Holy Moley

This arrived in my email at work today:

As [employer] pivots to resume normal operations across the system, we know many members of our team who have been working remotely during the pandemic are awaiting details about plans for when they may return to the workplace. Employees who quickly pivoted to working from home at the start of the pandemic, and those who are flexing or rotating their schedules to reduce density, have made it possible for our clinical teams to remain safe on site.  At this time, those who can work from home–for some or all of their hours–should continue to do so until after Labor Day.

 My employer, not I, added the bold print for emphasis.

This tells me that my employer does not expect COVID to just disappear magically any time soon. They are taking precautions at least throughout the summer. Moreover, there is not any indication that after Labor Day, they will reduce their precautions appreciably. Rather, it appears to me to be a case of "We will revisit the policies and see whether to extend them or not".

It looks like I get to keep my ten-second commute for a while longer.

From Red to Yellow

My county, and the surrounding suburbs, are planning to go from Red (full COVID lockdown) to Yellow (partial lifting of restrictions) on Friday, June 5. Churches will begin reopening on Saturday. My first interpreting since March 8 will happen on the second Sunday in June.

We had a Zoom chat with the local Catholic Deaf community to discuss what will be happening. Here is how that is going to play out. As an interpreter, I need to walk into the church with the mask on, but once I am in the sanctuary, I will take the mask off. Communion lines will ensure that people are standing 6 feet from one another. Everyone will have to take Communion in their hands, and I think carry it back to their seat before consuming the Eucharist.

I don't even know how many Deaf will be at the Mass two Sundays from now. There is one person who is both a regular attender and sits up front; however, there are some others who come sporadically and sit elsewhere in the congregation, so I can't reliably predict whether they will be present on any given Sunday. But hey, no matter what, the interpreter will be there if they decide to brave the crowd and attend Mass.

Then there's my deaf-blind friend who I normally help on Fridays. I miss going there and they miss having their signing aides coming in. I told his mom that I was willing to start coming back again as soon as their county and mine both went to Yellow. She called me yesterday and said we might have to hold off on that for a little while longer, because he has freaking SHINGLES and gave her chicken pox. Un-freaking-real! They can't catch a freaking break. 😡 So when both our counties are in Yellow *and* the freaking shingles/chicken pox are gone, THEN I can resume going there on Fridays.

In happier news, my parents celebrated their 59th wedding anniversary yesterday. It also was the 100th anniversary of the birth of my maternal grandmom. So that was nice. I really hope that we are able to go out and celebrate like normal humans NEXT year, which will be my parents' 60th anniversary.

Oh, and last night, the city did not send out the very jarring cell phone alert to signify the beginning of the curfew. I thought we would have a break from being deafened by that shocking noise, after getting the alert every day since Saturday when curfew began. But no such luck. We got the deafening cell phone alert because of a TORNADO WARNING instead. At least I knew it was coming. When we were on the Zoom chat, someone's phone sounded the alert, and just then, our weather radio started talking about tornadoes. So I figured my phone was about to go off at any moment with the same alert, and a couple minutes later, the alert came in. Fortunately, we only got heavy rain and high winds, but as far as I know, no tornadoes. The storms we did get yesterday, one around lunchtime and the other around 7:30 PM, were pretty severe, with a ton of trees and branches down and power outages, but tornadoes would just have made an already-serious situation even worse.

We are supposed to have feisty weather today, too. I hope it's not as insane as yesterday's storms. The news called it a derecho, which I had to look up, and this is what it means: a line of intense, widespread, and fast-moving windstorms and sometimes thunderstorms that moves across a great distance and is characterized by damaging winds. Yikes! That's a big NO THANK YOU to any more of those!

That moment when...

That moment when you log off work for the day, and holler, "I'M HOOOOME!" 😂😜

Someone must have found a batch of faxes that needed processing, because I got inundated by the fax fire hose again today. Oddly, the ones that were not dated with a recent date were all dated for the third week of April. I suspect that there were some items set aside back then for whatever reason, and today, they were found and sent my way. Well, it's all good. The ones I couldn't finish today will be done on Monday.

In other news, I have enrolled in the Hadley School to take an online braille course. They took over for the Library of Congress, which used to offer a free braille transcription course. I had started the transcription course back in 1990, but at the time, I was working full-time, studying ASL interpreting, AND moving from my apartment into a house. Something had to give. So I didn't complete the transcription course.

I'm interested to see how they handle this online. When the Library of Congress was doing the course, we had to use a slate and stylus and actually braille the assignments. Obviously, I can't do that for an online course.

I will get started on it this weekend. One blessing of the lockdown is that we have all kinds of free time, lol. No commuting, no going out with friends, no going to church... that leaves a person with a whole lot of downtime, so I am finding constructive ways to fill it.

Social Distancing and Work

Today, we got an email from work.

Commencing June 1, folks who are working remotely will have their state and local income taxes deducted based on their HOME address, not their work address. This means, for example, anyone who lives outside the city, but works in the city, will NOT have the city wage tax deducted from their pay. Anyone who live out-of-state will have their own state's income tax deducted instead of that of the state where they work. This will not be retroactive to March 13, but it is how things will proceed going forward from June.

My first thought was that I won't be impacted, as I live and work in the same locality. Then, I thought some more. I started wondering exactly how long they expect things to continue as they are going, if the largest employer in the city (after the city itself) is going through employee records by the zillion and making changes. I realize that not everyone can work remotely, but even so, that has got to be a boatload of humans whose records are being adjusted. This is being done with the knowledge that as everything reopens, all those records will have to be returned to their pre-lockdown state.

