canyonwalker | Entries tagged with the new normal

Today' the fifth anniversary of the Coronavirus pandemic. Five years ago today, on 11 March 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared Coronavirus a global pandemic. As I wrote in my blog that day, classifying it a pandemic was debatable and political. But I meant those terms positively. It was debatable because the definition of what's a pandemic involves subjective terms; and political because determining it was a pandemic would open up more political solutions. Governments that might not act in the face of a regional health concern, something happening "over there" and "to some people", could be prodded to act against what international health experts deemed a global problem potentially affecting everyone.

A common question I've seen posed in a lot of writing about this 5th anniversary is, "What's changed and what hasn't since then?" To answer that question it's important to be able to go back to that point in time and understand what was happening then. I fortunately have my own record of it: my blog. Take a look at my blog's table of contents page from March 2020 to see the things I was writing about in real time then.

Unfortunately this is how a lot of people wound up wearing masks during the Covid-19 pandemic (Mar 2025)

Unfortunately this is how a lot of people wound up wearing masks during the Covid-19 pandemic (Mar 2025)

One thing I was struck by in revisiting my contemporaneous writing was how Covid denialism was there pretty much from the beginning. Denials started started with China, of course. China's dictatorship covered up the seriousness of the problem to protect their reputation and keep their own populace in line. But very quickly the US political right, led by President Trump, started pounding Covid as a hoax ginned up by domestic political opponents to make him look bad in a reelection year and gain dictatorial control over the US. Trump had already established a daily cadence of calling it a hoax even before the WHO deemed it a global pandemic. And now, 5 years later, President Trump elected for a nonconsecutive second term has pulled the US out of the WHO.

It's sad to be reminded of just how quickly the situation with Coronavirus turned from political in the good sense— able to spur governments into action— into political in the bad sense, falling prey to partisan differences and demagoguery. It's still with us today. Covid denialism has become a tenet of the political right. And it's actually spread. Denialism has become a political way of life. The MAGA movement churns out "alternative facts" on pretty much every issue of the day. Undocumented immigrants are causing a crime wave, rooting out fraud in government spending has saved billions of dollars in just a few weeks, vaccines are worse than the diseases they supposedly prevent, tariffs lower prices, and the stock market isn't crashing because of the chaos coming from the White House. Don't believe your lying eyes when they tell you otherwise.

A few weeks ago Amazon changed the game in remote work. It announced that, effective 1 Jan 2025, all workers would have to report to the office 5 days a week. It's a major change from the company's previous 3-day-a-week RTO policy. Employees are unsurprisingly unhappy about it. Various surveys show they gave it a satisfaction rating of 1.3 on a 1-5 scale (1 being the lowest) and that 73% are considering quitting to work elsewhere.

Elsewhere may be a dwindling choice, though. When a major company with enormous cachet like Amazon makes a move like this, others will follow— others not just in the technology industry but across all industries. Indeed, Dell made a similar change for at least some of its employees already. After a 3-day-a-week policy announced months ago, Dell upped it to 5 days a week for its sales staff two weeks after Amazon's announcement.

Some leaders couch this change in terms of "Back to normal", like they're simply undoing the unique adaptions we were all forced to make during the urgent conditions of the Coronavirus pandemic. But the pandemic didn't create remote work; it merely increased the number of people who performed it. 5-day-a-week RTO is not just going back to how things were in 2019, it's actually a regression back many, many years.

After being exposed to Covid-19 last week I took an at-home test on Saturday. It was negative, thankfully. But I didn't stop there. Guidance is to test again 5-7 days after exposure even if no symptoms have appeared.

But did symptoms appear?

Part of the New Normal of living in the post-pandemic world— more accurately, the Covid endemic world— is that every time I get a stuff nose, every time I cough more than twice in a row, I wonder, "Could this be Covid?!"

Part of the new normal is wondering "Is this Covid?" with every cold (Jan 2024)

Part of the new normal is wondering "Is this Covid?" with every cold (Jan 2024)

I tested negative again today, so those scattered coughs were just coincidental. I did not catch Covid-19. Hooray, immune system boosted by multiple shots of the vaccine!

I want to repeat that I'm happy my colleague told us he tested positive for Covid. A lot of people would not have. In this situation it arguably didn't matter to me since I didn't actually get sick. But I may have gotten sick, and quite probably someone in the room of 20-25 people with him did get sick. It's better to know and to know to get tested. Notifying us was a class act.

