One Hundred Days of Solitude

Well, we’ve reached over a hundred days since I intentionally went to a public place to interact with real live people. Besides a five-minute visit to my office to pick up my books before labs were shut down, I’ve been to exactly two indoor locations – the grocery store and my apartment. I haven’t ridden the bus, been driven in a car, or flown anywhere for the better part of four months. We’re technically allowed to go places now, but I’ve stuck to my apartment and outdoor locations while waiting to see how reopening goes. Approaching the end of the month, the numbers in Michigan looked pretty good, both in terms of cases and deaths. Michigan Medicine posts the number of COVID-19 positive inpatients they have every day, and they hit a low on June 17/18 since this all started in March. However, that number then rose 50% in 4 days. Time to lock everyone back in their closets? Not quite yet. They went from 6 to 9 patients, and only time will tell if this is statistically insignificant or the start of another wave.

At the beginning of the month, Governor Whitmer lifted the stay-at-home order, effective immediately on Monday, June 1. Indoor gatherings with less than 10 people and outdoor gatherings with less than 100 people and social distancing were permitted. As this was only a week after Memorial Day and its unknown numbers of barbeques with unknown quantities of people practicing unknown degrees of social distancing/facial covering, I declined to do anything other than stay at home and do research and watch Netflix. On Sunday, June 7, my church restarted in-person services outdoors. I didn’t attend because 1) I didn’t want to bike there and 2) unknown quantities of people practicing unknown degrees of social distancing/facial covering. I did, however, bake a pineapple upside down cake. It was a midcentury-esque masterpiece.

Pineapple upside down cake

By Monday, June 8, retail, restaurants, pools, libraries, museums, offices, etc. were all allowed to be open with varying social distancing and capacity restrictions. The places that were left closed at this point were things like gyms, bowling alleys, movie theaters, and nail salons, where groups of people congregate and/or are in close contact for not strictly essential activities. I did my roughly biannual intensive floor washing on Tuesday, June 9, because turns out dust is a thing. On Wednesday, June 10, I finished watching all of the Great British Baking Show episodes available on Netflix. Friday, June 12, the Ann Arbor library started the coronavirus/socially distanced/virtual summer 2020 Summer Game and I started rewatching Avatar: The Last Airbender, which is even better than I remembered.

The weather was too nice on Saturday, June 13 to not go out, so even though I knew it would be “crowded,” I set out on my bike for the Bird Hills/Barton Nature Areas area. After the world’s most unnecessary detour, I made it and added a couple more parks to my list. It was indeed busier than my usual mosquito-infested, swampy haunts, but not too bad away from a couple spots. On Sunday, June 14, I again watched church on Facebook live, then did a load of laundry, and ate my last two freezer pancakes for dinner. I did my semi-annual file backup/SD card reformatting on Monday, June 15 and otherwise got research done over the rest of the week. Plus baked a batch of popovers for the heck of it on Wednesday, June 17 (I got flour at the grocery store and it wasn’t 900 degrees in my apartment).

Looks very refreshing.
(Fuller Park pool, closed, at the beginning of June.)

On Saturday, June 20 I went grocery shopping in the morning (still basically 100% of people wearing face coverings¹) and in the afternoon headed out to visit another group of parks. Why the city of Ann Arbor thought right next to the M-14 was a good place for a nature area is beyond me. Nothing like the sounds of the birds and 75 mph traffic as you walk through the woods. Anyway, joke’s on me because I took the time to visit this park. I still wasn’t attending church as of Sunday, June 21, so it was another Facebook sermon with questionable audio for me. The rest of the week was research as usual; I also visited parks, ate sandwiches, baked apple cobbler, watched Netflix, reread books. The university committed to a partially in-person fall semester with a modified schedule, but we’ll see how well that works out once students return en masse.

On Saturday, June 27, I took my bike out to the northern half of Ann Arbor to visit my remaining parks north of the Huron River. With that done, I’ll have to start ranging farther afield into lesser known territories. On the plus side, biking in high heat, humidity, and sun makes my 85-degree apartment feel cool . . . for about ten minutes when I first get back. Another Sunday, another Facebook sermon on Sunday, June 28. Then I finished out the month with a couple days of work. On to July. I’m still not making plans to go anywhere/do anything while I wait and see how things go. Like I said, the numbers in Michigan still seem pretty good but other states are not looking great.

¹A side note on masks/face coverings from my science-ish perspective: Even if they aren’t super effective, and are hot and uncomfortable, I’d rather be careful. And no, you are not suffocating yourself, with carbon dioxide or otherwise. 1) Air is already mostly not oxygen (78% nitrogen, 21% oxygen by volume). 2) You don’t extract all the oxygen from air you inhale. Exhaled air is still ~16% oxygen; in other words ~80% of the oxygen that’s inhaled is exhaled. 3) Masks are porous. The pore size of cloth is on the order of microns. Air molecules are hundreds of picometers, or 5-6 orders of magnitude smaller. Your exhalations are not hitting your mask and rebounding back into your respiratory system. (Virus sizes are on the order of nanometers, so would not be filtered out by a cloth mask, but respiratory droplets are again in the micron range and could be stopped by a mask, which is the point.) 4) Doctors, nurses, dentists, construction workers, etc. are not all passing out at work from hypoxia every time they put on a mask. So even if you don’t really think masks do anything, you’re not killing your brain cells by wearing one, and you might even be helping other people. Isn’t that nice?