Natterings From Nepantla

Technically the fourth anniversary of the pandemic was sometime last November, but since we don't know the exact date, all the articles on "X Years of the Pandemic" get timed to the day when the WHO finally was able to bring itself to use the p-word.

I never thought I'd like working from home long-term, yet here I am now, still doing it and never wanting to have a commute again. When the office shutdown turned out to be far longer than anyone first expected, I also thought my new habit of a psuedo-commute with a walk around the neighborhood every morning and evening wouldn't survive the arrival of winter weather, but I've managed to keep it up except for the occasional day when the amount of snow and ice really wouldn't permit.

We'd been planning to travel to New Zealand for Worldcon in 2020, and my passport was out for renewal at the time the shutdown occurred. Last year I finally used it when I went to Winnipeg for Pemmi-Con. It was when copying information from it into the ArriveCAN app that I finally noticed something ironic: it was issued March 13, 2020, the very day my company switched to indefinite WFH.

Virus Appreciation Day: OK, so it's been almost three years since Covid rocked the world. Is there ANYTHING you appreciate about that particular virus — well, maybe not the virus itself, but the impact it had on workplace arrangements, or social norms, etc.?

Well, I do like the move to WFH but I would rather it hadn't included millions of people dying.

If we're going to appreciate a virus, how about the cowpox virus, for being the original vaccine.

Just before Oregon's mask mandate expired, my county's weekly case rate was 50.89 per 100k. Since then... I don't know, actually, because the state doesn't update its site on weekends, and the CDC's site hasn't updated since the 11th due to a "data ingestion error". If the rate does manage to drop and hold below the 50 per 100k mark, though, some places I want to try to get to:

• The zoo
• Powell's
• The Cart Blocks, home for many of the food carts displaced from the Alder Street pod, conveniently located just down the hill from Powell's
• Bullwinkle's Family Fun Center and its two entire miniature golf courses

The top of my list should be The Tiki Putt, an indoor miniature golf course on the other side of town that I'd been planning to go to when everything shut down in 2020. But I checked its Web site yesterday, and it turns out it closed all the way back in September 2019.

After declaring that the end of Oregon's mask mandate was absolutely, positively, definitely not being moved up again after being changed to March 19th, the state has changed it again to the 12th, as hospitalizations continue to drop spectacularly.

GameStorm is keeping its vaccination-or-test requirement, but to my surprise it has loosened its mask rules. Masks will now only be required in certain function rooms. GMs can require masking at their tables, but in a room full of otherwise unmasked people all talking loudly, I can't think that's going to do much to lower exposure.

The SO and I just had to travel for unavoidable family reasons. When we headed out last week, the 7-day average test positivity rate for our county had only just dropped below 10%. When we got back yesterday, it was down to 6.9% and the case rate was half what it had been when we left.

I'm not planning to throw caution to the winds anytime soon, but I am hoping I can switch back to my comfortable, non-glasses-displacing (also tightly-woven, multilayer, and well-fitting) cloth masks by GameStorm.

Our state health officials have announced that Oregon's indoor mask mandate will end on March 31 or earlier, depending on how the hospitalization numbers look.

We have some ways to go. Oregon was one of the last states to be hit by the omicron wave, and test positivity rates by county are mostly in the 15-20% range right now. (The rule of thumb is that if your positivity rate is over 5%, your case rate numbers are essentially meaningless because you are failing to detect them all.)

Still, it's nice to contemplate another lull coming. GameStorm is looking better and better timed.

The New York Times has an article on an interesting bit of coronavirus science that I thought would have been picked up and reported more widely. Some scientists have done a simulation of what's in all those little aerosolized droplets that people put out when talking, coughing, etc. The tl;dr is that the spike mutations in the Delta and Omicron variants appear to give them big advantages in surviving in those droplets.

Which is fascinating because all the talk in SARS-CoV-2 mutation right now is about it trying to evolve away from being recognized by antibodies or latch onto receptors better. Here's an evolutionary pressure that has nothing at all to do with how it interacts with the human body.

Alaska Airlines's Web site is currently proclaiming it to be The Official Airline of Rescheduled Events.

I had the day off yesterday and decided I wanted to go visit the food carts in central Beaverton. So for the first time since March 13, 2020, I rode my bike up to the light rail station and got on a MAX train.

Where the buses have been cut to half their seating capacity, the trains are down to one quarter of theirs. This might be because the trains don't have openable windows, but MAX's web site says the HVAC units can exchange all the air in one car every 7.5 minutes, and in my experience so far the buses have all their windows closed more often than not. I will say the proportion of people who are vague on how to use a mask properly was noticeably higher on the train, though.

But it was a worthwhile trip. Thai Bloom turns out to have one of the better pineapple fried rices I have had around here.