It's been about a year since I've written about my dining-out habits. A year ago I observed that, post-Covid, I'd returned to eating restaurant meals (dining there or taking it home) 8x per week. That was a big drop from dining out basically every day for lunch and dinner before Covid. During Covid I dined out way less. In fact at the start of the pandemic I ate strictly what was in my own kitchen/pantry for a full month. I broke my fast after 31 straight days when I had a jones for a big, sloppy burger. Then I did it again a few weeks later, risking my life for a shitty burrito. But, hey, the lockdown era is in the rear view mirror. We've had a few years of getting back to normal. So, what's the new normal?

My new normal is dining out 8-9 times per week. That includes lunch most weekdays, either lunch or dinner each weekend day, and one or two weeknight dinners out. For these purposes I count takeout/takeaway food as dining out, though I do that less than once a week. For me part of the pleasurable experience of dining out is dining out.

How have I landed on a new normal of 8-9 restaurant meals per week instead of basically 13? It's a few things. For one, Covid was like a big reset to break old habits. But old habits are easy to get back into. After all, I'd been dining out most of the week for years, decades even.

What's really helped me is the reset opportunity Covid provided for relearning that I can make tasty food at home. And it's not hard. I've thought about that the past few days as I've pondered what to make for dinner. In the past I would've been, like, "Ugh, do I even have anything to eat at home?" But now it's like, "There are at least three tasty things I could make for dinner; which one do I want tonight, which tomorrow, and which two nights from now?" Thus yesterday's dinner was a roast beef sandwich (I'd bought fresh roast beef slices and sandwich bread at the supermarket), tonight's was shrimp cocktail, and tomorrow's will likely be ravioli with marina sauce.

I've been sick all week. Starting Sunday night I had a sore throat and slept poorly. Then other symptoms started to develop. Monday evening I had feverish chills. I think that was the worst of it. But that wasn't the end of it. I've had various cold symptoms all week. I think the most annoying is sticky phlegm in my lungs that I can't seem to cough out.

Part of The New Normal is wondering, "Is this Covid?" whenever cold-like symptoms appear. Every coughing fit, sneezing fit, sore throat, etc. is suspicious.

Indeed I did something Coronavirus-risky a few days before my symptoms started: I traveled on an airplane and attended a training session for 2 days with 25 colleagues. And judging from the conversations I heard over breakfast each day, an alarming number of my colleagues espouse all sorts of gloom-and-doom, the-country's-going-to-hell beliefs... except the belief that, "Hey, y'all, Coronavirus is a real thing, it's still potentially deadly, and there are simple things you can do to protect yourself... like get vaccinated."

So I tested myself for Covid in between gobbling all sorts of pills to treat cold symptoms. Covid: negative. It's just a cold. And not even a particularly bad one, though it is the worst I've had in several years now.

Some weekends are busy, others are slow. This weekend brought some of each. Sunday was the slow day when I finally had time to relax. Among other things I caught up (mostly) on my blog backlog. The things I posted Sunday tell the story:

Playing my D&D game on Friday night
Having our joint 102nd birthday party on Saturday
My retrospective on the year 2023— which had been in the queue for 3 weeks!

So, what did I do Sunday? For starters I slept in... though not as much as I expected after being up past midnight both Friday and Saturday. I did allow myself to take a nap late afternoon to catch up.

Hawk and I had lunch on Sunday with two of our friends who couldn't make it to our party Saturday. Well, I guess they could make it but they chose not to. They are hyper-vigilant about Covid and won't take a chance on indoors things like parties, even among groups of known friends who are all vaxxed. Sadly part of the new normal is some people are still in crisis mode with no exit criteria defined. Anyway, we met at a restaurant that has outdoor dining. The weather isn't the greatest for eating outdoors this time of year, but at least it wasn't raining at lunchtime.

A Home Office Move Out and Back

In the evening I decided to tame the mess that had taken over my desk. Last week I moved my work area downstairs to Hawk's crafting table. I did it because she needed to work at home all week, and we conflict too much over talking needs when we work in the office together for more than a few hours. I did a similar move in Sept. 2022 during a heat wave. My office setup is smaller than hers (she's got more external monitors) so I made the move. And now, like in 2022, I moved back after a week.

The thing was, while my computer and extra monitor were off my desk last week, the piles of stuff that have been growing around them got worse. And with cleanup for the party on Saturday, stuff wound up all over the desk. I knew if I didn't clean it up Sunday evening it would be an agonizing mess to deal with while trying to start work Monday morning.

I could have just cleared up the space in the middle of my desk. Indeed, that's what I did first, so I could set up my laptop and reconnect it to the external monitor. But I figured as long as I was in cleaning-things-up mode I might as well sort through the pile of papers in what I call the "landing zone" on the corner of my desk. It's basically an unlabelled inbox.

Desktop Archaeology

As I worked my way down through the pile of papers, sorting them into three piles— to keep, to trash, to shred— I felt like an archaeologist working a dig site. I was scraping my way down through older and older history.

