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Coronavirus prep

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Replies

  • mmapags
    mmapags Posts: 8,934 Member
    lemurcat2 wrote: »
    mmapags wrote: »

    Howard County bars sales of nonessential items at essential businesses


    https://www.kokomotribune.com/news/local_news/howard-county-bars-sales-of-nonessential-items-at-essential-businesses/article_6d0c2798-7074-11ea-9136-538d5d848958.html


    Howard County has banned the sale of these items in local stores during its stay-at-home order:

    Banned purchases
    Jewelry.
    Furniture.
    Home and lawn decor.
    Toys and games.
    Carpets.
    Rugs and flooring.
    Non-emergency appliances.
    Music.
    Books and magazines.
    Craft and art supplies.
    Paint.
    Entertainment electronics.

    Staying entertained during a long quarantine seems to me to be pretty essential. Not everyone spends all day watching TV. Books, art supplies, music, etc. and even home repair or decorating seem to me to be a very valid way of enduring the long quarantine.

    Of the things you mentioned, you can get books via the Kindle app without ever leaving home. You can also get tons of music to listen to via spotify or Itunes. Art supplies can be more problematic. I hardly watch TV now or prior to the coronavirus. I am also a muscian. So, multiple instruments are at hand and plenty of material and tutorials via YouTube to learn and existing material to practice and perfect.



    Personally, in addition to work and gardening, I'm also back to trying to learn German, which also is something I can work on online (although I have books too).

    Great point a about language learning! Since moving to Mexico almost 2 years ago (and for some time before in preparation), I've been working at becoming more fluent in Spanish. So, I have more time to get better at it right now.

    Just as an aside, we have been able to learn much from being behind the curve here in Mexico. The overall numbers are very low, 1215 cases in the whole country and 29 deaths and it is progressing at a very slow rate so far. Social distancing and staying en casa has been happening for a couple of weeks and that seems to be holding the numbers down.

    Here in the state of Oaxaca, where we live, there are only 14 cases with no new ones in a few days. Mexico City has 234 cases as of today and, while that seems like a more, it is a city of over 25,000,000. Time will tell how it develops but I think there may have been a benefit to being a little later in the curve and learning from what has happened in other places.

  • lemurcat2
    lemurcat2 Posts: 7,885 Member
    Ruatine wrote: »
    The zip code with the most cases also happens to be the "rich" part of town (finding a house for less than $500k is rare), which makes me wonder if the increased cases there are from people coming home from international trips, especially from Spring break a couple weeks ago.

    That was the upshot of the piece I linked earlier about the Chicago burbs. Chicago itself has the most cases (but suburban Cook has more deaths so far), but some of the communities on the North Shore (rich areas with impressive hospitals) have even more diagnosed cases per population than Chicago, and the question was whether it's that those areas are getting more tests for obvious reasons, so more mild cases are being diagnosed (I suspect this is the real reason) or if it might be more people who had been traveling internationally. Of course, with O'Hare, Chicago as a whole is affected by international travel, and the city certainly is very interconnected internationally. And one of the perks of the nice North Shore burbs here is they tend to have easy metra travel to the city so you don't have to drive (which could obviously mean more opportunity for transmission). Although that is not unique to them, it is probably a higher percentage than other suburbanites.
    I'm beginning to remember why I stopped working from home 5 years ago. I've only been working from home now for 2 weeks, but I'm finding the lack of getting out and about and talking face to face with people depressing. I haven't been grocery shopping for 2 weeks and really do need to go - I'm out of several food items that I regularly use - but I'm loathe to go to the grocery store. The couple times I went out to get a few items for my grandmother were hellish - going from store to store to store trying to find basic items like milk, butter, flour. :/

    Yeah, I also hate working from home for similar reasons, although I'm dealing okay so far. I normally would have hated the idea of Zoom but I get the benefits now. I did go grocery shopping today (the first time in about 2 weeks), and the grocery seemed normal (I went to a small local grocery but reports are that my closest chain and the closest TJs are also pretty normal).
  • bmeadows380
    bmeadows380 Posts: 2,981 Member
    mmapags wrote: »

    Great point a about language learning! Since moving to Mexico almost 2 years ago (and for some time before in preparation), I've been working at becoming more fluent in Spanish. So, I have more time to get better at it right now.

