If Trump Gets Re-Elected Tomorrow…

Posted on by Scott / 0 Comment

…I won’t go so far as to say I’m moving to Canada or anything – namely because Canada is very cold and I’m pretty sure we’re not allowed in right now due to COVID anyways – but I’ll certainly be disappointed, to say the very least.

Amid all of the craziness that’s plagued our daily lives for the last four years of America’s reality TV president, the easiest way for me to sum it up is that Donald Trump is an asshole and we deserve to be represented by somebody who isn’t.

It comes down to basic human decency because as far as I’m concerned, all of the other issues that we face as a society don’t mean much if our country can’t maintain a basic standard for how we treat each other within our borders, and Trump has done nothing but tear down our values since before he took office. When sexism and racism and bigotry and xenophobia rain down from the highest office in the land, it encourages other people to be assholes, too, because hell, “If the President said it, that must be presidential now!”

Yes, I want a president who cares about a strong economy and military showing, but I also want one who’s looked at throughout the international community as a leader instead of a bully.

It’s ok to be frustrated by how the press covers you, but to claim that our free press “is the enemy of the people” is not ok. Just like it’s not ok to label anything that you don’t agree with as “fake news.”

I want a president who doesn’t pick fights with people all. of. the. time. – whether they’re professional athletes or war veterans or kids who are passionate about climate change. The term unpresidential doesn’t even begin to describe Trump’s behavior on Twitter and in front of his favorite hosts on Fox News. He’s turned the office into a three ring circus and we’re all tired of cringing every time we wake up to see what he’s managed to sully the American image with today.

I know a lot of people voted for Donald Trump because they wanted someone who wasn’t a politician for a change, but this was a mistake. Instead of a politician in the White House, we got a cruel-hearted con man who reduces every problem we have to dollar signs and who’s biggest trait is being able to pull the ugliest out of the fans who vigorously chant his name.

Unlike President Obama and so many that came before him, I can’t let my kids watch him speak because I don’t know who he’s going to dig at next and it’s a damn shame that we live in a time when the President of the United States isn’t fit to even be a role model for our nation’s youth.

We need a leader who will speak kindly and rationally, who will look at our problems honestly and listen to our experts because they’re our experts. 

We need someone committed to bringing us together and representing all of us, not tearing us apart and pitting Americans against each other whether they’re red or blue, rich or poor, black or white.

Ultimately, I fear that if Donald Trump gets re-elected tomorrow, it will be like letting the bully win … reaffirming the asshole … and giving him carte blanche to reap even more havoc upon our nation in his second term that will only serve to set us back even further.

The economy is important. Healthcare, and welfare, and infrastructure, and international discourse are all important. Lots of things that our federal government does are important, but first and foremost, we need a leader who isn’t a complete asshole in the White House.

Without that basic level of respect – for the office, for the American people, for our international neighbors and for everyone who we inhabit this tiny blue dot with – without respect, none of the rest of it even matters.

*fingers crossed*

A Day in the Life of Me…

Posted on by Scott / 0 Comment

This is a unique time in my life, and not simply due to the global pandemic, so I thought this might be a fun exercise to look back on for posterity’s sake…

7:50am – My alarm goes off and I reluctantly get up because this is when Sara leaves to take Christopher to school and I need to watch the other two kids and let Matthew’s therapist in at 8:00am.

8:00 – 9:00am – After making the kids breakfast, if I’m feeling productive I’ll do dishes and other chores; if not, I’ll waste time on social media until it’s time to pack David’s lunch and take him to school.

9:00am – The drive to school is short and pretty uneventful. Not as close as the kids’ old school which was literally half a mile away, but it’s maybe 10-15 minutes at best. Recently I’ve started listening to books on Audible and this is a nice way to get in a few hours of otherwise captive time each week!

10:00am – 12:00pm – This is where my day becomes a little more fluid because I’m currently working from home due to the pandemic. My life is much more chaotic if I have to physically go into the office, but right now sometimes I’ll dive right into work once I get home, sometimes I’ll flex my time and do a little writing, and occasionally I’ll even squeeze in some exercise! I need to start doing that again…

12:00 – 2:30pm – This is lunchtime, and shower time if I haven’t already, and sometimes I help put Matthew down for his nap. Even though the noise distractions of working from home can at times be frustrating, I love knowing what’s going on with the family during the day and getting to peek in on what Matthew’s learning instead of just hearing about it after the kids go to bed once I get home.

