now with 33% more human.

We acquired a Bonus Teenager some weeks back. The pandemic weighs on everything, pressing us all out of shape, and households already under strain are not going to un-strain themselves. Long story short, J's friend X lives here now, until...later. He's been able to de-stress and keep talking to his family, so he's doing well.

Ironically, one of my brother's friends came to live with us (twice!) when I was a kid, and many of our friends we met here in California (some have moved on to bring their awesomeness to other states) have a similar story somewhere in their lives. It's a thing we can do.

One of the many changes is that J has someone to talk to, or sometimes just exchange monologues with. There's a marvelous early episode of Mythbusters where they investigate a myth that a duck's quack doesn't echo. I've never heard this elsewhere, but it resonated enough for Mythbusters to take it on, even if there was no obvious endpoint that involved fire, electrocution, or explosions.

(My friend group and I used to watch the show religiously.)

They find an acoustician and bring him out to some duck farm in the Central Valley, which picked a couple ducks (Bob and Roy) for them. They got the shoot all set up, and Bob the duck wouldn't quack. The show hosts are (or act like) City People™–not that growing up around ducks makes you an expert in making them quack–and host Jamie has an awkward little while trying to get a duck to quack.

They go to switch out Roy for Bob, and as the ducks pass each other, there's a festival of quacking. They just needed another duck there to listen.

Watching J and X is exactly like that. Left to his own devices, J will mostly not seek out social contact. But maybe it's never too late to have a sibling you get along with.

Incidentally, according to the Mythbusters wiki:

Initially, no echo could be found, so the team moved to an anechoic chamber for comparison. When examined by an audio expert, it was found that the echo was "swallowed" by the original quack, due to the very similar acoustic structure between the quack and the echo. Because of this, it may be difficult to tell where the quack ends and the echo begins, both having similar waveforms on an oscilloscope and blending together in a way that makes them difficult to distinguish. In the same way, human hearing may not perceive the difference between a duck's quack and its echo. 

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.