Second Dose

 I had my second dose yesterday on my way home from school. The injection felt like nothing. I went home and continued to feel fine all evening. My shoulder muscle (deltoid?) became a little sore by the time I went to bed, and like the first dose that soreness kept me from sleeping well. 

Today I felt completely normal until mid afternoon, and then I got increasingly achy. and cold. But that isn't actually unusual after I sit in my office for many consecutive hours. I went home for supper and my temperature was about half a degree Celsius higher than it was in the morning. I took an ibuprofen and drank a beer, and after a while I felt fine again. I guess I will call that a mild reaction, as long as nothing more happens.

Tomorrow is our last day of regular classes. I have one last lab session, and a bunch of meetings. After that, it's just final exams.

Finally Had Enough of the Card Table

 Here I am at the end of my 10 day quarantine, thankfully with no symptoms of COVID-19 still. I have been teaching from home since April 8, and it has gone about as well as I could expect. I couldn't teach any labs of course, so that is the biggest disappointment for me but the students have not complained much about it. 

The first day I returned to my attic "office" I decided I had had enough of the card table I used as a work surface all last year. I bought a writing desk from Target and it arrived Tuesday. It is one of those flat-pack things and I was really amazed at how efficiently all the parts were packed together in the box. It took me a day or so to put it together but I'm already thrilled with it. It is sturdy, looks nice in the space, and even has a little drawer for my pens and other little items. It's slightly taller than the card table so I am working at a more comfortable height.

I have to have a negative COVID-19 test before I am allowed to return to campus, so I drove over to the Walgreens yesterday morning for that. They do drive-thru tests, which actually means they send the swab through the little drawer in the drive-thru window and one has to do it oneself in the car and send it back through the drawer. It was a PCR test and sent out to a contractor for processing (and a weekend) so I have no idea how long it will take to get the results. The pharmacist said I should call if I haven't heard anything in 72 hours, which will be Tuesday. If the results don't show up by this evening I will have to teach Monday's classes from home again, which is fine but I don't like the uncertainty. Will I be here? Will I need to pack things up and go to campus? Do I have everything I need in the same place? Besides that, I kind of need to know if my non-majors class will be able to have lab on Wednesday or not, and it would be helpful to be able to tell them in class tomorrow.

Are We Making Any Progress At All?

Feeling defeated today.

Monday I did go downtown and get my first dose of the vaccine (Pfizer). The clinic is in the convention center and it was packed with people. It was weird and uncomfortable being around so many people. Everyone was well-behaved: wore their masks properly, distanced from each other, and followed the instructions of the many volunteers. My arm hurt that night, it was sore enough to wake me when I rolled onto that side, but by Tuesday evening the pain was gone and I don't think I've had any other effects.

Classes resumed. I only have an upper-level lab on Tuesdays, first thing in the morning. Unfortunately, one of my three students tested positive for COVID-19 later that day. The college considered me "exposed" and I got a phone call from HR yesterday (Wednesday) afternoon, just as I was preparing to leave campus for the night. I need to stay home in quarantine for ten days. It is unlikely (but not impossible, of course) that I have been infected. The lab is pretty big, and well-ventilated. I was usually at least six feet away from the students. We all wore our masks and didn't touch each other. Will the vaccine I received ~19 hours earlier do any good?

I grabbed what I could think of from my office and now I'm teaching from my laptop in my attic again, just like last spring. I had to tell those upper-level students today that they don't get any more lab experience this semester. By the time I'm out of quarantine, there will only be a week left of this semester and not enough time to do any of the remaining activities on the schedule.

I barely slept at all last night. My brain was full of what I needed to do this morning to be ready for the Zoom lectures, anger at the student who exposed me, and just plain anger and frustration. Our state is having a huge spike in COVID-19 cases right now, and my school has the most cases we've had all year (it was something like 37 active cases when I checked most recently), but the administration keeps saying "business as usual" and classes are still primarily in person, our athletic teams are having practices and traveling for competitions. All the students went home for Easter last weekend, and I've overheard enough of them talking about all the fun things they did that I just despair for the future. The city schools are all having spring break this week, too. It's going to get even worse here when those people get back from Disney or wherever they all went. 

