Stay safe tonight.
Category: Pandemic Diary
2020: Overachiever (The Monoliths)
November 23: Helicopter pilot finds “strange” monolith in remote part of Utah.
November 25: Using Google Earth to look for the Utah monolith site. One candidate that matches the landscape seems to have something vertical that appeared between the 2015 and 2016 images.
No coordinates in the article. Attempt no landings there.
December 7: After the Utah Monolith was found, everyone was making comments about 2001: A Space Odyssey. But as more have popped up, I’m starting to think about The Chronoliths. It’s a novel by Robert Charles Wilson in which obelisks appear out of nowhere, commemorating future military victories by someone no one has heard of – yet.
The monolith in Atascadero, California, was installed by a group of local artists who, on hearing about the one in Romania, figured, someone’s going to make a third one, so why not us?
It was meant to be something fun, a change of pace from the kind of conversations 2020 has been plagued with
After a group traveled five hours to tear it down on video, the town rallied around rebuilding the obelisk and putting it back up on the mountain.
December 27: I…what????? Gingerbread monolith appears — then collapses — on San Francisco hilltop
In true pop-up-art fashion, a nearly 7-foot-tall monolith made of gingerbread mysteriously appeared on a San Francisco hilltop on Christmas Day and collapsed the next day.
Virus protection down the drain (photo)
I’ve mostly gotten tired of the discarded-mask theme, but I saw this today and it seemed like an appropriate metaphor with a new wave of cases surging and so many people refusing to take precautions.
An Expression
Overheard during Zoom Mad Libs:
Teacher: “I need an expression.”
Student: (unintelligible)
Teacher: “An appropriate expression.”
Distant Halloween
Halloween was weird this year.
OK, everything has been weird this year. I mean, I’ve been in the same place as my parents only once since…February? January? I forget. We stood out in their front yard one evening this summer, 10 feet apart, talking for about an hour. Hooray for living in a time when video calling is commonplace and not just science fiction.
Anyway, Halloween. All the usual events were canceled, and health departments recommended against, you know, walking around and interacting at close range with lots of people while Covid-19 is still spreading widely in the community. California state guidelines are actually saying you should avoid gatherings of people from more than three households. The local elementary school still let kids wear costumes on the video chat if they wanted, and they had some games they could play, but there was no costume parade like in most years, and of course no class party.
So, no community events, no school events, no parties (I’m sure there were some, but none close enough to hear), and no trick-or-treating. I mean, we’ve had years when most kids just bypassed the building because it’s not clear from the sidewalk where the apartments’ doors are. But there was no one. At all. Not even groups walking by. That was weird.
But decorations…That’s something you can do without physically getting close to lots of people. So a lot of people around here did put up Halloween displays, ranging from one or two fake tombstones to a full circus of evil clowns. One house kept adding more inflatable figures every time I walked by it. Katie wondered if they were adding one a day like an advent calendar.
We ended up not putting up any decorations ourselves and just had a kind of low-key evening at home. Though playing Among Us — a game where you either try to kill everyone or try to escape the killers — seemed a good fit.
