There are rumors that, by the calendar, we had the first day of spring. The calendar lies. It’s -7°C out here, and while a lot of snow has melted away, the trees are still bare and the lawn is sere.
I’m not calling it spring until I find the first spider outdoors and Mary comes home.
We were incredibly lucky — we had our campus job searches at the end of fall term/beginning of spring term, and we signed on two new faculty just before the coronavirus hit the fan. If we hadn’t, we probably would have postponed the searches until next year and left a lot of good people hanging, wondering what next. I can’t imagine the stress of trying to search for a job right now in the middle of this chaos.
Abe at Oceanoxia doesn’t have to imagine it — he and his wife are both smack in the middle employment uncertainty. He does good work. If you’re in a more fortunate position, check him out and do what you can to help.
I’m reading about the news from Italy, and here’s a dramatic scene for you: a line of army trucks hauling away coffins from Bergamo, where the crematoria are overwhelmed by the number of dead they have to deal with. It’s like a scene out of a disaster movie.
A #Bergamo hanno dovuto chiamare l'esercito per caricare camion e camion di bare da destinare a crematori fuori regione. Prima di lamentarvi della proroga del #lockdown riguardatevi sto video in loop.#coronavirusitalia pic.twitter.com/ofR1raGVTb
— Alessandro Zanoni (@AlexZan87) March 19, 2020
Then the mail was delivered here. Look what I got!
The local funeral home wants me to do some “advance planning”. Sorry, guys, bad timing. My plan right now is to have my corpse thrown into a military truck, driven to some remote spot, and flung into a mass grave and covered over by a bulldozer. Won’t cost me a thing!
I’m going to try again — a few friends and I will be trying to stream on YouTube tonight, at 7pm Central. Last time, I somehow botched the YouTube connection, but this time it might work. If it doesn’t, I’ll shut it down and restart and hope it all finally comes together.
Anyway, we’re just going to talk, drink, swear, weep, all the things I’m doing in private, only in public.
Hey, I actually got everything to work this time!
Unfortunately, watching the frantic back-pedaling and sudden about face of loud conservatives is only good for entertainment value.
After mocking the coronavirus panic, Jerry Falwell Jr. has closed Liberty University.
Paula White, the venal “spiritual advisor” to Donald Trump, used a prayer meeting to beg for cash, and plugged a big evangelical event that would have “spiritual protections” against the coronavirus. The event has since been cancelled.
The Museum of the Bible spent a lot of money looting artifacts from the Middle East illegally. Now it’s been discovered that many of them are fakes.
After doing their best to downplay the pandemic, Fox News is now changing their tune and pretending they knew it all along.
It’s a sick sad world when we are watching everything crash and burn but can take some pleasure in seeing the assholes in flames, too.
OK, world, buckling down. It’s time to get a whole lot of course development done in a few days. This is supposed to be my vacation, why am I looking at a scary pile of work?
The syllabus is going out the window. There will be less testing, and more regular assignments. These assignments will also be given at the start of the week, and will be due a week later — I’m going to try to accommodate the new demands on our students’ time, so we all have to be flexible.
Exams will all be open book, open notes, open internet essay exams. This could be wonderful, or it could be painful. We’ll see.
Our regularly scheduled class meeting times will now be used as optional office hours via Zoom. I’ll just be hanging out in front of a camera with a whiteboard.
You can’t do Zoom at home? Fine, I’ll be giving out my email (they’ve already got that) and my cell phone number. I’ll be accessible, I hope they are.
My first video and text page will be #1, above. I’ll be working on that for both my classes today.
My second video and text will be a recap of the semester to date, with explicit references to the textbook and the battery of pdf files already on Canvas. With this abrupt shift in narrative style I have to at least nod in the direction of continuity. I should have that done by the end of the week.
Then, over the weekend, I have to assemble the first new videos+text. In my introductory biology course, we’ve just begun the basic genetics section, so this will be an overview of Mendelian problem solving; in Genetics, this will be an introduction linkage and linkage mapping. (Whenever I teach these two together, this is always a problem: I have to simultaneously teach a gentle review of the basics to first year students, and a full-on mathy in-depth deep dive to the seniors. I have nightmares about mixing them up.)