2:30pm – If it’s my day to pick kids up from school, I’ll leave to get David and then pick up Christopher afterwards. I’d like to say that it’s more time to listen to a book, but lately it’s more like listening to the same kids song on repeat 37 times in a row…

4:00 – 5:30pm – More work. I try to break around 5:30pm to watch the other two while Sara works on homework with Christopher and maybe get started on dinner, though admittedly that doesn’t happen as often as we would like.

5:30 – 7:30pm – Dinner, playtime, chores, baths … this time it usually pretty crazy. By the time we’re ready to put kids to bed, the whole house is equally pretty exhausted.

8:00pm – KIDS BEDTIME!!!

8:30pm – 12:30am – This can be a number of things … relax/wind down time watching TV with the wife, wrapping up work, maybe some writing. It’s tough because while this is a nice block of time to get things done, I’m usually running out of steam and don’t have the energy to do anything!

12:30 – 1:00am – It doesn’t always happen, but I’ve really been trying to get to bed around 12:30am because 7:50am comes way too soon the next day and it’s unfortunately one part of my day that’s anything but flexible.

You’ll note that the biggest theme for my schedule right now is flexibility. I never have more than a couple of hours doing any one things and it seems like there’s always a doctor’s appointment or a random errand to squeeze in somewhere, so it’s really important for me to be able to set my schedule around my life as opposed to living my life around my schedule.

Sometimes I might fantasize about getting to spend eight whole hours just sitting at my desk working, but the reality is that all of this other stuff that’s important to me will still be swirling around whether I’m there to help manage it or not. Except that it becomes way worse on Sara who would have to do more juggling to make up for my not being there. And if we’re being honest, some of the things – like Matthew getting therapy and the kids getting picked up from school – simply can’t happen without us both being around to be able to divide and conquer.

It’ll be interesting to look back and compare this to what my days look like five years from now, but for everything going on at this moment, this is what works – for better and for worse! 🙂

Coronavirus, Day 205 – Random COVID Thoughts…

Posted on by Scott / 0 Comment

It’s ok to fear things that can kill you.

There’s nothing wrong with being afraid any more than there is crying or being anxious or any other emotion. For a disease that’s killed 215,000 Americans in the last seven months and literally put our nation’s leader in the hospital, it was disappointing that this was his message the moment he got out.

Not urging people to take necessary precautions. Not compassion for all of the people before him who struggled with COVID-19 but didn’t have access to the best medical treatment in the world.

Instead, it was just more pandering to his base to minimize the affects of COVID and make the people who are taking it more seriously … like his opponent in the election … look weak by comparison.

…and he’s not even done being sick yet…

One of my pet peeves lately has been watching company layoffs when I feel like businesses could really be doing more to support their own employees. The most significant of these examples is Disney.

Last week Disney announced that it would be laying off 28,000 employees from its theme parks division, presumably mostly because Disneyland hasn’t yet reopened, although the parks here in Florida are also seeing heavy reductions.

This bothers me because unlike a lot of other businesses struggling with the effects of COVID-19, The Walt Disney Company has an astonishing $23 BILLION in cash on hand right now.

To put that in context, Disney could pay every one of the 28,000 people they’re laying off $825,535.71 … or more realistically because they’ve said that the majority are part-timers, they could spend a mere 10% of their cash reserves and still have an excess of $80,000 to help support each employee who directly plays a hand in creating Disney’s highly coveted Disney magic…

Now I know that companies don’t normally operate this way, but if you want to talk about actually maintaining a culture of family and inclusion, why not? Think of the incredible goodwill that Disney could gain by financially supporting their people instead of turning them loose on unemployment benefits and food pantries to survive, not to mention the press from doing the right thing.

Shareholders might not be as crazy about Disney spending its cash on its own employees instead of new attractions that can further boost earnings per guest, but … I just don’t have the energy for that argument right now because without their staff, who’s going to sell their tickets and load their rides and keep their parks flowing for millions of paying guests every year???

