I’m keeping myself in self-isolation for a couple of reasons. if people were doing the right thing and acting smart, then there are many activities that should be perfectly safe. Unfortunately, there are far too many stupid people out there who don’t care who they infect. I don’t want to be an accidental victim of their stupidity. The other issue is that I also have to rely on the businesses doing the right thing, and following the right protocols. But I have little confidence in a for-profit enterprise doing so. And of course, there are certain risks all the time that a business, a restaurant as an example, isn’t following the right protocol. For example, undercooking the chicken or making food without washing their hands. But COVID-19 requires much stricter adherence and the potential consequences are much higher. I’ll feel better when there’s a vaccine, but until then I’m only going out for essentials.
This seems kind of silly. Is there any reason to think you can get COVID from a plate or cup that’s been washed?
I’m probably going to get my hair cut soon. I’ll find a barbershop with one barber who will wear a mask.
We’ll get our hair cut as soon as we can. Barber shops and salons are reopening today on Kauai but not here on Oahu. Still, we’re not too worried. Precautions will be taken, and it helps that Hawaii has gotten off relatively lightly – 642 cases and 17 deaths to date.
Maybe it’s to protect the dishwashers? I dunno.
My (conservative) inlaws are getting haircuts. Their attitude? “I know I’m putting myself at risk, but I can’t stand my hair!” Well, what about putting the stylist at risk, and everyone they come in contact with?
I hate my hair, too, but I’m sticking with my Jack Black With A Hangover look, just to protect everyone.
I mean, why is “inconveniencing yourself for the common good” so hard for Americans?
“The common good starts with me.”
“There’s no ‘I’ in team. But there is a ‘me’.”
That’s the attitude around here
but you have a brain bigger than most in my community
…I say if they want to do that fine just sign a paper saying if they get sick they get no financial assistance of any kind in getting over it even if they’ve signed up for public medical care Nordo they get any help in time off etc
they just have to tough it out
China more or less burned out covid because they locked down hard across the country.
US did lock down lite. While if flattened the curve, it didn’t burn out covid. I am afraid we are going to have flare ups until the world is vaccinated. Will get the first hint in a week or so looking at Georgia, Florida and other’s in the gotta open and protect the Dow zone.
I had to go to LA to sort out my eldest kid last weekend. I am very pleased to report that there was no pissing and moaning about wearing masks in the airports, on the plane, or in the super-markets. None of this “my rights” to infect others BS. (Eldest just needed Dad to get out of the rut, deep clean the apartment, stock the fridge and pantry, and have a “normal” life for 2 days to get back on track.)
I’m ready for a pedicure. But I am not ready, nor would I find it relaxing in the least, to sit around for an hour wearing a mask. While the person doing my pedi also wears a mask. Sometimes they did anyway–and the ones doing manicures always did–but I already can’t understand what these people are saying.
So, I need to wait until I don’t have to wear a mask.
Oh, and by the way, for all the people who want to say to wear a mask to protect others, not yourself: If you need protection from me because I am infectious then social distancing fails utterly. There is literally not the slightest chance that I have encountered in the last 16 days someone who could have given me germs. After this weekend that will change, but only somewhat.
I’m with this. Yes I’ve been to a few stores, and I have to go to a home improvement store. Heat would be nice, our propane ‘wood’ stove went out, and I have to prep the area for a new one. I can deal with my hair.
The country to really look at as a way forward is Japan.
They didn’t close schools. They didn’t shut down.
They got basically everyone to wear masks, and to stop the 3 Cs:
- Closed spaces with poor ventilation
- Crowded places
- Close contact settings.
And they basically made it a minor problem. Tokyo is incredibly dense with lots of public transit. A month ago Tokyo looked like it was going to be the next NYC. Yesterday it reported 14 cases in a population of 9 million.
I can go without a haircut for a good long while yet. What I really need is a beard trim, which is impossible with a mask. So the hell with it, just call me Santa Junior.
Restaurants are definitely out. We haven’t even ordered delivery. Most of us in NYC got the fear o’ god rammed into us when we were the world epicenter so we’re all being good little girls and boys, staying inside and masking up when we need to replenish the bread and milk.
You know what my problem is? I don’t trust my judgment, because my terrible dark secret is that I fucking love quarantine. As a mom to an only child, I typically feel like it’s on me to make sure my son’s days are full of activity–not just scheduled things (we don’t overdo those) but play dates with friends from school, trips to parks and zoos and museums. As a teacher in a quasi-administrative role, I don’t just worry about the job part of my job, but the emotional labor shit: I go check on people, listen to them bitch, make sure they feel appreciated, take concerns to my boss, organize happy hours, etc. As a person trying to build a career, I have a network that needs tending: people I’ve worked with over the years that I genuinely like, but who also are useful to know–but if I want them to reach out to me with information or opportunities, I have to do the same in turn.
