I haven’t written about COVID-19 in a little while. Not a whole lot has changed for my family and me. We’re homebodies by and large, so other than essential trips out, we mostly stick around the house. We venture out to do outdoor things occasionally.

The Biden administration, though surely flawed in many ways (e.g. there are still kids in cages at the Mexico border), has really taken the pandemic seriously and oversaw the distribution of 100 million vaccines within the first 60ish days of the administration. I believe they’re on course at this rate to have distributed 200 million by Biden’s 100th day in office, doubling his ambitious initial goal. We haven’t been vaccinated yet, but I today scheduled an appointment to get my first dose in about a week.

I don’t know if vaccination will be enough. There are variants of the virus, and I imagine complacency and easing of restrictions will result in resurgences of the disease in spite of mass vaccination. Every time I drive by places like the Applebee’s and the nearby bowling alley, I find the parking lot pretty much full. I would think the bowling alley would be very nearly the last place you’d want to find yourself during a pandemic (“here, let me stick my fingers in the holes in this ball that other people’ve been sticking their boogery fingers in”), but I guess dummies gonna dumb.

Groceries and toilet paper are not hard to come by, as they were this time a year ago. Gas prices have risen again, to something like $2.80 a gallon if I’m not misremembering. Mostly I still see people wearing masks in places like the grocery store, and I wonder how long that’ll go on for. Flu cases were way down this year, and I’d like to think that our memories for that will not be so short that we forget to keep up with effective precautions next flu season.

I haven’t done one of these in a while. COVID has become pretty routine for me. I wasn’t one to leave the house without a good reason previously, so for me, this is largely more of the same.

The most stark contrast I’ve seen between now and March or April has been that wearing masks is pretty normal now, and it’s fairly rare to go out and see somebody at the grocery store without one. It’s a nice change. The other night, I was watching a TV show in the realist tradition (mostly I guess I watch other stuff) and I was suddenly horrorstruck that nobody was wearing masks. What were all these people from this TV show from 10 years ago thinking?

Whether things seem all that different to me or not, here’s what we’re looking at right now in Tennessee.

Back in July and August was our first big uptick. It looked pretty severe at the time, and I think it was actually at about that time that I noticed more consistent mask usage. New cases even dipped for a while. But now they’re 2-plus times higher than they were during that spike. And with Thanksgiving and Christmas around the corner, it’s hard to imagine this sort of graph will start to look better any time soon.

Meanwhile, we had an election. Trump lost, though he is not conceding and indeed is raising a big lying stink about it, opening lots of lawsuits to try to end-run around the results somehow. I worry that he and others will find a way to get past the election results and that we’ll double-down on fascism if he manages it. Meanwhile, he seems to be doing nothing but tweeting and golfing. He’s not really acknowledging that this virus is still a thing (though he and a bunch of the people who work closely with him contracted it) and has no apparent plan to try to do anything further about it. Biden and Harris meanwhile have formed a committee but can’t do much until the White House starts working with the transition team.

School is still in session, though I’m seeing more and more short-term closures as specific schools run out of custodial staff or substitute teachers. With the numbers climbing again, it’s really hard to believe the kids’ll go back post-Christmas, but then I thought they’d only go for a week or two so far this year, and they’ve been in session since late September. The school system has done a surprisingly good job with things, though I wish they had taken a different approach.

This past Sunday night, before the kids started school for the year on Monday, I got word that there had already been a case of COVID among the staff of my son’s school. Similar news from my daughter’s school landed on Monday. This isn’t surprising, really, but it’s discouraging. Our school system provided a pretty crummy set of options for returning to school — either virtual with the possibility (and, it turns out, reality) of limited access to certain classes or in-person with the associated COVID risks. Other school systems have taken what seem more sensible approaches to me, with in-person and virtual school staggered to reduce in-person class sizes. I really don’t understand why we didn’t do something similar. I wrote a fair few emails to school officials late in the summer, to no avail. We opted for in-person schooling, hoping sense would prevail and that school would be shifted to virtual. So now my kids are in the building; at least they have their correct classes. It certainly feels like a bit of a Sophie’s choice.

