Quiz #103. Ring in the New Year
Why are we extra vigilant and on guard in 2021? Reflections on Ring doorbell cameras, a fox and signing up for the vaccine in Steve's Stay-at-Home Coronavirus Quiz for Sunday, January 17, 2021.
Sunday morning, January 17, 2021. 4:05AM.
Awake too early, but what else is new?
On Saturday afternoon, I watched the first NFL Playoff game between the Green Bay Packers and Los Angeles Rams. When it ended, I programmed the TV to record the second game between the Buffalo Bills and Baltimore Ravens. I turned off my devices and watched the end of Season 1 of “Broadchurch” with Sara. A perfect activity for a January Saturday night during the 10th month of a deadly global pandemic.
As soon as I woke up this morning, I watched the Bills-Ravens game on the DVR. I’m not invested in either team. I just wanted to see the big plays unfold, mostly because I am in several playoff pools and wanted to see how individual players did. It only took 40 minutes. Fast forwarding is a wonderful thing. By 4:45AM, I was done. Even with not much to do during another stay-at-home coronavirus weekend, I was pleased and surprised at my time-use efficiency.
By 5:00AM, I needed something new to do. I went upstairs to find the Ring doorbell which Ted and Erica had given us several years ago for Christmas. We’d never used or installed it. Mainly because we didn’t want our neighbors to think that we didn’t trust them and also worried about the Big Brother aspect of a surveillance camera on the front of our house.
I dug out the Ring because of something that happened on Wednesday morning, January 13th. After I’d been awake and let the dogs out, Sara came downstairs. While she was fixing her first cup of coffee, I stood in the kitchen talking to her. Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed some motion on the back deck, right outside our back door. I thought for a moment that it was one of the dogs, but then I remembered that I had already brought them back inside. I looked more closely and in an instant realized it was a fox. I grabbed Sara to turn her around so she could see it too. That caused her to scream and the fox to scurry. We ran to the back door to see the fox run to the back of the yard. It stopped at the chain-link fence at the back of the yard and stared back at us for a moment. As I tried to figure out where my phone was so I could snap a photo, Sara worried that the fox was now trapped in the backyard. Before I could get my camera, we watched as the fox just jumped to the top of the fence and then back down to the ground on the other side of the fence, scurrying into the river bank behind our house. We were amazed that the fox would come up a flight of deck stairs all the way to our back door. Clearly, it had followed the scent of the dogs but it was daylight--and this seemed like a brazen act.
I am sorry that I did not get a picture of the fox. These images are taken of the kitchen, back deck and back yard at the same time of day that we saw the fox on the deck, right outside the back door.
Enter the ring. This Sunday, I have now set it up on the side of the garage to keep track of the fox and any other critters that might be lurking in the dark. It wasn’t a surprise to us that there would be a fox near the back yard. We live on a small river and know that’s a haven for wildlife from ducks and herons to deer and racoons. Sara has often seen foxes running down the riverbank across the river from to our house. For the last two years, both of our neighbors have reported that a fox had a litter of foxes on the riverbank behind our three houses. The mother and her kit would come up in the neighbors’ backyards to play in the early morning, but they’d never come into our yard that we had seen. We always thought that the smell and presence of our 4 dogs kept them away. We knew they were lurking but always thought of them as “out there”--beyond our yard. Not a problem. They’d never approach the house. Our house. The problem, it seems, was a failure of imagination on our parts. We just never thought a fox would come out of hiding and go up the steps onto the back deck in the light of day. Our lesson learned, we’re now vigilant. On alert. Watching.
Look closely to see Happy by one of the backyard chairs. We’ll let you know what creatures we see with the Ring now installed in the back yard. Thank you, Ted and Erica!
With my weird sleep pattern of waking up between 4AM and 5AM no matter when I go to sleep, I also take a lot of naps. On weekdays when I need to work until 11PM, I usually nap in the late morning. After seeing the fox on Wednesday morning, I settled in for my nap at about 9:30AM. It was a weekday so Betsy had dropped off her dogs, Fred and Brownie. In addition, Sara had to run a training session on Zoom so needed me to keep all 4 dogs away from her workspace. I took them into the guest bedroom with me and we all settled down for a long winter’s nap. With the thought of the fox in my head--and wondering what our own animals might be up to when we weren’t looking--I decided to set up my iPhone on a tripod by the side of the bed to see what the dogs would do while I napped. I recorded a :31 time-lapse video which covers 2 hours. What’s remarkable in looking at this time-lapse is how little the dogs move (and how little I move). In 2 hours, Brownie and Happy never left the bed, Fred and Stella do. (It’s hard to tell, but I also got up once.)
It shouldn't surprise anyone that Sara cautioned me against sharing this video. It shows me sleeping--and she felt that’s something that should be kept off an internet blog. I carefully framed the video so you’d only see my back and clearly have different boundaries than Sara on what can be shared and what cannot.
