Tuesday, April 7th, 2020
Four weeks aka one month since work from home started, depending on whether a month is made up of four weeks of seven days each or not.
In terms of calendar months, it would be two more days until the month is full. I have never really thought about the difference in calculating a month until I had a discussion with the payroll provider for my housekeeper about payment dates, the irregularity of which drove me insane. While I get paid on the first and 15th of a month, they insisted that salary payments be every 14 days, arguing that with two payments per month my employee would only be paid for 50 out of 52 weeks in a year, which of course is correct. Thinking about this basically means anyone on a monthly salary is working "for free" for two months in a year; just think about it for a while.
During the days when I still drove to work – can you imagine? There was a time when people drove to work every day, now my car goes shopping every ten days and for a distance, I could easily walk were it not for ten days’ worth of groceries to schlepp – I heard an interesting story on the radio. Some US university has apparently developed a calendar were all months of the year have an equal number of days and all days are identical over the years. This means if you were unfortunate enough to be born on a Monday, every birthday in your life would be on a Monday. New Year or Christmas would always fall on the same day, each and every year. The story goes, that these researchers wrote a draft executive order which they send to agent orange residing in the White House for signing. I am desperately hoping it will never arrive; life would become so monotonous.
America is the only country in the world I know off which has not moved to the metric system. As a result, I have a hard time grocery shopping. I get the pound bit (1lb ~ 500g), but what is the weight beneath pounds and how many of those do I need if I want, say 150g of something? So I work my way around the deli counter with “slices”, as in “May I have five slices of roast beef please” or “Cod fillet for two servings”.
After my old oven exploded, I thankfully now have one that is “bilingual” it does both Celcius and Fahrenheit.
When moving here I had a similar issue with washers – the temperature does not exceed “warm”, that is about hand warm. When asking the nice salesperson at Bray & Scarf how the whites would get clean I was informed: “with bleach”. So I proceeded to have a 220V power line installed in my house and procured a model which washes at “sanitize” heat. (roughly 90C).
Today was a rather mediocre day as far as the weather was concerned, warm, overcast, heavy rain, cool and then sunny – a typical April day. I am still waiting for my order of plants to arrive as well as the cover for the outside furniture. The plants can wait, as I will not have time to attend to them until the weekend anyway. Speaking of which – my two rescues are sadly not doing too well. I do hope their roots have not been damaged and they will be able to resuscitate themselves. The furniture cover is a different matter. I am admittedly a bit tired of carrying the cushions back and forth between patio and garage every time it rains.
When checking on the order with the vendor I received some standard email response about checking online. As EM would say “no shit sherlock, like I did not do that before writing, why else would I take the time to email you?”. Suffice to say there is no information on the delivery date or the whereabouts of my order.
We did have an exceptional lunch at least as I had found some Kohlrabi at the market recently. Every once in a while one has to strike lucky. If I could find some Rhubarb on one of my next shopping outings that would almost be heavenly. Rhubarb pie with a meringue topping or Rhubarb-Strawberry compot to blend with cereal for breakfast - a mouth-watering idea.
COVID19 statistics still look like more home-based work coming our way with there being almost 1.5 million reported cases today, with 386k of those in the USA and 11,900 death the USA is now taking the lead. At least science is getting creative. A team of MIT researchers converted its DNA to music in an effort to better understand its patterns and thus identify where it is breakable. I will see if I can check out the 70-minute long symphony!
I also found some tangible advice from those who have contracted the virus: do not take it lying down! That is what the virus wants us to do so it can happily grow. The breathing exercises advised are making a lot of sense to me. This advice also corresponds to one of my posts on Day 6 which featured a breathing exercise enhancing resilience by Wim Hof. I found a video he posted specifically on COVID, which I will try.
The current health care crisis has given rise to all sorts of interesting discussions on the web. There is for instance an argument on why health care should not be fully private (it should not as evidently that model is not working too well). As well as a look at the UN development indicators used to assess if a country can be considered “developed” data includes statistics such as number of hospital beds, women in politics and child mortality among others. Have a look and see for yourself were the USA falls. Which takes me back to my ponderings over what it is this society subscribes or aspires too...
07.04.2020 23:22
Zig
The Calendar you are referring to is most probably the "13 Month Calendar" that was used at Kodak - https://www.citylab.com/life/2014/12/the-world-almost-had-a-13-month-calendar/383610/