Love in the Time of COVID-19

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The Italian epidemic seems to be flattening, but not necessarily slowing down. I doubt it’s halfway, but I hope it’s at least a fourth-way through.

Some are saying that they’s only had 0.0001% fatalities, or 1 per million people, but so far it’s 0.0124%.

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Makes sense, I did pick up the small amount of flour I did with bread in mind, though I haven’t had to go find a recipe yet.

Of course, I wonder if the people googling “sourdough starter” are getting a letdown realizing the time and extra flour they’ll need to go through for it.

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I dare you to listen to the entire album.
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PICKLES THE PENGUIN!

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I love the first track, “Everything I Own,” but I’m not sitting through the rest. (Sounds awful tinny as well. Gooorn!)

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Which is why I left a ziplock bag and instructions on the front steps for my friend to come up and grab on his way home from work (he’s a doctor). He’s literally building the starter to 100 grams tonight so that he can make the dough tomorrow morning and bake in the evening.

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And if I weren’t appropriately practicing social distancing and not going near friends (and in a different part of the country), I’d now wish we were friends so I wouldn’t have to go through the trouble of making a sourdough starter. :smiley:

I’m tempted to legit start one, if for no other reason than that sourdough is IMO the best bread to do grilled cheese sandwiches with. But, since I wasn’t aiming for unbleached/etc flour and only got two rather small bags, I’m worried about starting something I can’t finish. :wink: (also, I think in my life I’ve made more alcoholic beverages from scratch than I have loaves of bread, so…)

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I got the starter originally from a former poster at The Other Place who came to visit while on a trip through the U.S., so it’s only fair I keep passing it on!

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I’ve been utterly humbled by my students retooling thesis projects to work on COVID-19.

The kids are all right.

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Yesterday at work, we got a message from one of our customers to let us know that the stuff we had built was helping them in their work on Covid-19, which was a good morale boost. Then this morning we started on requests for new features specifically in support of that work. Those requests jumped the queue over everything else, of course. Today was a release day, so it was a very short timeline, but we got most of them through the QA process and deployed. Makes me happy to see how everyone’s working together on that and to be a part of it, even if just a small part.

I do kinda envy people getting an extended vacation for this, but don’t envy the ones not getting paid, nor having to go back afterward.

Also learned that my neighbor is working long hours managing the volunteers handling the school lunches for a bunch of area schools.

In bad news, waffle house is now over 20% closed, which is a red alert for FEMA. And we’re above China in total cases and deaths per million population. Starting to feel like a global total war scenario, just not the one I pictured when I was a kid.

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I got this in the mail today. It gave credit to the wrong person, so I fixed it.

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I have the flu, mild cough, but no fever. About 4 days now.

Fuck.

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Are you sure that’s what it is?

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Russian numbers have a whiff of poop about them.

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The flu is what it feels like, but who knows. Testing for Covid19 is not easy to get, and I’m not having shortness of breath so local authorities probably wouldn’t give me one. And I’m not sure I need the extra stress right now.

But it’s scary. Every now and then I panic and that causes tightening of the chest. But it soon goes away (sometimes with a little help from my “friends”).

Thanks…

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