Today’s a bit of a crapshoot day for me.  As a consequence of traveling during break, I am required to get a (negative) Covid test before returning to work.  Granted, almost every teacher on the island now seems to be required to do the same.  I actually scheduled mine as I was sitting in the Minneapolis-St. Paul airport on the way to Tennessee when I realized that things really were about to get tricky on the island with cases and testing.

So beyond the neighbors, I haven’t really had close contact with others since returning.  Even in public, I’ve kept some distance.  I am, of course, hopeful for a negative test today.  But with the prevalence of asymptomatic results running around, you never know.  If it’s a negative test, I get one more full day of vacation before heading back to work.  If it’s positive, I get to quarantine and teach from home for a week, which isn’t all that appealing.

We’re also allowing students to go online for a couple of weeks if their families are concerned.  I’ll be teaching seniors this semester, the group with the most mobility and freedom for online learning.  So that will also be interesting.  Beyond that, I’m in the process of “on-boarding” two part-time teachers for my department.  So yeah.

I’m actually expecting the next few weeks to be pretty messy all around.  And I’ve tried to make peace with that.  The trip home was good and necessary, and I knew the risks.  Because you can’t wait around forever for things to “return to normal.” Obviously, that isn’t happening anytime soon.  So we make the best decisions we can given the circumstances.  But yes: this will be a messy month.  And it will be a messy semester, but more on that later.

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It’s interesting to me that today’s Old Testament reading is the story of Elijah as he flees and cries out to God in great distress just after his defeat at the prophets of Ba’al.  That’s a bit of what January 2nd is like for all of us, I think.

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Yesterday I posted a couple of “New Year’s” comics that showed some of the effects of the “lag time” that threads the out-going year to the in-coming one.  Today’s classic Peanuts strip by Charles Schulz is another example.  I’m not sure if it make much sense to children, but to adults it likely resonates deeply.

(image from gocomics.com)