In the top layer were a few things I tossed atop the pile in the last month or two: a primary election re-registration card and a few financial/medical statements. Then there was a layer of stuff from 3-4 months ago. Then June 2023. Then March 2023. February 2023. When I got to paperwork from January 2023 I mused how I'd just reached stuff that had been buried for a literal year. And there was still more below!

My desktop dig reached all the way back into 2022. I found an insurance card... issued for 2023. We have a different insurer in 2024. Oops, I guess I didn't need that. I had a receipt from a hotel stay in October 2022. That was the oldest thing on my desk. 15 months old! Why did I even have that?

All the stuff I wanted to actually keep I sorted off into appropriate folders. That meant, of course, creating some new folders for things. And by "creating" I mean repurposing old manila folders and hanging folders with new labels and putting them in my file drawers.

Oh, but putting new stuff in the file drawers in the office means having to take old stuff out. There's only so much space in the office. What's old, in this case? For one, I pulled out a folder of maintenance records for a car we sold in 2022. That goes to the industrial shred bin. (It's too much for our home shredder.) Then there are taxes from a few years ago. Those we keep, but down in the Hobbit Hole.

I thought about leaving the 2017-2021 tax folders in a neat pile on my desk to take downstairs later but then decided that if I didn't move them immediately they'd simply wind up on the bottom of the next archaeological dig. So I tucked them in one of our storage bins down in the Hobbit Hole where there's paperwork dating back to the 1990s. And now my desk is clean! Well, at least that one corner of it is clean. 🤣

Every year around the new year I do a variety of retrospectives about the year just finished. Several of those are about travel, as that's the main theme of this blog. My travel for 2023 ran right up to within 12 hours of the New Year... when I returned from a phenomenal trip to Australia on midday December 31.

Here are Five Things about my travel in 2023:

I traveled 92 days and 81 nights in 2023. That splits out as 22 days/17 nights business travel and 70 days/64 nights leisure travel. Overall these figures are up about 15% over my stats from 2022 and much higher than the pandemic years of 2020-2021. I'm not quite back to recent pre-pandemic levels. In 2019, for example, I logged 115 days and 103 nights of travel. And even those figures are well below my gonzo days of travel in the late 00s/early 10s.

It's satisfying that leisure is 75% of my travel. That's a turnaround from 10-15 years ago when leisure was less than half, sometimes as little as one-third of my travel. The shift in the ratio is due partly to fewer business trips and partly to making more leisure trips. There's a big element of intentionality in the latter; we've got to plan to spend time traveling. And generally we do, though not always as much as we'd like. For example, we didn't travel as much in the summer this past year as we usually do. It's not just that there was no big trip but there weren't even many weekend getaways. Partly that was due to weather patterns but also partly it was due to us being less aggressive about making trips happen for a few months.

Business travel's "New Normal" after Coronavirus. Business travel has partly come back after Coronavirus. Trade shows are all in full swing again. That's what most of my business travel this year involved. In-person visits to customers remain much slower than before. That's not due to Coronavirus restrictions on workplace visitors anymore (it was in 2021 & 2022) but due to the greater shift to remote work. Widely publicized "RTO" (return to office) mandates notwithstanding, the kinds of customers I call on work in-office maybe one day a week. They prefer not to make a special trip into the office just to meet a vendor when they feel they can get everything they need in a videoconference. Plus, the trend of distributed teams continues to grow. Workers can't come in to the (same) office when the company hired them across multiple states and countries.

I flew 47,500 miles in 2023. That's a step up from the past few years when Coronavirus put the kibosh on a lot of flying. I flew 11k in 2020 (all in Jan/Feb), 21k in 2021, and 32k last year. 2023's tally represents a return to my recent pre-pandemic average of 50k miles/year. Though 2023 would have been a lot like 2022 if we didn't come up with the idea of traveling to Australia late in the year. And even this amount is nothing like the 150k+/year I flew back in the late 00s/early 10s when I was a globe-trotting business traveler.

Bucket List items checked off: 3 🪣✔. After making a miserable zero progress on my bucket lists in 2022 I made progress on three (all three?) in 2023. I visited one more state, Mississippi, bringing my list to 50/51. I visited one more US national park, New River Gorge in West Virginia, upping my count to 52/63. And I visited two more foreign countries, Cayman Islands and Australia, bringing my tally to 21 countries.

More 2023 retrospectives to come.

