Day 55 - Governor Newsom imposes new resrictions

R. is quarantining…his mom has Covid-19. Maybe it’s the B117 variant?

1/9/21. Saturday

9:30-10:00 – I’m up but I stay in bed.  Terrible cramps.  I take two Advil and wait for it to kick in.

10:30 – 11:00 - Downstairs and the dog is waiting to go outside, jumping on the child-gate and wagging her tail.  Why doesn’t she go out on her own?  She has a doggie door!  We go outside and I see dog poop in two separate places on the patio, as well as two puddles of vomit.  She eats plants and what little grass she can find in the yard pretty frequently – and then she vomits up the plant material. I clean everything. I make coffee for me, rotten chicken for her [if you think the chicken made her vomit, think again].  I take a few pieces of L.’s Edible Arrangement – chocolate dipped – and return upstairs.

10:00-12:30 – I start The Beauty in Breaking, a memoir by a black female who is an ER physician. Good book, thus far.

In a previous blog, I note that I vetted all the books my Mom gave me and placed them in the order I want to read them.  In the past, once I finished a book, I spent way too much time going through the same pile of books and thinking, “Well, what should I read now?”  After the completion of every book, I would repeat the process, again reviewing the same pile of books, albeit with a few extra thrown in from my Mom throughout the year, and ask the same question: “Well, what should I read now?”  Finally, all of the books are stacked and ready to read – it’s simply a matter of taking the next book off the top of the pile and cracking it open.  Much more time efficient and frees up my mental bandwidth.

My Mom is a “book whisperer” and has the uncanny ability to pick the perfect book for every family member, even when she doesn’t read the genre.  My brother is a science-fiction nut and my Mom isn’t…and yet she still manages to get good ‘reads’ for him, too.

For me, my Mom typically gives me memoirs from female authors. We like addiction memoirs and my Mom and I love a good weight-loss memoir, to include eating disorders.  We “eat” that stuff up [pun intended]. There’s also the occasional infertility/childless memoir and the “adoption-gone-bad” memoir.  Basically, we like reading about misery – it’s fun!

L. gets tons of YA fiction from my Mom, which she tears through [recall that L. read 100 books for 2020]. My brother’s son, my nephew, A., hates reading.  This remains one of the greatest unsolved mysteries in the history of the world.  In a family filled with readers, A. hates books.  He’s smarter than all of us combined – he just hates books. We still love him, though.

12:30-1:30 – Bad news. L. tells me that R.’s mom, who is an LVN, returned from a 5-day white-water rafting trip feeling under the weather.  She says she gets a sinus infection every January and is sure this is what she has, but she wants to be tested for Covid-19.  R., wanting to be on the safe side, suggests he quarantine until they get the results of her test.  Both L., R., and his mom think she has a routine sinus infection as her symptoms are mild and resemble that.

I don’t want to overreact, but I’m uneasy.  It was a 5-day water rafting trip with other people.  L. asks if I think R. should quarantine and I say yes, at least until the test results come back. They agree to quarantine and I’m so grateful they readily acquiesce. In the meantime, R.’s sister sleeps in her car, while R. remains on the couch in the living room. His mom is quarantined to her bedroom and bathroom as they await the test results. R. does the responsible thing and tells Starbucks - Management says he cannot return for 14 days.

Spoiler Alert: The test comes back positive and R’s Mom has Covid-19.  R.’s sister leaves to stay with friends, but R. remains with his Mom, having no place else to go.  L. and R. don’t see each other for 7 days and counting as of the date I am writing this entry [1-12-21].  R.’s sister’s test came back negative, but the soonest R. could be tested [Kaiser] was Monday, 1/11/12 - he will receive the results on Thursday, 1/14/21. The circle is tightening.

1:30-2:15 – I call B. and ask if he wants me to quarantine from him.  Recall that R. was here for a couple of hours on L.’s birthday.  I was in my room, but he and L. were in her room, watching a movie.  There is a likelihood that we’ve all contracted Covid and perhaps all of us are asymptomatic?? I don’t want to risk infecting B.  I tell him the sequence of events, but he doesn’t seem too worried. We agree to meet for coffee tomorrow.

