I haven't read the book, but a few weeks ago I saw the opera. No, really! It was great. The book will probably be good, too, if with fewer arias. It's an eyewitness account of the 1996 Everest disaster, from a travel journalist who was part of one of the expeditions.

Great Expectations should be finished tomorrow. I paused earlier this week to read (in translation) Jean Anouilh's Antigone, his 1944 allegory for occupied Vichy France. It hadn't been on the reading plan but Middle Girl was assigned it (in French) for her French Lit class, simultaneous to reading Sophocles' original in her Greek class, and, for good measure, Irish poet Seamus Heaney's version. Better her than me.

I’m imagining watching the apocalypse unfold, a bowl of tortilla chips on the lap and salsa at hand, through very clean living room windows.

I mentioned this on the other thread, but since it's relevant to prepping .... I was at our HEB this morning and they had seized opportunity by the forelock and put together a big display of Coronavirus products: paper towels, toilet paper, jugs of water, hand sanitizer, wipes, and tortilla chips.

I loved visiting that sculpture garden, and I envy you the opportunity to enjoy it. Big State U. has an art museum but it's second- and third-rate stuff.

Stanford's cast of The Gates of Hell would be appropriate viewing. South By Southwest, cancelled. Big State U.'s open house event, cancelled. Rodeo and Fairgrounds going forward ... do I take Wee Girl, or wait for next year? She'd want to go with friends and it might depend on whether their parents think it's okay. Our HEB made up a big display of CoronaPanic products: paper towels, toilet paper, jugs of water, wipes ... and tortilla chips. Nice that they're keeping their sense of humor through the apocalypse.

I don't think you're considering the importance of the hand sanitizer enabling. ETA: Mayor A. could kill 2 birds with 1 stone by handing out free hand sanitizer to the homeless as a good will gesture.

Great news: the South By Southwest music festival will go on, packing people from all over the country into crowded venues for a week, because our mayor tells us "there's no evidence cancelling SXSW makes us richer safer." Our Interim Health Authority Spokesman says: “We are also concerned because SXSW has been so engaged in helping us mitigate, that if we shut it down people will come to this community anyway, they are going to go to restaurants and public gatherings anyway, but we wont have the messaging, we wont have the hand sanitizer, we won’t have the additional mitigation steps SXSW has really been partners with us on.” (Apple, Amazon, TikTok, Facebook, and Intel, unaccountably unconvinced, have pulled out of SXSW.)

When the power grid has gone down here, it's because of a temperature spike when lots of people are home and everyone runs their AC at once. So I think, what happens when all the big tech companies here tell all their employees to stay home and telecommute, and the ISD cancels classes so all the kids and their parents are home, and Big State U. cancels classes and all 50,000 students are stuffed in their dorms, and we have one of those crazy humid spring days when the temperature spikes up to the 90s?

Dh says, I could get rid of some of the books.

I notice a lot of people are getting frozen supplies. After 40+ years living here, I have a lot of confidence in our city keeping the water flowing (if not necessarily clean) if they're understaffed, but zero confidence in their ability to keep the electric grid up, so I haven't bothered buying frozen. Though the rice and beans and flour are in the freezer because there's no room for them in the tiny pantry (and because of meal moths). We can light our stove with a match if necessary. What are people's thoughts about electricity availability? Has it been a problem anywhere hit by Covid?

That's reassuring, thanks. I would be a stockpile person by personality, but we live in a house without a lot of storage possibilities: no garage, 18 cubic foot fridge, food pantry smaller than that, tiny closets that barely hold the clothes. The grocery store is nearby so we pick things up as we run out of them, and generally have three or four days' worth of food at most. Living in the middle of the city is nice but Costco buying is not a thing we do. I agree with you about the water, on reflection. But where to put it....

Actually I should totally buy some extra alcohol because Middle Girl uses it all for her art projects. Though I'm still not clear what it's for in the Coronacrisis.