    I have wanted to learn Welsh for years, but I don't do well with just being given a bunch of phrases like so many online tutorials do; I need to learn the grammar at the same time, but can't find any online classes in the US like that. Duolingo has it, I think, but its learn a bunch of phrases. I want to know how to form my own proper sentences so that if I need to say something that isn't a stock phrase, I can! that and I want to learn to read it as well as speak it. And its not exactly something I can just teach myself because while Welsh might use the same alphabet letters, they don't get pronounced the same, and a lot of those "this letter in language A sounds like this word in English" doesn't compute - I'm born and bread in West Virginia and we don't pronounce hardly anything like the rest of the English speaking world......
  • lemurcat2
    lemurcat2 Posts: 7,885 Member
    Duolingo has it. I don't know if it's good, but worth a try as it's no cost. I've thought about it -- Welsh, Swedish, and German are languages I've considered (I studied French and Russian in school and learned some Spanish and Italian before trips). Ultimately I've done Swedish and German on Duolingo (and now German at a local learning center online), and would love to do Welsh too.

    The phrases are often hilarious -- I know how to say, in German, "I am not pregnant, I am a man," and "the duck ran around the pig," among other silly things, but I do think they are teaching concepts in a way.
  • Ruatine
    Ruatine Posts: 3,424 Member
    lemurcat2 wrote: »
    Duolingo has it. I don't know if it's good, but worth a try as it's no cost. I've thought about it -- Welsh, Swedish, and German are languages I've considered (I studied French and Russian in school and learned some Spanish and Italian before trips). Ultimately I've done Swedish and German on Duolingo (and now German at a local learning center online), and would love to do Welsh too.

    The phrases are often hilarious -- I know how to say, in German, "I am not pregnant, I am a man," and "the duck ran around the pig," among other silly things, but I do think they are teaching concepts in a way.

    I tried learning Spanish with Duolingo since Spanish is as ubiquitous as English here. I should pick it up again, now that I'm home more. I found with the first go that there are some useful community features with Duolingo where you can get insight from native and non-native fluent speakers for questions not answered by the standard lessons. I also really liked they have lessons that incorporate listening and speaking.
  • lemurcat2
    lemurcat2 Posts: 7,885 Member
    Ruatine wrote: »
    lemurcat2 wrote: »
    Duolingo has it. I don't know if it's good, but worth a try as it's no cost. I've thought about it -- Welsh, Swedish, and German are languages I've considered (I studied French and Russian in school and learned some Spanish and Italian before trips). Ultimately I've done Swedish and German on Duolingo (and now German at a local learning center online), and would love to do Welsh too.

    The phrases are often hilarious -- I know how to say, in German, "I am not pregnant, I am a man," and "the duck ran around the pig," among other silly things, but I do think they are teaching concepts in a way.

    I tried learning Spanish with Duolingo since Spanish is as ubiquitous as English here. I should pick it up again, now that I'm home more. I found with the first go that there are some useful community features with Duolingo where you can get insight from native and non-native fluent speakers for questions not answered by the standard lessons. I also really liked they have lessons that incorporate listening and speaking.

