This is hard. I’ve got decades of experience teaching face to face, and I’ve got a battery of notes and files to work from, and they’re all more or less useless right now — I have to invest so much time rewriting everything to make it work better in an online format, and further, I’ve got little interactive feedback from the students, so I don’t know if I’m making everything even more incomprehensible. I’m up late, I get up early, all focused on producing useful content, and I fall further and further behind on grading. And I’m alone at home.

I’m miserable. I need a good day of hanging out with spiders and even that is getting neglected for all this class development work that has suddenly been thrown in my lap.

Now we have to think about Fall classes — we’re having a meeting tomorrow to discuss what we’ll do if this situation continues for another six months. I fear it will. Our university has announced that it will announce a decision about Fall classes in June. Our idiot US president wants to pressure everyone to be fully open for business by early May. We’re coping with a disease with a long slow incubation period, so if we rush into business as usual we’re going to get an even bigger second wave, possibly in August, and we’re just going to have to reinvoke the stay-at-home orders again, and I’ll be doing cell biology online.

Unless the ‘rona gets me first. I don’t know which alternative to favor at this point. I suppose at least next semester I’d have a summer to prepare for it, unlike the current nightmare.

But I have to make a post! Why? Because I realize that I’m totally isolated, I don’t go outside, I don’t talk to anyone, so if I were to drop dead, it might be days or weeks before anyone noticed…except that there’s this outside world that reads my blog, and would wonder what’s happening if I went silent.

So you know if I stopped posting for significantly more than 24 hours, you should immediately call our local mortuary in Morris and ask them to swing by to pick up my corpse. Before the evil cat eats my eyes. I know she’s thinking about it.

(You might be wondering why my students wouldn’t notice — I’m contacting them every weekday. It’s because I fear my sudden disappearance might translate into “HOLIDAY!” in their minds.)

Now back to the prep work. I have to explain imprinting to my genetics students, and that’s not an easy concept for most of them.

A billionaire is giving away a significant fraction of his money to coronavirus relief. Jack Dorsey has said he’s donating $1 billion to the cause. This is a good start — he says it’s over 25% of his net worth — with a couple of reservations: he has only said he’s going to do this, and rich people have a reputation for not following through; distributing that much money is a huge, difficult task and Dorsey is not an expert on funding biomedical institutions; and damn, he shouldn’t have that much money in the first place.

He also still has a couple of billion dollars more in his pocket. He’s not going to be hurting.

I really shouldn’t listen to the first song in this set when Mary is gone and we’re not sure when she’ll be able to get home again.

That guy put so much feeling into his voice.