My Lenten resolution to stay off the internet has already fallen victim to the Coronavirus, so here goes. In the Coronavirus Megathread, there's some talk about supplies. So, what supplies should one get? Not get? What's already out of stock or rationed in your area? Has the CDC said anything specific? The Crown family caved and made a prepper shopping trip: dried beans, rice, pasta, powdered milk, canned fruit & vegs, peanut butter and mixed nuts, salt, sugar, flour, oil, potatoes, onions & apples, chili powder & comino (essential). These are all things we eat anyway, the Crowns being mostly vegetarian (I got some cans of tuna for myself). Multivitamins and iron supplements. Extra canned and dry cat food we got last week when it looked like there might be shortages because of panic buying: the rest of us are able to eat unfamiliar foods without throwing up on the carpet. Toilet paper, paper towels, kleenex, tampons, batteries, liquid hand soap and detergent, dishwasher tabs, laundry tabs. Not in hoarder amounts, just extras of things it would be annoying to run out of. Illness supplies: extra strength Tylenol, Immodium, Pedialyte, cough syrup, Sudafed (actually store brands for all of these). These are things we should have had on hand already but didn't. We ordered a fingertip pulse oximeter on the advice of an actual prepper, as one of the Crowns has a history of fighting for breath when she gets a respiratory virus (she's the reason everyone gets a flu shot the first week they come out). We didn't get water, alcohol, or wipes, though I see those are now all rationed at our HEB. I honestly couldn't think of a great reason to get them when we have bleach solution and cloths and paper towels; and I couldn't think of a scenario requiring water hoarding. When our city went nuts last year in the Great Water Panic, we just boiled our water for a week. Now please tell me why this was all misguided. :)

Why would you have peanuts when you could have pecans? I remember Stuckey's had those little peg games in the little wood boards, where you jumped the pegs over each other and tried to get down to one peg. I also remember reading in the Statesman that the last Texas Stuckey's had closed -- I think I was in college -- and though I hear a few have reopened, there are none in Central Texas anymore. So sad.

Our focus will be on free reading of every level and kind; she didn't read for a long, worrisome time and is now catching up and devouring books. Reading will be half the 'school' day. Academics for the other half (not all of them every day): English: So You Really Want to Learn English 2; James Boyd's Drums (with Study Guide) Vocabulary/Spelling: Word Wealth, Jr. Writing: Warriner's Composition: Models & Exercises (First Course) Latin: Artes Latinae, Level II Greek: if we finish Hey, Andrew! over the summer we will start Athenaze French: BJU French 1 (second half) plus Foreign Service International (summer) and conversational French with tutor (fall/spring) Math: AoPS Geometry / Alcumus Arithmetic: Standard Service Arithmetics 6 Science: Various TOPS units Music: Suzuki cello, Musition/Auralia (theory) Art: Phonics of Drawing and lessons from older sister; The Arts of Mankind for history Religion: Explorer's Bible Study; Vision Books History: Milliken workbooks for World History.* *For unfathomable reasons, out of all the worthier history resources we own or can get, she really loves these, and will learn history from them, because she enjoys gazing at the low-quality drawings on the transparencies while I read her the text. We don't even own a projector to put the transparencies on. Following the maxim "the best curriculum is the one you actually use" here. Also kind of sort of unschooling. 😬

Mmmmm pecan logs

I feel my profile pic captures me pretty well. My actual eyebrows are less bushy.

Excellent timing.

I finished Memoirs of Vidocq!!! At last. All 1000+ pages. The fourth volume contains an odd multi-chapter account of a young prostitute/thief who attempts to reform and is thwarted by the System that won't let her escape her past. Vidocq presents this as a true story but it's clearly fictional, and is the obvious source material for Hugo's Les Misérables (Hugo was an enthusiastic promoter of Eugène Vidocq and his Memoirs). A fascinating read in need of a modern translation; the English translator, working in 1829, admits to leaving out material he considers inappropriate for more modest English morals. Now I need to finish Great Expectations for Family Dickens. Dh better get on the ball. Are we continuing our list of Quarantine Reading, for those who would enjoy sitting out the Plague Apocalypse with a book about a Plague Apocalypse? I can't believe I neglected the greatest Plague Quarantine book of all time: Boccaccio's Decameron. One hundred stories told while the ten storytellers wait out the Black Death ravaging Florence in a villa outside town.

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There's an old joke that the Vatican admits the Pope is sick three days after he dies. They denied that John Paul II had Parkinson's for years after it was evident to the world. No, he doesn't have Covid; if he did, they certainly wouldn't be telling us.

Dh recommends Saramago's Blindness for plague reading, and something or other by somebody King. I read Blindness a few years ago and it does have very relevant quarantine content. Brennert, Moloka'i Mandel, Station Eleven Camus, The Plague Defoe, Journal of the Plague Year Shelley, The Last Man Saramago, Blindness

This cries out for a Coronavirus Quarantine reading list. Two literary must-reads that spring to mind are Daniel Defoe's Journal of the Plague Year, about the London plague of 1667 -- short and readable, and tremendously interesting -- and Mary Shelley's The Last Man, possibly the earliest post-apocalyptic fiction, in which the world's population succumbs to a plague (except the Byron figure, who naturally gets himself killed in a war). What else? Anyone?

I will try to be better about reading one of Newman’s Parochial and Plain Sermons daily. Yourself?