My university stays the course, no changes in policy, although the number of COVID-19 cases in Stevens County are climbing, I’ve had students tell me they can’t come to lab because they’ve been exposed, and are under quarantine. It’s all so predictable, but we’re on cruise control.

The missives from on high are sounding just like this humor piece on Miskatonic University’s safety plan.

Thank you for submitting Miskatonic University’s proposed COVID safety plan. We have a few brief comments and questions.

Social distancing in classrooms
You write that “through queer and monstrous perversions of geometrical laws, students will be seated at blasphemous angles outside the curves of our dimensions, thus remaining safely six feet apart.” Please clarify whether safe distancing could be achieved without resort to “loathsome horrors beyond human conception.”

Food services
We agree that students need not wear masks during meals. However, please revise the final plan to say “while eating,” rather than “while slobbering and ravening with delight.”

Huh. I didn’t find it very funny.

It’s been a rough week, and next week will be even rougher. I seem to have accumulated a collection of scheduled committee meetings. On top of that, I’ve got my first heavy dollop of grading to get done, and next Friday is a big math day which is always frustrating for some of the students.

So today I’m playing hooky and skipping town! Mary and I are heading north with a cooler to stock up on groceries, and to make a field trip to the ecostation looking for spiders. I shall emerge rested and refreshed later this afternoon, I hope.

Yeah, we’re supposed to do it and have in-person labs this week. I managed to defer it all, though, by making the first two weeks of lab virtual — one of the things that ate up my weekend was a last-minute rush to get a video guide together, with some image data for the students to analyze — before we commit to actually meeting students face-to-face in lab, on 8 September for me. Maybe the virus will disappear by then? Maybe the university will come to its senses? Maybe I’ll just have to be brave and risk exposure?

We’ll find out in two weeks!

I guess it’s nice that the administration is honest.

In a July 1 email to Silliman College residents when Yale first announced its plan to reopen on-campus housing, Head of College and psychology professor Laurie Santos warned Yale’s “community compact” was not to be taken lightly [and] explained that some staff members are from sectors of society that are particularly vulnerable to COVID-19, and that they do not have the choice of whether to come to campus. …

“We all should be emotionally prepared for widespread infections — and possibly deaths — in our community,” Santos’s email reads. “You should emotionally prepare for the fact that your residential college life will look more like a hospital unit than a residential college.”

Welcome to college! Prepare for a year of suffering and death!

It was a killer weekend, but I got a pile of work done, and now I’ve got a brief respite ahead of me. Very brief. My plans now are:

• Spider feeding! They hunger.
• More egg sacs hatched over the weekend, so I’ve got a lot of babies to sort out.
• We’ve been collecting time-lapse recordings of nocturnal web construction. I’ve got to sort out a few gigabytes of images.
• Class! Today I’m talking about basic chemistry of small molecules as a prelude to macromolecules the rest of the week.
• My students have been submitting lab schedule preferences, this afternoon I have to sort them into sections before the first lab tomorrow.
• Yeah, first lab tomorrow. This one is online, so I’m still not bumping into students, yet. Two more weeks until we’re physically rubbing elbows. I’m terrified.

As usual, it’s busy busy busy.

But here’s one more! It’s about trilobites. You can’t go wrong if your song is about trilobites. Prove me wrong!