keep moving

On the one hand, dying in an MBTA accident is tragic and I feel very sorry for the man's family and I have a feeling he was probably drunk or otherwise under the influence of something that impaired his judgment and can't be held fully responsible for the action that led to his death.

On the other hand, KICKING A MOVING TROLLEY IS NEVER A GOOD IDEA.

Thought we were going to get told about company plans re: Delta at the next all-video staff meeting on the 11th.

CEO sent out a message today saying the return to the office has been pushed back to November 2nd from the previous target of Labor Day.

Can't say I'm all that upset.

Awake. A little grumpy about it. Alarm snapped me right out of REM sleep and I still have a moderate degree of stiffness in my forearms from having put off my weight training until not long before bed last night.

(I am more than happy to talk about the exercise stuff if people are interested in fitness at home, I just haven't been doing it here because I didn't want to bore folks with accounts of I Picked Up Heavy Things A Lot or I Punched Pretend Things A Lot. I've been exercising solo for years rather than going to the gym, and using online sites for support/reference/encouragement instead of coaches or trainers.)

Got down to the water for some birdwatching yesterday. Had the experience of seeing swarms of starlings and grackles suddenly go silent and take off en masse because a bird of prey blew through the area. Judging by the size and what little markings I could see, it was a Cooper's hawk. Much too small to be a redtail, that's for sure. At the actual water I mostly saw gulls, surprise surprise, but there were still oystercatchers, two different species of merganser, and one surf scoter, which is another weird-looking duck. ( https://www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/Surf_Scoter/id ) I swear, the longer I spend watching wild birds the more I can't help but picture predatory dinosaurs in modern bird plumage and looking either ridiculous or terrifying.

We don't know what color T. rex's eyes were. IT COULD HAVE HAD FREAKYDEAKY OYSTERCATCHER EYES.

I think there was something else. It may have had to do with exer- oh, right. Wanted to note in case people had large amounts of oats on hand but were running low on milk for whatever reasons, if you have something reasonably fine you can strain it through and you also have a blender and clean water, it's pretty easy to make oat milk. I dunno if the homemade stuff is on par with commercially produced oat milk for drinking purposes, but mine works fine as a coffee or tea addition without cutting into my actual milk supply, plus I make my own bread anyway so now it's whole wheat bread with added oats, because I hate wasting supplies. If you're interested I can fill you in on what I'm doing, but honestly, at this point I have no idea what actually interests other people.

Facing a surge in both coronavirus cases and related deaths, Governor Charlie Baker on Monday ordered the closure of all non-essential businesses in the state in an effort to curb the spread of the disease.

The order takes effect Tuesday at noon and is effective until April 7 at noon. The Department of Public Health is also issuing a “stay-at-home” advisory, which will also be in effect until April 7, Baker said.

“Everyone is advised to stay home and limit all unnecessary activities,” he said at a State House news conference. “We’re asking everyone to use their common sense, think about the impact this virus is having on the sick and elderly, and to limit their interactions with other people. This cuts down on the chances this virus has to spread.”

Travel is not barred, but people over the age of 70 or with underlying health conditions are “strongly” advised to stay home and “limit interactions” as much as possible, Baker said.

He stressed that essential businesses including grocery stores, pharmacies, medical facilities, and gas stations will remain open.

“We will always allow” such essential businesses to stay open, he said.

“The people of Massachusetts are meeting this challenge exactly the way we would expect — with determination, cool heads, and a selfless sense of community,” Baker said.

He said that while areas like public parks will remain open for exercise, there should be no touch football games or similar activities that involve close person-to-person contact.

"That spreads the virus," Baker said. "We're advising people to use common sense with every step we take."

Baker added that while buses and trains will continue to operate, “that doesn’t mean we think it’s a good idea to take the train downtown” to visit friends. He stressed that public transit should only be used for essential travel.

(Boston Globe website. The Globe has a paywall so I'm just cut/pasting here.)

Boston Marathon postponed to September due to coronavirus

The Boston Marathon will be postponed, and rescheduled to Sept. 14, officials are set to announce Friday morning.

Governor Charlie Baker and Mayor Martin J. Walsh, along with officials from the Marathon and its sponsors and from other towns along the 26.2-mile route, are set to hold a press conference Friday morning at City Hall where they will announce the new date for the race. It will be the first delay in the 124-year history of the Marathon, which had been scheduled for April 20, and comes as large and small gatherings worldwide are being canceled and postponed to help blunt the spread of coronavirus.

They chose to reschedule it Sept. 14 — a Monday — in hopes of best replicating a typical Marathon three-day weekend, and to fit in among various other major events in the fall, such as college move-ins, Jewish holidays, and the Chicago Marathon, said a source familiar with the planning. Doing that will require special legislation to declare the day a state holiday — like Patriots Day — which Baker plans to file soon.

Officials are hopeful that the event — which typically brings more than 30,000 runners, and their friends and families, from 120 countries — will spark tourism and help hotels and restaurants at a time when, hopefully, the region is recovering from coronavirus-related shutdowns that are expected to last weeks if not longer.

