Category: health

Monday links and pandemic thoughts

I often spend a few minutes spelunking through the links in my “On This Day” sidebar, if I happen to pull up my home page for some reason. I know that’s not really a productive use of my time, usually, but sometimes I find some fun stuff. Today’s links included a reference to a 2016 NY Times article titled How Social Isolation Is Killing Us. However isolated I was feeling back then, it’s nothing compared to how I’m feeling after ten months of working from home, not traveling outside of NJ, and spending nearly all of my time alone in my apartment.

I’d like to think things are looking up now, but looking at some more recent links:

  • Two Masks Are the New Masks – I think I’m still fine with just one mask, but if I ever actually have to take a train to NYC or something like that, maybe I’ll try doubling up. (And maybe I should look into those KF94 masks they mentioned in the article. I already have a few KN95s. Can’t hurt to have a few different options, I guess…)
  • How to Take a Walk – This is kind of silly, but I get it.
  • It’s 30 Degrees. Shall We Have Brunch Outdoors? – There really isn’t anyplace here in Somerville that’s still doing outdoor dining. I should have taken more advantage of that, back when the weather was nicer. Of course, back then, every place that was doing outdoor dining was too crowded.

I’m looking at the calendar now, and thinking that, at the end of this week, I’ll at least be able to say “I made it through January!” My hope is that things start getting better in February. I’m hoping that vaccine distribution will start ramping up, the weather will start getting nicer, the days will get longer, and Tom Brady will lose another Super Bowl. Then we can move on to March, which is when things will really start getting better. (I hope.)

New Year’s Day 2021

I’ve been writing big New Year’s Day posts on this blog every year for the last several years. I might as well do one this year too. Obviously, last year was a doozy, and a lot of stuff has changed, and a lot is still in flux. I’m not even sure where to start. So I’ll start with links to the last few New Year’s posts:

And I guess I’ll follow a format not too different from previous years.

Health, Weight, and Sleep

My weight has been pretty steady at around 135 pounds this year. It dipped a bit in spring & summer, getting down to 130 briefly, but has rebounded back to 135. I dropped some weight at the beginning of the pandemic, probably because I wasn’t eating any take-out food. I’m still logging all of my meals with Lose It, which I’ve been using since 2013.

I’m also still using Sleep Cycle as an alarm clock and to log my sleep. I’ve been having some weird dreams this year, but apparently so has everyone else. My sleep quality has been mixed, I’d say. Some nights I’m fine, and some nights I’m not.

I was pretty good about exercise through the spring and summer. I did a lot of walking. I’ve cut back on the walks now, since it’s been getting colder. If I don’t go out for a morning walk now, I try to do ten minutes on my exercise bike instead. (I’m glad I didn’t get rid of that thing.) I need to be careful about not letting up too much through the rest of the winter.

On the meditation front, I’ve certainly done more meditation this year than I’d usually do. One of the reasons for that is that I’ve been working from home since March, so it’s easy to take a ten minute midday meditation break. Back when I was working in a cubicle, I was too self-conscious to meditate at work. (And, really, the office environment is too noisy for meditation anyway.) I was using Insight Timer for most of this year, but I switched to Calm in December, since I had a deal to get a free year of Calm Premium. I have enough opinions on meditation apps right now that I should probably hold them for another post. But overall, I’d say that meditation helped me get through this crazy year.

I did finally get my hearing checked this year, in March, just before the pandemic lockdown really kicked in. The results were pretty much what I expected: I’ve lost a lot of hearing in my left ear. My right ear is fine. The doctor said that I’m not really at the stage where a hearing aid would make sense. My hearing issues haven’t really much mattered this year, though. If I’m talking to anybody at work, it’s on my computer, and I can just turn up the volume as much as I need. And I’m never in a crowded restaurant with a lot of background noise, so that’s not a problem either.

Work and Professional Development

I’m feeling very lucky to have had a good, steady, job this year, and to be able to work from home. My performance review for 2020 was very good. I didn’t really expect a raise this year, given the general state of the economy, but I got one. So that’s all good. There are going to be a lot of challenges ahead, going into 2021. Again, that’s probably a whole blog post of its own though.