Taking Forever

 The days are passing at normal speed, I know it. Yet it feels like everything is stuck. I've been knitting the same three projects for months: a pair of socks, a pair of mittens, a baby blanket. I think I'm happiest with the blanket. It is for my unborn nephew, due in early May, and I've been working on it every weekend since January. On Saturday mornings, after my walk, I listen to Radio Deluxe and do another 6-8 rows. The cables are massive and take a long time. The pattern is for a full-size blanket and mine is only about half as wide, but it is difficult to feel like I've made any progress, week to week even though I've used up six skeins of yarn so far.

I think the main problem is that life just keeps going on, every day basically the same as every other day. Some days I go to a classroom and talk to students about something, some days I stay home. We're down to the last month of the semester and I think I care more about their work than the students do. They are still very polite, and they humor me when I try to get them interested in whatever topic I have to tell them about, but no one cares. This part of the semester feels the worst, when I start questioning why I keep doing this job when obviously I am bad at it. Maybe I'm not good at anything else, either. What's the point?

But, yesterday was our first day off since the semester started (and we have another day off Monday) for the Easter break. I went to campus and spent the day grading papers in my office, in the nearly empty building, sort of like old times. It felt nice in a way, and I was happier after that. 

Today, after the weekly Zoom call with my family, we're going to a friend's house to sit outside and drink beer and talk. I have only been to two other gatherings in a year, both of them last August. It is a sunny, warmish spring day today (nearly 20 C!). It hasn't been too bad for me, but BAM used to have two or three friends over on Friday afternoons and they would sit outside and drink beer together. He hasn't been able to do that all winter and that has been hard for him. I guess I have less need for people (though not zero). It will probably be good to hang out with people before I forget how.

Monday I have an appointment for the COVID vaccine and I am looking forward to that. I felt such visceral relief when I made the appointment last Tuesday. Happy, of course, but also relief that maybe, maybe, maybe this nightmare might be almost over! I can still count the number of non-home, non-work places I have been (pet store a few times, supermarket twice, dentist twice, car service place twice, lab for a blood draw, Walgreen's for a flu shot, haircut place, Lowe's, and two small gatherings). I am afraid to feel too much hope, in case something still more awful happens. My parents this week mentioned they want to come visit us this summer and I can't even comprehend that idea.

Other than the teaching part, school has been terrible lately. I don't like the new Provost, I think he is either lying or has no idea what he's doing. In February he announced he is expecting the faculty to study the idea of changing our courses to a 4-credit standard (it's 3-credits now). That's not so bad since almost all my department's courses are already 4 credits anyway. His other big idea is to switch our semester schedule to a block schedule, to which my department is adamantly opposed. He also wants to reduce the number of adjuncts (I approve) teaching undergraduates, but won't answer who is supposed to teach their courses. It's not as if the college will hire an equivalent number of full-time faculty. He wants to cut the number of courses required for majors and minors, and cut the number of majors. This type of talk always makes the chemists anxious, as we have few majors but high expenses. Then, there's this presumption that the faculty will spend the summer working on all these projects and I have actually started to speak up in meetings to object. Firstly and most importantly because that's not how I want to spend my summer break. Secondly because I don't think it's right to put that kind of pressure on people who are going to feel they have no choice but to comply. Every time I talk to this Provost, I get the strong impression that he doesn't want to listen to me, that I am only opposing him because of my lack of vision (or something). He tends to fall into a rut of these same messianic plans no matter what topic is being discussed. He says he wants the faculty to decide, but it feels like the decision has already been made (by him) and he's just waiting for us to confirm, or submit. As I say, I don't like him.