West Virginia / North Carolina Travelog #Ω
Back home - Sun, 24 Sep 2023. 10pm

It's a good news/bad news evening. Good news: We're home. Our flights were mostly on time, nothing went wrong, and we walked through our front door just before 9pm local time. We're already mostly unpacked and I've showered up. Getting to bed at a reasonable hour tonight will help me be ready for digging out from under the blizzard of work emails and Slack messages I've been scrupulously ignoring for the past 9 days while we've vacationed in West Virginia and North Carolina, with bits of Virginia, Tennessee, and even a brief foray into South Carolina mixed in.

Now for the bad news: I'm sick. I was up half the night last night (basically from about 3am Eastern onward) with what I at first thought was a food-related sickness because I had some stomach heaves. By mid morning it became clearer it was something else: a head cold. I've had a stuffy, runny nose and occasional sneezing all day since then. Plus now I seem to have a bit of chest congestion.

Could this be Covid? That was one of my first thoughts once I recognized I had cold-like symptoms. Sadly part of The New Normal is that whenever you have cold symptoms you need to test for Covid. I just finished my test— 30 seconds of painful swabbing followed by 15 minutes of waiting to see if a second pink line appears— and I'm negative. Whew; it's only a cold. Or maybe a flu. But for now, at least, I remain a Covid virgin.

Today I had a business trip to San Francisco. ...Okay, it's not a business trip so much as a business drive. Downtown SF is 40 miles from my home in Silicon Valley. But as little as I travel for business anymore compared to years ago, driving to SF for a 3 hour long customer meeting felt like a bit of a work adventure.

Drive or Transit?

Initially I planned on getting to SF by taking public transit. From home I can walk to Caltrain one mile away, ride Caltrain to Millbrae Station, transfer there to BART, and ride BART into downtown SF with a station less than 1/2 mile from my client's office. But I'd have had to catch a 6:57am train, which would've meant leaving home at 6:40am, in time to meet my customer 10-15 minutes ahead of our meeting allowing time to get badged in and set up in the meeting room.

Leaving home at 6:40am seemed kind of... ugh... so my idea #2 was to car-pool with Hawk to the Fremont BART station near her office. We could leave home at 7 in plenty of time to catch a BART green line train that would get me to downtown SF with no transfers. Idea #2 seemed like a plan. But then Hawk's plans changed and she needed to work from home today. That left me with plan #3: drive.

The Last Mile Takes 20 Minutes

I left home at 7am sharp, figuring on up to 90 minutes of drive time plus 15 for parking to meet the client at his front desk at 8:45am. Good news: because I left early, the first 39 miles of the trip took way less than 90 minutes. I had exited the freeway and was on city streets in SoMa in 45 minutes. Bad news: the last mile of the trip took another 20 minutes. And it would have taken even longer if I didn't commit two traffic offenses right at the end. 😳

The last mile also would have taken longer pre-pandemic. In 2019 driving in SoMa was like trying to drive through a street carnival. There were so many office workers in crosswalks that you basically couldn't make a turn anywhere. Oh, I'm not talking about a left turn; those are illegal almost everywhere in SoMa already. No, I'm talking about a right turn. At a green light. Maybe one car would manage to turn right per cycle because the crosswalks were always full.

Parking: The Process is the Punishment

The company I was visited, a major tech company in San Francisco, has a crazy parking process at its site. The garage requires badge access to enter. Does that mean it's only for employees? No, visitors are welcome to use it— and pay $12/hour for it— but they need to get a visitor badge first. ...Which mean I had to park, to go in to get a badge, to come back out to my car, to enter the garage to park. Fortunately there was a loading zone I could use. That was one of those two traffic offenses I mentioned, though. 😰

The New Normal: Far Fewer People in Offices

When I met my client we made smalltalk about how SoMa is way less crowded that it used to be. That "Last mile takes 20 minutes" problem I mentioned above? It would have been twice as long in 2019. Credit the pandemic to making the streets actually driveable again. Even though the pandemic is over, it ushered in a new normal. With office vacancy rates at 40% in SF and employees still preferring to work remotely, there are way fewer people coursing through SoMa on a workday.

We also chatted about return-to-office (RTO) policies. His employer, a major tech company, announced over a year ago it was instituting an RTO plan. At the time it was a transitional, three days a week plan. Many other companies announced similar 3-day plans and it became kind of an industry standard. Yet the reality more than a year later is that his company quietly backpedaled on the plan. Employees are asked to average just one day a week in-office, and even that is not enforced. He personally rarely works in the office. And he was the only person in-office for the meeting. Ten of his colleagues joined remotely on the videoconference.

I picked up a cold, or something like it, in New Orleans.

I could tell at the time the air conditioner in our room was giving me trouble. Our Room of the Seven Gables was nice for having lots of windows, but none of the 6 windows opened, only the door. The AC provided relief from hot, humid weather— but it also circulated air that choked me as I breathed it. Thankfully in the evenings 10-12 days ago it was generally cool enough to open the door to get relief in the evenings. But propping the door open could only reasonably be done late in the evening while one of us was sitting up in the living room.