Wow. Yeah, the big picture looks a bit different to me now than it did before I logged on this morning. Don't get me wrong; I love my ten-second commute and I will enjoy it while it lasts. However, it might be lasting a little longer than I initially realized.

Double wow.

I think I can, I think I can

Keeping my ailing laptop running during the workday reminds me of the story about The Little Engine That Could. The engine had to scale a steep hill, and all the way up, he kept repeating to himself, "I think I can, I think I can!" Then, when he crested the hill, he was able to say, "I knew I could, I knew I could" all the way down the other side.

Well, aside from one glitch during my lunch break, when the computer wouldn't wake back up after going to sleep, I actually did manage to keep the laptop going throughout the workday without issue.

That is huge, because the 17" screen REALLY makes a difference. Some of the software that I have to use for work looks like heck on a smaller screen, and it's not just my eyes that are the problem in this case. The different columns of data are all getting smooshed together (that's a technical term 😆), and it's a pain to read.

I am crossing my fingers for the new device to arrive soon enough that I can spend the weekend setting it up.

Last night, after I set Mark's computer up to work from home, I realized that there were 25 faxes that had come in after my workday ended. So I started putting the patients' medical record numbers on them, on my own time, just so I wouldn't have to go insane first thing in the morning doing that cumbersome task. It was two hours well spent, believe me, because when I logged on this AM, the fire hose of faxes was going full blast and I had truckloads of new items coming in. If I hadn't taken the time last night to do what I did, I would have been running around with my hair on fire today. Instead, I got ALL of last night's faxes processed, plus the avalanche that came in this morning, and the normal level of work that arrived during the afternoon. So there was nothing left undone by the time the day ended.

Now, will the fax fire hose reactivate itself after I logged out for the day? It certainly did yesterday. So who knows what my inbox will look like when I log on in the morning, lol. Watch this space.

Oh, and I got some sad news this afternoon. A former organist from my parish passed away of COVID-19 today. He was 76. This blasted, no-good virus! That's two nice folks that I personally know who passed away because of it, plus there is one person from the local Deaf community who passed away about 3 weeks ago.. We really need our researchers to develop meds that target this rotten thing, because I think that will be at least as important as the work they are doing to create a vaccine. It's fortunate that most folks who contract COVID do not have severe symptoms, but unfortunately, the ones who DO develop severe symptoms wind up in a LOT of difficulty. For their sake, as well as for the sakes of everyone who loves these patients, we need to create medications that will beat back the virus so the patients are in less danger of a health catastrophe.

Laptop woes

My laptop is fritzing out again. I think it’s on its last legs for sure this time.

I just ordered a new one. Le sigh. Thank God that’s an option, but boo hiss on surprise expenses. 

If I can’t revive my machine, I’ll have to work on Mark’s laptop until my new one arrives.

It’s harder than it ought to be to find a 17” screen with touchscreen AND (hardest of all) an optical drive. I’m old school that way. HP came through on all counts. 👍🏻

Resurgence

Today, the medical system is officially embarking on what has been termed "resurgence". This is the gradual reopening of our clinic, which will be seeing patients for the first time since April 1. That was when we began transitioning it to be repurposed as surge beds for non-COVID-19 patients.The good news is that we never reached such a level of overflow that our clinic was pressed into service for inpatients. The other news is that all the things that were done to ready the clinic in case it was needed for overflow beds, has had to be UNdone so we can use it as an outpatient clinic again.

We were a Tier 4 surge area. The hospital got as far as Tier 2, to the best of my knowledge, when making use of overflow beds. I don't know if Tier 3 was used, but Tier 4 was not.

We will be resuming the skeleton crew staffing that we had prior to the changeover. Only a very limited number of urgent patients will be seen in person. The rest will continue to be scheduled for telemedicine for the time being.

I, however, have been instructed to continue working from home for the time being. That works just fine for me. There is no shortage of electronic faxes to process. That goes double since today, it seems like they have turned on the fire hose of faxes now that the resurgence is underway. Holy moley but it has been busy today! I have had over 30 faxes so far today, and it's only lunchtime.

That's fine by me! Bring it! 👍

To Do List

I have been building up to starting to write on Medium for a while now. I would say it's been two or three months since I made the decision to start submitting articles. But first, I prepared by creating a list of topics to write about.

It amuses me that the article I submitted last night actually started out as one topic, but quickly morphed into expounding on a different topic. Here I was, thinking that I was going to cover one particular situation, and then my brain said  NOPE and veered off in a different direction. I just went with the flow, edited accordingly, and hit Publish.

In retrospect, maybe I need to go through that topic list and make sure that there aren't redundant entries on there. Perhaps a few of the items on the list are a little TOO closely related to one another, and they can be categorized as a single topic.

I had forgotten how much I enjoy writing.  I just heard Todd Rundgren's "Bang on the Drum All Day", and it reminded me of how enthused I am to sit at a keyboard and just create.

Fortunately, the past few workdays have been offering me ample opportunity to deploy my brainpower, which means that I am already in high gear when I log off at the end of the day. I have started handling electronic medical records requests, and it has been a bit of a travail trying to send faxes via email. Once I got it working on my end, the Gremlins started acting up on the receiving end. I got an email yesterday afternoon, saying that we are now to email the requests to a new address set up for this purpose, rather than using Outlook to send the faxes.

It's all good. I started sending the medical record requests the new way as of today, and it works. Take that, Gremlins!