Technology Triumphs and Failures

 --On Tuesday, I posted a link to my Hilda of Whitby post on both Twitter and Facebook.  I was so pleased when the Whitby Civic Society like my tweet.  It's a small thing, I know, but it delighted me.

--Yesterday, I got to work to find that we had no internet.  It's becoming quite usual.  I have work that I consciously save for days when we have no internet.  Since our internet was not restored until just after noon, I made a lot of progress on action plans and faculty forms that must be filled out annually and that must match (which is why I do it--it's easier and takes less time than sending forms back to faculty to be done and redone).  I spent the afternoon feeling discombobulated, as the day wasn't what I had anticipated.

--I got so much done, though, without the distractions of the internet.  Plus, I hadn't brought a book with me.  If we continue to have weeks where the internet goes down regularly, I'll need to remember to bring a book.  I'll have all the forms done, all the reports and action plans written, all the drawers holding old paperwork sorted.

--I thought I might get some framing done this week; I had a great JoAnns coupon.  But not every JoAnns has a framing department.  When I called the one that does, the person on the phone said, "Our store is closed, and we don't know when we'll reopen."  Her voice cracked, and I said, "You mean like closed closed?"  She told me that they might open again after January, but she just didn't know.  I apologized, and later I wondered why they didn't just change the message that greets phone callers.  Was the information that new?

--We hit a grim corona virus milestone:  We've had 250,000 die in the U.S., and this new disease is now the 3rd leading cause of death, if we lump all cancers together (which would make cancer the 2nd leading cause of death, and I'm fairly sure that heart disease is the first leading cause of death).  It's sobering, however, to realize how many people have died in such a short time, just 9 months.

--This morning, I heard this statistic on NPR, that no other event of the past 100 years (except perhaps for the 1918 flu) that has created more carnage in the U.S.  We could argue that it depends on how we define carnage--we're not quite at the number of U.S. dead in World War II.  But that was only 290,000 dead, so we'll be there soon.

  --And of course, also heavy on my mind is that a week from now will be Thanksgiving.  What a strange time.