2:15-4:00 – I update my blog.  There is nothing to eat in this house since L. hasn’t gone to the store in awhile.  I have steamed carrots with sea salt, a piece of the bread I made the other day, and a boiled egg.

4:00-5:00 – Shower. Lotion. Covid-19 uniform

5:00-6:00 – I braid my hair in several places while listening to Organize 365 and The NY Times Book Review.

6:00-10:00 – I continue designing Specialty Class 1-A.  Because of my previous blog posts over the past 10 months, I now have a better idea of the time involved in designing a class.  Prior to the blog, I operated on loose approximations, but more recently, I just designed an accelerated 5-week core class – “the class that didn’t run” – that took 6 to 9 hours.  I had no idea, even after being an adjunct instructor for 20 years, that it took that long.  Disgusted that I wasn’t more time efficient, I examined what on earth was taking so long, only to discover that I’m a little hard on myself. 

In order to create a new class, the syllabus has to be designed in accordance with the college schedule – holidays/days off -  and all dates need to be changed to reflect the new semester.  Course content has to be reassessed – is it too old?  Is it redundant?  Once the syllabus is complete, everything has to be loaded online, into the Canvas shell.  Yes, teachers can utilize the “course copy” function and dump the previous course into the new shell, but at the very least, all the assignment dates need to be changed for the new class. In the case of “the class that didn’t run”, 81 separate dates had to be changed.  This is to say nothing of course content.  Sometimes, after a “course copy”, assignments, quizzes, slides go missing and I have to re-input them, manually. This also takes significant time.

Needless to say, after assessing the time spent on preparing previous classes and noting that it took  around 7 hours to fully prepare “the class that didn’t run”, I know that I should finish my work around 10:00 tonight because I was 50% done with class prep the previous night. I’m looking forward to this – I will actually be done working at 10:00 and not some godforsaken hour, like 3:00 a.m. Although I have TWO more classes to design, they start on Thursday and I can block time for class design over the coming days.

10:30 – I’m actually finished with Specialty Class 1-A and L. has prepared the Google slides for Chapter 1, which I’ve reviewed.  I check my Spring Semester 2021 class schedule one last time and note – “THE HORROR!!  THE HORROR!!!” – that I have TWO classes running on Monday, back-to-back. No, the schedule didn’t change – it’s just incredibly poor planning on my part. I thought my long day was on Thursday, not Monday. This means that I have just finished designing my Monday, 6:00-9:00 p.m. class.  The Monday class that meets at 2:30, in essentially ONE day because, come on, we’re into Sunday now, is NOT READY…AT ALL. 

Because I’ve finally, after all these years, taken a critical look at my hours spent working, I know that it will take me – fill in the blank, here, readers - approximately 7 hours to create my Monday afternoon class.  This time period is unwavering, even with complete focus and concentration.  I know it’s extremely unlikely that I will be able to steel myself and move “superfast” because the design work is so tedious.  You know…81 dates?  And that’s just one step.  Working in complete silence tends to reduce the time spent by 10 minutes on the hour, on average, but that is not a consistent statistic.  Do I want to work in silence for the next 7 hours, only to reduce my completion time by 45 minutes? No.

10:30-10:45 – I take a break to prepare for the next 7 hours.  At least I know the time block and what to expect.  I take the dog out and have a glass of champagne to steel my nerves (j/k).  I clear my desk of Specialty Class 1A and replace it with Core Class #1 material. Then, I make ready my podcasts. During crunch time, Forensic Files podcasts make for great “comfort food” and this will be my background noise.

Picture Rocky doing a running-in-place thing and moving his neck from side-to-side before he enters the ring.   That’s me.  We can even add some Rocky theme music to this narrative…I get started.

10:45 – 4:45 – …and at 4:45 a.m. I finish Core Class #1 at the 6-hour mark. I am absolutely disgusted with my poor planning and lack of time management.

5:00-5:30 a.m. – Nighttime routine. Bed.