Well, it could be worse. As I could feel the liquid piling up at the bottom of my lungs I worried I might get a pneumonia. Legionnaires' Disease was specifically spread by a poorly drained AC system.

I hoped that once we left Nola I could dry out. Our room in Mississippi had a better maintained AC— and it vented straight to the outdoors, unlike the units in Nola— but still the windows didn't open. Phoenix, then, was my hope. We had a private balcony off the bedroom! And the desert's famously dry air would help, too.

Alas it wasn't enough. I came home with a bit of a chest cold. The past few days I've been hacking occasionally with a dry cough. This morning it took a worse turn as it became more of a head cold, with a headache and occasional sneezing fits. I also felt sick to my stomach.

I've taken an at-home test for Covid. Sadly part of The New Normal is to wonder, "CoULd tHiS bE CoViD?!" every time one has cold-like symptoms. Fortunately, in this case, it's not. My test was negative. I remain a Covid virgin, a Covid dodger, a Novid.

I'm starting to give up on masking against the Coronavirus. I won't say "I am giving up" because I'm not totally giving up on masking— or other health precautions. I'm still wearing a mask in highest risk situations such as aboard airplanes and in airports. But I've basically given up masking in stores and restaurants.

I remained one of the last holdouts in masking. Even in the otherwise health-conscious area of Silicon Valley I live in I've noticed that voluntary masking in stores is down to about 5% now. Ditto at SJC airport, even.

The government has long since thrown in the towel. President Biden essentially announced the end of treating Covid like an emergency a year ago. Two weeks ago he signed a bipartisan congressional resolution (example coverage: NPR article, 14 Apr 2023) abruptly ending the official emergency just four weeks before it was set to expire already on May 11. And California state government, which was a leader nationally in having a well articulated, evidence based policy, dropped even its requirement for wearing masks in hospitals and clinics, leaving it up to individual hospitals to defend on their own.

In addition to having been one of the last mask-wearing holdouts I remain one of the last never-had-Covid holdouts among people I know. Many people I know have had it twice now.

Catching Covid has become accepted as the new normal. Early on in the Coronavirus pandemic, deniers scoffed, untruthfully, that "Covid is just like the flu". In terms of impact it's not. It's 4-5x more deadly. But it has become like the flu in the sense that getting sick with it has become normalized. The public considers it one of those things that just happens; nothing to be done about it other than seek care & tough it out when you get it. (Nevermind that the chance of getting the flu can also be greatly reduced by annual vaccination... which also most people don't bother to get....)

It's in this context that I'm dropping my mask in more places. There remains little value in trying so hard when virtually nobody else does.

President Joe Biden announced yesterday (30 Jan 2023) that he intends to end the Covid-19 national and public health emergencies on May 11. Biden's move comes only a few weeks after he last extended the emergency on Jan. 11. What's changed in 19 days? His move appears to have been prompted by bills introduced in the Republican-controlled Congress to force an end to the emergency. Though such bills were unlikely to become law— the Democrat-majority Senate likely wouldn't have approved them, and the president could veto them if they did— Biden's move is seen as giving cover to Democrats in Congress who wish to avoid being forced to make a "show" vote.

What actually changes as a result of ending the emergencies in May? Very little, it turns out. In terms of public health policy, masks and other public health restrictions have been off the table for well over a year at this point. In terms of posture, Biden already announced the pandemic is basically over a year ago, as well. In terms of public perception, most of the public already considered it over— largely ignoring public health recommendations such as wearing masks and minimizing time among indoors crowds— even before that.

What the general public will notice as a change after May 11 is that certain things won't be free anymore. The program providing free at-home Covid tests will end. Tests in clinics will no longer be free. Some Covid treatments, e.g. monoclonal antibodies, will no longer be free. At least Covid vaccines will still be free. Those are funded by a different federal law.

The end of these emergencies was announced while the death toll due to Covid is still 500/day. 500 seems like not such a large number, right? Certainly it's way lower than the 3,000 deaths per day we saw during the worse surges. But do the math.... 500/day is over 180,000/year. That's around 5x as many deaths as from influenza. 180k/year still puts Covid as the #4 overall cause of death among adults in the US. And those figures are without another huge spike like the Omicron surge we saw a year ago.

Over the past several years I've made a habit of using New Year's as a time to reflect on, and take stock of, the year just finished. Recently I've posted a few retrospectives about travel. That's only one part of my life. As I've mentally composed this article about everything else I've wondered what the theme would be. Like, if there's a title for 2022: My Experience, what would it be?