On Tuesday morning, Sara and I sat drinking our morning coffee. A quiet time to catch up once the work week begins. She told me that she wanted to share something with me that she’d done over the weekend. This peaked my attention. We live together in the same house. With the pandemic, we don’t go out except to walk the dogs. There are not a lot of secrets.
The secret was that she’d submitted something to the New York Times’ Metropolitan Diary, diary@nytimes.com. My first reaction was that I was upset. Not angry, just perturbed. Not that she’d kept it from me but I was annoyed that, for her, she’d taken the very unusual step of sharing something from her life in a public forum--and it might get published in the New York Times. Meanwhile, I’ve been writing this quiz for almost a year now, sharing almost every detail of our stay-at-home life to a small, yet loyal, group of about 50 regular readers on Substack. If her story gets published--it’s very good and very New York--I told Sara I would be shaking my head (as the kids would say). Not so much “Why her?” but more “Why not me?” Sara, who knows me all too well, said she was not surprised by my reaction. It was, she told me, one of the reasons she hadn’t told me about sending it to the New York Times in the first place. I am flawed but predictable.
Sara later shared a copy of her submission with me, reprinted here with her permission.
In my twenties in the mid-1980's, I worked at a small non-profit on 78th and 5th on the Upper East Side. Each day I would commute uptown on the 6 line and walk from the 77th Street station. At that hour, I would rarely see people as I walked. One day, I saw a man standing alone waiting to cross the street at the corner of 78th and Madison. As I approached him, I smiled warmly and said, "Hi! How are you? How have you been?" while I wildly searched my brain for his name thinking -- where do I know him from? High School? College? Where? He smiled with a twinkle in his eye and said warmly "I'm great! How are you?" I started to answer him when I suddenly remembered....I knew him from TV! It was John McEnroe! I gasped and covered my mouth with my hand. I swung my body parallel to his on the corner while I tried to re-wrap the city cloak of anonymity around myself. When the light finally changed, I rushed down the street toward my office. As I dashed to unlock the door, Mr. McEnroe passed by me on the sidewalk and said, "Have a great day!"
This week, our home state of New Jersey was in the news when health officials announced that they were expanding the criteria for those now eligible to get a Covid vaccine. In New Jersey, the group now includes people with a much broader range of risk factors than the CDC has recommended--including smokers. Some people were upset that smokers were being rewarded for bad behavior while health officials pointed out that it had nothing to do with that. Theirs was a simple calculation of risk and keeping as many people who might need a hospital bed if they caught the coronavirus from catching the virus in the first place.
As noted in Quiz #102. January, we registered for a vaccine with the state on January 5th. That put us in the line, but with the new criteria, the line has changed. What’s more, I found out that the state registration is not synched up with all of the more than 100 vaccine sites that are being set up across the state. By adding 4-million new people to the list of those now eligible to get a vaccine when the state only has 400,000 vaccines, this week there was an online surge in people trying to sign up for the vaccine.
I am sorry to confess that this week I got briefly swept up in an online panic, mostly from worried (and yes, entitled) baby boomers like myself. Frustrated that the state registration wasn’t synced with local sites, I scrambled to get signed up at local sites. We don’t have an appointment, but we’re signed up at a few local sites so we’ll get an alert when they do get vaccines and have openings for appointments. Sara could sense my upset (in editing this, Sara called “could sense my upset” an understatement) especially when I saw images on social media of non-health care workers getting their shots in New Jersey. She urged me to be patient. We’re on the list. Our turn will come.
And so here we are. Sunday, January 17th.
On the verge of an historic week.
A nation on edge. Vigilant, watching and waiting.
Trust the process. Do the work. Be patient.
Help is on the way.
If you like what you’ve read here, feel free to share it with others.
What did not happen?
A. Sara’s already watched “Broadchurch.” It’s a murder mystery and before watching the final 2 episodes of Season 1, she asked me who I thought the killer was. I told her who I thought it was and it turns out I had figured out the right person though Sara did not let on that my guess was right;
B. This week, we got new laundry baskets from Amazon. The tops of the old ones had been chewed by Happy when she was a nervous puppy;
C. In my gift exchange with co-workers, I got a copy of Obama’s book, “A Promised Land:”
D. A coworker emailed me last weekend for advice on a pandemic photo project, “Curious if you recommend going by year or by events?... I welcome you checking in on my progress since I have some momentum now that could easily subside!” I responded, “I cannot tell you how happy this email made me.” I then explained my system of organizing photos by year and date in digital albums that are consistently named across storage methods on different platforms like the cloud and a hard drive. For more, see Steve’s Guide to Family Photos.
E. This weekend, I am scanning pictures from 1991 which include a picture of me blowing a bubble while chewing gum in Moscow’s Red Square.
Want the answer?
Answer #103. Ring in the New Year.
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Want more?
Here’s the next quiz in the series: Quiz #104. Conduct Unbecoming.
Here’s the previous quiz in the series: Quiz #102. January.
Here’s the first quiz in the series: Quiz #1. Stella and Social Distancing, March 13, 2020
Here is an archive of all the quizzes.
The quiz is explained here: Steve’s Stay-at-Home Coronavirus Quiz.
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