The Okie in Isolation: Blood

By Bobby Neal Winters


I went to give blood today at Countryside Christian Church.  The Red Cross will be there again on Thursday, as the blood drive at the University has been moved there. 
The experience was not unpleasant.  When I walked through the door they took my temperature: 98.0 in case you are interested.  All of the staff were wearing gloves and masks.  They sat us in chairs that were spaced apart in accordance with social distancing.  My appointment was at 9:45am so I got to the gurney about 11am and was eating raisins at 11:20.  
It was, in other words, about par for a blood drive. 
I took advantage of my freedom to get a prescription filled.  They have the drive through open at Lindberg Pharmacy.  
This afternoon I’ve been fighting the email war.  I think I will mow sometime tomorrow.

The Okie in Isolation: The Dark 4am of the Soul

The Okie in Isolation: The Dark 4am of the Soul
By Bobby Neal Winters
There is a quote by someone--I want to say Winston Churchill--about waking up in the middle of the night with your thoughts when all of your old wounds begin to ache. That was me this morning.  Spurred by some dreams that I don’t remember about graduate school, I got to thinking about a thing that had happened.  I won’t be specific--some of my OSU friends will remember--but it concerned an incident of faculty impropriety. It’d been swept under the rug.  I’d filed it away, but last night my unconscious found it and brought it out to play with.  Thirty years have passed and I have a different perspective now.
My new perspective caused me to reinterpret the events.  Reinterpreting is like eating peanuts: you can’t stop until the bag is gone and the floor is covered with shells. I strayed from my grad school days to the current shutdown of the country. In the darkness, my mind ventured into dark thoughts that daylight banishes.   By the time I made myself get up, I had convinced myself that I would have to start living on pinto beans and get things to barter by scouring the curbs and allies, pushing a shopping cart with a broken wheel just ahead of me.
Getting up, making a pot of tea, and eating a bowl of oatmeal turned out to be a cure for this.
Taking care not to spread COVID 19 is important.  That has been made clear.  But taking care not to spread gloom and panic is also important.  It is a tight-rope we walk: We must be vigilant; but we mustn’t despair.  We must fight the good fight and keep the faith.  We must share Hope:

The Okie in Isolation: Sunday, Sunday

The Okie in Isolation: Sunday, Sunday
By Bobby Neal Winters
It has been a long time since I’ve seen such fine weather.  It’s been like a hot summer day in England: It’s almost 70 outside.  The sun is great.

The "weeping angel" over on Euclid and College

I hosted Bible Study on Zoom this morning.  Seven followers of Christ turned up to talk about the last chapter of the Book of First Corinthians.  Not all shall sleep, but all shall be changed. I did seene of us nodding off, but I don’t think anyone else noticed.
We were all grateful to see our fellow human beings, other friendly faces.
Did Chili’s via DoorDash for lunch.  It’s not the same experience as dining out, but it is a change.  We will have nice leftovers tomorrow.
The town is quiet.  It is a college town and all of the students have been sent home.  This is like Christmas or Summer Break, but with better weather.

Old Glory over the Pittsburg City Police Parking lot.

The Okie in Isolation: A Walk on Saturday Morning

This is the Jock's Niche.

The Pitt is open for Carry-out only

You can worship online with the Presbyterians.

It looks lonely in front of the FUMC

Xanadu has been postponed.

Looks like an episode of the Twilight Zone

The Library had the most helpful information.

