September 28, 2020

by eric

Things are… okay?  For us, at the moment, maybe?

Remote schooling started for the oldest earlier this month.  The transition for everyone took some figuring out, but for right now it seems like we’ve stabilized in a surprisingly good place.  The child is cooperative and as positive as he’s been since this all started, and he seems to be learning.  We’ve got a schedule arranged so we can both get some work done, even with my ever-changing meetings.

Perhaps prematurely, signs of normalcy are returning to the wider world as well.  There is a sudden surge of sports, with seasonally strange conjunctions: the Tour de France! the NBA finals! NFL and college football!  There seem to be more cars on our streets, driving faster.  Governors of some Southern states have declared complete reopenings.

It still seems hard to reason about the outbreaks.  The summer surge in the Southwest has abated, and now the upper Midwest is seeing a sharp rise in cases.  But it’s hard to understand in any practical sense what makes the case counts decrease–it doesn’t feel like people are really changing their behavior anymore, but maybe they do, locally, if it gets bad?  (It isn’t yet herd immunity, though.)

Political news is consuming most of our minds these days, in any case.