A Week in the Life of a Pandemic Age

Let me capture some moments from the past week--I'm not sure I can make any of them into a sustained blog post, but they seem worth recording.

--This morning, I added some running bursts into sections of my morning walk.  I use the word "running" loosely.  You might call it a jog or if you're particularly unkind, a shuffle.  Once, I was a runner; I went out and covered 6 miles at a time, sometimes faster, sometimes slower.  I miss the endorphin high of a good run.  But the reason I did it this morning is that I wanted to get a bit more of a workout than my usual walk.  I know it may seem silly to worry about gaining weight in this pandemic time, but I do.  And I don't really have a good home scale, so I have no idea whether or not I need to worry.

--I am predicting that the Broward county library system will re-open May 3.  Why do I think this?  I discovered a book in a stack of magazines.  My first thought was shock and dismay about how overdue the book was.  Happily, because the library closed on March 19, I wasn't in as much trouble as I thought I was.  When I went to the website, my account showed that all of my materials are due May 3.  That's nowhere close to the original due date--thus my prediction.  Of course, May 3 is a Sunday, so in some ways, that opening date doesn't make sense.

--I spent some time this week trying to analyze the efficacy of online virtual simulations for health care students.  Once again, I am struck by how nothing in my training prepared me for this task.  Happily I do have common sense.  If students can access these materials for $2 or $3 a student, it makes sense to explore these materials, especially in a time where we're not sure when students can come back to do real life labs.

--Broward College, our county's community college (although it has several BA and BS degrees, so I'm not sure what to call them these days), has announced that classes will remain in a distance learning mode for all of summer.  I am not surprised, although each one of these announcements feels sobering.

--After reading this article by  Kristen Kuempel, the Lutheran (ELCA) bishop of the Northwest Intermountain synod, I begin to wonder if it will be wise to gather in larger groups (20+) until we have a cure or a vaccine.  I had already been thinking about what might be needed in terms of sanitizing.  I hadn't thought about insurance and liability issues, and not only for the immediate group but for all who use the facilities.

--Let me finish on a hopeful note.  While I didn't write any new poems this morning, I did send out some packets of poems to some journals.  I had worried that all of my old poems might seem irrelevant in our pandemic age, but that was not the case.  I don't know if I'll feel the same about the fiction I wrote before the pandemic.

--This week has also been a week of interesting sketching, work that took me in interesting new directions.

Here's a spiral that interested me, one of the first times I've intentionally tried to make my sketching denser by putting images over each other in this way.

But here's my all time favorite of the week: