Social Distancing: Day 136 -- Sabbatical is already 1/6 over

It's hard to believe that my sabbatical is slipping away! The days are just passing by so fast. In my imagination, time just stood still when I was on sabbatical, with time enough to do everything I wanted to do. Why isn't reality more like I imagine it should be?

It's kind of weird to think that we've been doing this COVID thing for 4.5 months now. And the politics of this is getting more and more strange all the time. I've been reading short articles about the 1918 influenza pandemic, and it seems that we're doing what we've always done as a country, which is to ignore the experts and do our own thing. So now more and more schools are going online in the Fall while some places (like Orange County) are doing everything they can to bring students to campus. And churches are upset because somehow it's been decided that the core of our faith is what happens on Sunday mornings, and that we absolutely have to do it in large groups in person. It's all just very strange to me, and I view it through the lens of Ecclesiastes 3 (There is a time for everything... a time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing -- and this is definitely a time to refrain).

The statistics with R course is going very well. I've learned a ton in a short amount of time, which exactly what I hoped for. I cranked through the 1000 page textbook in about 3 weeks (also, I think that explains why time is slipping by so fast). I did "cheat" a little in that the book has a companion website that has a lot of the code written out (though it doesn't all work), and that saved me a ton of time when it came to working through the exercises. The group I'm in seems like a decent group. We've decided that we're going to do something with UFC data, which is at least intrinsically interesting.

But I'm really finding the value of this course in trying to apply the techniques to the ATMI data that we collected. Since we are just collecting data without a predefined question, I feel like I'm swimming in data and ideas, and it's really just about bringing some focus to it. I've run a few different analyses and have looked at the data in a couple different ways, which is helping me think through it a little bit better.

I let the lead data scientist at the Southern Nevada Health District know what my availability will be, and he hasn't gotten back to me yet. But I don't really expect him to get back to me because my availability doesn't start for another few weeks. But in my email exchange, one thing he suggested was that I may do some COVID modeling for them, which would be both interesting and kind of fun. I've been watching various models over the last few months, and the prospect of being on the production end of that is definitely exciting. But I'm not tied to that project and will do whatever it is that they want me to do.

I've started making some graphs for a colleague, which is also finding all sorts of hidden quirks in the data that are leading back to needing to reprocess some of it. I've started to get pretty comfortable making graphs the way she wants, and that's been a good learning experience for making plots with R.

I'm also going to look into another source of institutional data, which is the climate survey we've done a couple times. I don't know that there's actually anything there that I'd be able to extend into a publication, but it won't hurt to at least look. I'll have to do a literature review to start to get a sense of what sorts of things people even publish with that sort of thing. And then I'll have to stare at the data for a while and see what I can see.

My general plan is that sometime in the next week or two I'm going to head in to campus and print off a whole bunch of papers and things to look at. I've got a printer at home, but it's not really designed for super heavy printing, so it will take forever. (It also only prints one-sided, so I'll waste twice as much paper.) I have to review what the campus protocols are, but I think it's a self-check and then masks on in public spaces. I'm going to be on campus as short a time as possible, so I'm going to have all the files set up and ready to fire off. As I think about it, I may actually be able to send them to print before I leave home and just pick them up when I get to campus, which would be ideal.

I've been starting to explore pickling again. After making more picked onions a little while ago, I've decided to pickle some carrots and jalapenos, partly because jalapenos are crazy cheap. Most of the time, the jalapenos from the store aren't that hot, but somehow the batch I made is pretty spicy. It's a good thing pickled vegetables last a long time, because I'm going to need time to work my way through them.

I've also really started to hone in my technique for chicken chicharron, which are exactly what they sound like they are. I take chicken skins and roast them in the toaster oven until they get super crunchy. I don't think the name is technically correct, but I don't care. I know what I mean, and that's what counts. Also, based on the amount of fat that renders out (which I sometimes keep, and sometimes don't keep), this is probably a relatively healthy way to eat a chicken skin. (I said *realtively* healthy. Not healthy.)

Thor had his two weeks of medicine, and was definitely done with it by the time we got there. Squirting the 0.9 mL of fluid into his mouth was a little gross and a little frustrating. He would hypersalivate, which caused his mouth to foam up, and then he would shake his head and foamy spit would go places. So I had to wipe up afer giving him the medicine. He still sometimes hides from me in the morning and evening because he thinks I might do it again, but I hope he gets over it eventually. But in general, he seems to be back to his old self again. I'm starting to transition him off of wet food back to dry food (which he had preferred), and he seems to be okay with it. He lost some weight over the last several weeks (probably because he couldn't eat as much because of the stitches in his mouth making him uncomfortable), but now he seems to eat everything I put out for him, and so he'll probably normalize soon enough.

Other stuff: No, I haven't touched the piano. But it's on my August to-do list. The indoor garden continues to grow. I've used a bunch of basil in things, I've used up most of the first head of lettuce, and I'm still waiting for my tomato plant to actually make tomatoes. The flowers are starting to get the swollen fruits, but it's probably still another couple weeks off. I haven't gone very many places. But visiting some of the local parks has been nice. They aren't that crowded so there's plenty of space to walk around without encroaching on other people. Life remains good. And it's 12:30 AM, so I'm going to sleep.