Sunday walks again 29 March 2020

 Go to Clickon 43 Photos > https://photos.app.goo.gl/EVW1PVEtqCu4Ufqj7
    A boring day with two wonderful walks. The first along the Moores Creek trail (western side) with Deej starting from Hardees on 5th Street and heading east. The Creek was first on our right with the Wegmen's shopping center looming tall on the other side. Met bikers, walkers, saw flowers, rocks, etc, but not quite as crowded as yesterday's walk. We looped back and saw geese, 'beggers,' a man resting, etc.

Walking

Bikes

whites

whites

 

  Then Deej dropped me off on 5th street (for the second alone walk) where a creek runs underneath the road - and the eastern Moore's Creek trail starts up from there and runs east. That small creek later joins up with Moore's creek. I had a hard time at first going through bushes with no trail, crossed another creek and found the well-used trail we had been on yesterday. Came across again - waders, contemplaters, a small party complaining about people not keeping their distance, bikers, runners. Then up to my Pollock's trail and through the bamboo clump to cross Pollock's creek to home.

Plate

Contemplating

 

 

 

 

 

white

 

bamboo exit

      We had the second half of Deej's marvelous chicken tika dinner. No really good tv, but did watch West World episode and the very sparce LastWeek Tonight.
       And finally Scavanger Hunts - this sounds like a great idea to me, from Facebook

Ann Gold OK, I have to brag now about my neighborhood which 2 weeks ago on the neighborhood listserv organized a *scavenger hunt* so different families put different things on display in their windows; 100 houses participated! mine has a spider web. The list of items was published and I see parents and kids with notebooks and pencils going around looking for stuff."  

       Let's do it.

Philip waves at #55

Kali by my mailbox for Scavanger hunters

 

Saturday Zoom Creek 28 March 2020

    Mainly two things today - setting up and hosting a zoom 1.5 session with my Woodstock School Class of 1959 mates, and going for an hour walk along the Moores Creek nearby.
   The Zoom had 9-10 participants from 1:30 to 3 pm Eastern time.  I hosted it with my University of Virginia good Zoom account. As Gil from Eugene, Org. wrote "Alan in Granada, Judy in England, Dale in Scotland, Alice in NY, Phil in Virginia, Lindsay in Washington, Jack in Maryland, Les in Ohio and Jim in Tennessee." Many different topics a good session - needed to tell people to unMute, to turn on their Video, and discussed the customizable background. Some stayed away because they did not trust Zoom to be private and secure enough.

Class of 1959 Zoooming

    Around 4 pm we headed down to Jordan Park and went for an hour walk along Moore's Creek. Lovely blosoms of flowers, trees, etc. Two families were playing in the water at different points. Others were walking with their dog, or by themselves. One woman was siting on a large rock with her ipad and chatting on her cell phone. A nice sunny day in the 70s. 
     Click and check out these photos > https://photos.app.goo.gl/Wzn8wgGPktbYm8zg9

Kids playing

The trail

Philip waving

 

reading

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

   In the evening Deej decided to make curried chicken, which was very good. My tomato and onion fresh chutney Deej said stunk up the kitchen. She had Alexa tune in Indian supper music - interesting, but then we switched over to "Alexa, shuffle the India playlist" Soothing music.
    Deej complained I was kicking last night keeping her awake.  Ahh, it's always something.