On the professional development front, one nice thing to come out of 2020 was a lot of free virtual conferences. I didn’t participate in as many of those as I would have liked, but I did manage to watch some content from Microsoft Build and Microsoft Ignite. Most of my efforts at learning new stuff this year were centered around SharePoint Framework (SPFx) and Microsoft’s Power Platform stuff. I wasn’t really successful in getting any projects done with any of this new stuff in 2020 though. I have a couple of big projects at work that will really need to get done in 2021. I’m still not even sure if I’ll be using SPFx or Power Platform or something else though.

Looking at last year’s post, I see I was talking about trying to learn maybe Rust or Swift in 2020. I definitely didn’t do that. The one new general thing I tried to learn in 2020 was React. And that was mostly because I needed to learn it for SPFx.

Finance

I’m in pretty good shape, financially. Certainly better than most people, given the state of things. I’ve actually seen my checking account balance grow this year, presumably because I didn’t spend any money on travel, or on day trips to NYC, or even on a lot of little things like restaurant meals and gas for my car and Starbucks coffee. I expect 2021 will be similar. Given how little interest I make on my checking account, I really need to shunt some money over into my Merrill account and buy some more shares in an S&P 500 fund. The stock market (after a brief crash back in March) has done surprisingly well this year. And I probably need to sit down with a financial advisor at some point in 2021 and move some money around. There’s some stuff I want to do to simplify my finances a bit, but I can’t do it without figuring out the tax implications.

I opened two new credit card accounts this year, which is pretty unusual for me. I traded in the AmEx Green card I’d had since college for an AmEx EveryDay card. That was done mostly because the fee on the Green card had gone up to $150, so I wanted to replace it with a fee-free card. And I finally gave in and got an Apple Card. I’ve only used the Apple Card to buy my new Apple Watch, in November. I don’t really anticipate using it for anything other than Apple Store purchases.

I’ve also been thinking about getting an Amazon Prime credit card. I spent nearly $2000 at Amazon this year, so the 5% back could be as much as $100 for me. There’s really no reason for me not to get it, other than not wanting to add yet another card to my wallet.

Subscriptions

I’m always obsessing over subscriptions. The pandemic has caused me to pull the trigger on a few subscriptions that I’ve been holding out on for years. Partially because I have some extra money to spend (as noted above), and partially because I have some extra time to kill at home. So I might as well spend some money and time on nice stuff that’ll distract me from the horrible state of the world right now.

I finally subscribed to Apple Music. I signed up for a six-month free trial in October, so I don’t need to start paying for it until April. But I will likely keep it going when that happens. After years of trying to resist switching from CDs & MP3s to a subscription service, I’ve finally given in and embraced the new way of doing things.

I’ve also signed up for Disney+ and Hulu. I wanted Disney+ for The Mandalorian and Soul. And Hulu had a Black Friday deal where you could get the ad-supported tier for $2/month for a year, so that seemed worthwhile. I’m still resisting HBO Max, but I might give in on that one too eventually. If Wonder Woman 1984 had gotten better reviews, I’d probably have done it by now.

I might also sign up for the Apple One subscription bundle at some point in 2021. I don’t really need Apple TV+ or Apple Arcade, but if the pandemic keeps going, I’ll probably give in on that.

Books and Comics

According to Goodreads, I read 86 books in 2020. I’d set a goal of 100 books, and I didn’t reach it, but I’m OK with that. Most of those were comics, but (again) I’m fine with that.

For my Great American Read group, I didn’t really get through much, but I did finish Gone With The Wind in March, so that was a big one. I also read White Teeth, Invisible Man, and The Outsiders from the TGAR list. I’m still an admin in that group, and we’re still posting monthly group reads, but I’m not sure why I’m still bothering with that. The other admin is doing about half the work, so that’s good. I feel like we’re going to have to wind that group down in 2021, but I’m not in a hurry to do so.

My favorite comics of the year were probably the Resident Alien collections that I read back in May. And the Locke & Key series was also surprisingly good.

