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Looking Up at Friends in a Window at Chesapeake Commons at Howard & Centre Streets

Looking up at a window at Chesapeake Commons at Howard & Centre Streets

It is an absolutely beautiful day in Baltimore, and it sucks to have to spend most of it inside. Outside feels increasingly dangerous to me. I think it’s the new relatively new call to wear a mask when outside. It’s an acknowledgement that this virus is invisible and could be hanging in the air anywhere, that not even standing all by yourself on a street corner is guard against it. And the masks we’re told to make ourselves, out of cotton, maybe with a coffee or furnace filter stuck in there, will only stop a relatively small percentage of those viruses from getting in. Wear a mask, but not a mask that actually works, because those are (absolutely rightly!) for folks working directly with patients.

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Blue Skies Over McKeldin Square at Pratt & Light Streets

McKeldin Square

I didn’t have a lot of time for a bike ride on Friday, thanks to a writing date, a phone call, and a couple of meetings that broke up my day. Friday was the end of week three of this stay-inside-work-from-home business, and parts of my life are moving along in deceptively normal ways. The deception is that it’s normal.

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Stairs Next Door to 2808 Kennedy Avenue

Stairs next to 2808 Kennedy Avenue

Tuesday had a little bit of sun, and after a long day of work–I’m still working–I decided to get out for a run, so this post is about something I saw on my run that day. I headed out and east, no real destination. I ended up running down Gorsuch to say hi to where R. used to live. She moved away a few years ago, but Gorsuch will always remind me of her, our time in her backyard, admiring her cat, talking about bikes and queers and popcorn and art. I miss her, even though I still talk to her all the time. It was good to say hello.

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Empty Lot Along Druid Hill Park Lake Drive

Empty Lot Along Druid Hill Park Lake Drive

It’s Saturday, and it feels like I’m in the slow beginning of a disaster movie, where the characters are all going about their daily business with no idea what’s ahead. Except we know what’s ahead. We see what has happened in China, Korea, Italy, Iran, France, Spain, and, like, Seattle. We see what is happening here as the case count ticks up. Schools are closed, workers are told to work at home, the Department of Defense has banned even domestic travel. The writing is on the wall, and yet.

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Park Construction at Redwood & Greene

This week has felt like a thousand years, as I’m sure it has for most of us. We started getting warning emails about taking our teaching online last week, but it’s not easy to figure out how to respond to those warnings. I’ll go online when I need to go online, but until that moment, there’s not a whole lot to do. I mean, get extra training, rewrite the syllabus, etc. etc., but nope, I spent that time fretting and talking with the students who made it to class on Tuesday about what we’re all afraid of and what we think we should do. That was basically it for preparation.

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Cherry Blossoms Along Lombard Between Greene & Penn

Cherry Blossoms Along Lombard Between Greene & Penn

It’s the end of February, which means spring is around the corner. It’s hard to be excited about spring when we barely had a winter. I wore gloves on today’s bike ride downtown, but it was one of only a handful of times I’ve felt the need to slip them on. I should have slipped them on more times than I actually did so, but sometimes I have to learn a lesson over and over again in perpetuity, apparently. But spring is here, as evidenced by these cherry blossoms in front of the nursing school on Lombard.

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Parking Lot and Prisons at Fallsway & E. Centre St.

Parking Lot & Prisons at Fallsway & E. Centre I hadn’t ridden my bicycle in a couple of weeks, due to holiday travel and holiday sit-around-the-house reasons, but I finally got in a ride today, and wow, I instantly felt so much more like myself than I have in some days. It was a beautiful day, finally sunny, blue skies peeking out more and more as the day went on. I rolled down the hill, made a quick stop at my gym to earn the 100 bonus points you get for checking in to the gym nine times in a month (a very on-brand choice, if you know me in real life), and then down to Harbor East to meet my work wife for lunch.

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