Wed-Friday 25-27 March 2020

     Sorry, I've been busy with all sorts of other things.  Mostly work during the day, plus other things.
     Fell into a pattern during the last three days of getting up - checking email, handling requests and other business, keeping an eye on the changing posts in 5 Slack channels, and afternoon Zoom meetings, even a 'coffee' one with non-library banter.
     Our Delhi and other Library of Congress offices are locked down, since the embassies in Cairo, Islamabad, and Delhi have mostly closed or working at a bare minimum.  Shipments are on hold until further notice. Delhi is empty and eerie.
     I sent out another post to my Anthropology and Middle East and South Asia Languages Departments' faculty with library updates and how to request ebooks, scanning of text books, and what libraries are open or closed, and their hours. Responded to requests for 2 ebooks; and where our online video collection could be accessed.
     Also went on Thursday afternoon to my real office at Kerchof Hall, mainly to pickup my duo monitors, plus 4 boxes of (1,000?) pamphlets to review for developing cataloging inforation. It was a ghost campus, only one car in about 60 parking slots.
     Did I mention, I did my for online annual evaluation with my boss? - she had some good suggestions of what I might work on for the next year. We are slated to get a 2% or so salary increase.
     We have gone to two quick grocery trips - Wegmen's carefully wiped down everything - belt, items, and kept us behind the line. Foodlion, not so much.
      Deej went to an entivio infusion Thursday morning and she is uneasy about going into grocery stores with her Crohn's disease.
       Nonetheless Deej mowed the front yard Friday afternoon and so it's now my turn to do the much larger back yard. She also went on a walk with me this afternoon along the new trail just west of the Wegman's shopping center, down to the creeks and along dirt, muddy paths which seem heavily used by mountain bikes.Another nice trail, though.
     One of my Woodstock classmates got back from Papua New Guinea to Washington state okay; another classmate is finding the Spanish restrictions quite severe. The worst case right now is a Woodstock school mate in the class below me (1960) - she and her husband were on a cruise to Chile and got restocked down there and are heading back to Norfolk, but uncertain if they will get through the Panama canal, plus 2 people on board have died today and another 2 are sick and the medical staff is very limited. Dire circumstances.
     I've gone ahead and alerted my Class of 1959 mate that I will host an hour zoom session with the 35 or so of us at 2 pm Saturday afternoon (Eastern time). That should be interesting. 4 or 5 of them have already used zoom with family and church members. We'll see. 
      Are you zooming, too?

Tuesday routine? (and spies) 25 March 2020

Seems like we have started to fall into a routine working at home. Check email, Slack, websites, etc. Listen to the constant 'chatter' on Slack.
     Notified others that shipments from Cairo, Islamabad, and Delhi from the Overseas Acqusitions Offices of the Library of Congress at those centers that shipments have stopped until further notice. An email from the head of the Delhi office pictured a very beak town - empty, quiet, shut up, police - I can't image how the poor are going to last through this for 2 weeks or more.
     Participated in another daily Zoom from our head librarian - people are helping out people to keep the library and the university oiled. They established a new hosting program, https://uvacreate.virginia.edu, costing $15 a year, where you can set up your own academic website, fully functional - that was in the planning for several years and now it's happened. Some are thinking of setting up a 30-minute coffee Zoom, with any library talk, so we can see faces and pets!
      Also participated in another 1 hour Zoom of Yoga - don't know if I did very well - I tried and stretched, breathed.
       Good simple meal of salmon, baked potatoes, and string beans this evening - haven't gotten my evening ice cream dish yet.
        Worked for about 5 hours late afternoon and evening setting up a video and photos of our South Asian Materials Project zoom 2-hour meeting last Friday to share with that organization. Is it worth it to spend all that time on photos, video editing, sounds, etc?
    About 40 photos at SAMP Zooom meeting last Friday
    And the 1 minute 28 second video of the Zoom meeting (See note below)
    We've got a little rain so the spring flowers are happy again. The four or five feral cats outside seem to be doing well, and inside our cat Kali had taken up sleeping and sleeping and sleeping. She seems unfazed by the C Virus. Maybe she's a Trump supporter? Bite your tongue, Phil!

Note: the last image of the SAMP meeting video is of Marueen Patterson - homage to her since she laid the solid foundation at the U of Chicago for all of our South Asia libraries and librarians in the 1960s and 1970s. In all sorts of ways, personal, leadership, publishing such as her manmoth South Asia Bibliography. Few people also know that, as her graphic of her 1945 identification certificate indications - she was a 'spy' for the OSS. Two women worked in South Asia during that time (1940s, 1950s), Joan Bondurant who wrote a fantastic book on Gandhi's Conquest of Violence, and Julia Child, working for a while with her State Department husband in Ceylon.  It's all in the book Sisterhood of Spies. Have a look.

Monday back to work in the morning and afternoon - then the dryer, shoping

     Monday back to work - getting, reading, and answering emails and Slack, etc. The Governor has closed down the public schools for the year, while the University is going full tilt to try to finish the semester online with 4,000 courses, though Zoom and other means. A very nice, heartening message from our UVa President Ryan in the morning also. Discovered I might be able to use my Library account to send off my and the library's duplicate books through Better World Books. Then the first Zoom library session with Librarian John in the afternoon from 3 to about 3:45.
  

