Initially, it was looking like this would be a V-shaped recession, but that’s less likely now. This probably explains the push to reopen: it’s the White House’s race against time to prevent a v-shaped recession from turning into a u-shaped recession.
It’s because people are going out for walks more. It’s a way to fight boredom, and get exercise, if you had a job where you moved at all (I taught preschool, and was on my feet about 85% of my workday). It makes no sense, if you have a dog, to go out for a walk WITHOUT the dog.
Also, I used to take my dog on her longest walk before I went to work, and before the morning minyan I usually attend, which mean she was walked before 6:30am, usually-- she’d get walked from like, 5:45-6:30, or 6-6:45am. Few people saw me walking her. Now she gets her long walk around 9 or 10am. Later, if it is supposed to be very cold that day. So people see me walking her.
There are probably a lot of people you just SEE with their dogs, who aren’t walking them more than normal, simply at different times.
The lockdown has actually improved my relationship with my son. It wasn’t problematic to begin with, but he is 13, and at a “parents suck” stage. Also, we are at the inevitable battle over screentime.
The lockdown, and his eLearning, plus his need to “be” with his friends virtually has made me shut up about his screentime. So, no more arguments. Also, he is interested in participating in board game nights with the neighbors, and in watching my old movies with me, especially monster movies, suspense films, and screwball comedies (he’s not ready for Anna Christie yet). He is in love with Ingrid Bergman. He also can’t get enough Hitchcock.
My neighbors, who are maybe 28-32 range have discovered pinball. At first they thought it was weird that we had so much space given up to archaic machines, but now they love them.
Teenaged boys eat a shit-ton of food, especially when they are 13, and 5’8, rapidly becoming 5’9. He is eating three meals with us, plus a substantial bedtime “snack,” that is almost a meal, and a mid-morning snack as well, and eating occasional other things, like grabbing fruit, cookies, or popsicles.
Teenaged boys, shut up indefinitely, will learn to bake cookies, and they will be GOOD cookies.
A quick note I got from a fellow faculty member on Facebook: (Partner) and I put together a bicycle this morning. Now we are having Quiet Time. 
I just picked up my first carry out pizza since the world got weird. (Nice that I can still do that- won’t take it for granted again.) New process. Phone in or order online, have order number assigned. The parking lot at the place had a white tent set up at a restaurant entry door. Drive up to the tent, roll down window, let them know the order number. Credit card only payments and an employee leaves the tent, you hand over card. (We were both wearing gloves and a facemask. End Times Surreal.) Card is run, then returned and customer is assigned a numbered parking spot. Order is brought out to your car. I can open the rear door (Equinox) from the driver’s seat. It was a weird experience sitting in my car while my order was placed in the back, then I hit the button and the door closes before I drive away.
(bolding mine)
Don’t you have The Tap? I know that I am very glad to tap my card or my phone when paying for groceries. They have these transparent barriers up at the pay stations, and there’s a hole for the payment terminal, but I’m not even sure whether they are taking cash any more at that store. You either tap your card or stick your card in the slot and push buttons… and I think people are very glad to tap and not have to push buttons right now. They also scan your points card through the barrier.
Edit: that specific store does accept cash, but only at one checkout lane and at the Customer Service counter. No cash back either.
In the past few days, the banks have done something to increase the tap payment limit to $250, so that makes things better for people buying larger grocery orders. (Any more than that, you have to stick the card in and push buttons.
They do do delivery, via Instacart, but you have to book a delivery time, and the one time I tried it, the first available delivery time was well over a week away. :eek:
If The Tap is an app, my flip phone is incapable. Today I handed my debit card to two different humans, and wished I didn’t have to each time. Weird times.
“The Tap” is EMV contactless payment. Most debit and credit cards here have it, and most payment terminals here accept it. Phones and watches with Apple Pay and Google Pay can also use it.
I have noticed the same thing is a number of news stories. The Proper Authorities announce a lockdown starting in a few hours. Everyone packs up their car and leaves. On a cruise ship the captain asked everyone to go back to their cabins. They did, but first they stopped at the buffet. The Saudis announced restrictions. I went to get my last haircut.
Had I given it any thought I suppose such behavior would have been expected.
No one cat-calls me anymore. Or leers at me in public. It’s honestly great. I wear whatever I want when I have to get groceries and no one makes lewd comments. Also, people are far less likely to engage me in excruciating small talk. I miss the hell out of playing sports and being active, but a lot of the social changes are to my liking.
I’m astounded by how many people here are not making even the slightest effort to do what’s required to at least flatten the curve, if not kill this bug.
I live in Brooklyn Heights, a relatively affluent neighborhood in New York City. Residents here are pretty high-income, and have high levels of education. A college degree is the norm,and graduate degrees are a dime a dozen around here.
I also live on the edge of a very nice park (Brooklyn Bridge Park, if you know the area), where everyone wants to go on nice days (like today).
Masks? Hey, not for me, say the runners and joggers, as they run down the narrow streets of the neighborhood to get to the park (and it’s impossible to get six feet away from someone running by on those narrow sidewalks), or as they run through the crowds in the park, breathing hard and exhaling clouds of quite possibly virus-laden moist breath. Or as they jog in the bike paths, because slow pedestrians annoy them. The fact that they’re the annoying slow pedestrians when they’re running in the bike path is not relevant to them.
