The PVP Diaries #51

MOAR DAYSHBOORDZ! We’re up to six now:

This new one shows some interesting data for a change. Click through to the link – it’s a little expansive for a useful screenshot. Here’s a carefully chosen selection that I am somewhat dishonestly using to present the picture I want you to see. I wonder if anyone else does that:

There’s some more red triangles at the page (two more), but they both involve testing capacity, not the actual sickness. There’s plenty of hospital bed capacity, and only 5% of occupied beds contain patients with COVID-19. Keep in mind that being in the hospital while having COVID is very different from being in the hospital because of COVID. But that’s a number you just don’t see parsed out anywhere.

I mentioned recently that graduating to Phase 2 of normalization comes on a case-by-case, county-by-county basis. The county that contains the state capital just received approval. This is my surprised face:

The religious service guidance is out. This, too, is Phase-dependent (somehow I remember something like that from my electronics days in the Army):

Phase 1:

Phase 2:

Some people think the timing indicates that Trump is to blame for this. Some people think that the timing indicates that Trump is to credit for this. Some people are just getting back from their visits to essential businesses like pot shops and liquor stores, and will share their valuable opinions freely once they log in.

*It’s FEWER, you friggin’ halfwits.

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I’m just a guy measuring life by the cubic yard:

Sometimes you flow, sometimes you ebb. Yesterday ebbed hard.

I’m just about over it. I did make it about halfway through that pile on the left yesterday, but I’m not enjoying the work like I was 2 weeks ago. At leas it’s keeping me busy. Today I’ll seal the pavers, which means putting out the word to the not-so-dead-end street that the kids all need to stay off of it until tomorrow. They’ve had the run of the place for the duration of the lockdown, and because our house is on one of the ends of the course that they travel, the patio sits right in the natural turn for any loops they make during their games. The problem I’ve noted with kids – all of them – is that they are kind and respectful, and they listen and they understand, and then they turn from you and just forget everything you’ve said. I’ve made several areas off-limits to their feet- places where plants are growing or the shrubs are a bit too delicate to be run through, and every single day I catch them running through there anyway.

There is a childless couple on the street who was long ago singled out by one of the moms on the block as being not nice enough to her children. She’s one of those sorts who cannot bear the thought of someone else telling her children off, no matter how much they may need to be silenced or put in their places. She bristled and still speaks disparagingly of the time when the childless ones placed a large garden/shrubbery area off limits to the kids on the street. I hear her exaggerating the terms of the story every time she tells it, so that by now it sounds like the neighbor came out waving a butcher’s knife and chasing the kids away from her hydrangeas behind a flood of curses and threats. Ok, ok, so not quite like that. But certainly it has changed from the reality of “can you kids please not play in this area,” to the perception of, “GET OUT OF THERE RIGHT NOW YOU DIRTY VERMIN.” Increasingly, we behave in person the way we do on the internet.

Yesterday the childless ones, along with the widowed mother of two teenagers, asked us all to please make sure our kids stopped climbing the trees in their yards. There’s a special discomfort in asking a kid to stop doing something so quintessentially tied to childhood as tree climbing. The neighbors are not ignorant of this. You never want to be that person. But I’ve seen the harm that climbing can do to a healthy tree, and I get it. Several months ago I banned them all (5 total kids who are old enough to do it) from climbing a cedar in the yard, because the branches just couldn’t handle them. The lowest ones – even large, healthy ones – were drooping desperately so that I had to do some undesirable pruning to save them. It took a solid two weeks of telling all of the kids, sometimes individually, sometimes gathering them up and telling them collectively, before they actually stopped climbing it. They’re good kids, but playtime erases their brains.

Anyway, the “please keep the kids out of our trees” message came to the neighborhood via text yesterday, as well as in person. I thought it was handled well. Not everyone else felt the same way. But as a species in general, there is perhaps nothing at which we do so dependably poorly as receiving criticism. Most parents, when told, “please ask your kids not to climb my trees,” hear “you are a terrible parent of terrible children.” Criticism and correction are taken as personal insults instead of opportunities for reflection and improvement. You don’t have to agree with every criticism you receive, I always tell the kids, but you don’t have to fight about it, either. Don’t be petty.

I fear, ultimately, that the beginnings of some unease on our not-so-dead-end street have been sown. We need to be let out of our cages, soon, all of us, so that we can finally have the freedom to choose how we want to get the hell away from each other.

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— Respect your neighbors, Comrade Citizen! —