The Hazards of Battery-Powered Mowing

The Hazards of Battery-Powered Mowing

By Bobby Neal Winters
We are in the time of year when we will soon begin mowing.  Indeed, my neighbor has started already.  He re-seeds his yard every year and it just explodes in the spring.  This is in contrast to my yard which just looks like something has exploded.
But I try.  Or I try to try. Anyway.
NALM, the National Association of Lawn Mowers, has started an initiative about sustainable mowing.  They are a very “woke” organization.  Not long after COVID 19 got loose upon us they started promoting the fact that while you were mowing you were engaged in the act of social distancing.  Everyone should be much more than six feet away from you.  
I wish I’d taken that more seriously.  Let me explain.
I bought myself a battery-powered mower.  I should say that I had my son-in-law buy me a battery-powered mower.  Well, that’s not exactly right either.  My children are terrified that my wife and I are going to get COVID 19 and die in a paroxysm of agony because we are so old; and they are afraid we are going to give it to their grandmother and take her along with us; as a result of this they won’t let us go to the store.  Therefore, my son-in-law bought me the mower from Home Despot (uh, Depot) and brought it to me.  I then gave him money.
It is a 20-inch Ryobi.  I got a Ryobi because my battery-powered hand tools are Ryobi. It uses the 40 volt 6 Ah lithium batteries.  The 40 volt is how strong it is; the 6 Ah is how long it will last.  It came with one battery and I have since bought another online.  Let me say that most of the cost is in the battery.
Before I go any further, let me say I’d been thinking about this for a couple of years now, and the tipping point was the fact you don’t have to jerk on them to start.  Press a button and mow.
Anyway, I’d gotten this and I was pretty anxious to try it out, but my lawn is not tall enough yet.  Then I saw that the boundary between my yard and my neighbor’s was kind of tall.  Well, I said to myself, let’s give this a little five-minute tryout.
That, I maintain, was a good idea.  It was the next thing that was a mistake.
I invited my wife along so she could see it too.  
I pressed the button and started it up. I made a run along the edge of my driveway.  I then mowed the edge of my garage.  In that one sentence lay the problem.  Along the edge of my garage I’ve been...storing...some leftover fencing material.  I’ve been storing it there for the last twenty years. You never know when you might need it.  Lest any of you are afraid that I mowed over it and destroyed my mower, put those thoughts out of your head right now.  The mower is still safe.  
But...
My wife saw the pile of fencing material.  
“You know,” she said, “I’m making a pile of scrap metal for the parquet scavengers.  Why don’t we move that there?”
“Sure,” I said.  I suddenly found myself in a rendition of “If you give a mouse a cookie.”
As I mentioned, that pile had been there for twenty years.  It was chain-link fence and small trees had grown up through it. It took pliers, hacksaws, shovels, adzes, angle-grinders, and two hours to move that pile. During the course of doing this, we were attacked by a very aggressive and possibly venomous snake.
That was yesterday morning.  It rained in the night, and you can’t even tell I mowed that strip of grass.
I’ll be needing to recharge my battery.
Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com. He invites you to “like” the National Association of Lawn Mowers on Facebook. )

The Okie in Isolation: Mowing the Edge

By Bobby Neal Winters
You will all understand the rest of this if you know that our children are terrified that Jean and I will get COVID 19.  They are isolating us from themselves and our grandchildren who are filthy little vectors. They’ve gone as far as parking one of their cars in our driveway and not moving it to let us out.  They run errands for us and bring us stuff so that we won’t get exposed.
This may be the best thing that has ever happened to Jean and me.

Saturday I decided that it was time to buy a battery-powered lawn mower. (I will tell about this at greater length in my weekly column in the Morning Sun.) This week has been wet and most of my grass--as there is such variety within my lawn--is not ready to mow yet.  But along the edge with the neighbor it is quite a bit taller as he does take a lot better care of his lawn.
I decided that I would mow the edge and I used the opportunity to show the new mower off to my better half.  The rest, as they say, is history.
While I was mowing, Jean got a look at a pile of old fence posts and chain link fence wire that I have been mowing around (had been mowing around) for about 20 years. 
Jean has been cleaning up the yard over the course of the Great Isolation and is throwing away some stuff.  She saw my pile, and said, “Let’s put that in my metal pile.”
Over the years we’ve noted that if we leave metal on the parquet that it doesn’t sit there long.  It will soon be picked up by enterprising young men who will sell it at scrap.
I said, “Sure.”
It has been 20 years.  There were small trees that had grown up through the wire.  It took two hours with various implements of destruction to get this out.
Moral: Don’t let your wife watch you mow!

The Okie in Isolation: Thursday

By Bobby Neal Winters

It is a beautiful day.
I did my walk and took a picture of the Cross which has been dressed for Lent. There is a nice (in the sense of being strong) breeze and bright sunshine.

