Up From Here

[Dawn70]

Our university went to "remote instruction" as of 5:00 yesterday and will remain all online until April 13. How the h3ll am I supposed to do hands-on lab activities online????? Oh well, my problem to deal with. Students were sent home and only those who absolutely cannot go home or have nowhere else to go (mostly a very small number of international students) are allowed to stay in the dorms. Those students are restricted to their dorm and the dining hall and are not allowed into any other buildings on campus for any reason without being accompanied by a university employee. Most of us are working from home part of the time with sparse office hours on campus to service those who require face to face interaction for whatever reason, but this is VERY limited. Sparky works for a small company that only has 7 employees so for now, they are going about business as usual, but I am staying home as much as possible. Sparky can be a bit of a germophobe anyway, so other than going to work, we are ordering groceries online and not eating out or going out for entertainment purposes. We live out in the country, in a fairly remote area so I think we have the social distancing thing down. We had planned to go see a movie this weekend, but have decided to just stay home and work outside, weather permitting. If it rains as it is supposed to, we'll hang out in the house and read, visit, play games, whatever.

Like everyone else, we are mainly mostly inconvenienced by the lack of TP. I'm not saying this is all hype or anything, but good Lord people...………..who needs 15 cases of toilet paper? I'm going to have to brave a few stores today in search of some, not because I need to hoard, but because we are down to 2 rolls.

This whole thing was actually a great jumping off point for a very open and frank discussion with my class yesterday because a young man asked me when he came in what I thought about all of it. I asked him to hold that thought until class started and we would talk about it and we did. It was interesting to hear a young person's perspective, especially those of people who are just now really feeling their independence for the first time, so this may be the first adult thing they have really had to face. It served as a great discussion and we talked about the importance of washing hands, social distancing, being very cautious, making hard adult decisions about NOT going to do that fun thing (whatever that may be, assuming it isn't cancelled). At the time of the discussion, we didn't know our university would be going all online by the end of the day, but we talked about what if and why that was a good thing and what the potential bad parts of that was. Believe it or not, they did actually have some bad points to go with their good ones, which kind of surprised me because I thought I would get a lot of answers about it being good because they would be able to sleep late and do their coursework late in the afternoon or in the evening or not having to actually attend class but being able to just go online and do it on their time.

I appreciate your comments, kml, and I appreciate that they were general and not necessarily aimed at anyone in particular, but I think it is imperative for informed people to continue to speak out and HOPEFULLY get through to some of those not so informed people. I am not necessarily saying I'm super informed, but I do think I'm reasonably intelligent. I'm not going around saying this is all a hoax, but I'm also not panicking and buying 700 rolls of toilet paper (clearly, since I am down to 2...LOL). I am going to do my part and help my husband do his part and we will also help his mom do her part, since she is actually one of those in that great risk factor category (elderly, has an immune-compromised health issue already). We are going to keep to ourselves and avoid crowds and buy what few groceries we need online until all this blows over. I wish those tp hoarders would just calm down and do the same.