How are you?

November 3, 2021 — nicoleandmaggie

What’s up with you guys?  Anything interesting going on?

(That’s right, we didn’t have a post for Wednesday…)

Posted in Uncategorized. Tags: , . 44 Comments »

44 Responses to “How are you?”

  1. Bev Says:
    November 3, 2021 at 5:22 am

    Thanks for asking! The candidates I supported won the local school board election, which is a good sign. Classes are going well and I’ve fallen in love with my job all over again, but my husband is going to get transferred soon, possibly as early as Jan. 1, which will disrupt all of my holiday plans, boo hiss. It seems as if every snippet of good news is overshadowed by a big heaping pile of bad news, but we carry on. What else can we do?

    Reply
  2. Anonymath Says:
    November 3, 2021 at 5:27 am

    Shot! After the CDC director signed off on the vaccine for 5+, I gave my local Walgreens a call and they confirmed they would be doing walk-ins this morning for kids’ COVID-19 shots. DS is unamused, but I’m so looking forward to having at least one shot on board for him. It’s almost time to exhale for us. Not so much for the immunocompromised, but at least we’ll be less likely to infect them soon.

    Reply
    • nicoleandmaggie Says:
      November 3, 2021 at 5:44 am

      Lucky! I thought we would be able to just do that but Walgreens “has no information” and the local pediatric office is only doing Saturdays and they’re booked up for three weeks. If we drive to the city we can get an appointment for the Monday after next if we hurry. Also all the local pharmacies are out of moderna for adults.

      I guess we no longer have those supply imbalances from people not getting the shot. Which is more efficient for the country but a little annoying for us.

      Reply
  3. CG Says:
    November 3, 2021 at 5:48 am

    Scheduled a covid vaccine for our youngest on Monday! I watched the end of the CDC meeting yesterday and it was really moving to hear all the committee members talk about how important this is and how they are going to get their kids or grandkids vaccinated as soon as they can. I was in no way hesitant but it was great to hear that they determined that this vaccine not only has a favorable risk-benefit ratio at the population level but also for the individual child. Can’t wait!

    Reply
    • nicoleandmaggie Says:
      November 3, 2021 at 6:21 am

      Me too! (Re the end of the cdc meeting and finding it moving—also loved the part where the white doctor dude was like I owe you an apology for telling you you had a math error when it was my math error when I tried to do a back of the envelope calculation.)

      Reply
  4. Leah Says:
    November 3, 2021 at 5:57 am

    I got a vaccine appointment for our oldest for Saturday!! I’m so excited!

    Reply
  5. delagar Says:
    November 3, 2021 at 6:13 am

    It’s cold and rainy here, my favorite weather. And we’re reaching my favorite part of the semester, when all the heavy ground work I do at the start of the semester begins to pay off.

    Also, there was a fox in the backyard yesterday. My little dog was very nonplussed.

    Reply
  6. nicoleandmaggie Says:
    November 3, 2021 at 6:40 am

    Update: CVS just added appointments!!! DC2 is scheduled for this Sunday which is the earliest available but sure beats 3 Saturdays from now.

    Reply
  7. gwinne Says:
    November 3, 2021 at 10:35 am

    Vax appt for Tiny Boy a week out! If his school holds a clinic sooner, we might do that depending on when it falls. I’d rather not cancel a work day.

    AMEN!!

    Reply
  8. omdg Says:
    November 3, 2021 at 11:02 am

    Making good progress on a training grant(s) application (due Feb) that department leadership is excited about, and making good headway on some other projects as well. Happy at work right now and I just have to keep this in mind for when I feel shitty about myself again in the future.

    Daughter seems to be doing well in school (teacher told her she is excellent academically, but needs to stop acting bored — any suggestions on how to deal with this?) and has new friends. We are looking for a house to buy, which sucks. We are also au pair-less for the first time in a long time, and it is so wonderful not having another person living in the house. Husband has been picking up (all) the slack, so my life is basically the same, which is to say I work all the time. I think I’m supposed to feel guilty about that… but mostly I feel like I need to apologize for NOT feeling guilty, which I think may be weird.

