stusser
1692
It’s all asinine. They should just mandate vaccinations.
They do. For students, at least. Which is why I think we will be in normal classrooms. For faculty and staff, who are by now like over 90% vaccinated, they are still waffling on making it mandatory, but in practice it already is a done deal.
I’m doing fine. My mom too. My wife too. All vaccinated.
We finally could physically reunite with my wife for a few weeks after being kept apart for nearly two years by the stupidity of her country.
She now is back to her country. I think this is probably more P&R material, since not many foreign people enjoy to think of Japan as anything but a theme park inside a big mall.
Once upon landing, you are asked to install an application ironically called “mySOS” on your smartphone. If you don’t have a smartphone, or own a model too old to run it (the application requires iOS 13.5), you are helped to get one at the airport. Everybody must get one, no dispense for kids. If you can’t connect to the 4G network, you’re helped to subscribe to a service that will give it to you. This is what nearly happened to my wife and she had to spend a few hours on the phone with her provider to finally be allowed to leave the premises, on top of a full inspection of her luggage and about 20 pages of paperwork. She landed at 1PM, was back to our appartment 40 minutes from the aiport at 7PM.
The MySOS application is tasked to transmit your position at all times. On top of it, you have to press a button once a day as a purification ritual of sort. You can also be called at anytime by a person whom you can’t see (black screen) and will ask you to show your surrounding appartment in a video call.
You might think this might happen, but it’s Japan. My wife’s been called at least two times a day since she landed.
Failiure to comply to any of this repeatedly may result in your name being published on a hall of shame. In case her country hadn’t made the daily case very clear for the past 20 years that she had betrayed her country by living once upon a time out of it.
Meanwhile, here in France, antivaxx protest because the government requires for restaurants and bars to ask people to display a small paper proving that they have been fully vaccinated for over 2 weeks before allowing them to get drunk. And those dumbwits call it a dictatorship here, in all seriousness.
I spent time with her. I’m happy.
RichVR
1695
And people here are comparing vaccine passes to Nazi Germany. Unbelievable.
Petey
1696
Indoor mask mandate for Snohomish county, WA…starting tomorrow. My co worker said she was just getting used to not wearing a mask in stores and now this. Uh, I never NOT wear my mask…it’s not hard, just wear the damn thing.
wavey
1698
What a horribly frustrating situation that must be, you have my sympathy. Really glad you managed to share some time together though.
We managed to get together with my mom for some outdoor dim sum. I have really missed going for dim sum. Getting a few items from the Chinese supermarket hot table for eating at home just isn’t the same. The tables were decently spaced apart. The service was great and so was the food. Just a happy day.
Downtown Toronto is pretty rocking these days - looks busier than in 2019; impossible to get a reservation at a restaurant, although I don’t think they are full capacity indoors. The patios are massively expanded, however, with the city relaxing its generally restrictive bylaws.
schurem
1702
Corona pretty much passed me by. Running a landscaping crew, we work outside and we just kept going. We got vaccinated very early because one of my guys is in an institution, and he, and everybody who works with him got a shot.
Last week, that boy just up and died. Passed away in his sleep. Probably heart failure. Boy was 20! Nothing to do with corona of course, except maybe that of all the things I had expected, this was the fucking last. We’re devastated but determined to regroup and keep on keepin’ on.
I had an interesting weekend. Friend invited me to check out his new place up in the northern tip of Idaho - small town, kind of a hippie enclave. And the place was virtually maskless, folks were just quite casual about getting on with their lives I guess. Obviously I am less so, I wore a mask when we were out around other folks, and I saw a few other families here and there also masked. And nobody gave us any grief about it, it’s not as if they were anti anything, just didn’t seem to be touched by COVID, somehow.
I had a really good time there, but I felt very strange about the whole thing. Not to be overly dramatic but I felt like I imagine a veteran returning home might - like I could just grab someone by the shoulder and shake them, while yelling 'Don’t you know?? Don’t you know what’s happening?? You could die!!!" but instead I’m walking around feeling slightly tensed up, looking over my shoulder, wary of someone coughing near me. I may have spent too much time indoors over the last year.
God damn man, that’s rough. Hang in there.
Sad; way too early. It sounds like you and your crew contributed significantly to his life and he did likewise to you all.
schurem
1707
Yeah, though his contribution was mostly goofy-ass talk all day long lol. I’ll be saying my eulogy on thursday.
Scuzz
1708
I thought all Idaho was crazy Trumpistas? I kid but I do know several people who have moved from here to the Cour d lane area.
We have made several trips to the Central Coast and usually we are the people wearing masks while others didn’t. It does make you feel weird but we have never had a confrontation over it.
Well like I mentioned, this particular town is a bit of a hippie enclave, lots of art shops, hand crafted furniture, breweries, stuff like that. It’s about an hour north of Coeur d’Alene so, also a bit of a tourist destination.
Scuzz
1710
Beautiful area, I have relatives south of there. I hope to get back that way when/if the pandemic ever ends.
First day of class was yesterday. I taught two sections back to back, all of us in masks. Didn’t help that it was very warm and muggy, and the AC was not really working well, so it was rather tiring. Students were super cool about everything though, as even sitting in an overcrowded, too warm classroom in masks beats Zoom hands down.
