Last week I had to begin doing the daily COVID-19 self-screen, which is an online survey with questions asking about symptoms and travel/contact with others. Every day before 9 am I have to submit this survey. On Wednesday there was a strong thunderstorm here at midday, and some tree limbs fell on the power lines about three houses down from mine, taking out our electricity. We were without electricity for 27 hours, until late afternoon on Thursday. For all that time, I didn't have internet and I was trying to conserve phone battery as much as I could. On Thursday morning, since I couldn't do the self-screen online, I called Campus Safety to ask what I should do. The dispatcher filled out a paper form for me. Then I got a nasty-gram email from Human Resources, scolding me for not doing the online survey. I answered that I HAD done it, by phone, and they said "well, you should have called us, not Campus Safety!" Well excuse me, jerks! I could have done nothing at all, but I made an effort and CSO had no other instructions so I think we did admirably!
I'm making a list of what I need to bring home from my office to work on for fall classes. When we evacuated in March, I only brought one box and one tote bag home, and it was only things I needed for my spring classes in progress. I'm only allowed on campus Mondays, Thursdays, and afternoons on Wednesdays, so I'll still need to do the majority of preparation at home this summer. I need textbooks, and files from my office computer (I could use the VPN to remote in, but it takes a long time and is clunky. Much faster to just copy things to my flash drive when I'm there.)
I'm required to wear a mask at all times and to sanitize everything I touch (I don't know how that's going to happen, unless someone has left cleaning supplies for me). A few weeks ago my PhD alma mater had "germ keys" for sale in their alumni e-newsletter, and I bought a bunch of them (from a somewhat-shady Ebay seller based in Hong Kong). They look something like this:
They are for pressing elevator/keypad buttons and opening doors without touching. They haven't arrived yet, but the tracking information says they are being processed by Customs at the port of entry. My plan is to possibly engrave them with people's names and give them to my department colleagues and other people I like. In the meantime I am thinking of wearing a pair of thin winter gloves for opening doors on campus. I have to dig around in the box of winter accessories in the hall closet to find them.
In other news, we received our first box from Imperfect Foods on Saturday. I signed up in mid-April and was on the waitlist for about seven weeks. It was kind of fun to pick out what we wanted one night last week, and everything arrived in pretty good shape although the box looked like it had been dropped upside-down a few times in transit. The blueberries had escaped from their container and were rolling around loose. One of the tomatoes was slightly smashed and another had a black bruise. Everything else seems fine and it has been a joy to have an enlarged variety of produce in the kitchen. If this helps us cut down on the number/length of trips to the grocery store, I'll consider it a win. We set up our second box yesterday and may have gone a little overboard, but I like that we can say "never send us cilantro" (or whatever), and I like that there is much more variety available than I was expecting.
The college still hasn't given more information about fall semester, other than the change in semester calendar. We are expecting that there will be limits on the number of students that can be in the lab at a time, and I'm hoping that number is 12 so that we can have our usual-size sections. I participated in advising for incoming first-year students the past two Mondays and now we have 21 registered for both sections of General Chemistry lab. The Registrar emailed me yesterday afternoon to ask what I plan to do about it, and I said I wasn't sure I should increase the section capacity (normally we have caps of 24, but if I can't have 12 students at a time this fall, I shouldn't do that) and I wasn't sure I could add another lab section. If I add another lab section, that will increase the total number of students in the lecture section to at least 60 and up to 72. That's not good for me (I teach the lecture). I told the Registrar I hoped to have more clarity before the next advising date, which is thankfully not until middle of July.
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