I still have to work around the details of the online lab — the announcement of new restrictions on using the facilities on campus is making that a little tricky. I have homozygous flies growing in an incubator right now. The plan is next week to set up the parental reciprocal cross, photographing the phenotypes and putting those online. A little more than a week later, I’ll photograph representative F1 flies — the two crosses should produce different results, which will be presented without explanation — and set up the F1 cross. Maybe two weeks after that, I should have swarms of F2 flies, which I alone will have to sit down and score, for hours and hours (usually I can just crack the whip and have a legion of undergrads do the tedious work). I’ll post the numbers of each phenotype, again with little comment, and then the students will have to get to work interpreting the data and writing up a lab report describing what I did and what it means. They should have the background to understand what’s going on, since I described sex linkage last week and will be giving them all the logic of linkage next week, so it’s going to be more like a science puzzle they have to put together.
I also have to unwind, so I’m also planning a little social hullabaloo on Wednesday evening with friends on YouTube. Maybe I’ll watch something on Netflix later, or read a book. I was going to use this week to get a draft of a paper together, but that’s another thing that’s going to be thrown out the window, to avoid burnout. Maybe next week, when I’ve settled into a new routine.
That’s my life for the next 6-8 weeks, at which time all the upheaval will be totally over and the sun will be shining and the birds will be singing and my wife will show up at my door and the spiders will be flourishing and the Revolution will be in full swing and we’ll all have happy normal things to do.
I decided that the only way I could celebrate my anniversary this year was to take care of Mary’s birds, so I scattered some popcorn out in the yard, put up some fresh suet, and hung some strange log of pig fat and seeds that I got at the store. They were not fooled. Mary’s not here, so they knew better than to come around to some crotchety old man’s idea of a party. It was a flop. All very high school, to be rejected.
I stood around outside for a while, and finally some bird came by, spurned all the new stuff I’d put up, and just went for the old suet Mary hung up before she left. I guess it tasted better.
There weren’t even any spiders to cheer me up. It’s still too cold, and we had some freezing drizzle this morning. There’ll be no springtime until my beloved returns.
Yesterday, I tried to have a remote conversation with some smart people. There were problems.
The good news: Zoom performed smoothly and well. We could hear and see everyone, we had a pleasant discussion, and everything was saved nicely locally. That’s mainly what I need for working with students.
The bad news: The parallel display in a live YouTube stream did not come off at all well. The first sign of trouble was that YouTube ignored all my prior planning and set up, and at the last minute spawned a new video stream. I don’t know what happened there at all. Then this new stream showed everyone, but only included my audio. It was a total mess for viewers at home.
When it was all over, I just killed the planned live stream, deleted the recording with only my voice, and re-uploaded the video. Here it is:
I’m going to experiment today with some private videos to iron out the kinks, and then on Wednesday evening I’ll try again with a casual conversation with some wicked SJWs and Skepticon weirdos.
Today is our 40th wedding anniversary! Sadly, because of an accursed virus, we have to spend it 800 miles apart. Our relationship is strong, though, so we’ll abide.
I did flip through our old photos, though. Here’s one with my parents and her parents on our wedding day.
To grumble a bit…we’ve got all these ancient photos that I would nowadays immediately throw out. We just had a relative with a cheap kodak point-and-shoot wander about and snap pictures, and it shows — I take sharper, brighter photos of spiders than we’ve got of the early days of our marriage. Oh, well, it’s the life that matters, these pieces of paper will just end up in a landfill in a decade or two.
Now I just have to get her back home, but even that can wait. Better that she avoids the risk and stays healthy, and it’s also important that she not spread a virus on an 800 mile transit (we have no idea whether either of us have been infected, but it’s wisest to pretend we are. We don’t need to kill immunocompromised or elderly people so we can share a cupcake and a glass of ginger ale.)
I’m lucky: I have a lab full of healthy, non-infectious spiders with no other people around, so I’m going to go entertain myself by feeding them flies for a while.
I’m also unlucky: my wife flew off to Colorado before all the alerts started going up, and now we’ve decided that she’ll just have to stay there for maybe another month. Or more. Until the risks are lower. At least she has a grandbaby to provide entertainment, which is almost as much fun as a room full of spiders. It does mean my house is empty except for me and the evil cat, and that I have to do all the dishes and clean out the litter box.
I might be a little bit stir-crazy by the time Mary finally gets home.