I’m still ordering a few titles from Westfield every month, but I think I’m going to wind that down over the next few months. I haven’t gotten on board with DC’s Future State thing, and I’m not reading any Marvel books. So that just leaves a few books from smaller publishers, and it’s probably best if I just switch to digital and/or trades for those. Also, my Comixology backlog is nearly 200 books (mostly collections, not single issues), so just working through that could take me a few years.

Movies

As I mentioned recently, I watched a lot of movies in 2020. Looking at Letterboxd, I see that I watched a total of 73. Probably my favorite film of the year (that actually came out in 2020) was Soul. My second favorite would have been Onward, so the year for me was bookended with solid Pixar films. I did a rewatch of all four Avengers films early in the year, and a rewatch of all the Daniel Craig Bond films just recently. Those were both fun distractions. I also tried to watch a bunch of Kurosawa films, but I only got through four. For 2021, I want to watch some more Kurosawa, and maybe rewatch a bunch of Miyazaki films. (I bought several of them on Blu-ray earlier this year, and haven’t watched any of those discs yet.)

Summary

I am kind of proud of myself for getting through 2020 in one piece, not too much worse for wear. I managed to avoid putting on weight, picking up a drinking habit, getting COVID, and losing my job. I think my mental health is reasonably OK, all things considered. I’m trying not to stress about things I didn’t do. I’d like to have spent more time on “enriching” activities and less on pure distraction, but I’m mostly OK with having watched 73 movies and lots of TV, and having read a lot more comics this year than novels or non-fiction books.

I’m expecting the first couple of months of 2021 to be pretty rough. I think the vaccine rollout will be slow. I don’t expect a change in the status quo on mask wearing and social distancing and working from home. Winter will probably still be in full force through to early March, so we’re not going to be able to do much outdoors. I think the current surge of COVID cases will continue through February, and not start to let up until March. I don’t see us all being able to return to anything like normality until very late in 2021, if at all. But, hopefully, by summer, we’ll have enough folks vaccinated and the political situation will have stabilized enough that we’ll start on the road to “normal.”

I’m thinking a lot about short-term strategies for getting through winter. Things like getting my groceries delivered, watching a lot more “comfort” TV, reading a lot of comics, working out on the exercise bike, meditating, blogging, journaling, whatever helps. I’m not making any resolutions for 2021. I’m going to take it day by day, and I think that’s what we’re all going to have to do.

 

the rest of the year

I still seem to be dealing with a lingering cold that I picked up last weekend. So this weekend has been pretty quiet. I finished reading The Outsiders, finished watching Young Wallander, and started watching Giri/Haji. I did my laundry yesterday, but that was it for productive work, really. I had my groceries delivered from Whole Foods, so I didn’t even get out to the grocery store. And I’ve mostly been living off leftovers from some takeout barbecue I got on Friday night.

Last week, I attended a remote workshop for Microsoft’s CSP program, and this week, I’m supposed to be attending a week-long class on Microsoft’s Power Platform. Last week’s workshop took up only about 3 hours each day, but this week’s class is supposed to run from 9:30 to 3:30 each day, so that’s going to take up most of the day. Normally, this would be an in-person class, but of course now it’s going to be delivered remotely. The CSP workshop was done over Teams and went pretty smoothly, but it wasn’t very interactive. I’m wondering about how the Power Platform class will go. I assume it’ll have to be more interactive than the CSP thing was. And I think it’s being done over Zoom, rather than Teams. For various reasons, I’m going to need to do the class directly on my work laptop, using only the laptop screen and keyboard. So it might get a little tough to follow along with the instructor while also working through examples on my own in a separate window. I wish I could get a multi-monitor setup going for that, but there’s no practical way to do that right now. So, anyway, it’s going to be an interesting week, trying to get through the class while also keeping up with anything else that comes up at work. (And, again, I’m very grateful to have a job right now, never mind a job that’s letting me work remotely, and paying for me to attend workshops and classes and whatnot. I’m very lucky.)

