matthearn.com

(If you aren’t a giant nerd, “^2” is shorthand for “squared.” Hence, hour 24*24, or day 24. I know. Don’t worry about it.)

Things continue more-or-less as they were. The number of sick people keeps climbing, as does the number of dead people, sadly. I won’t go into a lot of detail about the virus because that info can be acquired elsewhere. Instead, I offer a few highlights about what Team Hearn has been up to.

Official remote learning has begun! The kids use a tool called Schoology where they can get their assignments and communicate with teachers and peers. So far it seems to be working reasonably well, although it can be very, very hard for parents to figure out what assignments there are for a child without clicking each “course” and digging through it, which for 3 kids with 6-8 courses (specials like PhysEd and Music are included for the youngers) is time-prohibitive. Still, it keeps the children reasonably busy for a few hours, even if we end up having to monitor them and answer questions.

Working from home is going okay. It’s generally fine for me; there’s literally no reason for me to go to the office other than to be face-to-face with people, and because my employer has expanded so much in the last few years, we don’t have enough desks. Half the time I went to the office I had to find a little university-library-style carrel in which to set up my laptop, which means I don’t get my multi-screen view, so it’s actually less productive than being at home. I was working from home 3-4 days a week anyway.

Sarah’s job is more complicated because of the need to manage people and run training sessions and presentations, but she’s been using Zoom to her advantage there. Teacher “inservice” classes have been more or less cancelled at this point. The hardest thing was that she had started “facilitating” an actual college class this year, working with professors and running small discussion sections. That has proved a challenge for everyone involved, but they’re once again using Zoom to help. Hopefully they can avoid being “zoom-bombed” with porn…

As the weather improves we’ve been trying to spend as much time outside as humanly possible. I was able to mount a trailer hitch to our van, which means I can attach my 5-bicycle rack to it and haul wheels to places to ride. On Sunday, we loaded up and went to Bellevue State Park, where the boys and I put a few miles on our legs on the Delaware Greenway Trail, while Sarah and Josephine hiked around the pond.

Being trapped at home does give me more opportunity to work around the house, so I’ve been able to get yard work done when it hasn’t been raining. Hopefully this year I can get my lawn looking decent; every year I try to over-seed and fertilize, and every spring it still comes up with bare patches and brown spots. I also need to hack away at tons of stumps from trees that have fallen or been removed.

Since any church with any ****ing sense has cancelled all in-person services and is doing things online, I haven’t had to get up on Sunday mornings to go sing in weeks. However, I did get the opportunity to be the “Easter soloist” for my usual church, Christ Church Christiana Hundred. On Easter day they’ll release a pretty high-production-value video of a service featuring yours truly fighting his way through some challenging Ralph Vaughan Williams solos, along with hymns and other pieces with organ and trumpet, plus the actual Easter liturgy, minus the Eucharist. We recorded it in pieces last Friday and I think it went very well.

My facial hair situation has gotten…grim.

Sarah is not thrilled, but tolerating it. I keep hoping the moustache will fill out a bit, but based on the rest of the beard my hopes are probably going to be dashed.

Edit: For some reason this didn’t post on the day I expected it to, but instead on roughly day 29. I cannot explain this, but do not feel that you are crazy that this post seems mis-dated.

COVID cases continue to climb throughout the country, including Delaware, which sadly saw its first death from the virus this week. Reportedly our healthcare workers are starting to be infected as well, which is to be expected, but still terrifying. So far only one person I know has been confirmed to have it, but I’m sure it’s going to start making the rounds.

Went to the grocery store today, and was surprised to see that they’re still out of most paper goods: toilet paper, paper towels, etc. Are people still buying that stuff up like they’re going to stop producing it? My mind was boggled. Other things are hit-and-miss as far as availability. They had tons of pork chops and chicken, but absolutely no hot dogs, and very limited supplies of butter, red meat, and sugary cereals (though they had plenty of “healthy” stuff like Grape Nuts, Special K, Sugar-free Kitty Litter, etc.).

Team Hearn has been muddling through. We haven’t been eating or drinking very well; too much booze, too much sugar, not enough exercise. I’ve been able to get in my usual weight-lifting schedule, but I suspect I’ll come out of this crisis weighing 285 pounds and being unable to go upstairs without having to lie down for a while.

We’ve done a pretty good job of having the kids do at least 3 hours of various educational activities, and we were able to take advantage of the warm weather on Tuesday to get a nice walk in on the paved trails around Newark. We saw trains! I love trains.

We find ourselves getting pretty loopy most days, particularly by mid-afternoon. We get the giggles, and start doing things like figuring out how I would look with a Sam Elliott moustache (answer: breathtaking):

I’ve also taken advantage of downtime to watch a truly embarrassing number of NASCAR races from the early-to-mid-80s, AKA “when NASCAR was worth watching.” So far my favorite is this classic from 1983 at the old Richmond Fairgrounds Raceway, when it was a 0.542-mile track (before the 1988 reconfiguration that expanded it to 3/4-mile). I’ve also enjoyed the heck out of some of the Daytona and Talladega races from before they used restrictor plates, when the cars actually had to handle well and could separate from each other.

Only 7 more weeks to go!

(Day 10, for those uninitiated into Snoopisms.)

As others have noted, the COVID19 quarantine is giving people a lot of opportunities for activities. Folks are spending time outside, cleaning their homes, educating their kids, learning to play instruments, and even putting on virtual concerts.

In addition to some of the stuff I mentioned last week, we’ve been doing some baking:

Working on a 1000-piece puzzle:

Creating art:

I’ve been practicing the piano nearly every day for at least a half-hour, and have taken my skills from “yikes” to “I can play like a couple Bach 2-part inventions fairly well and fumble my way through sight-reading easier hymns.” By the end of the crisis I hope to be up to “Playing some portion of Joplin’s ‘The Entertainer’.”