I get that none of this is easy for school administrators. Federal funding has been tied to in-person attendance, for example. Well, schools are already under-funded. I imagine it’s a bit of a Sophie’s choice for administrators who wish to provide education but have their own options limited. Still, it’s frustrating, and I am consistently baffled by some of the magical thinking and lack of basic human decency and any sense of equity in our government at all levels (which is not to say by all individuals in those governments).

COVID numbers in Knoxville had begun to look better in the week or two leading up to school. I had seen a lot more people with masks on out in public. I think it’s finally been normalized enough that most reasonable people have adapted to the inconvenience of it, and that has been heartening. But the university opened back up and kids started partying, and naturally that resulted in hot spots on campus. It seems likely that the return to school (not just for college kids) will further the spread. The numbers in the county are beginning over the last week to creep back up.

Gas prices have risen a bit, though they’re still a dime or so under $2. Groceries on the whole are available, though paper products and isopropyl alcohol and such remain in pretty short supply.

Another Black man, Jacob Blake, was shot by police offers this week. They shot him in the back while his children watched from his car; now he’s paralyzed. He was unarmed and doing nothing wrong. Police apologists are saying that he had a knife in his vehicle (which he was not inside). Protests erupted as they should have, and a 17-year-old white boy shot three protesters with an assault rifle, killing two. Police did not shoot him.

Meanwhile, the Republican National Convention has been held this week. I haven’t watched it, though it sounds like it’s been a circus. It closed, apparently, with a rally on the White House grounds, which besides being a breach of ethics at best (and actually a breach of the Hatch Act, meaning that it’s illegal) also seems profoundly risky during a pandemic. These conventions are always circuses. I didn’t watch the Democratic convention either, though I understand it was more measured. I don’t typically go in for politics that much, though I do vote. I’m starting to pay a lot more attention to local politics. I feel so helpless about policy at the national or even state level, where I think largely you pay to play and it’s hard for politicians (if they even try) to understand how most of us live. And I say that as a very privileged person who knows he’s disconnected from how hand-to-mouth many people live. But at the local level, double digit vote differentials can determine outcomes and influence policy, I’m learning. I don’t like this stuff, but I’m feeling more these days as if it’s important for me to become more engaged and to lend my voice (or at least my vote) more conscientiously on the local scene rather than leaving those who are not as privileged as I am to shoulder the whole burden of caring and engaging. I’m not patting myself on the back here; it is pretty much the very literal least I can possibly do that is not doing nothing.

That was a bit of a digression, I know, but these things — racism and politics and public health — seem so profoundly intertwined right now that it’s hard to think of one without thinking of the others.

On the whole, for my very fortunate family, things seem normalish right now. The kids were definitely ready to see friends and have more structure in their days again, so even though the decision to send them to school was very difficult, I think it’s been good for them so far. Let’s just hope we don’t regret it. I’m sort of skeptical school will remain in session for long. The sense I’m getting from emails being sent out these days is that the school is basically trying to get the kids trained on how to use virtual schooling technology (most of my son’s first week focused on this) so that when school inevitably goes virtual in the coming weeks, the kids will be better equipped to handle it.

COVID-19, while only getting worse after a brief trend toward improvement, has all but fallen to the background of the national dialogue in recent weeks. The murder of George Floyd by police offers a few weeks ago was a straw on the proverbial camel’s back, and led to a number of protests and marches, which police largely responded to with remarkable force. Trump has continued to stir up his base, today apparently tweeting a video in which a supporter shouted in support of white power. He has also continued to weaken the federal government, removing people fit to do their jobs and putting supporters with little experience in their place. It is shocking and pretty scary how unfit he is for the office and how little the other branches of the government have really done to try to rein him in. It is such a strange time, and I feel like I’m living in a satire or some sort of over-the-top dystopia. I feel pretty powerless. Mostly I am responding by donating money where I think it’ll help, but that feels pretty toothless.