I’ve been thinking a lot about how the rest of the year is going to go. Thinking back to the summer, I guess I was vaguely aware that we might be going through a second wave at the end of the year, but it’s looking now like it’s going to be a doozy. I’ve been spending maybe too much time doomscrolling on Twitter, but there are a lot of reasonable people talking about how bad it can get if people aren’t careful around Thanksgiving and Christmas. So I’m trying to get into the proper lockdown mindset.

Since I’ve spent so little money this year on travel and other stuff like that, and since I’m going to be stuck inside a lot, I’m thinking that maybe I should pop for Disney+. It’s only $7 a month, and I keep hearing good things about The Mandalorian. Plus, the next Pixar film, Soul, is going straight to Disney+. (And it won’t cost $30 extra, like Mulan did, which is nice.) Disney+ has been around for just about a year now, and seems to be doing really well. So I guess I should give in and sign up. Eventually, I might even talk myself into canceling cable TV. But maybe I’ll keep that going until the end of the year, since (again) I’m going to be spending a lot of time indoors and I have enough disposable income to pay for both cable TV and streaming right now.

The second wave, and other bad news

We’re definitely seeing a big second wave of coronavirus cases here in NJ. I’m glad I’m still able to work from home, and I guess I’ll be doing that through to the end of the year, at least.

Meanwhile, my local House rep, Tom Malinowski, who seemed to have won reelection, has seen his lead shrink as more votes are counted. (No shenanigans here; it just seems like more Democrats voted early and more Republicans voted late.) I hope he hangs on to his lead; he seems like a good guy. (While his opponent seems like kind of a jerk, to be honest.)

And also meanwhile, there has been another wave of layoffs at DC Comics. I think I’m actually going to give up on buying new DC books in 2021. I opted out of ordering any of the Future State books on this month’s Westfield order form, so I only wound up ordering 3 books total (one DC and two Dark Horse). And that might be my last Westfield order, unless I can talk myself into adding some more books from smaller publishers, like Dark Horse and Image. It’s not worth paying the shipping charges for just 3 or 4 books a month. And I’m far enough behind in reading that I should probably take a break anyway. I’m a little worried about the health of the market for regular old monthly comic books at this point. (But I need to keep reminding myself that it’s not my job to prop it up by buying a bunch of books that I don’t have time to read or room to store.) I might sign up for Comixology Unlimited at some point next year, but I have enough books piled up to keep me busy for quite some time, even without that, so I should probably hold off until I’ve put a dent in the backlog.

So that’s my bad news overview for the day, I guess. Obviously, the coronavirus stuff is the most important of these three items. I’ve been trying to get my head straight and prepare myself for the rest of the year, assuming I’ll just be working from home, and celebrating Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year alone in my apartment. (I might have been doing that anyway this year, even without the pandemic, but it would have been nice to have some options.) I’m realizing now that 2020 is going to be a full year without an in-person comic con, a trip to the Met, or MoMA, or… anywhere, really. I have a week’s vacation scheduled for early in December, and I guess I’ll just be sitting around in my apartment for the week, catching up on my reading. That’s not such a bad thing, I guess. I’ve got a job, and an apartment, and my health isn’t too bad, and that’s more than a lot of folks can say.

sick again

So in yesterday’s post, where I was talking about all the stuff I did on Saturday, I said “I’m hoping that doesn’t result in me getting another cold, or even worse.” Well… I started feeling like I was getting a sore throat last night, and this morning I had all my usual cold symptoms: sore throat, headache, and low energy. This is, I guess, the third cold I’ve had so far this season. It seems like any time I leave my bubble for any activities that involve moderate human contact, I get sick. I got sick pretty frequently before the pandemic, but I was kind of hoping that all of the mask wearing and social distancing would keep me healthier this year. I guess it did, up to a point, but now, it seems like I’m getting sick every other week. Oh well.

Back on the subject of my new Apple Watch: I’m fairly disappointed with the handwashing feature. I had it enabled over the weekend, but I’ve turned it off now. It had a tendency to get activated every time I was washing dishes in my kitchen, but only sporadically when I was actually washing my hands in the bathroom. I think that might be due to the noise from my bathroom fan. It’s pretty noisy, and I can’t turn it off without also turning off the light. And I guess there’s no easy way for the watch to distinguish between washing out a coffee mug and washing my hands. (I guess I could also commit to always washing my coffee cup for at least 20 seconds.) Other than that, it’s a great watch and I like it a lot.