The call came in tonight; schools are closed until May 15th, which is terrifying. We’ve decided to try and do at least 3 hours of “learning” a day, in sort of a Montessori-style method. The kids are given some tasks, and then choose from among them to be completed in any order:

• Some Duolingo language practice
• Online learning (Dreambox, Khan Academy, etc.)
• Practicing musical instruments
• Math
• Lots and lots (and lots) of reading, followed by crafting some kind of response

If they want to do other stuff, like googling up how the nudibranch do, they can absotively have at it. The kids seem to have embraced the new schedule, at least after day one, and we’re happy to have their heads out of devices for a few hours. The downside is that they require a certain amount of monitoring and they constantly request help or attention, which means getting our actual jobs done is a touch challenging.

As to the crisis itself, so far nobody we know is sick, but the counts just keep going up, so I suspect it’s inevitable. I’m legit worried about my older relatives and friends, particularly since people don’t seem to have the sense God gave a gooseberry and keep going out and getting breathed on and touched. It’s a shame that governments are having to order people to stay home, but apparently we’re too stupid to be relied on.

We’re also getting our spring allergies, so every day I wake up with a tickle in my throat thinking “Uh oh,” and by mid-morning I’m feeling fine. Probably going to continue until one of us actually gets the dreaded COVID.

Avoid touching, you know, anything. Especially your face. Tell your kids to read. Stay safe out there!

The best day to start documenting what’s going on during a quarantine is during the first day of the quarantine; the second best day is whatever today happens to be. Today, six days in, is when it finally occurred to me it might be wise to start noting what’s been happening, what might happen next, and any other thoughts that occur to me.

So, after 5 years of zero updates, I’m resurrecting matthearn.com, at least for the Duration of the Current Emergency.

A brief glimpse of what’s happened so far, just for posterity; the details can be found at many other sources far more reliable than I.

• A new (“novel”) coronavirus erupted in Wuhan, China in late 2019.
• It reached the United States via cruise ship and other travelers in early 2020, and rapidly began to spread throughout the country.
• The Trump Administration, in its collective “wisdom,” played down the severity of the outbreak, even implying that it is a “Democratic hoax.”
• In mid-March, the first cases were confirmed in Delaware; a professor and three of his students who apparently picked it up at a conference out of state. Other cases began to be confirmed over the following days.
• Friday, March 13th, Governor Carney ordered schools to be closed for two weeks, and asked people to begin to use “social distancing” to slow the spread of the virus and avoid overwhelming the healthcare system, which only has so many ventilators and ICU beds.
• Shortly thereafter, following the lead of other states, the Governor orders restaurants and bars to become “take-out only”, with no eat-in service.
• Saturday, March 14th, the Hearn family goes into more-or-less complete lockdown. Our eldest asks if he can still play with his friends; we decree that he can only do so outside, not trapped in the same room sharing germs.
• Tuesday, March 17th, our eldest and his friends spend the afternoon writhing all over each other on the trampoline in our backyard.
• Wednesday, March 18th, one of those friends is now reportedly “sick.”

So we’re playing the waiting game to see if any of us contract some sort of virulent illness. The good news is that none of us is in the demographic that’s in significant danger, so I’m not terribly concerned about any of us getting sick to the point of hospitalization or worse.

There is much to be concerned about, of course. We’re lucky; my jobs can be done from anywhere, and Sarah’s office completely closed, so she and I have both continued to work, while trying to keep our children’s brains from atrophying. We’ve been making them try to do a little bit of schoolwork every day, though at this point they’ve completed everything that had been assigned before schools closed their doors, and have mostly moved on towards educational videos and Duolingo. I’m hoping we can start doing some actual instructional time, because it’s looking increasingly likely that schools will be out for far more than the two weeks that the Governor originally decreed.

I’m worried for people who can’t work remotely, or whose jobs depend on folks actually being able to leave their homes. We’re going to try and get in the habit of getting take-out from local restaurants on occasion to help keep them afloat. It does look like the Federal government is actually doing its job; we could see billions of dollars spent on actually helping people, which is more novel than the virus itself.

My main concern is for anyone over the age of 60. Not just for their health, though the virus seems to be far more dangerous for them, but the stock market tanking seems to be hitting everybody’s retirement funds pretty hard. I know the value of mine has dropped 25% in the last 3 weeks. Luckily, I’m 17 years away from being able to withdraw anything from mine, so I’ve actually increased my 401K contribution to buy while the funds are cheap. Plenty of older folks are in a tough spot right now, particularly if they didn’t move their money from the stock market to less volatile investments as they got closer to retirement.

We’ve decided that it’s possible for us to “isolate” but still spend some time outside, which is good. The kids and I have played soccer in our yard every evening this week, and yesterday afternoon we drove to the DuPont Environmental Education Center (the funny-looking building in Churchman’s Marsh south of Frawley Stadium and the Shipyard Shops in south Wilmington); the center itself is closed, but all of the walking paths are open. There were a fair number of other people there as well, taking advantage of the warm sun. The Jack Markell Trail was also open and busy; I might need to take a bicycle down there and go for a ride if I can break away for a few hours. We hope to start going to state parks, particularly as the weather warms, but have to deal with the fact that the younger kids will want to use playgrounds where they found them, and I have to assume that every inch of a jungle gym is crawling with COVID19 and my children cannot stop touching their own faces.

From reports, China is starting to recover from its outbreak; hopefully more good news comes from there. Meanwhile, hunker down and wash your hands everyone!