     Our dryer has stopped heating and drying clothes - what to do? the vent was not clogged and it appears the wall fuses are okay.  But we took ours to the Martin appliance store - they do not check to see if the fuses are okay or not. So I bought two to replace, just in case.  Deej has looked up getting a new dryer ($400) and maybe also her freezer - both charge $30 for taking away the old ones.
   We went to Preston Laundromat to dry 4 loads of clothes Need to buy a card and load money on it, then use it for drying - which is 28 cents per 8 minutes! Deej helped me carry the loads in her car and then left while I finished drying the cloths, folding etc. Gave a fellow woman at the laundromat my card which may hae had $1-2 unused on it. Went to Reids first and got soy sauce, sardines (no oils though, only water), scallions, etc. And then to Kroger for Deej's Turkey Roast 3/4 pound medium slices and called her that there was some cod and salmon, but no jars of yeast. Another customer was looking for the jars at the same time (looked like a Madrasi, who knew cooking) - and we were both disappointed and unsatisfied we could not find the jars of yeast.
       Finished putting away my clothes at home, continued looking at email, Slack and nightly news - there was a great segment on what books to read See https://www.pbs.org/video/what-to-read-1585004975/  Ann Patchett of Parnassus books. Even a reading group spending 13 minutes a day going through War and Peace. Meanwhile Deej prepared a delighful supper of salmon, baked potato, and beans.
       My friends emails and Facebook are following Ruth and Arny returning on their cruise boat from Chile, hoping to get through the Suez canal and home. Ruth's sister Jessica returned from her weeks in Australia yesterday to LA and trying then to go on home. Alan's with a walking group in New Zealand. Alan's coming from Nicaragua to be with his other daughter in Colorado. Julie's church had an online service yesterday. Robert told us he is still alive and was not to be confused with the John Bonham, who is known by some as the best ever rock drummer - played with Led Zeppelin, but died in 1980. I've put up two videos over the week end - one a sunrise down at Betty's in Palmetto, and the other pushing the use of Namaste - which I included Forrest Tobey's song.  See Sunrise in Florida (January 2020) and Namaste.  Laksmi was quite complimentary of me from that video. 

Sunday yard work 22 March 2020

    Slept in late.  Mainly because last night and into the morning (til 3 am) I was entralled and finished the last 3rd of Mark Helpin's Paris book - had to wade through his impossible irrelevant prose to get to the plot and the ending of the book - reminded me of Syphisis in some ways - put a review in Goodreads.  Now, what to read.
      We did do a little digging of back yard's upper plot, preparing for onions, etc. Where the blue berry bushes are.

And I got some great photos of snowdrops too.

 I'll try to add them here.

Saturday 21 March 2020

Let's Zoom together! (only trusted friends - you know who you are) Send me an email to pm9k@virginia.edu
and I will host a Zoom for us together - just for 5 or 10 or so minutes.
    I did it with Nadeem last night, and we can do it any time.
    Try it. https://zoom.us/
Here's a photo with a Taj background which I have used

https://zoom.us/

In the afternoon went on a walk over at Sunset trail - we had not been there for 4 or so months and they have built a new trail which goes up the hill from the creek and loops back around - lots of bike tire marks on it - pretty nice.    









  And then went to Azalea park, seeing Judith with her husband and their dogs there, and checked out our plot where we've had done nothing - talking to other gardeners, seeing children playing in the mulch pile, and posed with the flowering trees. The playground ant the restrooms are closed.

 

  
    

 

Virus times - week one 2020 March 21

The end of the first serious week dealing directly with the virus and all i means.
I'll be working at home for the next months or such.
This week worked on trying to serve my University of Virginia faculty in two departments - Anthropology and Middle East and South Asia Languages.

      Examples - 1.
getting an ebook for an Anthropology Department professor working in languages
      2. Telling a MESA professor how she can order ebooks of three books (in English) for her class on Persian literature, so she can zoom manage her class for the rest of the semester. [Final graduation exercises have been canceled for this year.]
      Work from home most days 9 to 6 with breaks, handling emails, requests, orders, books, shipments, daily zoom sessions.
     Also this week - I was scheduled to go to the annual Association of Asian Studies annual conference in Boston, participating in 3 librarian meetings and attending academic panels. But the Conference was canceled - so had to cancel air tickets, hotel, registration. And tell my Boston friends I would not have a chance to meet with them in person.
      I've also been using Slack, email, and attending a daily one-hour update library Zoom session at 3 pm.
      Have been out to get groceries 2 afternoons. Have been on daily (40 minute) walks. Participated in a one hour contemplative science session (yogo and meditation).
      Of course, look at Facebook also.
      Otherwise we are working from home, staying, cooking, entertaining, movies at home.
      Seems like it is a heightened sense of worry and anxiety - what next, but also sort of bringing us closer together - we're all in the same boat.