In general, it really makes me uncomfortable to see more and more people relaxing their concerns about this virus and trying to push us “back to normal,” as if COVID will understand that “We’re all tired of it…” and move on to greener pastures to infect.

It certainly didn’t help with Florida’s governor being the first to relax our restrictions, at least as much as he could, by not only removing capacity restrictions for businesses but also by trying to pull the rug out from underneath local mask mandates by telling counties that they can’t assess fines for people not following them anymore.

For the most part, businesses are keeping their rules in place. Maybe not so much for restaurants, but honestly we’re not eating out anytime soon anyways. What’s tough is that it opens the doors for more people to challenge these businesses, and each other, and start fights over whether they still have to wear a mask or not. I know that we had a handful of questions that turned aggressive on the kids’ school Facebook groups when parents asked if the kids still had to wear masks to school after the governor’s announcement.

As a side note, so far our kids’ schools have had four cases between the two schools, although only the first case prompted one of them to close.

Just this morning I read a story out of New York about two old guys who got in a fight at a bar over wearing masks and one pushed the other, who ended up hitting his head and dying.

And lastly, admittedly I haven’t really looked at our stats in a while, so it was interesting to see that Florida’s cases have gone down by about a third over the last month…

…however nationally they’ve been slowly trending back up again.

Curiously, if you look at the number of tests being done each day, Florida is doing dramatically less than we were this summer – 25k down from 65k – however nationally we’re almost double – nearly 1M today up from 500-600k over the summer!

Particularly here in Florida, I worry that we seem to be preparing for the perfect storm with the next wave between less testing and less restrictions coupled with more people being frustrated and wanting to fight things like mask rules. Right now the majority still seems to be wearing masks and keeping their distance, however I think that’s going to become more of a struggle as that anti-mask group grows more vocal and especially if people start getting self-conscious about taking precautions if not as many people are doing them.

The other day I noticed a stark contrast just between going to Walmart and Target – our local Walmart stopped putting its sign about masks out front by the doors and the greeter doesn’t challenge anyone, as displayed by a couple without masks walking right in without a word, whereas at Target there are signs front and center, plus several employees inside to monitor the door, and they even had an announcement reminding everyone of their safety procedures while we were shopping.

I don’t care what happens with government rules – at least for right now, I won’t shop at someplace that doesn’t actively take COVID-19 procedures seriously and that includes requiring masks for anyone and everyone.

I’m afraid of this disease that’s killed at least 4-8x more people than the flu did last year because our risk of contracting it is greatly diminished simply by following a few basic precautions. My family’s lives, and the lives of our friends and neighbors and people we’ve never met, are worth those minor inconveniences.

Coronavirus, Day 172 – Why Do We Still Have To Do This Stuff???

Posted on by Scott / 0 Comment

I’ve tried to take in as many different perspectives on America’s COVID-19 experience as I can because I know that there are a lot of variations to how individuals are going through this.

For example, at 10:30pm last night one of the schools that my kids attend announced that they were switching to virtual school immediately because a staff member had tested positive for COVID. We’re still waiting for more information, but understandably a lot of parents are frustrated and upset because they have to work outside of the home during the day and can’t stay home to supervise kids in virtual school.

My wife and I are very lucky in this regard because I can work from home and she only works part-time on the weekends.

That said, when I look across the measures that we’re still taking to prevent the spread of the virus – everything from masks to some businesses being closed to quarantines – I can’t help but think that the reason why we’re still having to endure these invasive measures is because, quite frankly, we didn’t do a very good job of facing this virus as a whole from the very beginning.

  • Medical personnel spent the first month struggling to get their hands on basic safety equipment for their staff.
  • Political leaders shrugged off the seriousness of the pandemic and downplayed its potential instead of making critical early steps.
  • The financial support offered by Congress was rife with abuse and often went to people and corporations who didn’t need it, and archaic unemployment systems left even more Americans begging for relief.
  • Some Americans fought tooth and nail against restrictions aimed at keeping people safe, and even today chatter about the virus being a hoax is common.
  • Testing never really went mainstream by being too confusing, unreliable, and an undue burden to establish a regular testing cycle needed to truly monitor the population.
  • Speaking of monitoring, contact tracing never really took off here, either, because vocal Americans determined that privacy was more important than safety. Case in point – for my son’s school, we don’t know if the employee ever had contact with Christopher or not, which makes it difficult for us to manage his potential exposure here at home.
  • Despite the importance stressed on opening schools, many were never given safety equipment that they needed, with some schools here in the Tampa Bay Area giving each teacher only “a rag and a spray bottle” to keep their classrooms clean.