    My dad lives in Mexico part of the year (just returned on Sunday), and he's been using Duolingo and likes it.
  • Nony_Mouse
    Nony_Mouse Posts: 5,646 Member
    Nony_Mouse wrote: »
    Checking in from the bottom of the world. Here are New Zealand's latest stats

    sryc6lrbrk5n.png

    We're on Day 8 of lockdown, and as I've said previously, lockdown really does mean lockdown here. Everything is closed except supermarkets, pharmacies, medical centres, petrol stations, and dairies (convenience stores). We are expected to stay local if going out for a walk etc, only go to supermarket when we really need to. Supermarkets have a one out/one in system to limit the number of people in store, markings on floor for checkout to show distancing, shields for the checkout operators, and we pack out own groceries. Dairies can only have one customer in at a time (many are very small). The rules on essential items were relaxed a little early this week, so some things are now able to be ordered online for contactless delivery, mostly it's things like appliances, home office needs, winter clothing and bedding, etc (though I may have just ordered curling mousse to aid my apocalypse project of encouraging my hair to curl :lol: I'm not quite sure how that qualifies as essential, but I'll go with it!). Most people are adhering to the rules very well. People who aren't get an initial friend chat from the police to explain the requirements, repeat offenders get to visit a cell (has only happened a few times). I think one person has now been prosecuted for repeatedly being a dick.

    I did a supermarket shop this morning, my first trip out other than my usual close to home walks, and it was very surreal with queues at the supermarket, made more so by the fact my little town's testing caravan is set up right opposite one of the supermarkets. I can report that toilet paper was in plentiful supply. Like, overkill plentiful supply. I should have taken photos of the multiple stacks around the place.

    It's very interesting reading everyone here's posts. i honestly don't know that NZ's hardcore approach would have a hope in hell of being accepted in the US.

    Full lockdown does work. New cases here have been declining for the past few days despite increased testing efforts.

    5ogg93yrj28l.png

    Yep, we're hoping to start seeing a decrease in new cases in a few days.
  • ladyreva78
    ladyreva78 Posts: 4,080 Member
    lemurcat2 wrote: »
    Duolingo has it. I don't know if it's good, but worth a try as it's no cost. I've thought about it -- Welsh, Swedish, and German are languages I've considered (I studied French and Russian in school and learned some Spanish and Italian before trips). Ultimately I've done Swedish and German on Duolingo (and now German at a local learning center online), and would love to do Welsh too.

    The phrases are often hilarious -- I know how to say, in German, "I am not pregnant, I am a man," and "the duck ran around the pig," among other silly things, but I do think they are teaching concepts in a way.

    I might give it another try; I had looked at Duolingo but wasn't having much luck before. I tried a CD teach yourself course once. Just listening like that took me over a month to be able to repeat the phrases. They lost me on the second lesson.

    Spanish is one language I've pretty much given up on, because no matter how hard I try, or how many variations of trying to learn how, I cannot trill my r's. I don't think the romance languages period are that easy to pronounce for me. Easier to learn the grammar, sure, but I have a time with some of the sounds. I can do a passible German ch and a somewhat passible Welsh ll, but forget tapped r's and trilled r's. Which is kind of funny because my best french can trill her r's all day long and speaks wonderful Spanish, but she can't do the gutteral sounds like "ch" at all, which frustrated her to no end when she was trying to learn Hebrew.


    A classmate of mine from high school lost her husband the day before yesterday in a bad car accident. That's hard enough, but because of the virus and the lock down, they are only going to be able to do graveside rites (neither of hte funeral homes in this area are set up for live streaming). Its sad because they had 2 kids both under the age of 6. The pastor's wife is starting a round to have folks who normally would have been at the funeral to at least send sympathy cards. She would usually also put together a meal and have folks bring food for the family, but with the stay at home orders, I'm not sure if she'll be able to do that.

    Not sure if it's what you're looking for, but the BBC has a basic welsch grammar document, downloadable for free:

    https://www.bbc.co.uk/wales/learnwelsh/pdf/welshgrammar_allrules.pdf

    It won't teach you much vocabulary or how to speak it, but it'll teach you how it's build up :wink:

    Reminds me that now would be the time to get back to Japanese. Although I still have quite the workload coming up for my studies. Worse than my work workload...