It struck me over lunch today. 2022: Stuck in a Holding Pattern.

Coronavirus: The New Normal

The long shadow that Coronavirus continued to cast over 2022 is part of the feeling of being stuck in a holding pattern. I remember at the end of 2020 I expressed cautious hope that 2021 would be the year we beat Coronavirus. Vaccines with strong trial results were rolling out. It seemed the only challenge was how fast we could get to 90%+ uptake and start seeing the virus basically eradicated as has been done with smallpox and measles.

Alas by mid 2021 it was evident that people's mindsets had hardened along partisan lines, with Republicans denying that the vaccines were necessary or even worked at all. 2022 continued more of the same. There's still a stubborn 30% of the US population who refuse to be vaccinated. There's an even larger portion who oppose common-sense public health precautions like wearing masks in indoors public spaces.

Meanwhile we're seeing that the vaccines are not a "silver bullet". Unlike with smallpox and measles, the Coronavirus mutates just fast enough to work its way around vaccine induced immunity. That's not a reason not to get vaccinated, BTW. The vaccines still help, not only reducing your chances of infection by 2-3x but also reducing chances of severe symptoms by 6x.

It just feels like we never managed to fully turn the corner from 2020. It's like instead of 2020, 2021, and 2022 the years have been, movie title style:

2020

2020 Won

2020, Too

I'd say that 2023 is safe from 2020 homophones... except that it could still be "2020 III".

Health

I left 2022 in the same health I started it. Really I should work on getting healthier, especially losing some of the multiple spare tires I've been lugging around for years. I'm not sure when I'll break out of that holding pattern.

One upside of 2022 being same-same for me is that I didn't get Covid. Partly that's preparation: I got fully vaccinated as soon as I reasonable could, and I've gotten all the boosters available. Partly it's caution: I've continued to wear a mask in indoors public spaces and avoid the riskiest situations (aside from airports and aircraft when I travel). And partly it's just luck— or at least things I can't take credit for as deliberate choices. For example, when my spouse got Covid this past year I managed to avoid it!

Friends & Family

I'm going to damn 2022 with the same faint praise I damned 2021 with: At least nobody died.

Continuing to manage through The New Normal of the pandemic-turned-endemic meant not having as many chances to socialize with friends and family as in The Before Times. I haven't made any new friends recently that I can think of. Worse, I've chosen to fire a number of people from the position of being my friend. As I explained in Less Patience for Sucky People the forced alone time of the pandemic gave me a clearer perspective on whether people I counted as friends from years ago were still being friends or if they'd dropped down to jerks whose behavior I don't find amusing, or even tolerable, anymore.

Career

My career is definitely a "stuck in a holding pattern" situation. I continue to stick with a job where I'm underemployed and am being given no support to develop or advance meaningfully. Yes, I've requested it. A few times. Yes, I could push on it even harder— or just find a better job. But like I noted a year ago, I'm pretty much out of fucks to give. I'm being paid reasonably well, even if it is 25-40% less than I'd be making if my career hadn't been stalled the past 10 years. I believe I can retire in a few years. More on that below. Why scratch and claw to get ahead when I can relax on a glide path? There are some benefits to being in a holding pattern.

Finances

2022 has not been a great year financially. The S&P 500 was down 19% in 2022; some indexes were down even more. The silver lining to this cloud is that I actually beat the index in the non-retirement accounts I manage. I finished 2022 down only 6% there. In our retirement accounts we lost 15-16% for the year. I have less control over investing that money. At least we still beat the market there.

I track our investments closely because they're key to us being able to retire soon. What's "soon"? Several years ago I said to myself and my wife: Five Good Years. All we'd need is five good years, then we'd have enough to retire.

I knew when I made the mantra Five Good Years that it wouldn't be just 5 years on the calendar. Markets go down some years. I figured 5 good years would actually take about 7 years, allowing for one down market cycle in the period. How's that worked out? Well, across the past 7 years we've only had three good years, financially. We still need two more good years.

UPDATE: I forgot to explain why I'm overall satisfied with our financial situation at the end of 2022. It's not just, "Ooh, we lost less than the market." Silver-lining-to-a-dark-cloud is never satisfying. What's positive about our finances in 2022 is that we continued to save money, bigly. We set another new record for money saved in 2022. Basically we're living on one salary and saving the other. ...Actually we're living on less than one salary and saving the rest. Aggressive savings has been part of my Five Good Years calculation since the beginning. I'm excited we're outperforming even aggressive goals.

The Year Ahead: More Holding Pattern?

