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Mar. 16th, 2020 12:09 pmWorking from home, HSDM Curriculum Coordinator version:
Spent large chunks of this morning working on a report for CODA about how we're conducting distance learning through secure sites and how we'll make up lost clinic time. The day CODA does anything that makes anybody's life any easier will be the day the universe ends.
Also trying to figure out if it's worth even having tutorial sessions for a course meeting online with students scattered all over the place. Pre-recorded lectures they can watch any time from anywhere are one thing, but real-time case discussions across four or so time zones are something else. Fortunately I don't have to answer that question myself, and it doesn't take effect until April 12 or so anyway.
I read something somewhere that said working from home works best if you pretend you're really going to work: get up at the usual time, do the usual things, leave the house for the length of time you would commute for. So I did that, and thought I'd go get coffee (which I knew would be takeout because you can't sit down in a restaurant until April 17 or so). Unfortunately the local small business coffee shop doesn't open until 9:00 in the current crisis. So I walked home again, and considered that a commute of 20 minutes, and had breakfast, and got online at 8:45 as usual. And had a video conference at 10:00, which was a mercy because I wanted to do a small one before the 39 members of the Curriculum Committee all tried to do one in April.
Last night I made Half Baked Harvest's chicken meatballs, sort of. The recipe as written didn't have any binder in it at all, so I added some bread crumbs, and some dill because they were supposed to be Greek meatballs and didn't call for any dill. Unheard of. They came out mostly OK, but the whole back of my apartment smells like fried oil, and I don't like the texture of ground chicken. It's extremely squishy and you end up with sticky blobs that don't even pretend to be meatballs until they're half cooked. They did brown up pretty nicely, though, and I had some with orzo into which I threw most of a container of Whole Foods feta salsa (feta and olives and scallions and parsley and oil and so forth), and that was perfectly adequate dinner.
I suppose I should be a good social distancer and not run out at lunchtime to buy more mangoes and more feta salsa and other silly things like that. I don't really NEED anything yet. I just want more mangoes, and blackberries, and seltzer, and I drank the last beer last night. I can live without all of the above until at least Friday, though, and grocery shopping once a week is normal. I could use a little more normality anyway.
I've read so much WWII history that I can't help drawing parallels. Yes, life is unsettled right now and everything anyone in authority says is unsettling. But we aren't rationing staple foods, and we're not all in physical fear for our lives every minute, and life won't be like this for six years. Mere weeks from now we'll either be back to the way things were in early February, or we'll have a new normal. The fact that nobody knows how many weeks is the unsettling part.
Spent large chunks of this morning working on a report for CODA about how we're conducting distance learning through secure sites and how we'll make up lost clinic time. The day CODA does anything that makes anybody's life any easier will be the day the universe ends.
Also trying to figure out if it's worth even having tutorial sessions for a course meeting online with students scattered all over the place. Pre-recorded lectures they can watch any time from anywhere are one thing, but real-time case discussions across four or so time zones are something else. Fortunately I don't have to answer that question myself, and it doesn't take effect until April 12 or so anyway.
I read something somewhere that said working from home works best if you pretend you're really going to work: get up at the usual time, do the usual things, leave the house for the length of time you would commute for. So I did that, and thought I'd go get coffee (which I knew would be takeout because you can't sit down in a restaurant until April 17 or so). Unfortunately the local small business coffee shop doesn't open until 9:00 in the current crisis. So I walked home again, and considered that a commute of 20 minutes, and had breakfast, and got online at 8:45 as usual. And had a video conference at 10:00, which was a mercy because I wanted to do a small one before the 39 members of the Curriculum Committee all tried to do one in April.
Last night I made Half Baked Harvest's chicken meatballs, sort of. The recipe as written didn't have any binder in it at all, so I added some bread crumbs, and some dill because they were supposed to be Greek meatballs and didn't call for any dill. Unheard of. They came out mostly OK, but the whole back of my apartment smells like fried oil, and I don't like the texture of ground chicken. It's extremely squishy and you end up with sticky blobs that don't even pretend to be meatballs until they're half cooked. They did brown up pretty nicely, though, and I had some with orzo into which I threw most of a container of Whole Foods feta salsa (feta and olives and scallions and parsley and oil and so forth), and that was perfectly adequate dinner.
I suppose I should be a good social distancer and not run out at lunchtime to buy more mangoes and more feta salsa and other silly things like that. I don't really NEED anything yet. I just want more mangoes, and blackberries, and seltzer, and I drank the last beer last night. I can live without all of the above until at least Friday, though, and grocery shopping once a week is normal. I could use a little more normality anyway.
I've read so much WWII history that I can't help drawing parallels. Yes, life is unsettled right now and everything anyone in authority says is unsettling. But we aren't rationing staple foods, and we're not all in physical fear for our lives every minute, and life won't be like this for six years. Mere weeks from now we'll either be back to the way things were in early February, or we'll have a new normal. The fact that nobody knows how many weeks is the unsettling part.