The people in my apartment building who insist on barging on to an elevator with me (with our without masks) are really fucking annoying. It’s not possible to get six feet away from someone when you’re in an enclosed little box. And there are five elevators in this building. Nobody has to wait that long for an elevator.
And the Hasidic groups who come to the park are beyond belief (this is true all over the city, but Sundays are the days when Hasidic families come to the park). Not a mask among them. Not the slightest concept of social distancing. None whatsoever.
And the significant percentage of people in the neighborhood who just can’t be bothered with masks, or with social distancing, and who get completely bent out of shape if you ask them to step back a bit.
Holy shit.
We’re barely emerging into spring so outdoor activity is still down. Traffic on our rough mountain track and in the sky is even sparser than usual. Fewer people (or bears) stroll the woods so dogs don’t bark as frantically. Utilities and governments exploit decreased paved-road travel to replace poles, repair roads, remove dead conifers, and securely fence the post office. (Don’t want more Amazon pallet thefts.)
On our rare drives into town (half-hour away) we see most people being cautions but too many as dumb as ever. Few cars are parked on a Main Street filled with closed non-essential shops. Only hardware, the kitchen store, and food takeouts are open. No shoe or bike repairs now; I’ll need to tune our BikeE 'bents myself and I’m rusty.
I don’t watch TV or news videos, relying on The Dope and online bulletins. A tiny local telecom monopoly provides phone, cable, and net; access sucks as they’re overloaded by stay-at-homers streaming and gaming. Fewer store ads appear in our post office box and the weekly classified gazette can’t be found. Bills still arrive in the mail so the economy hasn’t shut down yet. We can gossip in the parking lot if ten feet apart.
We can treat Stay-At-Home as if we’re snowbound in a stretched winter. Life as usual, almost. Just avoid contact and maintain distance. But I do miss browsing stores.
Doubled post. From CityLab* - How Infectious Disease Defined the American Bathroom - Cholera and tuberculosis outbreaks transformed the design and technology of the home bathroom. Will Covid-19 inspire a new wave of hygiene innovation?
From Atlas Obscura - Around the World in Pandemic Street Art - Messages of respect, hope, and frustration have appeared in our largely empty public spaces. and How Museums Will Eventually Tell the Story of COVID-19 - Masks, ventilators, and Zoom recordings may one day be the artifacts of our time.
From HyperAllergenic Dot Com via Everlasting Blort (Meepzorp)** - Artists Across the Internet Make Tributes to Dr. Anthony Fauci - *On social media, Fauci is being celebrated with admiring portraits, from cartoons to sock puppets bearing his image.
- CityLab - formerly owned by Atlantic, now by Bloomberg, but it’s still fairly interesting.
** Meepzorp has been around a LONG time and features The Daily Donald for our edification.
That’s baffling considering how hard NYC got hit. C’mon, people.
Minor update from my sister: as my trucker brother-in-law was driving the tractor unit of his transport back to the house, people clapped and cheered. 
Dogs are acting all smug like “ha ha we can’t get sick” when they go for their walk outside.
Dogs are loving this. But we are interrupting their nap time.
I have been driving 100 miles each way to assist my 90 year old mother for years. About twice a month. The pee break thing when you have to go is a little different now, but I have good places to pull over.
Oddly, with my Wife and I both working from home, we seem to see each other less. But now we play chess or cards each evening. We watch a lot LESS TV. Pointless idiot president is comedy hour.
Every night is sort of a Friday or Saturday night (when my wife and I would usually play chess), but not really. Not having a real structure for the next day is turning out to be good.
Our normal hours seem to be get up at 4am, work, take a mid day break and then finish work. Some cards or other game and in bed by 7-8pm. This is also due to internet speed and download limits.
I’m working a bit more because when I get an idea, I can do it right then. Thanks to instant messaging on Slack, I’m actually getting to know my coworkers much better.
I’ve been barefoot since the middle of March.
I’m thinking I’m giving my wife a skewed impression of my work habits, etc… I’m an IT business analyst, so my work is very intense during the early phases of projects, but tends to wane in the latter parts. And due to a recent reorganization and attempt to align our department with the ITIL job descriptions more closely, they’ve taken away a lot of the assistant project manager and support responsibilities that a lot of BAs tend to accumulate.
And we’re assigned by functional business department- each of us has one or more departments that we’re assigned to work with. Mine happens to be a big one that has two of us detailed to exclusively work on their projects (they fund our salaries even).
So since both of the projects I’m assigned to are out of the initial intense phase, I’m sort of in a coasting phase where I’m the subject matter expert, but don’t actually have much in the way of deliverables- I attend meetings, answer emails and look stuff up, but I don’t have a lot of minute-to-minute stuff to do.
As a result, I’m sure my wife thinks I just sort of loaf around all the time, which isn’t the case- it’s a sort of perfect storm between the realignment of our responsibilities, new supervisors and the specific phases of the projects that we’re working on.
We live across the street from an elementary school, and between the sidewalk and the fence of the kindergarten playground there is a stretch of dirt and scrub. Some younger teenage kids build bicycle jumps there. It took one of them days of hard work. Now a bunch of kids ride their bikes over it, and they are good about restoring the bump after they are done. They might not be social distancing quite enough, but they all wear helmets.
They’ll probably remember working and using the jump for the rest of their lives. No one has objected so far. I’m closest to them, and I think they’re doing great. No accidents either that I’ve seen.