I don't have strong expectations for 2023. I mean, I'd love to think that it's going to be a banner year, one of those last remaining Five Good Years, etc. I'd love to think that, but there's no indication it'll happen. Financially speaking, most people are expecting a recession in 2023. Of course, most people were expecting that for a lot of 2022, as well, which is a large part of why the market was down 19%. Expectation of a recession creates a recession. Maybe 2023 will be another year of a holding pattern... or maybe we'll break out the other side of the holding pattern during the year and finish strong. I hope for the latter but prepare for the former.

Hawk and I are both sick right now. We've got a pair of colds. I'm not sure if one of us brought it home and infected the other (if so, I think she infected me as her symptoms seem to be peaking 1-2 days ahead of mine) or if we got it from the same place— possibly when we dined at a restaurant with a friend on Saturday. The incubation time doesn't seem right for a Saturday infection, though. Hawk had symptoms as early as Sunday evening.

This being the 2020s it's not possible to have cold-like symptoms without having to ask, "CoUlD iT bE cOviD?!?!" Welcome to The New Normal. Hawk took a test a few days ago; the result was negative. This morning we've both taken tests. Results in a few minutes....

Update: *DING* Results are in. Negative for both. Yay, it's just a pair of normal colds. 🤧🤒😵

Update 2: My cold turned out to be a head-fake. Yay, immune system!

As news about the tripledemic has been growing for a few weeks I've considered what changes I can/should make in my own routines. I can't mask up.... I've never actually masked down! All year I've continued to wear my mask in indoors public spaces. I'm one of the few still doing that, even here in politically progressive Silicon Valley. And I've continued to avoid crowded indoors spaces. I don't visit bars or clubs; I don't attend concerts, plays, or sports games. I try even to avoid restaurants when they're packed.

Restaurants are one place where I can further reduce my risk.... by going less often. But how often is less? Before the pandemic I dined out frequently, averaging maybe 13 times per week. When the pandemic officially became a thing in March 2020 I was able to pivot hard on that, not dining out at all, not even getting take-out food, for several weeks. Later in the year I started dining out again once a week, then twice, and so on. As the pandemic situation loosened up in May 2021 with vaccinations freely available and restrictions mostly gone, not to mention good weather meaning I could sit outside at many of my usual restaurants, I resumed dining out more frequently. I never went all the way back up to the 13/week level— which is perfectly fine, since eating at home is better in numerous ways— but I have kind of settled in at the level of 8-9/week.

So, yes, I can dine out less often than 8-9 times per week. I'm not switching to zero; that's too hard of a pivot. But I can drop by, say, 2-3 per week without feeling like I'm denying myself the pleasure of dining out.

Woohoo! I'm finally an executive...

We finally upgraded to executive membership at Costco! (Jan 2022)

...member at Costco. 🤣

Hawk and I upgraded our membership a week ago. I just got the new card today. The store's printer was busted when we were shopping 10 days ago; I had to wait until my shopping trip earlier today to get one.

What does Costco Executive Membership get you? The main benefit is a 2% cash rebate on a year's purchases, paid at each anniversary. There are nominally other benefits, like special sales only for executive members, but I haven't seen people talking about specifics of those very much so I gather they're not that special.

Math Is (Not) Hard

The 2% rebate isn't free. The executive membership costs an extra $60 beyond the $60 regular membership (it's $120 total). Is it worth it? Fortunately it's not hard to figure the break-even point. At 2% back we'll save the $60 premium with $3,000 spend.

Three thousand dollars may sound like a lot but it's only $250 a month. On groceries. And all the miscellaneous stuff Costco sells. On just today's trip, for example, I spent $257. I'm already ahead for the month! I'm confident we'll total $3k in a year.

Ideally we would have upgraded to executive membership a while ago. When we first joined Costco several years ago we figured we weren't spending that level of money there so we turned down the upgrade. That was the right decision then.

When the pandemic started in March 2020, though, our shopping habits changed. Suddenly we were cooking at home frequently enough that it made sense to buy Costco's larger packages at lower unit prices. I guess it was out of a sense of optimism that the end of pandemic, and thus a return to life like "before", was only ever a few months away that I kept putting off the decision to upgrade.

Now I figure that even if the pandemic-turned-endemic does ultimately fade away— which seems unlikely; I've been saying for weeks already This Is The New Normal— we'll keep using Costco size packages because we've altered our habits to cook & eat at home way more often. I'll report back in 11½ months to check the score!

Crossposts: https://canyonwalker.livejournal.com/1044970.html

One way we've been dealing with the Coronavirus winter/Omicron surge is by eating in. After we got home from Hawaii a week ago Tuesday— and canceled our New Year's Eve trip, opting to celebrate safely at home instead— I ate all my meals at home for a solid week. As always, that's a big change for me because pre-pandemic I typically dined out 12 times a week. And while I made a similar pivot to zero with surprising ease when the pandemic first started, back in March-April 2020, it feels harder this time... I think because subconsciously I'm irritated that widespread irresponsibility, fanned by evil demagogues who tell harmful lies for profit, fame, and power, is the reason we still have to suffer this shit almost 2 years later.

