More bad news yesterday. My one wish is that the last two months of this year are uneventful.
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Hang in there.
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I vote that we just fire 2020 into the sun, and start over in January.
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Groundhog Day for a whole year?
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2020 is a total Ned Ryerson. He deserved to be punched.
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Today is my last day off until Christmas.
I might have a few half-days (Sundays, for example, we’re only open 12-4 for the first few weeks of November), and I may get an unscheduled day off at some point depending on how much my bosses are feeling sorry for me and/or if Canada/Ontario goes into lockdown again. But assuming “normal” working conditions, I will work the next (checks calendar) 57 days straight.
Woo.
sigh
I have a novel I haven’t finished editing that I want to have up and for sale on Amazon by the end of the week. I have 4 tiny models I said I would paint for a friend for his birthday that are definitely not done (they’re tiny, might get them done tomorrow).
I remember once watching a short interview about something changing in some Eastern European country and the man they were interviewing said “There is a tunnel at the end of the light”, and I have felt that way many times. This feels slightly more like “there is a darker, tunnelier tunnel at the end of the current tunnel you’re going through”.
Anyway. Not thrilled about today. Might order fried chicken. That sometimes makes things feel a little better.
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That seems like the kind of thing that shouldn’t be legal…
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We’re going back into semi-lockdown. Social life–not that we had any since Feb–ends and everything social closes… as shops, schools and most workplaces remain open. I hope it works. We’re back to being allowed to meet with one other household. That’s the rule we have been following all the time.
We have barely left the apartment in months and still got a speeding ticket from Austria today where allegedly we were sometime in August. That’s going to be fun to clear up.
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It looks like England is about to head into a month-long lockdown. I’m going to miss going to the gym 
Since the last easing of the restrictions, the gym was the only thing I introduced to my routine, I haven’t socialised with friends or done any non-essential trips. It’s easy to be angry with those who have been bending/breaking the rules for the situation we’re in, but then I’m not sure it’s their fault.
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I’m at a loss as to what that means for the rest of the UK. Expecting wee Nicky to put us in a lockdown too next week.
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Stay safe peeps, regardless of how the blonde haired womble contradicts himself.
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It’s a failure of policy. Too many different rules. A tier 3 plus was introduced in Nottingham FFS.
The first lockdown should have bought time for a good test, trace, isolate system. Instead we got an excel 2003 sheet for £12billion. The centralised system gets 59% of contacts whereas localised systems get 90%. So we continue to spaff money at Serco.
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What I would like to do (and indeed what I was suggesting in March):
- with a week’s warning, nobody leaves a specific location for three weeks except for life-threatening conditions. (Doesn’t have to be their home; this can mean you move your elderly relative in with you.)
- anyone showing symptoms gets tested and isolated along with anyone else in their location
- during this time, close the borders to everyone; residents are not magically healthy
I realise there are problems with this: property crime, for example. (The police are if anything less competent than the general public at basic hygiene.) Some people don’t have space for three weeks of food. Some can’t afford it. And so on.
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Half of me thinks the first lockdown needed to be longer to get the numbers down to a more sensible order for a track and trace to be in any way useful (if there was a T&T system).
The other half thinks that not enough of the country follows lockdowns for them to be effective at all, and we are heading down the inevitable road towards slow spread throughout the country which makes the whole economic quagmire we’re entering wholy unnecessary.
Quite a thing that the UK can sink our economy whilst not even sorting out the Pandemic in any meaningful way.
I’m still questioning what the hell the exit strategy is. Arbitrary assignments of tiers that are rebranded every couple of weeks and meet no logical reason to wait for a vaccine that is likely multiple years away. How can any business survive waiting that out? It’s all so confusing.
Kinda feels like it’s fighting against the laws of nature (or God, if you will) at times. Maybe I’m just growing nihilistic!
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I really feel as if they slept on it for too long then a combination of seriously mixed messaging (remember when they were pleading with us all to go back to the office) and people being fed up meant the guidance has been ignored by some, meaning more of us have to deal with the consequence.
In Scotland the messaging has been clearer but I do feel the contradictions with the English approach hasn’t helped. This is a time when politics really should be parked and a “war time coalition” may better serve the people.
Rant over, sorry. Thanks for letting me vent.
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I consider myself a smart guy, but living on the edge of a Tier 1 and Tier 2 county has been quite confusing nevermind all the mixed messaging that preceded the latest rules.
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It’s just like here. The federal system with the 16 states can be quite helpful in some ways during the pandemic but at other times when each of the state leaders insists on what is best for their part we’ve had a sad merry go round of different ideas and policies and where each state wants to be treated differently… I’ve developed an allergy for the word “differentiated”
The first lockdown everyone (mostly) worked together–IMO it came a week or two too late, just like the one starting on Monday–but at least in comparison to the usual slow grind of politics they acted quickly. And it ended too early. But even though I am sure Merkel wanted the lockdown to last at least two weeks longer, the pressure to get the economy back up and running was immense… and it kind of worked out.
We got through the summer okay-ish and people kind of “learned to live with it” and maybe it became somewhat normal and now they have a hard time going back to a mode that is safe for the colder months. Now all the unity of the pragmatic politicians has turned into posturing for next year’s elections (a bit of hyperbole here) and the smart behavior of the grown-up, responsible citizen has become “let’s see how far we can push those rules”
I keep pulling up the same example. There’s a road in the Black Forest that is called “Rote Lache” (translates to red puddle) that is favored by bikers. This road has a speed limit of 70km/h. If you really go down that road at that limit, you will very likely have a terrible accident. Common sense dictates not to push the speed rules to the limit. The limit is given that high because it’s a certain type of road that has these kinds of speed limits. So if people refuse to go by common sense, of course there are alternatives:
a) differentiated rules for each road/place, confusing everyone and being expensive to maintain and hard to enforce
b) lower speed limits everywhere to ensure safety for everyone (aka lockdown!)
Does anyone really want that? I’d much rather give a bit of responsibility to the citizen.
Sry. Ranting. I’m not amused about all the people making it more so that we have option a or b instead of common sense.
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Living in Manchester, the general feeling is that we’re fucked and the government doesn’t care. We were in Tier 2 for months before most the country with no aid (and Leicester even longer!). The minute London enters tier 2, the conversation about aid suddenly begins. Fully costed requests for aid were treated like business negotiations to be beaten down in a game of chicken, while the government tell the media how greedy we are. It’s all been so ugly.
It’s really exposed how only London really matters. If London needs lockdown, the whole country gets a lockdown. If the north needs lockdown, we’re told to go beg and it’s all left to local government to sort out while the national government jeer and antagonise.
I would say this is going to cause the biggest north/south divide since the 80s, but I know all it takes is the mention of “what would Corbyn have done?” and it’s all okay.
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How about we get Scotland to vote for independence and we can annex the rest of the Uk leaving London on it’s own?
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