I know it feels like we’ve all been through a lot in the last six months, and we have, but it’s hard to not ask ourselves if we really did everything that we could when you look at other countries that experienced a curve back in the spring and basically have it more or less stabilized at this point.

If America is supposed to be the greatest country in the world, or the richest, or whatever, why are we struggling with this so much?

Tracking Me

Posted on by Scott / 0 Comment

I just finished a really fantastic book called Atomic Habits by James Clear.

There were so many useful bits about productivity and behaviors and getting stuff done and creating better goals – too many to list, really – and I’m super excited about implementing many of the ideas he talked about in various places throughout my life, but right now I want to talk about tracking and statistics.

I’ve always been kind of fascinated with numbers. My personal word count for writing is something that’s very important to me, and yet aside from staring at the numbers and hoping they’ll go up (or down, in the case of weight loss), I’ve never really had a great approach for actually influencing those huge numbers in a consistently positive way.

If I look at my word count, for example, it’s clear to me that this massive number was built over time, but I wish I could say that I had a better system in place to ensure that it continued to grow on a regular basis. Case in point – with each post averaging barely 300 words, that’s really a minuscule amount of blogging each day. I could knock that out in 15 minutes a day. Yet in the twenty months since I hit that 1 million word milestone, I’ve only added another 34,000 words to my total.

Even if I only blogged 5 days a week, one post a day, at my given average I could’ve added another 120,000 words in the last year and a half!

So I’ve decided to do a little experiment to combine my love of stat tracking with my newfound I’m 40 and It’s Time to Improve My Life-mentality by taking the next four months to track a handful of “key stats” that I’ve identified for myself across three areas:

  • Creative Output – Number of Things Published
  • Health – Amount of Sleep Per Night
  • Health – Number of Days with Exercise
  • Family – Number of Family Photos Shared

1. Creative Output – Number of Things Published
I know I talked about word count above, but for this iteration I want to take a step back and basically just count any time that I hit a Publish button – be it for a blog post, a humor column, an ebook or some other written thing. Tracking should be pretty easy between WordPress stats and the other platforms that I regularly publish stuff through. My goal here is really just to improve my overall output – we’ll talk about bigger goals influenced by this task at a later date!

2. Health – Amount of Sleep Per Night
This has really been a horrible one for me, not just in the last week although school starting and having me up at 7:30am certainly ain’t helping! I know that good sleep is linked to so many other aspects of health, and I actually think I might like the routine that I started developing for my mornings this week, so I really want to try to use this stat to drive going to bed earlier and getting a more consistent amount of sleep. Tracking will be through my Fitbit, where I’m hoping to see some scores that are a little better than “poor”…

3. Health – Number of Days with Exercise
There were a few different parts of Atomic Habits that talked about making progress in tiny increments, whether it was improving a process merely by 1% or creating better habits by starting with just a minute or two at a time … Do two minutes of yoga/meditation/exercise/whatever per day, and as you build into your mind the drive to hit that simple task of only two minutes, naturally you’ll likely try to push yourself to do more because you’ve already started. Earlier this summer, I lugged our elliptical back into my office from the garage in hopes of actually starting to use it again, so I want to try employing this technique to start building it into a daily routine.

Tracking, again, will be via my Fitbit … which might I add I think that it’s really cool that this thing somehow is able to identify not only when I do exercise but also say, “Nice job with that 10 minutes on the elliptical!” without me ever telling it what I was doing?!

4. Family – Number of Family Photos Shared
Admittedly this is kind of a silly one – I wanted something around family to be my last stat, but it’s not like I can track days at an amusement park with COVID and all. Still, I thought this could be kind of fun because a couple years ago I started working on a family photo album website and I stopped due to some technical reasons, but we take so many great photos that I don’t always want to flood Instagram and Facebook with that I’d still really like to revisit the whole effort.

