What a strange time we are living in. My CEO has closed our office and is having everyone working from home for at least the next two weeks. On top of that, we've learned that employees in my office building as well as a coworker have been exposed to COVID-19 (so far, none have tested positive). Since my parents are both over 70 and have health conditions that put them at greater risk for complications if they contract COVID, I'm back in Kansas City, working there and helping out by running errands and doing things around the house.
Plus I've got two of the best social distancing buddies on the planet:
Teddy, on the left (my parents' dog), is almost 11 and Zeppelin, on the right, just turned 2 yesterday! We celebrated with a drive to Kansas City, a new toy, and a yummy peanut butter treat he'll get later this evening.
I was invited to complete the 2020 Census, so I hopped online and filled it out. Surprisingly, all they asked me was gender (binary - male or female, with no options for other or even prefer not to say), birthdate, zip, race, and whether I rented or owned. Nothing about marital status, income level, sexual orientation... I expected a series of demographic questions, but what I ended up with took 2 minutes. So yeah, the Census is going to be a joke this year. Of course, I suspected this would be the case when I blogged about it previously (
here,
here and
here). And Trump from the beginning has been problematic with data (see
here) and his (lack of) response to COVID is likely also to keep the numbers artificially low and help his reelection odds.
Otherwise, things are quiet here. Schools are closed (mostly because they're on Spring Break, but they're likely going to stay closed even after that) so there's not much traffic, and we have plenty of food plus Netflix, Amazon Prime and Disney+. The dogs have no idea what's going on in the world, so they're pretty happy. I'm crunching away analyzing data for work and texting with friends, dreaming about spring and my garden, and taking inventory of my huge stack of books to read.
That's all for now! Hopefully more blog posts soon!