Not much has happened since I last posted in December 2019. Perhaps that's why the blog has been lying fallow for two years, the sheer uneventfulness of it all.
The pandemic blew up in our face just a few months later. I was worried. I had been listening to the BBC and they were doing a good job reporting on the "flu" in Wuhan, as was STAT news. And I had an inkling. This is not one of those retrofitted memories that one makes up after the fact. I was freaking out long before the coronavirus made it to the neighborhood and I have the gallons of hand sanitizer to prove it. I made night runs to Wal-Mart weeks before the lockdown. I had already trained my students on all of the online tools that we would be using for the rest of the semester and had essentially excused them from attending in class a week before the school closed. I never lacked toilet paper and I never lacked Diet Pepsi--at least not until they ran out of it all over South Jersey this fall. Believe me, I checked.
I had purchased gloves and goggles and alcohol wipes and even had a box or two of facemasks before they disappeared, the last ones in the local CVS, if I remember correctly. The lockdown, when it hit, was very intense; it was a hard year and a half. Eve and I did--and are doing--our absolute best to keep our distance from the rest of the world during this ongoing public health emergency. After the first three or four months, I had dreams of hugging people.
Right after the virus appeared in China, I finished my tenure file and submitted it. As the months of lockdown dragged on and as my colleagues and I worked from home, the file made its way up through the layers of the university bureaucracy, and I believe tenure was voted on by the Board in April 2020. I am glad I had already finished the file before the end of the world. I'm not sure how I would have coped if I had to complete the file under lockdown. Truth be told, I think the jury is still out on how well I coped anyway.
This site is my New Year's Resolution. Just typing more. That would be nice.