Anyway. 21 meals cooked at home. Yay. To celebrate we ordered take-out pizza for #22. Then it was back to cooking at home, until...

...And On The Tenth Day He Dined Out

I get stir-crazy eating at home all the time. Restaurant food tastes good; plus I like the change of scenery of dining out. So today I ate lunch at a favorite local hamburger chain, The Habit. I found they have a new special item, a patty melt burger. It was pretty good. And I ate my lunch at a small table on their well-spaced outdoor patio. Knowing that kind of seating was available was my reason for picking that restaurant and even dining out at all today. And for minimal risk, the food was good.

Crossposts: https://canyonwalker.livejournal.com/1044060.html

"When will the pandemic end?" I'm sure billions of people have asked over the past 22 months. Medical science has a technical answer for this, relating to the Basic Reproduction Number, abbreviated R₀ (R-naught), a measure of a virus's contagiousness. By that standard we're not to the "after" phase yet— particularly because Omicron seems to have a higher R₀ than previous strains.

Recently I read an alternate definition of pandemic/post-pandemic based on a sociopolitical gauge. By that standard, the pandemic is over when we stop focusing on interdiction and instead shift to adaptation. I.e., we stop trying to stop the spread of the virus and instead focus on how to learn to live with it picking us off. But that is not a "Back to Normal" scenario; it's a New Normal. It is a scenario where the pandemic becomes an endemic. 😨

By that social definition we're already post-pandemic. We're into the endemic. 😱

What's the evidence for this? First, half the country, political, has been post-pandemic for at least a year already. That half is done with closures and limitations on indoors restaurants, clubs, gyms, concerts, etc.; done with masking requirements (indeed several states have made it illegal to require masks anywhere); done even with social distancing. And approximately 30% of the country say they will never, ever get the Coronavirus vaccination.

Sadly it's not just the reality-denying wing of the US that's basically given up on trying to stop the pandemic and focused instead of learning to live— or tolerated acceptable losses— with it. It's our Democratic leadership, too. President Biden's speech on the pandemic 10 days ago was all weaksauce stuff. He promised to get us more tests— which haven't arrived! Everyone I've spoken to about Coronavirus is scrambling to find one! And he sent the military in to bolster hospitals that are becoming short-staffed due to insufficient resources and burnout.

Days later the CDC announced a new, shorter recommending quarantine period for people infected. The reduction was not because medical science says less time is needed but because the government recognized virtually nobody was quarantining anyway and hopes a shorter time will get more people to comply.

Crucially, these are not measures to stop the virus; they are only measures for us to figure out how to live with it— and to accept 1,000+ US deaths per day (note: that's 9/11 THREE TIMES A WEEK!!!) from it.

Crossposts: https://canyonwalker.livejournal.com/1038742.html

One thing that's changing as lockdown lifts and life returns to normal is eating out at restaurants. When the lockdown started (actually a few days before it started) I made an abrupt change in dining habits. I went from eating restaurant food at least 12 meals a week down to 0. Zero. I didn't eat restaurant food for a month! After a month I started to do takeout, but only twice a month at first. Gradually I increased that to once a week, then to twice a week— especially as pleasant summer weather made outdoors dining a thing.

I never felt frustrated while my eating-out habit was way down; I was happy that I was cooking at home. Part of it, yeah, was knowing I was safer at home. But a bigger part of it was knowing that home-cooking was cheaper and healthier than buying restaurant food. The pandemic was kind of the kick in the pants I needed to change my habit.

All throughout the lockdown I wondered, When things return to normal will I eat at restaurants twice a day again? I hoped the new habit I created of cooking at home a lot would endure. Sure, I knew my dining-out frequency would be higher than zero; the point was, would it be significantly lower than the old 12x a week?

I'm happy to observe that over past week I've only had restaurant food 4 times. That's actually exactly what I'd set my goal at: twice during the week and twice on the weekend. I'm looking to make something around 4x/week the new normal.

A big part of what's helping me maintain this new normal is having food I enjoy at home. Yes, being forced to kick the old habit has helped. But it's not just about practice saying "No" to going out to restaurants. Any behavioral psychologist, even any dog whisperer, will tell you that to eliminate an undesirable behavior you need to replace it with a satisfying good behavior. A key to being able to eat at home, for me, has been having food I enjoy eating at home. Several times this past week I've thought, "Hmm, I could go out for lunch today..." then thought about food right in my kitchen that would make me happier overall than going out.