I have a few random articles bookmarked that I kind of wanted to link to and blog about, but I’m too tired now to do that. I’m hoping I can get through this cold without taking yet another day off from work, but I will if I have to. I still have a few days to burn before the end of the year.

Halloween Blues

I’ve been feeling sick since Wednesday afternoon. I’m pretty sure I caught a cold Wednesday morning, probably when I brought my car in for an oil change. That’s pretty much the only time I was out of the apartment and around other people since last weekend. This is the second cold I’ve gotten this autumn. The last one was only about two weeks ago, and this feels pretty much the same. This time, I took a whole day off from work, on Friday. So, between that and the general situation, I’m not really in a festive Halloween mood.

I ordered my groceries from Whole Foods last night, since I didn’t want to have to go to ShopRite today if I was still feeling sick. I usually select the 8-10 AM delivery window when I order from them, but they only showed the 6-8 AM window as open, so I picked that, and hoped the guy wouldn’t show up right at 6. Well, he did actually show up exactly at 6:01 AM. Luckily, I’d gotten out of bed at 5:30 AM and had just gotten out of the shower when he called to get buzzed in to the building. So that worked out well. I opened my apartment door at 6:05 to see five bags of groceries right outside. I’ve had mixed success with delivery from Whole Foods, but this time it worked out reasonably well. They only had to make one substitution, and they didn’t skip any items at all. And nothing was messed up. The eggs are all whole, the bread wasn’t squashed, and all the produce looks OK. I don’t think I want to go with that 6 AM delivery option again though. That’s just too early.

So now it’s 9 AM, and my laundry and grocery shopping are all done, and I can probably just spend the rest of the day reading comics and napping. I might as well add a few random items to this blog post before I give up and take a nap.

I’ve mentioned Evernote a few times recently here. Since the last time I mentioned it, I’ve upgraded to the new client on my main desktop PC, but not yet on my Mac. So I’ve got the new client everywhere but the Mac. I’ve hit a few bugs and annoyances, but they’re pushing out new versions frequently, and at least one or two of my issues have already been fixed. So, as of now, I still plan on sticking with Evernote.

I did take a look at Notion recently though. I hadn’t previously considered that as an Evernote replacement, largely because I didn’t know that they had a Windows version. Their home page only shows screenshots from iOS and macOS, but if you dig a bit, there is a mention of a Windows client. Their desktop app is definitely an Electron app (as is Evernote’s new app), so switching to Notion wouldn’t resolve any issues/annoyances that are due to Electron. Still, I might sign up for a free account and mess around with it a bit, if I have time.

I’m still having fun with Apple Music. I’ve been listening to some jazz and classical this week, including Louis Armstrong’s Satch Plays Fats and Yo-Yo Ma’s Bach: Unaccompanied Cello Suites. So, yeah, I guess I’ve finally given in and accepted that streaming music services are fine, and I’ll be paying for one. Once my six-month free period is over, I might even go ahead and sign up for the individual Apple One bundle.

 

Splendid isolation

Sometimes, I take a little time and go through my unread Pinboard links, and try to clean them up a bit, deleting some if they’re no longer applicable, and maybe reading a few random articles that I’d bookmarked long ago. Today, I stumbled across this one: Splendid isolation: how I stopped time by sitting in a forest for 24 hours, a fairly long article from The Guardian that I’d bookmarked back in January.

I know the phrase Splendid isolation as the title of a Warren Zevon song, but apparently it’s a term “used to describe the 19th-century British diplomatic practice of avoiding permanent alliances,” according to Wikipedia. (And I see I’ve referenced the song previously on this blog.)

Anyway, that article from January predates the pandemic, of course. The concept of “isolation” in general has cropped up a lot this year. I’ve been following Suleika Jaouad’s Isolation Journals, for instance, though I’ve fallen behind in reading those emails, so they’re piling up in my “read/review” folder, along with a bunch of other stuff.