Plus, now that we’ve got several DAKboards displaying photos around the house, it’d be neat to tie them in somehow to pull photos from a more current source than just whenever I add a few to the OneDrive folder that DAKboard uses.

So the idea is pretty simple – revisit that idea, refresh it, and start adding in newer photos. I don’t expect to finish the whole thing in four months … I think that’s probably another thing that derailed the project in the past because I just got too far behind with pictures that it was just a ridiculous task to try and get caught up! But if I can spend an hour or two on it once a month, I can probably get to where at least 2020 will be represented, and that would be a nice start! Tracking here will also be via WordPress stats.

Anyways, I’m sure I’ll write more about this later, but the idea here is really to hone in on something very specific, but also very manageable that I can focus on day after day to collectively lead to bigger results. More creative output -> more pageviews, subscriptions, sales; more sleep and exercise -> more energy and lower weight; more family photos -> a more meaningful record of our growth together as a family.

Not sure if I’ll share results along the way or wait until January, but I definitely want to write about some more points from Atomic Habits that I fell in love with, so stay tuned for that! 🙂

Coronavirus, Day 161 – The Last Day Before the First Day of School

Posted on by Scott / 0 Comment

So here we are, I guess.

Five months ago we were averaging 25% of the daily cases that we’re seeing today and in-person classes came to a halt, replaced by virtual learning for the rest of the school year.

On the upside, I’d like to think that we’ve learned a bit about COVID-19 since then … more people than not are wearing masks out in public and social distancing has become the norm, even though there are definitely still some among us – some in positions of power – who will fight tooth and nail for the right to ignore this global pandemic and pretend that it’s not the reality that we all live in today.

I know that our teachers will do the best they can because that’s what they always do, but I also feel like in critical times like these that that’s not good enough.

I’ve read posts over the weekend about teachers not being given enough supplies by their administrations to clean and even protect themselves, which isn’t surprising considering the laundry list of supplies that parents are asked to contribute to classrooms each year … but if reopening schools was really so damn important to kickstarting the economy, it sure would’ve been nice to actually see teachers getting the support that they need for a change.

As for our three kids, we’ve opted to send two of them to in-person classes and the third will do virtual school at home with the help of his in-home therapist who he’s been working with all summer.

I, for one, am incredibly nervous and we went back and forth all summer about whether we’re making the right decisions, but ultimately A) the two that are going in-person are much more likely to actually wear their masks than the third, and B) virtual school for Pre-K is kind of a throwaway anyways … so we decided to give these choices a shot and if we either see that things aren’t working or if new cases start absolutely skyrocketing, we’ll have to deal with that when/if it happens.

Obviously that’s my biggest fear because as much as everyone likes to tout that “Kids are basically immune to the virus!” and “Their risk of exposure is very, very low…”, I can’t help but think that it’s mostly due to how quickly we isolated the kids in school during the spring that has helped to keep their numbers so low compared to the rest.

I sincerely hope that I’m wrong, but if we’re being honest, kids are like walking petri dishes even without a global pandemic at hand, and as much as I’m sure everyone is going to try to keep them distanced and masked as much as possible … well, I guess I just hope that they do better than the worst of the adults right now who are getting in fights with store clerks over masks and acting like COVID-19 hasn’t already killed 180,000 Americans in the last five months.

We’ve spent the last five months trying to emphasize to the kids why they need to wash their hands thoroughly and how we can’t do certain things that they love right now because of all of the germs that are getting so many people sick.

I hope we’re not expecting too much of them by sending them back to school when the end of this thing still seems like it’s nowhere in sight.

Three Positive Things – Summer in CovidLand Edition

Posted on by Scott / 0 Comment

Lullaby, and Goodnight…
Lately Matthew has had this thing where he likes to be rocked before taking a nap or going to bed, and since Sara worked all weekend that duty fell squarely on me. It’s kind of cute, though – he’s got a big, stuffed Mario that he sleeps with and he likes us both to go under his blanket like a tent. Recently Sara started playing lullabies on her phone and he seemed to enjoy it, so I tried doing it, too.