I have lost one pound over the last seven days.  And this is a real one pound.  I have a FitBit and scale that synchronizes with the FitBit.  It keeps a weekly average for me, and I have lost one pound from the seven-day average.
My back has not hurt on any of the walks I’ve taken this week.  This is why I’ve set my sights on losing the weight.  There is cause and effect going on here. My weight goes down, ergo my back hurts less. Less weight = less pain. Sometimes doing the obvious thing works.

The Okie in Isolation: Disease Modeling

The Okie in Isolation: Disease Modeling
By Bobby Neal Winters

Another beautiful day has dawned. I’ve made it successfully to Wednesday of Spring break.  My day consists of getting up; stretching; showering; breakfast; doing my languages on Duolingo; and then my email.  While I have been instructed to get some rest during this period--and I am as having an electronic wall between me and everyone else reduces stress--the emails do come through because the university is still working.  We are working in isolation, but we are working.
The emails trickle into my inbox, and the rate is small, but if I don’t take care of them they will turn into a lake by the time next Monday rolls around.
For entertainment while I work, I turn to YouTube.  It provides some soothing background noise.  An interesting video that came out today was on Flattening the Curve by Numberphile. They discuss the SIR mathematical model of disease transmission.  The SIR is an acronym where S stands for the number susceptible, I stands for the number infected, and R stands for the number recovered.  Recovered is something of a euphemism because it includes the number of the dead.  The mathematics of this only cares about those who aren’t capable of getting it again. A special case can be modeled by the equations below:

N = S + I + R.
Geeks like me know what those fractions on the left are.  The rest of you should think of them as rates of change with time. On the right side, we’ve thrown in the Greek letters beta and gamma to assert our superiority over you.  It is like when chimps toss poop, but not requiring soap to wash with afterwards.  
The first equation says that the number of susceptible individuals will decrease as more people get it; you’ll either gain immunity or die. So beta is how quick you succumb.
The second equation says that the rate of infection will increase as a higher proportion of the population gets it, but once you’ve got it you're no longer at risk of getting it. (Oh boy!)
The third equation says that the rate of the number recovering is proportional to the number who have it.  So gamma is how fast you get well/die.
The number beta is what we are fiddling with by urging people to stay at home.  The folks on Numberphile have this animated and explain it in more detail for those of you who are interested.
So stay home and decrease beta.

The Okie in Isolation: DoorDash and the Johns Hopkins Map

By Bobby Neal Winters


We did Mexican last night.  I discovered DoorDash.  It is an app that lets you order food from local restaurants and have it delivered.  You put in your credit card; select your restaurant; choose your order from their menu; and order it. You will have put in your credit card and your address when you set up the app.
They bring it to your door and leave it there.  You don’t have to meet them.  Just pick up the sack with tongs, dressed in your hazmat gear and you are good to go.
We had a nice meal and felt better out ourselves for supporting one of my favorite restaurants in town.
In addition to El Caballo de Oro, they deliver for Wendy’s, Sonic, and a number of others.
I’ve been thinking about how this disease (or any disease) is transmitted.  I’ve been looking at the Johns Hopkins map. It shows the number of those infected and the number dead.  Zooming in on the Kansas map, I was stricken by how the cases were distributed in Kansas.  Highway 69 is a straight Euclidean line coming directly out of Johnson and is clearly delimited by the little red dots of contagion.
Johnson county as of this writing has 32 confirmed cases. Highway 69 is the way we get there from this part of the state.  I suppose that if anyone wanted to use this it would help make a case about how important Highway 69 is to this part of the world.  There would be those who would say, yeah, it brought us disease; I can’t argue with that: It brings us everything.
The map does provide a good illustration of how disease spreads. You get first in the hubs, the places where the roads cross.  From there it spreads to the secondary hubs.  From Chicago to Kansas City; from Kansas City to Pittsburg; from Pittsburg to Girard; from Girard to Hepler.
These transitions take time.  Lowering the bump means increasing the length of time in these transitions.
Take this same model and move it to a town.  Say a Rotarian comes back from Johnson County with the disease.  She gives it to people in the club.  They go to church the next Sunday, not know they have it.  They give it to Catholics, Methodists, Presbytereans, and Baptists.  They send their kids to school and day care and bam, it is everywhere.
So we shut down the local hubs.  We watch some more TV. We order in.  Some DoorDash from Sonic sounds good.  Maybe tomorrow.