When quarantine started, 90% of that went away. I just can’t do most of it, and the rest can be handled by brief text messages that don’t offend, because hey, quarantine. I miss my students, to be fair, but that’s also much less stressful: no one is crying on me. I know they are crying somewhere, and abstractly that worries me, but on the day-to-day level, it’s less stressful. I’ve fucking loved this. I have been walking every day. I hang out with my kid and he doesn’t nag me to go out, and I don’t nag him to turn off the TV. I have been working through nearly 20 years of deferred maintenance on my house, and while my yard doesn’t look good, it’s no longer an eyesore. All my closets have clean floors. I’m half done with a great book purge and reorganization. Our expenses are way down. I wake up every day excited to have time to do these things.
Now, I KNOW I benefit from all that social bullshit that I don’t miss. I don’t think this phase is bad for my son, if it’s fairly short, but I think he’s better off for having playdates and museum visits and swim lessons and Destination Imagination. I make stupid high money for a teacher, because we have incentive pay and I am at the absolute top of the pay scale, which gives us so many options. I also have a couple lucrative side-gigs because of my wider network, and it’s a comfort that it’s there, in case I ever need to change jobs. These are real things, important things, and I will have to go back to my old life eventually, because I want those benefits enough to make the sacrifice.
However, this does make it really tempting to sort of . . . .string this out as long as I can. I worry that the real reason I have turned down driveway happy hours and avoided signing my son up for the swim lessons that the Y has decided to offer is not that I really, rationally think those things are an unacceptable risk, and more that I just don’t want to go back to the real world. I don’t miss it AT ALL. And I worry that that isn’t emotionally healthy, and maybe I should be pushing myself a little to be more social, to start this process. But then I worry that that is just irresponsible of me, and that Texas is opening up too fast, and it’s perfectly rational to stay locked down at least another month.
Basically, I’ve got two supernatural entities on my shoulder, but I don’t know which is the angel and which is the devil.
I’m looking forward to a trip to the nail salon. My natural nails are so thrashed by all the hand sanitizer (workplace requires it each time you enter the building, which for someone who spends breaks and lunch in her car for some peace and quiet means 4x/day) that I really want fiberglass applied. The two candidate places near me (I’ve been to both in the past) are quite clean and the operator has to wear a mask while applying artificial nails. I’m sure she won’t mind if I’m masked too, and handwashing is part of the routine. I don’t see this as any riskier than grocery shopping, which I’ve had to do some of in person to obtain items I couldn’t get delivered for whatever reason.
“Won’t mind”?? Around here, it’s mandatory in hair and nail salons for both.
When I got my hair colored last week, the stylist wore a mask and she had me hold my mask up to my face the whole time. I had a pedicure that week, too, at a different salon and both of us were masked.
I don’t get this. Are some people’s beards just hard for them to do their own trimming at home? I’ve had a beard for 27 years, and have done my own beard-trimming the whole time; no barber or hair stylist has ever touched it. Comb, scissors, mirror - nothing to it, at least in my case.
ETA: If it makes any difference, I have a full beard and mustache; I shave my neck, but that’s all.
Now my hair, OTOH, is getting really BIG. Because my curly mop gets unwieldy after awhile, I normally get it cut every 5 weeks, and it’s now been >11 weeks since my last haircut. But I’ve decided I’m not ready to risk a hair salon, so I’m just gonna let it keep getting bigger. I’d be very much in style if a time machine took me back 50 years. It’s not for lack of bread, like the Grateful Dead, darlin’… 
I’ve had a beard for 40+ years and I’ve never successfully trimmed it myself. Anytime I’ve tried to trim it, I eventually get pissed off and shave it, then start from scratch.
I can’t draw anything more complicated than a stick figure either.
If it’s mostly an airborne transmitted disease then wouldn’t the 3 C’s spread the disease internally to people sheltering in place at the same time it limits the spread between the groups who are sheltering in place?
It will take years to sift through the data but it will be interesting to find out how the different approaches worked.
Sorry, was away for a couple of days.
She and I are friends outside of the client/customer relationship. She’s been ready for about two weeks to get back to work. She’s definitely not the type to do something she doesn’t want to do.