The only down side I’ve found is that in addition to being effective at helping him fall asleep, the combination of it all also seems to be great at making me fall asleep! That said, I keep meaning to set some time aside for meditation and it’s incredibly relaxing, so why not just kill two birds with one stone?!

Video Games FTW
I’m planning on writing a Scott’s Guide to Life article about it, but video games seem to have surged in popularity in our home this summer … and I love it. On top of continuing to work from home due to COVID-19, I’ve spent some great times racing Christopher and even David in Mario Kart, and because his Switch Online membership comes with a bunch of retro NES and SNES games, I’ve even been showing them some of my old favorites which has been super fun.

For example, one of Christopher’s favorite tracks in Mario Kart 8 is Excitebike Arena, so he was very curious to see the actual game that it was based on! He’s even been trying to play some of the original Mario games, some of which are a little less forgiving than the newer ones, but it’s just awesome to get to share that with really all three of them. 🙂

Ugh, Garage…
And last night I reluctantly did some more cleaning out in my garage in order to be able to fit one of the cars inside. The whole ordeal was anything but voluntary – we’ve gotten a couple of letters from our HOA complaining about our kids’ therapist parking in our driveway because there’s only room for two cars before someone is then parking over the sidewalk … which I think is an absolutely stupid rule, but after paying them a few hundred bucks in legal fees last year after they got trigger happy about weeding our garden … I just don’t have it in me to argue with them right now.

The last time I tried cleaning, I still was about a foot short of actually closing the door, so last night I rearranged a bunch of stuff and found some more things I could throw away, and now the car just barely fits … which is good enough for me.

Note to self – Next house needs to have so much more room for storage!

Bonus Positive Thing – Swim Time!
I think we went swimming every single day for the last four days, and even though I’m exhausted … like, seriously! … the kids really loved it.

Our pool this summer has kind of been my secret weapon when I’ve got the kids by myself because although it can sometimes be a little stressful keeping track of all three of them at the same time, particularly when Matthew wants to dive in without waiting for me, however we do also have a lot of fun and as an added bonus – it really wears them out and makes the rest of our time until bedtime a lot easier to pass!

I don’t know what we’re going to do in another month when it starts getting too cold to swim.

Regularly scheduled family Mario Kart tournaments???

Veneer

Posted on by Scott / 0 Comment

I’ve been listening to this song in the car a lot lately. It’s a nice, peaceful song – written about a highway in Northern Michigan that I used to drive quite a bit. In fact, I actually saw The Verve Pipe live back when I was in college … they were playing at a school that a friend went to and we played one of their albums on repeat the entire ride back, ironically, as we drove down US-131 to take another friend back to his own school.

They were a great live band and admittedly I’ve been enjoying a bit of nostalgia in listening to them during my quick, 10-15 minute drives around town. A great mix of both hard rock and melodious music, here’s a selection of my all-time favorites of theirs…

  • Hero (from The Verve Pipe – 1990)
  • Headlines (from The Verve Pipe – 1990)
  • Half a Mind (from The Verve Pipe – 1990)
  • Ominous Man (from Villains – 1996)
  • Villains (from Villains – 1996)
  • Cup of Tea (from Villains – 1996)
  • Colorful (from Underneath – 2001)
  • Veneer (from Villains – 1996)

Alien Bugs? In Washington???

Posted on by Scott / 0 Comment

Last night I started watching the CBS show BrainDead from a few years ago out of curiosity, and today I finished up its mere 13-episode run as the first show that I’ve truly binge-watched in a long time!

I stumbled across it purely by accident. Earlier in the week I found myself watching this hilariously fun table read of the Scott Pilgrim movie with the cast via Zoom and I realized that as great as she was in that movie, I didn’t really know much of anything else that Mary Elizabeth Winstead has starred in. Somehow I stumbled upon this weird sci-fi comedy about bugs taking over the brains of Congressmen, and what can I say?

OMG – It was soooooo addictive!!!

I think a big part of the appeal of this story is that it’s told from the perspective of someone who doesn’t like politics, so it’s not so much one party looking better than the other as it is both parties filled with stupid bickering and fighting for their own self-preservation instead of actually doing what’s best for the people.

