* Driving in today, had someone who did NOT have the right of way (but had a big, big pickup truck) decide he DESERVED the right of way, and I'm not going to argue. But that's how the aggressive jerks win, I guess: they just push their way in.
I did not appreciate having to stop mid-turn in the middle of the intersection (this is where I make a left turn WITH A GREEN ARROW and oncoming traffic *should* have a red light, meaning "right turns are legal BUT ONLY IF someone is not turning from the other side with an arrow" and more often than I'd like to count someone either doesn't see me, or decides they're more important and I will yield and I don't like that.
I mean, I know I'm unimportant, but I dislike having it reinforced with a "if you insist on going through instead of hitting the brakes while out in the intersection or speeding up precipitously, you will get hit" at 7 in the morning.
* Bad night of sleep; bad dreams. I don't even remember one but I woke up from it and considered getting up and going to sit in the living room for a while to try to exorcise it.
I also had a dream in which several of the young men I have known (a couple of which it might be said I went out on dates with) were present; the one I was involved with the longest but hadn't seen in some years, I was having to explain the events in my life of recent (including my father's death) as we were walking somewhere and I realized at some point he was totally not listening to me even though I was saying things I thought were important - they were important to me - and then I woke up.
So basically they were dreams about rejection.
I also woke up with the weird thought: the word "buoyancy" and the phrase "sometimes if you can't swim, it's enough to float" and I don't even know.
* I am still trying to triangulate the news about COVID-19 and decide whether to cancel my spring break trip. Amtrak has gone now to a policy of allowing rescheduling for free, without taking their 10%, I suppose to avoid sick people traveling/avoid bad PR about "you didn't respond to the epidemic." I don't know how much of a PR move it is vs. a "we think it's going to get really bad" move.
The train I would be taking originates on the West Coast and I don't know how scrupulously they clean them. I can take sanitizing wipes but that's not much use if the person before me sneezed all over the upholstery of the seat.
The other thing is: my mom does tend to get overly cautious and if I go up there and she doesn't want to go out and do anything and is on a "let's eat stuff out of the freezer instead of grocery shopping" thing, I'm not sure. I mean, I want to see her but I don't want to be stuck in the house for a week with only the projects and books I brought with me. I might as well "shelter at home" at MY home and just call her more regularly.
The other things is: I don't want to get sick and take it TO her. Or back here, to friends at church. I realize that's a remote possibility, but...
I guess I wait a couple more days (I would be traveling Friday after this one) and decide but I suspect we're gonna see more cases before it subsides, and there are some scary hints that either people can get reinfected right away, or the tests for it are considerably less than accurate and have an unacceptably high false-negative rate.
* Also for everyone screaming about how "seasonal flu regularly kills more people" - I got my gotdang flu shot. I get one every year. There is no coronavirus shot as of yet. And I don't know for sure how its transmissibility compares to flu in an unvaccinated population because there's not enough data out there yet. Apparently it's less transmissible than measles IN AN UNVACCINATED POPULATION but I have been vaccinated against that (and had a titer test during the last go-round of measles outbreaks, and it showed I was still immune).
And again: I worry less about myself (despite my asthma) than I do about my mom or about older friends
* We all had to do a forced password-change (including the "get into the desktop in your office" password) this morning and since I haven't had to change my "log on to the desktop" one in a long time (because it was really pretty secure, and because I am the only one who uses my office) I bet I forget the new one. I wrote it down and taped it to my desk which I know is not the security they wanted but my memory has been kind of holey of late and I don't want to come in some day and not be able to remember which 'special character' I used as part of the password phrase and wind up getting locked out because I try a wrong one too many times.
The problem will be logging into the classroom desktop if I go on autopilot and try to use my old one.
* Slept right up to the slightly-before-5-am-last-chance-to-get-up-and-get-in-a-workout alarm (I usually wake a half hour to 20 minutes before it) so I can tell I'm tired.
* Lots of just-ugly news out there. Apparently one school in my state shouted anti-Native American slurs at another school that had a lot of Native students (this was at a basketball game) and that kind of thing is beyond unnecessary. There are ways to "smack talk" the opposing team that DON'T involve that kind of ugliness. (I mean, I'm not a fan of smack talk at the best of times, but I understand it happens in sports). If I ran the show? Evidence (clear-cut evidence) of this happening would mean that school just forfeited the rest of their season. Yes, maybe that hurts some kids' scholarship chances, but....
Also it brings up bad memories of how we lost field-trip privileges when I was in seventh grade; we went to the Cleveland Zoo and apparently a couple boys on the bus thought it would be funny to should racist slurs (not the n-word, but insults anyway) at some African-American students from another school. (We were a ....very WHITE school). We all got in trouble for it. I don't know that that had the desired effect; the boys who did it were popular kids and I don't think it hurt them in the way it would have hurt an unpopular kid.
But yeah. People need to learn not to be ugly to other people.
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