Virus Blog

5/27/20

Quick Takes

#LH82. Linda turns 82 today. This day will be like most other days. In her home. We are having a family chat and then she is having birthday dinner delivered to her doorstep. Different times.
Dreams. The scariest dreams are when people come too close to me. Stay away! Keep that virus breathing breath to yourself!
Killing Eve. Jody Comer is my pick for the Best Actress award at least five times in the next decade. Definitely my favorite actress right now.

5/28/20

Casino Action. While casinos are still closed there is no lack of action available on the stock market. My history with picking individual stocks is not particularly stellar but the brain has this way of remembering the wins and quickly forgetting the losses. Hence I keep returning. While I've concluded that this is not a time to invest because the market is too crazy to risk one's savings on the volatility we are seeing, at the same time it's the perfect time to place a few bets. I have a pile of money that I set aside for "playing" the market. Over the past two years I've made some bad choices and some good choices. Since the pandemic I've seen my long-term purchase in Chinese eCommerce take off. I jumped on Facebook at a time when I concluded that quarantine would drive people back to Facebook. And after testing Michael's craft stores and concluding that they were doing a lot right, I bought 3,000 shares. My logic was that we would all spend more time at home and needed new forms of entertainment. For me, I decided to see if I could teach myself how to paint (not going so well) but I'm bullish on the crafts business right now. I made the purchase two weeks ago and the stock has gone up ever since. Well over the past two weeks the stock has done nicely and I've enjoyed calculating my gains. And then there was yesterday. In a single day the price went up 23.5% and since I bought it two weeks ago it's up 45%. These are gargantuan numbers that typically take years to achieve. No, I'm not ready to give up my day job to become a day trader but I'm having fun. This might be my new hobby since I'm not so hot at painting!

Quick Takes

Eve shops. Eve had a work thing and on her way home she stopped at the market. That might not sound like a big deal, but she hasn't set foot in a store since the quarantine began. We've had our groceries delivered and while she has complained that she doesn't love having someone else shop for her, she was unwilling to risk going into a store. We joked, that when she turned 60 in April that she could go during the early senior hours, but still she had not interest in risking her health for the sake of food. Yesterday, apparently, was different. She stopped. She masked and gloved up. She shopped. She distanced herself. She criticized the cleanliness of the store. She praised the store for wrapping it's fresh bread to protect against human touch. She succeeded. This may be the single biggest turning point in this house.
Back to the Office. Someone asked when we would return to the office and the HR response was very clinical. This led to a chat discussion that returning to the office was not something that the county alone would decide. Frankly our office is not conducive to social distancing. In our chat we concluded that we would have to wear masks for the full work day and that we had no appropriate meeting rooms. There were other concerns as well. The CEO stepped in and assured everyone that there would be a safety plan and that there would be no rush back to the office independent of what the County says. Do we even need an office?

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