Of course, it gets way worse as the bugs continue their infestation and more and more of Congress gets infected…

I literally ended up watching the first 6 or 7 episodes of this series last night after the kids went to bed, and if I didn’t have to worry about watching the kids the next morning because Sara worked overnight, I would’ve loved to just blow through the entire thing because they did an outstanding job with their cliffhangers and leaving you desperate to see what was going to unfold next.

It actually left me wondering how the series would’ve moved forward if it hadn’t seen its untimely demise and gotten cancelled after just the first season because I honestly felt like the ending was a little rushed. I think I read something on Wikipedia that the next seasons were going to follow the infection spreading to other sectors – Wall Street, Silicon Valley, and Hollywood – so that could’ve been interesting, particularly if the Washington cast was still involved and they could’ve played with how the different systems intertwined.

But alas, it wasn’t meant to be, so instead we’re left with this fun, little 10-hour sprint of alien infestation that could’ve been more, but admittedly was still a whole lot of fun to watch for what it was. If you have any interest in the more satirical side of politics, and you can handle watching bugs crawl into people’s ears, I highly recommend it!

Coronavirus, Day 132 – To School or Not to School…

Posted on by Scott / 0 Comment

So right now, and in fact for most of the summer, one of the biggest COVID-19 debates is whether it’s safe enough for kids to go back to school. Cases have surged to the point where 10,000+ new cases a day is the new norm here in Florida, and last week one of the teachers unions sued our governor for mandating that the school year resumes next month with in-classroom instruction.

Many counties, including ours, have already pushed their start dates back two weeks, but the looming question is really whether that’s enough to give time for schools to create a safe learning environment for both students and staff.

This, of course, is happening after President Trump just pressured the CDC to revise their guidelines for schools reopening because he thought that the existing rules were too hard or too expensive to support … which of course, resulted in new guidelines last week basically supporting reopening schools with pages of text about the importance of schools and very little on how to keep them actually safe.

Personally, I’m still very torn about the issue. A few weeks ago, we made the decision for Christopher and David to do in-classroom instruction, and Matthew do virtual school with help from his in-home therapist during the day. We were most confident about Christopher because he’s starting at a new charter school that really seems to have its ducks in order about how they’re going to operate; David’s public school … less so, but we don’t think it will be productive to have multiple kids at home doing virtual school during the day.

And even since then, our schools have come back and said that masks will now be mandatory for students and teachers are being very vocal at voicing their very valid concerns for their own safety.

I get that it’s a complicated issue because most parents can’t stay home with their kids all day in the event that classroom instruction gets cancelled again, and yet I also feel like it’s important to remember that the role of the school system is not to serve as babysitters so that parents can go to work!

The reason why I really wanted to write this post is because there seems to be this weird perspective across the Trump administration and the Republican party that kids need to go back to school so that the economy can recover … which I don’t understand because it’s not like people are staying home from work just because they have to watch their kids.

I mean, we’ve been on summer break for two months, which happens every single year…

The sad reality is that a lot of jobs have basically evaporated due to COVID because the world had to change – people aren’t out shopping and eating in restaurants and going on vacations because they don’t feel safe. Businesses have cut back on buying things from each other due to economic uncertainty, and teams aren’t traveling to conferences and customer sites for safety reasons, and a lot of these problems just aren’t going to resolve themselves in September because suddenly the kids are back in school again.

I’ve heard financial analysts say that it could take 3 – 5 years for places like Disney World to get back to the record attendance and revenue levels that they were enjoying just six months ago, and there’s no doubt that a lot of businesses across the board simply aren’t going to be able to stick around long enough to see that level of consumer confidence actually return.

In a perfect world, the worst-affected businesses could just hit pause and wait this thing out for a year, but with everybody having bills to pay, that doesn’t seem to be possible for most industries.

I don’t claim to have all of the answers for how to “fix the economy,” but I think it’s going to take a while and I don’t think it’s fair to couple this problem with the separate issue of ensuring a safe environment in which to teach our kids. I want my kids to get back to learning, but it’s not fair to all of the teachers and staff who support their education to force the issue if they don’t believe that it can be done safely right now.