While Triana Slept . . . Posts May Be Slowed Until April 6
Saturday the 14th. A bit of history: as a result of the coronavirus, Indiana University had decided that following spring break, technically beginning tomorow for a week, classes would be only taught online for two weeks more, or in effect the University would remain closed until Monday, April 6, the notion being to allow self-quarantining if needed for students returning, e.g., from overseas. Other things followed. Non-classroom functions would be curtailed too — no more IU Cinema movies for me for the rest of the month! Local schools also, with their own spring breaks on similar schedules, would be closed for the same time, and non-vital local government meetings would be postponed. And then, for me, the hoped-against drop of the Friday the 13th shoe: the Monroe County Public Library would also be closed until April 6th.
The problem is I do most of my internet work at the library, the Computer Cave equipment (including the World’s Second Slowest Computer on which I’m composing this post now) being too old and underpowered to cope well with much of what must be done. It can do some things — and actual new writing that I do is done offline, for which it works fine — so I won’t be completely out of touch with the world outside, but it can have troubles with certain downloads, for instance, or, more to the point, is not at its best dealing with things like Facebook. Or blogs like this either.
So, bottom line, my own activity may be curtailed for the rest of the month — or possibly more if emergency measures have to be extended. That most likely means fewer blog posts, and those I do post sometimes not being quite as up-to-date as I might prefer, to some extent due to my not getting new messages at this end as quickly as I might like — not to mention not being able to send work out as easily to publishers, et al. So I’ll still be around, but possibly a bit more hermit-like than I’d want. And on the good side, not being in places like public libraries, where already infected people may lurk, might have an effect in keeping me healthy (I being old enough to be in an at-risk demographic).
But then who said the Writing Life would be easy?
