Madness In My Method

Hahahaha

It appears that Denmark, among others, has taken Lutz’s message to heart. A public service announcement urges older Danes, “Send your child on an active holiday and get a grandchild within nine months.”

I guess it's time to get on with getting it on!

They lost a band member, and not due to some illness, but instead on bad terms.

I would like to applaud them for their pro-action.

( Details as posted by one of the band members as a pinned comment to the below song that was just re-edited to remove the offending band member. )

The world has turned upside-down.

Our house has turned upside-down.

I can't sleep.

Too many to-do things on my mind that I either can't get to or don't have the willpower to take care of once I'm off work.

( Wall-O-Text )

I believe it was called Surrogates.

Robots replace Japanese students at graduation amid coronavirus

I didn't get the better-paying job. I was told that I was one of their top two candidates, but they went with the other person who has more high-level corporate experience.

I'm pretty crushed, and I keep getting reminded that given the rest of the world's situation I shouldn't be. That doesn't change how I feel.

I'll get over it in a couple days.

So, I still have the accounting consulting job and am now working from home even though our cubicles are easily 6ftx6ft each. The better to limit human contact in general. Even walking past someone in the hall from another department or touching the coffee machine buttons risks cross-contamination, not to mention touching the elevator buttons and door handles in a 40-story building.

Like most people, I'm apprehensive. I have one less weight on my shoulders (interviewing for another job), but again, I'm crushed, so there's a slight hint that my brain would like to go into a depressive tailspin right now, but I'm not one to let my brain do such things.

Yesterday morning (before I got the bad news) I thoroughly enjoyed my morning, sipping coffee by an open window with a nice breeze, listening to the neighbor's kids playing, them doing yard work, the smell of them grilling for lunch, and even their damned rooster was pleasant sounding. I'm hoping this morning will help get me back into a similar headspace. I gotta buckle down and focus on my actual job instead of daydreaming about a no-longer-potential job. I'm missing that coffee/tea machine at work, and being able to actually talk to my coworkers in person rather than slow group chat and/or email, but at least we've got a group chat, and we send little jokes a few times a day and talk about our lunch plans.

Head Count: One roommate working from home in the living room. One roommate on furlough for two weeks, because he took the previous week off due to sinus allergies to be nice and not worry his co-workers, but they aren't trusting him to not still be sick/contagious/whatever, even though he never ran any fever nor coughed during that time and no one else is being furloughed - he's pretty sure they have it in for him. Third roommate is in a small handful of folks volunteering to still go into his place of work since instead of 150 people in the office there's now only 5 of them, and he's worried about our house bandwidth with 3 people working from home. I think he's also worried about being cooped up with all the roommates for so long. Of all of us, he'd probably be the one to go stir crazy first.

I'm already tired of the news about the virus and what's going on with other countries and all of the daily predictions regarding how things are going to go moving forward. Good thing my job takes me back to dealing with debits and credits and even more debits and credits, and a few debits and credits on the side. With a whipped debit and cherry credit on top.

Of all the COVID-19 emails I have received from places of business in the past 48 hours, the one from Barnes & Noble came off rather cryptic, as though it's really a secret spy message in need of being decoded.

Most of them probably copy/pasted from someone else and talk about how they've been following the news, health and safety of patrons and employees matters, and then specifics of what they have implemented within their business and/or closing info.

Some of them include special discounts for the weekend and free delivery to encourage continued patronage.

Here's B&N's:
-----------------------------------------
Dear Reader,

We’re living through turbulent times together. Our booksellers are your neighbors, your friends and family. Your stories are our stories, and we know how resilient our communities are.

Sincerely,

The Booksellers of Barnes & Noble
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Um...yeah...okay.

"...[W]e cannot emphasize how much the Moon is not a part of Mars."

- Brian Williams on The 11th Hour, in response to one of our notorious president's tweets

If MSNBC posts the video clip of this segment of his show, I'll update this post.

“This dramatic economic loss will cause substantial damage to California’s economy with repercussions to its annual budget potentially resulting ultimately in increased taxes," Myers said. "Deteriorating economic conditions brought on by the negatively economic impact of the fires coming on the heels of last years loses will stress the state’s budget possibly causing the state’s credit to deteriorate which, if it occurs, will result in lower bond ratings and higher interest rates with the snowball effect to greater deficits and more expenses."

I'm expecting Californians to continue their trek over to Texas, fueling the rising house price fires that we're dealing with presently.

Yes, I just made that awful, awful pun.

I've been watching the crap out of Tiny Houses on YouTube, which includes permanent houses (I have that bed), mobile houses on trailers, refurbished school buses ("skoolies"), RVs and vans, creative apartment designs, multipurpose Tetris furniture, amazing designs, and traveling castles.

In the middle of all these videos, I came across this guy with his 5 kids in a small condo. Interestingly enough, he's running for city council in Vancouver. His biggest platform is city living for family and the deconstruction of suburban sprawl.

I was also sent this article denouncing the open concept great room, which seems kind of fitting with some of the tiny house mindsets.

Funny enough, I picked out a random audiobook while awaiting other books I have on hold to become available. It's called The Bookshop on the Corner, and I picked it out after reading only the first info paragraph without knowing much more. The heroine goes from city dwelling to urban farm dwelling, living in a barn that's been converted into a cottage with a refurbished van she turns into a traveling bookstore. It's interesting in it's ability to role-combine (as opposed to role-reversal) the mindset of urban living + travel van.