Life of Wry

Home #1

UC San Diego is planning to suspend in-person lectures and classes for the duration of Spring quarter.

This is an excerpt of an email from the chancellor, Pradeep Khosla, dated March 9.

Such a bummer. Not sure what it will mean for graduation.. we’re just not sure how long such a moratorium will last. Peter’s disappointed, as he was looking forward, in particular, to the final class in a graduate fluids series with a professor he really admires. All remote classes, though, with little to no professor or student interaction … heckuva way to wrap up one’s undergraduate career. Feel sad about that for him.

All for the cause of safety and health. Which… who can argue with that?

Home #2

Our Election 2020 Volunteer Center, which had its fabulous ribbon cutting and grand opening just three days ago, full of fun and fanfare and the promise of a tsunami of new volunteers and activities …. is now closed to the public.. more or less. The Yolo County Health Department issued a new set of guidelines this morning with this advisory:

No big gatherings and the observance of “social distance.”  Social distance is now a thing.

Kinda puts the kabosh on a lot of what we had set out to do with our trainings, gatherings and voter outreach efforts.

There was a meeting this morning of a group of us to discuss one thing, but an hour before our meeting, these guidelines came out and the meeting morphed into a strategy session on how to respond, starting with cancelling every last thing. 😦

(I will say that it was an impressive, smart, quick response.. no time for whining .. we needed a plan, which we came up with and then moved to implement.)

Here’s what our entrance now looks like:

And a close up of that one sign:

We are all planning to get familiar with Zoom, a video conferencing platform which will allow trainings to continue for things people can do at home (text banking, phone banking for example) and we’ll remain staffed at the center so people can drop in to pick up or return postcards. For now, voter registration and canvassing and any direct voter contact is out.

Anybody’s guess how long this will last… can’t be through November, right?  I mean, RIGHT?

Sigh.