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Staying home during the COVID-19 pandemic: Day 23

Yesterday was supposed to be last day of the San Francisco Bay Area's shelter-in-place order. But we received a public health advisory last week that extends the order until May 3rd. 


This is expected because the USA is nearing peak resource utilisation, based on projections made by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington, assuming social distancing is enforced through May 2020.


So, it appears that Mommy and I will remain officemates for the next few weeks; except that I'll be on "maternity leave" starting next week and will probably mainly act as her IT support while waiting for the baby to arrive.

Anyway, yesterday was a big day for her because she had her very first online meeting via GoToMeeting. Her company's higher ups organised a virtual meeting to update employees on what's going on. I had a bit role in this meeting, showing up on screen for a few minutes as I taught Mommy which buttons to press to mute her mic, to activate her webcam, and to adjust the speaker volume.

Meanwhile, I've been busy the past week working on analysing data for a scientific paper that will be submitted for peer review soon. So far, I've generated co-occurrence matrices, heat maps, and bar graphs for the data that I previously cleaned, loaded into a relational database, and disaggregated based on categorical independent variables. I also applied two unsupervised learning methods to cluster the data based solely on response (dependent) variables. And I already wrote my contributions to the paper... the anthropologist just has to verify if the results are consistent to what happens in real life. Val's inundated with more work so I try to help as much as I can, especially when he needs to bounce off ideas. He even remarked this week that I am becoming an economist... this indicates that my views are making sense! 

On top of these, Biboy had the infant car seat carrier and the stroller set up (I just documented the process). I finished reading The Importance of Being Little. And I was able to successfully shop for household essentials that we were running low on. All in all, a very productive week, surprisingly, because I feel like I've been a heavy, waddling couch potato all week (I now work from my living room couch).

And it's a big week for Anna too because she's started working as a CNA in Yountville Veterans' Home.
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