Again, disjointed dreams last night. One involved my Mom and Dad, and being at home again. That seems to be the go-to type of dream I have a lot lately. Earlier in the night, I’ll be dreaming of random groupings of things — checklists and work and people I know and home — and it whirls around like dirt devils in my mind: not as serious or destructive as a tornado, but whimsical, slightly menacing but without all the devastation.
I’ve spoken about it before, but being quite suddenly and almost fully cut off from the States has been a very difficult thing to deal with, especially when New Zealand’s Government and its people have handled this crisis in an overwhelmingly strong and supportive way — I keep saying that Kiwis come together as a single massive unit in times of need, and how amazing that is — and America’s Government has completely botched up this pandemic. Correction: The Trump Administration has screwed up the American response to the pandemic. Hey Donald? You can’t gaslight a pandemic.
When I was at Northern Illinois University, my Shakespeare professor said something profound but very truthful. As we were studying Julius Caesar or some other profound piece of Shakespeare’s which dealt with the corruption and downfall of an empire or a kingdom or a republic, he said, quite boldly, that the United States was showing signs of the same decay and degradation that the Roman Empire had displayed towards its final years. That’s always stuck with me. And, sadly, I think he’s right.
Today?
Today, I worked. A lot. I ended up finishing up a lot of marrying narrations with PowerPoint lectures to make movies to upload to YouTube, splitting too quiet narrations from crystal clear videos to raise the decibel level so the viewer could hear the speaker and then rejoin the video and audio together to upload to YouTube, flesh out lessons on Moodle for next week (and some for the week beyond), and enrol students ready for those modules to go live. It was a lot of work, and I was getting very tired towards the end, but I soldiered on because our students need us in this time of uncertainty.
Again, no lunch. My husband felt so sorry for me that he made me a bowl of onion rings about 3 PM because I was starving but I had so much more to do.
Our Student Management System help desk called today, as did the Tertiary Education Commission person helping me with an open case, to see how our government return was going. TEC fixed the open issue that’s been there since early February, and we got the one anomaly out of the way, which was good, but once that happened, I tried to complete the return to find some of the modules on our SMS had reverted to 2019 prices, while the prices in TEC’s system were 2020 prices. I altered all those by hand, and so when I uploaded the files again, they reported the prices matched, but we had no active students. We somehow went from 70+ active students in our March indicative return to 0 active and 46 inactive students in our April return.
So I emailed our Student Management System help desk back to say: I am stuck.
This was around 5:30 – 6 PM tonight.
Long day again.
I was hoping that I could take tomorrow (Friday) off as it is a holiday weekend, with the recognised day off (ANZAC Day) now falling on the Monday, but… It doesn’t look like it.
We had an easy dinner and watched some TV, and I found myself falling asleep on the couch at about 7. Not a good look. I was overly tired when I woke up this morning and am overly tired now. Just too much work.
We had 3 COVID-19 cases today: 2 confirmed, 1 probable. However, this saw an increase of 0 cases overall because the 3 cases that came in from an Antarctic cruise ship yesterday may have been included in Uruguay’s cases, and I guess this is a no-no under World Health Organization rules. A kind of double-dipping if you will.
New Zealand also sadly had 2 more deaths today. That brings the total deaths to 16. 16 deaths too many from this horrible virus. I dread to think what the numbers would have been had New Zealand not locked down as early as it did. If the virus had been stopped entering the rest home here in Christchurch, even that would have prevented 9 of those deaths.
Christchurch again, hit with tragedy. It upsets me to no end. Haven’t we suffered enough over the last decade?
On that note: I am exhausted. Please look after yourselves, stay safe, and be kind.
Beam Me Up, Scotty 