Meanwhile, COVID cases and deaths continue to rise. Cases in Tennessee continue to climb as bars and other businesses open up. Texas and Florida have become hot spots. People have flocked to beaches for summer vacations. Nationally, the death rates have fallen some, but here’s a graph of a big recent uptick in cases (presumably deaths will follow):

That’s the graph since March, and we’ve got more daily cases than ever. The biggest hospital in Austin this week had all of its ICU beds full.

I see people wearing masks in public, but I see plenty who don’t, too. Plenty of folks have masks but have their noses exposed.

This is a big election year, and Republicans are limiting polling places. I read that in some places, single polling locations are now going to have to serve hundreds of thousands of people. Trump and his ilk have tried to prevent mail-in voting options. Democrats traditionally fare better at the polls when more voters show up, so this all makes sense but is very disturbing.

Meanwhile, Black people continue to be treated badly. Amid all the protests, after some of the gatherings had begun to dissipate, several Black people were found hanged, their deaths apparently ruled suicides. Police officers in Wilmington (near where I grew up) were recorded venting, using racial slurs and wishing (or even maybe plotting) violence toward African Americans. It feels like we’ve regressed 100 years. It’s shameful.

I worry a lot that Trump with Russian or other allies will steal the coming election and that our government and its checks and balances will further erode over the following four years. I worry that he’ll do more damage in the next few months in any case. Biden is the current Trump alternative, and he’s a milquetoast establishment candidate I have trouble getting excited about, though I’d take very nearly anybody with an ounce of intelligence and a rumor of integrity over Trump.

Gas is still cheap. You can get toilet paper if you go to the store at the right time, and when I last went, restrictions on how much meat you could buy had been lifted. So things feel a little more normal on the surface, but when you read the news, it’s clear that the new normal is anything but normal.

A couple of days ago, I needed some lime zest and lime juice for a recipe. I’ve been a bit of a slob about the kitchen lately, so I just left the lime halves lying around, and today it occurred to me that they looked like tiny watermelon halves.

Also, in the U.S., we’ve had nearly 90,000 deaths from COVID-19. But don’t worry, states are opening back up before we know it’s safe, and people are blithely going out without regard to the safety of themselves or others. I’m sure it’ll be ok. As long as we don’t test people, Trump has said recently, then we won’t have any new cases to report.

In other news, I know I said that I had left some limes lying around, but actually those are watermelon halves after all. I know I also said that it was a tiny watermelon. But it’s actually an extra-large watermelon. And an extra large pencil! I wrote this post with it. Also the pencil isn’t a pencil, it is a mastodon named Chuck who assures me that truth and facts and reason and empathy don’t matter anymore.

I went to buy our week’s worth of groceries this weekend and found the vibe pretty different. The CDC has recommended wearing some kind of covering over mouth and nose to reduce the spread of your own germs. A fair few people are doing so, more at my local co-op than at the chain grocery store. At the co-op, there was a weird sort of stalemate any time I drew near anyone. I didn’t come very close to anyone, to be clear, but any time it seemed a possibility, there was this furtive eye contact and a tacit agreement to sort of circle one another or hang back until it was my turn to approach whatever we were competing for. I felt a little criminal. At the small co-op, workers collected buggies and sanitized them, and they sanitized the credit card terminal’s stylus between uses and asked that people only use the stylus. By contrast, at the chain store, people wandered down the middles of aisles, shopped in groups, and seemed generally less concerned with keeping their breath to themselves, though many did wear face coverings. Both stores had plastic barriers between customer and cashier. Both were fairly well stocked, with paper products notably absent at the chain store. I did not have a face covering this weekend and regretted it; next weekend I will, if it’s a pair of briefs and some pipe cleaner.