    Daughter has a vaccine appointment! Yay! I have been dealing with covid drama at work which — I hate people so much sometimes. Would be surprised about ANY delay in getting my kid vaccinated in MI because there are just so many people who are opposed to it. Just drive 20 miles west of here, and I’m sure vaccines are abundant.

    Reply
    • nicoleandmaggie Says:
      November 3, 2021 at 11:13 am

      All of that sounds great except the guilt and house shopping sucking. And I guess the vaccine deniers—they also suck.

      I thought there would be no problem here but I think the state has started ordering less. Still once the pharmacies opened up for business the wait is only half a week. It looks like most here places are only doing them on weekends. Which makes sense with kids in school and a perishable product.

      I would ask daughter about it and then have DH make an appointment with the teacher to discuss strategies for how to keep DD challenged. If she’s being a jerk that needs to be directly addressed with daughter but being bored needs teacher strategies.

      Yay husbands picking up slack!

      Reply
      • omdg Says:
        November 5, 2021 at 9:00 am

        Update: Had parent-teacher conference yesterday, and teacher said that he’s going to give daughter projects to work on over the weekend where she will have to research something and then teach the class. We were delighted! Daughter is less so at having to do extra work haha. They have so little homework at her school however, and I am happy to be able to direct her to activities other than iPad over the weekend. She plays SO MUCH iPad.

  9. Lisa Says:
    November 3, 2021 at 11:40 am

    My youngest will get their first shot this afternoon, yay science! Seriously, I get a little weepy every time one of us is able to get this shot, it’s such a miracle.

    I’m really struggling with being at the nadir of my “life happiness curve” – I know objectively that things are going really well for us, but still feel dissatisfied. I’m obsessively looking at job ads and trying to imagine if life would be better if I took X job and moved to a new place. I’m trying to convince myself that life probably wouldn’t be much better and that I can do a lot of interesting things in my current situation while waiting for the upswing in happiness. And that now would not be the very best time to move, but if I still want to move in ~5 years, maybe that would be better, timing-wise. (In 6 years, my two oldest will both be through HS. The youngest would be starting 7th grade, but they’re just going to have to play caboose, it’s their starring role…)

    Reply
    • nicoleandmaggie Says:
      November 3, 2021 at 12:02 pm

      Yay vaccines!!!!!

      OMG, I feel that so much. I keep thinking about what I would DO if I quit academia and since I can’t come up with anything I’m just applying to job ads in Blue States at objectively better (but not insanely better) departments than where I am now. I haven’t written a blogpost on it yet because my thoughts aren’t in order yet. I’m not sure if this is temporary or a midlife crisis or what. And yeah, I want to get DC1 done with high school.

      One of my advisees told me that this is a major problem overall according to her part-time job at an education non-profit. Like, I shouldn’t feel bad about having more students than usual just not putting in effort because there’s been a general lack of motivation this year. They’re not sure why but they’re seeing it across the spectrum.

      Reply
      • Lisa Says:
        November 3, 2021 at 2:37 pm

        Right!?! And if it’s just a mid-life crisis/temporary problem, I don’t want to do anything stupid in response. Buying a red sports car is much more reversible than taking a new job in a different state and uprooting everything! There has been a lot written about the life happiness U curve. (see for example https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/12/the-real-roots-of-midlife-crisis/382235/) I’m exactly at the age the average person hits bottom. At least, I hope I’m at the bottom, I certainly don’t want to go any lower! Perhaps it’s just our very bad luck to be at the bottom of the curve during a global pandemic that magnifies everything bad.

      • nicoleandmaggie Says:
        November 3, 2021 at 2:43 pm

        I know some of the people quoted in that article! (Not just the economists– if you ever get the chance to hear Laura Carstensen talk, you should.)

        I do think that people can recover from changing jobs, but research (Til von Wachter) suggests they don’t necessarily recover from salary cuts with job changes (which is something I would likely take).

  10. Cloud Says:
    November 3, 2021 at 11:46 am

    I’m the only one without vaccine updates, because my youngest turned 12 at the start of October so got the 12+ dose then.