Isolation has come up in some music I’ve listened to this year, including this Music For Isolation project and this Isolate With compilation. I’m also kind of interested in Ulrich Schnauss’ ‎A Strangely Isolated Place. It’s an older album, but I’ve only started to listen to Schnauss recently. I don’t suppose there’s much point in just linking to a bunch of music with the word “isolation” in the title, but it amused me for a few minutes, and it’s all good music.

Anyway, the article I started this blog post with is a pretty good one and has got me thinking about my relationship to time right now. It definitely changes, when you’re home all day and the lines between home and office pretty much disappear. I find myself getting distracted a lot and then feeling guilty for not getting enough work done. And I’m trying to impose some discipline on my “free time” also, feeling guilty if I don’t make some progress in a book I’m reading, or fall too far behind on a TV show I’m watching, or whatever. I feel that I need to try to maintain a certain schedule and a certain amount of discipline to keep myself sane and on track, but it’s starting to wear me down.

I have several vacation days left that I have to use up before the end of the year. I’ve scheduled a full week off in early December. In any other year, I’d have plenty of interesting things to do with a week off. But this year, a lot of my usual options are either closed off or a bit too risky for me right now. I kind of like the idea of disappearing into the woods for a day and just sitting in a circle and doing nothing for 24 hours. But that’s maybe a little too extreme for me. Maybe just having a full week where I don’t have to get through work every day will be enough to let me hit the reset button on my anxiety, at least a bit. Maybe I can relax into some unstructured randomness. (Though I suspect the results of the election will affect my anxiety level, for better or worse, more than any amount of vacation time will.)

Labor Day

So, here it is, Labor Day. If you’d told me back in March that I’d still be working from home in September, and too afraid to take NJ Transit into NYC to visit a few museums on Labor Day, I’d… well, I’d be a little depressed but I probably wouldn’t be that surprised. I didn’t initially expect this thing to last so long, but there were good reasons to suspect that it would be around at least until the end of 2020, even back in March. I was ruminating in my last post about whether or not I could talk myself into going into NYC today; I’ve definitely given up on that idea.

Walking


I’ve been going out for a morning walk nearly every day since the beginning of this thing in March. That habit has been one of the bright spots of the last several months. I’ve gotten into the habit of taking a few photos on my walks and picking one of them to save to Day One, along with a short journal entry, usually just a sentence of two. Day One tracks streaks, if you post to it every day, and my current streak is nearing 200 days. (Looking back, it appears that my current streak started on March 10, just before the pandemic lockdown.) I post about other stuff in Day One too, but I almost always start the day with a photo from my walk.

Often I just walk a circuit down Main St, up one of the side streets, then down High Street, back to Main St, and back to my front door. I can get a good 20-minute, 1-mile walk out of that. On weekends, though, I’ll often walk along the Peters Brook Greenway. I can get some nice photos along there. I took the hibiscus photo in this post yesterday morning, just about one minute before getting bitten by a mosquito. That mosquito bite bothered me a lot more than it should have. I’d gotten so used to getting into a nice relaxed state on these walks, and it’s been so long since I’ve been bitten by a mosquito, that I took it as something of a personal affront. And of course my mind started playing out all sorts of nightmare scenarios. (Can you get COVID-19 from a mosquito bite? Almost definitely not. Whew.) But I got back out there this morning and did a nice 40-minute walk along the Greenway again. This time, though, I tried to keep a little further away from the water.

Reading

I really didn’t do anything much useful yesterday, and I don’t plan on doing much today either. Yesterday, I read the “City of Bane” issues of Batman, which were the end of Tom King’s run on the title. My Goodreads review for the second half of that story nearly turned into a long essay on the Trump presidency, but I held myself back. Finishing that story got me thinking about King’s run on Batman, which started with the DC Rebirth event from the summer of 2016, which was of course just a few months before the 2016 election. That got me thinking about how much the world has changed over the last four years, and especially over the last six months. And how much it might change over the next, say, six months, or four years. I’d started reading monthly comics again in 2016 with the DC Rebirth event, and have keep reading them, though I’ve dropped Batman and Detective recently and I don’t have any titles on my current subscription list that were on it back in 2016. And I’m thinking of dropping monthly books entirely again. (But this is a subject I’ve blogged about too many times.)