The Okie in Isolation: Spring Break Begins

By Bobby Neal Winters
I am at home.  This is the seventh day in a row that I’ve been at home.
It’s not too bad so far.
Though you can’t tell it, since I’ve written those first three sentences
I’ve set up a telephone appointment with my bank;
Walked around the block;
Called Bubba on the phone (this was done simultaneously with number 2 above);
Used a battery-powered angle-grinder to turn a Tea-tin into a piggy bank for my youngest grandson.
Let’s expand on those in reverse order.
(4) My wife has taken it as a quarantine challenge to potty-train my youngest grandson.  As an aid to doing this, she is giving him coins as a reward.  She first attempted using pennies.  To this my grandson replied: “No grandma, big pennies.”  He’s not yet potty-trained but he can negotiate. I think this needs to be rewarded, so he’s going to get a home-made piggy bank for his “big pennies.”
Pig pennies, by the way, are quarters, and my wife is taking them from my change flowerpots.  That’s fine.
(3) Bubba is trapped in his house as well. He isn’t dealing with the quarantine stoically.  He has a good imagination and has never used it to imagine anything good.  I suspect this is because he’s had too much pain and disappointment in his life.  So I talked with him and it did us both a world of good.
(2) I talked while I was walking because I am a Fitbit slave.  I’ve decided this isn’t a bad thing during the Great Isolation.  We need to have structure; we need to keep moving.  Walking around outside is a good reminder that there is a lot of good in the world.  There are no unburied bodies in the street yet.  Everyday that happens is a good day.
(1) My wife and I began the process of estate planning.  Having put together a revocable trust, the attorney gave us a letter of things we needed to do.  I immediately put that aside for “later.”  That was about 4 months ago.  It is now later.  It turns out there are only a few things we need to do because--and I cannot stress this too much--we don’t have anything.  Having said that, we need to move our meager savings into the trust. Therefore, I set up a phone call.
Happy first day of Spring Break

Hello from the Churn

By Bobby Neal Winters
I learned how to do a Microsoft Teams meeting this week. So did a lot of other people. If you have Microsoft 365, it is an easy thing to do. I got a google phone number this week. Changed my message at work so that it will tell people to call my google number and get me at home.  It’ll either forward to my cell phone or to voicemail. It also lets me use my computer as a phone.
With the inevitable exception here and there--to small to mention but I will because otherwise you’ll think I am lying--everyone has pulled together like troopers.  We’ve switched to problem solving mode.  Things which would have labored through the system at a snail’s pace (actually snails talk about how slow universities are) have simply happened: “So let it be written; so let it be done!”
We can do this!
I am a fan of the Expanse Novels written by James S.A. Corey.  As various points, these books refer to something called “the churn.” The churn is a generic term for a time of rapid changes.  There is a “before” and an “after” and in between there is the churn.  During the churn the world is reordered. The first shall be last and the last shall be first.
There will be more online meetings from now on germs or no germs. It is just too danged easy to do.
I consider myself to be tech-savvy, but I discovered that I’d been doing things the hard way for a long time with some of my software.  Having discovered these new ways, it is like scales have fallen from my eyes.  I want to go out into the world and preach the best practices of software use.
Halleluyah! Do I have an Amen on Sharepoint?
And our children, the much maligned Millennials, they were born to this.  My 21-year-old daughter was watching some of my compatriots and I struggle through the process of learning some of the things that she just knows.  She said, “This is painful to watch.”
None of these things is hard to learn.  We just put off learning them because we didn’t have to.  The system was working the way things were so we put off the five minutes that it took to learn to change our phone messages; to set up a Teams meeting; to do Zoom; to do VigGrid; to get Google Voice; to use Microsoft 365. 
Then there simply was not a choice and we did it.  There is no going back.  Even if you didn’t learn, enough people know how easy it is that you won’t be let off the hook now.  You will have to learn to do this or you will be left behind and laughed at.
Not everybody has Microsoft 365. However, if you have Facebook and a webcam, you can have face to face conversations with anyone else who is similarly equipped.  I bet your grandchildren are. There are videos on Youtube for how to do this.
This is the churn. This is the year you learn how to use all of the technology that you’ve been ignoring. You are trapped inside with your computer. Figure out what it's all about. We will be doing many things a different way from now on.
Restaurants are going to have to be nimble.  Sure, there will come a day when we all start eating out again.  In the meantime, a lot of restaurants have switched to serving take out.  Some of them by phone; some with online ordering and payment; some will do all of that and deliver on top of it all. 
Here’s a hint guys: The easier you make it, the more business you will get.  When this is all over, you will still know how to do this, and you will still get business this way. If you don’t you won’t.
It is a time of change.  It is the churn.
Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com. He invites you to “like” the National Association of Lawn Mowers on Facebook. )