Gas is under two bucks, though I forget exactly how much it is. It’s been a while since I’ve seen that figure start with a one, though.

My neighbors are having work done on their godawful pool, and other neighbors are have had other workers doing yardwork. I saw several neighbors with company visiting this weekend. Nobody comes into our house, and nobody leaves it except to walk the dog cautiously or, a little, to play in the backyard. Even that I feel a little weird about. We’re still having pizza delivered on Fridays as has been our habit for a while, and our pizza place has a hands-free situation that prevents me from having to sign a receipt or get near the delivery person, who puts my pizza boxes on the porch and loiters until I wave them away. It’s nice. I could get used to more hands-free services.

I planted my little garden I had dug last weekend, putting in mostly peas, carrots, and tomatoes, with a few broccoli, brussels sprouts, and kohlrabi plants just to mix it up a little. I don’t know if any of these will grow. The tomato seeds were mostly ones we saved from some tomatoes we ate a few years ago. The others were seeds we had purchased some years back. I did find some potting soil around the house that I used to enrich some of the soil, but the ground I’m planting in is not the most hospitable, so we’ll see how it goes.

Mostly, life remains near-normal for my family. We’re home-bodies in general anyway.

I’ve heard of lots of people having trouble with their internet, but mine has been stable so far.

The Prime Minister of England is in intensive care, having contracted the virus. Nearly 11,000 people have died of the virus in the U.S. so far, and we have I think 300,000-plus confirmed cases. A few famous people have died.

The president of the U.S. continues to lie and suppress opinions contrary to his own, and the sycophants he has surrounded himself with continue to drive the country into the ground. It’s hard to imagine a government more tainted by corruption and bumbling idiocy than this one. Wisconsin today opted to hold their presidential primary tomorrow instead of delaying, and the implication is that conservative politicians are doing so because they know it will suppress the democratic vote. This seems on brand, and it is unconscionable.

My friend and colleague wrote this post relating sheltering at home to caring for a bunny, and though that sounds a little weird on the surface, her post is well worth a read, for it is both wise and hilarious. You should give it a read.

We mostly stayed home over the past week, going out for a couple of medical appointments (nothing COVID-19 related) and having one medical appointment via video, which I could sure get used to, though I suppose there are limits (“hey, Doc, I’ve got this bump between my butt cheeks, here let me just drop trow and try to get my butt real close to the camera where are you going?”). I mowed the yard. We decided to bring back our garden, which we haven’t had for a couple of years because the last time we grew one, nobody really wanted to weed it, so it became a mess pretty quickly. My inclination right now is to be more resigned to whatever lies ahead than to be alarmist. So I’m not packing a go-bag or unrolling razor wire around my property or planning to feed my family for months from a little 6×8 plot or anything. But having a little garden, as we used to, will be nice, will make me feel like we’re another day or two from starvation if things do wind up going sideways. If only my kids ate vegetables.

Here’s the start of the garden. First I broke up all the earth with a shovel, so I could then till it a bunch to break the big chunks into smaller chunks. I’d like to get some decent soil rather than trying to grow a garden in red clay, but I also don’t want to be one of the yahoos packing the parking lot of the hardware/etc store now that Spring has arrived and spreading whatever I may or may not have around (or picking something up). I’ve grown veggies in this soil before, and I reckon I can manage it again.

I went to the grocery store today too, and it seemed a little farther from post-apocalyptic than it did when I last went. Many staples were either missing or in short supply, but there were paper towels, and there was meat, butter, milk, some bread. There were some canned goods too, and rice, but no flour. The store is imposing limits on how much of some things you can buy, which is a little annoying if you’re trying to just buy regular groceries for the week as I’m used to doing, but of course it makes sense and is why things are available that weren’t available a week ago.

