S.N.A.F.U.

We have had it pretty cushy as quarantine situations go: a house, with several rooms, and some yard to move around in or, as Anna has done, plant containers full of food. And, though I tend to take it for granted because I don't always value my own gifts properly, we have a sophisticated home network and Internet connection that lets the three of us do video calls all day without any issues. Earlier, Anna was listening to a school staff member describing his brother rebooting the household Internet connection in the middle of an IEP (Individual Education Plan) meeting: they are legally mandated and brutally difficult to schedule (they can easily have a dozen busy people in them), so that sucked for them.

Anna is growing a bunch of food plants in the front yard. Agriculture in California is practically cheating, as just about anything will grow here, and most plants will be pretty happy about it. There are the exceptions, like anything that requires combined heat and humidity (no bananas, alas) or colder winters (sugar maples? particular kinds of apples?). Roses, which in my childhood New England did indeed take some skill, here are the default plants for rental properties because they're so easy. We have a rose we were literally unable to get rid of, as it was dug up at least twice and it just came back. We decided to respect its determination. It's called the Zombie Rose. I want to put a little fence around it and give it a plaque.

Rosemary grows into a serviceable 2-3-foot hedge here. The hedges tend to be more lemony than I would normally want to cook with, but it's right there if you want it. The loquat trees are going gangbusters right now. Not ours, though, since it's sickly. The grapevines have a ton of nascent grapes coming in; maybe too many to taste good? We'll find out. Figgy is promising a mighty Figpocalypse this year; I'm hoping I can get motivated to pick and dry them this year.

I like that we have all the musical instruments. Shocking no one, I have more that I would like. I finall ordered a 5-string violin, which gives me the lower viola range to play with, which would be fun since my playing is starting to produce tunes of my own. Then again, there's a lovely standard 4-string from 1960 that I tried in Berkeley, or the charming 1889 I played back in August and haven't forgotten since.

I've been listening to the This Week In Virology podcast, which is full of adorable crabby researchers educators. They are naturally crabby, but I think they're extra crabby because they love studying the whole spectrum of viruses, and resent having to spend these months talking about only one.

I stopped looking at the COVID-19 numbers, because in the absence of a competent policy response, they don't mean anything. With sparse and highly erratic testing, happening in the matrix of a generally awful health-care system, we can't even make educated guesses for basic facts like the number of cases or the number of deaths. It turns out our government (and possibly some others) have actually been mixing different kinds of tests in their reporting: there are PCR tests that try to count the virus in your blood, and the antibody/serology tests that try to measure your antibodies to the virus. They're radically different in their accuracy and utility.

Here is what we know, more or less:

1. The number of cases appearing in hospitals.
2. The outcomes for those cases.
3. What's called "excess deaths," the number of deaths beyond the statistical norm (based on location/time of year, etc.).

And...that's it. There's not a whole lot to learn, especially when we still have to make it through the day-to-day of work and kids.

I started writing this a few weeks ago, but obviously it's not better now.