    My update is that I think I may have a solution to my problem with my job, and it is to move to a different position within my company. The only problem is that this will be done as part of some other big changes happening and so I am probably stuck where I am through the end of the year.

    Reply
    • nicoleandmaggie Says:
      November 3, 2021 at 11:56 am

      Yay solution!!!

      I’ve been wishing you could move to DH’s company (they’re at the point where they need real project management and don’t really have it yet, and it is a delightful work environment), but sadly it’s not pharma. I’m guessing that whatever project manager they end up with eventually will be coming from software development.

      Reply
  11. rose Says:
    November 3, 2021 at 3:11 pm

    Holding my breath for the 5-11 year olds to be fully vaccinated and safer. Interesting to see which shot locations are organized and ready for the push and which are not. Because it is NOT as if it was not possible to guess the outcome of the approval process.
    500 postcards in for the newest push and 500 to go. The next election cycle is already going.
    Thank you for posting today.

    Reply
  12. bookishbiker Says:
    November 3, 2021 at 4:54 pm

    I’m getting my moderna booster this evening, and am glad for the timing as I expect/hope most clinics and pharmacies will be jabbing kids for the next while. Yay kids getting the shot!!

    I thought of fodder for a future blog post – I don’t really get how people play video games anymore, like what is the actual technical mechanics of it all? Do all video games have to be played on consoles? Are there some games where you just log into a web page? Are there any good games that are phone-only? (I think you recently had that conversation and the conclusion is that phone games aren’t that good.) Every now and then I read a review about a game that sounds interesting but then I don’t even know how a person games. I’m old enough to barely remember using a cassette tape to load a game called Montezuma’s Revenge! And I haven’t gamed since. So feel free to break the concept down to tiny bits :) I’d like to try some immersive but not super HARD game sometime but I don’t even know how it all works.

    Reply
    • nicoleandmaggie Says:
      November 3, 2021 at 5:16 pm

      I will outsource this to DH. DC1 plays a lot of mafia style games on discord, so console isn’t the only thing. DH also does board games online with his former coworkers.

      Reply
    • Leah Says:
      November 4, 2021 at 6:06 am

      I like Board Game Arena for playing board games online. I know there are video games online, but I don’t play them. Steam (a program you can download) has lots of games.

      Leo’s Fortune is the best video game I’ve played on my phone. It’s still available in the apple store and definitely worth getting.

      Reply
  13. Matthew D Healy Says:
    November 3, 2021 at 8:48 pm

    I’m in Iowa’s most liberal County where there were no anti-masking candidates for any local office. But in some other parts of Iowa a group calling itself The 1776 Alliance won big in School Board elections. I doubt they realize George Washington won the Revolutionary War in large part by making his troops get immunized against Smallpox by a method that was far more dangerous than vaccines (but far safer than natural infection).

    Reply
  14. revanche @ a gai shan life Says:
    November 3, 2021 at 10:58 pm

    Yay DC2 appointment!

    We can start trying to book tomorrow. I expected to feel excitement about it, or the beginning of relief, but I don’t. I’m going to get on it regardless, it’d just be nice for it to also have a dopamine kickback too. Maybe it will when Smol is protected as well? I dunno, I’m just really tired.

    I’m hoping my doc comes up with some ideas to help with my excessive fatigue.

    Trying to get through stuff I absolutely hate at work. I hate recruiting and I hate training people but it’s important and we’re neckdeep in both. Wish us luck for good outcomes?

    Reply
  15. mnitabach Says:
    November 5, 2021 at 2:00 am

    I’m working on a recreation of vintage Old Spice cologne!!! 😹 😹 😹

    Reply
  16. First Gen American Says:
    November 5, 2021 at 6:48 pm

    3 out of 6 of us have gotten our booster shots.

    A big tree fell on my house last week but miraculously did minimal damage.

    I quit my job today. The new place is American owned and overall treats people better. More money, better benefits, more opps for advancement. It was hard because I’ve spent more than 1/2 my life at my first place, love my boss and have a lot of friends there but it was time. New place has a lot of people from old place so it won’t be that big a leap.

    Reply

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