We’ve tried using cloth napkins at times over the years, but it never sticks. I feel a little guilty. We’ve been using paper towels for a while (the narrow sheets, at least), and at some point this week, we started tearing those in half so that we’re not using as many. It makes me think of my grandmother carefully opening gifts and smoothing and saving the paper. Hopefully the world will right itself and we’ll keep some of these slightly less bad habits afterward.

There’s confusion about masks. Medical staffers need masks to protect them. People are sewing cloth masks at home that I suppose somebody is distributing to somebody? I think it’s lovely that people are trying to contribute in this way, though I’m skeptical of the efficacy of the masks and worry indeed that they’ll do more harm than good, being likely ineffective and potentially carrying the virus if handled by unknowing carriers. It’s a grander and more selfless gesture than my little victory garden, and the sap in me who gets a little misty thinking about this sort of outpouring of human kindness and cooperation has to tell the more vocal cynic to pipe down.

Lots of my neighbors seemed to have company this weekend. It’s a little distressing. Do they just not believe in science? I live in a conservative area, so that isn’t a rhetorical question. Well, it is when posed to my reader, but it is also a valid question here. A couple of neighbors have stuck teddybears in a window. My son stuck one in his window for a day but got tired of having his blinds up, and who can blame him, since these days he runs around in his underwear and spends a lot of time doing headstands in his room.

Never have I felt such a virulent disgust for any person than I feel for Donald Trump. This has been the case from day one, but it grows with every new inconceivable thing the bastard does. Today he announced an extension through April of the social distancing guidelines he has questioned to date. I think this is good, and I’m surprised he could be convinced to do it. He also went on Twitter to talk about the ratings of his daily briefings about COVID-19. My hatred for this man is not political. Certainly, my beliefs differ from the ones he claims to hold. But I would take a dignified, responsible adult of any party over this vacuous buffoon. I have felt shame ever since he became president, but his lack of a capacity to operate on any principles more sophisticated than the basest self-regard is especially appalling right now. I’m sure it will be somehow more appalling tomorrow, still more the day after that.

I hadn’t anticipated writing about this again quite so quickly, as I hadn’t anticipated much change. But there has been some change. Late last week, my city mayor made an executive order that bars and restaurants no longer provide dine-in service. Over the weekend, the governor (after initially saying something to the effect that he trusted the citizens of Tennessee to make good decisions) finally also issued an executive order limiting the same sorts of things. So, we’re in semi-lockdown.

It’s not a police state or anything, thankfully, though Trump has deployed the National Guard in California, and I can’t really imagine what that’ll mean for people in California. I hope it doesn’t mean that the most vulnerable people get treated (more) poorly, though that does seem to be the general modus operandi of the current administration.

I went to the grocery store on Sunday partially to resupply myself with candy but also to get food for our meals for the coming week. The shelves were a lot more bare this time. When I went a week ago, it was mostly rice, flour, and paper goods that were in short supply. On this trip, there was very little meat, just a scattering of canned goods, no snack cakes, no bread, no butter, and a much smaller selection of cereal than usual. Chips were fairly picked over too, as were frozen vegetables. Soft drinks and candy (historically my most important food group) were thankfully abundantly available.

I’ve seen photos of downtown, which has been fairly bustling in general over the past few years but which now is apparently a ghost town. I’m surprised and relieved that people may be seeming to get the message to keep a distance from one another.

I’ve seen more neighbors walking their dogs and pulling children in wagons than usual, though we are heading into Spring weather, and these activities always pick up after winter draws to a close, so maybe this isn’t pandemic-specific. A neighbor proposed to the neighborhood Facebook group that people put teddybears in windows to give little kids out walking sort of a scavenger hunt, and I find the idea sort of charming. Another floated the idea of bringing a food truck to the neighborhood one night a week so that we could help support local businesses without going out. I’m mixed on this idea — I like the notion of supporting such businesses, but it’s hard for me to avoid thinking that somebody cooped up in a food truck all day and passing food and money back and forth is a pretty effective germ vector.