Lufthansa said we had to deal with this third party. So we dealt with the agency that booked our flights. They informed us that they could not refund all of the money we'd paid for the tickets. For each ticket, Lufthansa would impose a $185 fee and the agency would impose a $100 fee.

I remembered, though, an email I'd gotten from Lufthansa, which read, in part:

The expanded route network offers you, our valued customers, more options for rebooking existing or canceled tickets to a variety of travel destinations, in accordance with the applicable conditions. As I wrote in my last letter, any ticket booked until May 15, 2020, which was affected by a flight cancellation, can be rebooked one time free of charge. You can also apply the value of your booking to a new ticket at a later date. Additionally, your travel date and destination can be changed in our route network. In this case, the rebooking must be made by January 31, 2021 and your new trip must begin by December 31, 2021. For a new confirmed travel date up to December 31, 2020, we will give you an additional € 50 toward bookings changed by August 31, 2020. Should you prefer a refund, this option is also available. We are increasing the capacities in order to process refunds more quickly.

I called back and forwarded the email to the agency as we spoke.

"Well, sir, that was just an email Lufthansa sent out to all ticket holders. Your ticket was purchased with many restrictions."

"I don't recall being informed of any such restrictions. The email doesn't indicate that tickets purchased with certain restrictions are not eligible," I replied with surprising calm.

Blurry phone image from our nightly family walk/ride

I'd done a little research about them before calling and found the following notes at a review site, all published within the last week:

One star is too much for this company. Sure, the agents that book your trip are friendly and the prices are cheap. HOWEVER, this company is dubious. They are now charging people to cancel flights, as necessary due to the pandemic. I had a trip booked to go to Greece, and the airline required me to cancel it through the travel agent ----. ---- charged $150 to my credit card, without my consent, just to cancel my flight. I'm working with my credit card to stop the payment, but ---- is fighting back, saying I agreed to this term. LIARS! Save yourself and NEVER use this company. It's incomprehensible that they would attempt to profit from the pandemic. Shame on them.

Another also seemed to have issues with getting refunds: "Horrible horrible con-artist at best. you are taking a chance using this company, refuse to give back refunds approved by airlines." And then there was this long story:

As many others said, i am also having issues receiving my refund! My flight to Europe was canceled, i was willing to change the flight, but they said the airline has no other flights this month. So i requested a refund. I purchased another flight with another agency, surprisingly they had flights with the same airline for dates i wanted. I called ---- today for an update on my refund and Owen said that the airline put a hold on all refunds. That was odd to me. Right after, i called an airline directly, and they said they did not put a hold on any refunds and they are processing refunds, but they were unable to help me because the agency is the one that has to request a refund from them. I emailed ---- rep who told me the airline put a stop to refunds and told him what i was told by the airline rep...no response... Im disappointed on how they are handling this.. They are very nice when purchasing the flights to get your business but this is unacceptable! I refuse to have almost 4k stolen!!

What I suspected was that they were planning on pocketing that money for themselves. I suggested that legal action might be required.

"I am just informing you of your options," the man replied, completely non-plussed.

In the end, though, he told me he would do what he could and called back much later saying that he'd talked to the airline, and they'd agreed to waive the fee. "Bullshit," I thought. "Your manager agreed to waive that fee." However, they insisted on the $100/ticket service charge. Now, we'd been working on this all afternoon, and we'd called other friends who'd been in the same situation (one of whom was also flying Lufthansa), and they'd had no problems getting refunds and their cancelation fee was non-existent or only $50. At that point, though, I was just tired of the fight. We'd been working on the issue for five hours, and I just felt exhausted with the whole thing.

I think that's what they were counting on.

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