Race organizers agonized in recent days over whether to cancel, reschedule, or hold the race only for elite runners, before settling on the new date when they hope to recreate as normal a Marathon weekend as possible. Though one thing will be different: The Red Sox are out of town.

This is a developing story and will be updated.

My office has been working on getting people the equipment necessary to work from home for two weeks at a stretch if self-quarantine is required. This has meant me sending a lot of emails to our primary vendor asking for quotes on five of the tiniest desktop boxes I've ever seen, two flatscreen monitors per box- can I just say how much I love flatscreen monitors? When I first did DR for the Red Cross we had to deal with CRT monitors in our disaster response centers, and the shipping/packing/unpacking/setup was HORRIFIC- five HDMI cables and five DisplayPort cables at a time.

Monday the emails went out saying that we'd be testing mass work-from-home. For the remainder of this week it'd be four people from the main trading floor at a time. Next week, everyone would WFH on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. The week after that, video teleconferencing testing would begin.

Yesterday the email went out saying we could work from home the remainder of this week at our own discretion so long as we cleared it with our managers and made a point of actually doing our jobs/letting the manager know if we were going to be away from the computer for a significant length of time.

I'm working from home today and tomorrow. At least I don't have to lug my sorry ass down to the bus stop and then onto the subway. It cuts into my Cornell Lab of Ornithology birdwatching- I take species tallies during the time between leaving the house and getting on the bus, and then again during the time between getting off the T and reaching the office, which is how I got the American Woodcock on my life list. But I'll deal, esp. if it means I don't have to take cough suppressant to pass for a fit member of civil society. If nothing else I can make my own coffee in the French press.

(I buy both whole beans and pre-ground beans. Whole beans mostly get stored in the freezer and used when I want to use my Moka pot. Pre-ground ones are used in the French press, because I have never had ground coffee sit around long enough to notice a difference in taste when I make it in the French press. I do, however, commit one act of coffee adulteration: I will use the hand grinder to add either cardamom pods or cacao nibs to the mix. Turns out that adding about seven or eight grams of ground cacao nibs to 52ish grams of ground coffee in the French press produces a very nice mocha approximation, at least by my standards. I just have to be careful 'cos the nibs are way fattier than coffee beans and it can gunk up the grinder if I'm not careful.)

( Debating using this as my jewelry icon instead of the old one. )
The piece of sea glass in the middle is about 10 millimeters by 15 millimeters- I use a caliper for measuring a lot of my jewelry stuff, it's just easier. As far as I can tell it used to be the topmost part of a beer bottle neck, but to get to the stage of frosting/hydration/pitting/whatever you see in the texture in the picture, it had to have been in the ocean for at least seven or eight years, possibly ten or more. I've also heard really good frosting takes twenty years in the water, but no idea how they arrived at that.

Found out today what it takes for me to start using my New York vocabulary again: a guy oh-so-slowly trying to drive his car in the bicycle-only side of a protected bicycle lane. As in, he'd turned out of a driveway or something and rather than cross the bike lane and join the car lanes, he opted to navigate in the one narrow lane of territory between actual physical poles and the curb until he got to the corner, and then merged into the car traffic. Never mind that that lane had the bike lane images and icons painted on it, or that like I said, it was separated from car traffic by multiple vertical poles to make it impractical for cars to use it, or that the traffic in the car lanes wasn't even all that heavy and he could have crossed the bike lane and merged into it- no, this schmuck was so fricking special that he was ENTITLED to take what little protected territory bicyclists get in this city.

Schmuck. I hope you find yourself stuck behind a Critical Mass rally, and I don't even approve of Critical Mass.

Which of the following two things that happened to me this week is more of a Sign That You Are In New England?

A: You get onto an Orange Line train and head for a group of three empty seats. They are empty largely because the woman sitting opposite them is an apparently homeless woman surrounded by bags and ranting to herself or anyone who will listen, or if not ranting, at least talking very passionately. She is talking about someone's marriage. Upon listening a little more closely it turns out she is ranting about Abigail and John Adams' marriage, with an added side bonus of distrusting Thomas Jefferson and something about Alexander Hamilton that you never quite hear.

OR

B: You are waiting to meet someone near the harbor seal display outside the New England Aquarium. Just as you are thinking about the idea that seals are dog mermaids, a group of people who have been taking photographs of the seals comes up to you and asks if you can help them with a scavenger hunt; they need someone who is not a member of their group to sing "Sweet Caroline" with them on video, because they are in Boston and that is a Thing. You do. The video ends with "IIIIII'VE BEEN INCLINED / TO BELIEVE THEY NEVER WOULD, mnnh mnh meh" because neither you nor the strangers can remember the rest of the song.

Ladies and gentlemen, my Wednesday and Thursday evening encounters, respectively.

It snowed again.

Inch and a half, two inches, maybe. Can't really tell. It's mostly noticeable on the cars that people cleared off and on the sidewalks that people shoveled out. It's not really something you can make out on top of the existing heaps and yards full of snow.

As long as it ends eventually, I'll be all right. I'm not really looking forward to a Fimbulwinter.