Listening

Bandcamp has continued to do their Bandcamp Friday thing, where they waive their revenue share and give all the money from sales to the musicians. I last bought anything from them in June, so I was overdue to spend some money on music. I wound up spending around $75 this past Friday, buying seven albums (all digital), including something called Good Music to Avert the Collapse of American Democracy, a compilation benefiting the voting rights group Fair Fight. So I hope my $20 helps, though I’m not optimistic about the future of American democracy, to be honest.

almost the end of summer

Well, here it is, almost Labor Day, and almost six months since the COVID-19 stuff started. Things are continuing to open up a bit more. I went for a haircut on Saturday, my first since February. I’ve been trimming my own hair since then, and honestly not doing the best job. Since my regular barber decided to retire during the pandemic shutdown, I had to go to Sport Clips, which was… ok, but not really the same quality as the 80-year-old Italian barber I’ve been going to for the last 20 years. NJ has also recently allowed gyms to reopen, and will be allowing limited indoor dining starting this weekend.

I haven’t been keeping really close track of what’s going on with school reopenings, but I actually saw a crossing guard out this morning, so I guess at least some schools around here are open now, for (presumably) some in-person instruction.

The Met and MoMA are both open now. As I mentioned last month, I’ve really been missing my visits to both of those museums. Here’s a post from a year ago today, talking about a couple of my NYC museum visits from last summer. Sigh. I’m pretty sure I’m not going to try going into NYC this weekend, but I’m still toying with the idea. It’s tempting. I haven’t really done much of anything this summer, aside from work, exercise, reading, and watching TV. (Well, and sleeping and eating too, I guess.) I haven’t traveled more than 15 miles from my home since March. And I only went that far for doctor’s visits.

Here’s an article from the Washington Post, by someone who went to the Met and MoMA right after they reopened. And here’s a visitor’s guide from the NY Times, with some information on the current exhibits at the Met and MoMA, and the new rules for getting in. It looks like they’re both open Sunday and Monday (Labor Day), so… maybe I can talk myself into it. Or maybe I should just order myself copies of Making The Met, 1870–2020 and MoMA Now, and stay home and enjoy the museums from afar.

Five months and counting

We’ve just passed the five month mark since this whole COVID-19 thing kicked into high gear. My last day in the office was Thursday March 12. I took Friday March 13 off and, at that time, wasn’t even sure if we were going to be allowed to work from home the following week. Well, we were, and I’ve been working from home since. At the end of May, it looked like we might have to come back in August. That got pushed to September, and has now been pushed to October 5. Meanwhile, I never even got a chance to clean out my desk, so it’s probably still cluttered with a desk calendar stuck at March 12, a few boxes of granola bars that likely expired a month or two ago, and random scribbled notes from whatever I was working on in March. (The wasted granola bars bother me more than they probably should.) It seems like we’ve been living in a state of denial through this whole thing, where we’re always a month away from reopening everything, but that date keeps getting pushed back.

I’ve really been missing my trips into New York to visit The Met and MoMA. The Met is supposed to be reopening on August 27 for members and August 29 for the public, and MoMA plans to open on August 27. I don’t think I’m ready to go in to New York yet though. I’m not ready to deal with NJ Transit, Newark Penn Station, the NYC subway, or all of the extra stuff that would be involved in getting into and moving through the museums. But I’m tempted to give it a try. I spent a little time last night thinking through it, but couldn’t really come up with a plan that sounded like it would be both safe and fun.

One thing that’s probably a bright spot is how well the S&P 500 is doing right now. It’s at a new record high, which should probably make me happy, given how much of my retirement money is in S&P 500 index funds. But it’s a little unnerving for some reason. Maybe I just don’t know how to process good news? Or I just don’t trust anything that looks like it might be good news?

I have a bunch of other stuff I wanted to blog about, including some tech stuff and some comic book stuff, but I should really stop now and plop myself down in front of the TV and relax for a bit.