BookWoman56

I remember watching this as a kid; the standard lineup we had for afternoon soaps was Days of Our Lives, The Doctors, and Another World. I remember some aspects of it fairly well, but also as a springboard for several actors who went on to bigger roles.

The surge in cases here in San Antonio has gotten bad enough that earlier this evening, the local emergency management office sent an alert out: The daily new case total was 795 cases for our county, a significant increase over the previous daily record of 638 new cases, which was set a few days ago. I know the blame is being put on young people going to bars, but I have definitely seen fewer people wearing masks than a month ago, and not all of the ones going without masks were young. It's as if people just decided they were tired of dealing with the risk, and with the state opening things up, quit taking any precautions.

It depends on the configuration of the specific office that people are in. I've heard there's plans to ensure 6 feet of separation between employees sitting in cubes, but in some of the locations I've visited (San Antonio and Charlotte), it would be difficult to do that without adding on office space and probably prohibiting the use of conference rooms for meetings. Glad you're enjoying the WFH arrangement; to me, it beats the hell out of having to commute to an office.

The very large financial services institution for which I work announced yesterday that it will continue the WFH model until at least Labor Day. There are employees such as bank tellers who interact with customers F2F and therefore can't work remotely, but IIRC close to 200K of the total 265K employees are working from home. This doesn't affect me directly, as I was already working 100% remotely pre-pandemic, but some of my colleagues are very relieved not to have to deal with going into the office again for a while. I can't help but feel TPTB are concerned, rightly, that ordering everybody back to the office while so many states are having a surge in cases will end up with employees spreading the virus among themselves.

Many banks are requiring customers to wear masks, in addition to having plexiglass shields between the tellers and the customers. I don't know about other parts of the country, but here in San Antonio a lot of banks require you to set up an appointment if you need to come into the lobby, so they can limit the number of people in the lobby. Most routine transactions are done in the drive-through lanes.

One of the very few benefits of the Covid situation is that many graduation ceremonies have moved to online only. For example, my daughter received her undergrad degree at the end of May and her graduation ceremony was live-streamed rather than in person. She didn't opt to have her name read aloud, but for any students who did, their families could have made all the noise they wanted to without disturbing anyone else in their own homes.

If my mother were still alive with her dementia, I'd probably be doing the same thing. She became convinced that she was in the wrong house before she died, along with losing her orientation to time and other people. I am frankly relieved that she died before the pandemic, because given the number of hospice care staff who were in and out of the house, I feel sure she would have contracted Covid and ended up dying in the hospital alone rather than at home. When you are interacting with someone who has dementia, it's often like dealing with a toddler in an adult body and as much as you want to be completely truthful, sometimes it's necessary to stretch the truth a bit. Yes, in theory you could travel even with the virus going on, but it would not be the best thing for your father to do so, and anyone who's been in a similar situation understands the choices you are making.

Yes, and according to a news story I read today, we're now in the top 5 hotspots in the country, along with Austin, TX. I go out maybe once a week to the grocery store at off-peak times; yesterday's shopping trip for a freezer was unusual for me. I prefer staying at home most of the time, so that aspect of the pandemic doesn't bother me.

I wish I could believe they'd get a clue, but this pandemic has completely reinforced my belief that you can't fix stupid.

The only ongoing shortage in my grocery store now is farfalle, and I fail to understand why spaghetti, linguini, penne, rotini, and other pasta types are readily available but not farfalle. Also, I didn't realize it until this weekend but another shortage makes sense. My son's chest freezer died and the manufacturer has opted to refund the purchase amount rather than repair it. However, freezers of any size other than the mini ones are difficult to find. Today we went to a few big stores that normally sell them: none in stock and online stock is back-ordered until a month from now, and some won't allow online orders because they're so backed up. Finally found one at a furniture store that also sells appliances, but this was a fluke; it had been a special order just before the pandemic hit, arrived a couple of weeks into the shutdown, and the person who had ordered it decided not to proceed with the purchase. It was a little more expensive than my son wanted but it's much larger than his old one, and is an upright one, which will make it easier to see what's in there. The stores we visited confirmed that around the beginning of the pandemic here, customers snapped up all the in-store stock, presumably to freeze all the food they were panic buying. In other news, my city has had a spike in cases, and the mayor has ordered masks to be required again, even though at the state level, people are in major denial that there's still a problem.

I have ongoing sinus issues, and my test didn't really hurt. It's uncomfortable but mostly just a brief sensation of pressure, and then it's done. I'd put it on the same level as getting your throat swabbed for a strep test, minus the gag reflex.

@bilgistic, even if this particular gig doesn't translate into an immediate FTE position or an extension on your contract, it gives you current experience in dealing with regulatory filings. Given where you are, there's a ton of both large and small places (banks, investment companies, etc.) that have regulatory paperwork that has to be done quarterly or annually. So I'm hopeful you can use this experience as a springboard into a FTE position with benefits, etc., that will be a good fit for you. There's also a good possibility that at the end of the project, your project managers will take a look at your performance and that of the other two temps, and decide to hire one of you full-time; that's pretty common when a company brings in several temps for a project.

Good for the daughter for insisting on a college away from the parent(s). If that comment by the parent is typical, then the daughter needs to get away so she can make her own decisions. Not that helicopter/overly controlling parents are entirely new, though; a few decades ago I taught freshman English at a few universities, and almost invariably the students who bombed were the ones whose parents had controlled every single aspect of their lives until they went away to college. The students had never had the freedom to make their own choices and mistakes when the stakes were small, and so they were not prepared to make decisions and deal with mistakes when the stakes were higher. Parents who had insisted their high school kids could never stay up late at home, could not hang out with friends not personally vetted by the parents, etc., ended up with their kids becoming college freshmen who often completely went wild once away from home. All too often, those freshmen didn't realize you can't generally party 6 nights a week and still pass your classes. So my pet peeve is parents who delude themselves that the day their kid turns 18, despite having zero freedom and corresponding responsibility prior to that, the kid is going to wake up on their 18th birthday with fully formed adult sensibilities. These days, it seems like those same types of parents are expecting to control their kids' lives until they're 21 or something. They're not doing themselves or their kids any favors.

I refer to grackles as "Stephen King birds" because they look and sound like they belong in one of his novels. If anyone were to do a remake of Hitchcock's The Birds, grackles would win my vote for the birds that terrorize everyone. To connect this to Covid, yeah, they totally look like birds that are omens of a coming pandemic/apocalypse.

My state has let its "stay at home" directive expire. So, yesterday my doorbell rang and I opened the door, thinking it was something I'd ordered being delivered. Instead, it was two fairly young women, without masks, offering to do a deep clean of a rug or something, so they could demonstrate a vacuum cleaner. Hell to the no. First, no way am I going to expose myself to a couple of people without masks who have presumably been going in and out of other people's houses unmasked for a few hours. Second, I've had prior experience with these salespeople and their offers of a free cleaning; if you ever let them into your house, it practically takes a bulldozer to get them out because they're pressuring you like crazy to buy a $2K vacuum cleaner. This time, I never fully opened the door and told them I was working and couldn't be disturbed. But the timing of this sales pitch has made me determined never to buy one of their vacuum cleaners.