I like my Pangolin Well-Done

I like my Pangolin Well-Done

By Bobby Neal Winters

You’ve heard, no doubt, about the Butterfly Effect: A butterfly flapping its wings in Beijing causes a hurricane in Florida.  Well, please bear with me. There is one theory that the Corona Virus, aka COVID 19, first entered the human world when someone bought some wild meat in a market in the Wuhan Province of China, didn’t cook it thoroughly enough, and ate it, becoming infected.

Not quite as pretty as a butterfly, but, hey, it does capture the metaphor: A tiny--a personal--action having global consequences.  As I write this, the university where I work started spring break a week early.  When spring break is done, we will be starting classes back using methods of instruction that do not require bringing large masses of students into the same room with each other.

Here is the math of it.  Suppose that, in the general population, only 5 percent have the disease.  That means a given individual has a 95 percent chance of not being infected.  If you bring 20 of these into the same room, however, there is only a 35 percent chance that no one is infected, i.e. a 65 percent chance that someone is.  You have just exposed the whole room.  They go to classes of 20 other uninfected students, and it spreads like fire.

This isn’t a zombie apocalypse.  A zombie apocalypse wouldn’t really spread because you can tell what a zombie looks like. If you are zombie, you know it because you’re gnawing on someone’s skull.

In terms of contagion, this is much more subtle.  Most people won’t know they have it; they might not know they are sick.  I’ve read the symptoms and for the most part it looks more like being in your fifties than anything else, but there is a nontrivial part of the population that is more susceptible.
For those with the co-morbidity conditions, it is much more serious.  One table I looked at, for those over 80 there is about a 15 percent chance of dying once you get it.  On one hand, that is an 85 percent chance that you won’t die; that’s good. On the other hand, I wouldn’t get on a bus that advertised that I only had 15 percent chance of dying once I got on.

Okay, then, how do you not get on the bus?

Here we look to simple, common sense things: Wash your hands and stay in.  Yes, you love your children and grandchildren.  You want them to know that.  Well, they do. They might feel sad if they don’t get a hug now, but how sad will they be knowing that they killed Mimaw or Pawpaw?  Don’t you want for them to be around you a few years longer so they know you better?  You’ve still got some things to teach them.

Okay, young people, you very likely won’t feel sick at all if you’ve gotten this.  I know you think you have to go to the beach or wherever to do what you young people like to do.  I was young once and I can almost remember how it feels, so if you can’t keep yourself home, do you think you can limit your talks with Mimaw and Pawpaw to telephone conversations until you can get tested. Surely there will be some tests sometime.

I’ve seen estimates that eventually 70 percent of the population is going to get this.  That is statistics.  We can try to manipulate this in various ways.  We can slow it down through old-fashioned, God-fearing cleanliness; that will keep our medical infrastructure from being overloaded if it works.  We can protect those who are vulnerable by being careful.

Until this passes over, wash your hands, keep your distance, and eat your pangolin well-done.

Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com. He invites you to “like” the National Association of Lawn Mowers on Facebook. )