April 5

Damn--I almost wrote March instead of April. I wonder if I did that over the weekend. I just checked and I didn't. Sometimes we just loose our place in time unless we have to be somewhere which isn't often. Today we have to go to get Mom's lab work going for her next doctor's appointment. That was another case of losing track of the schedule. She thought it was two weeks later that it actually is. Thank goodness her doctors call to remind us. Normally we have no problem because we make notations on our calendar. But for some reason our sense of time got screwed up.

Yesterday was an absolutely lazy day and I got just about nothing done. However, my mind has been working. I have been getting an itch that it is time to scratch. I did a lot of quilting several years ago but haven't recently. It is time.

Evidently Spain is going to try a 4-day work week with no reduction in take home pay. That last bit--without reducing weekly pay--has always been a sticking point. Companies don't want to pay someone 5 days wages for 4 days of work. And workers can't afford to lose 1/5 of their wages no matter how much they would like to have the time for themselves. I once did have a job with a four-day work week. Since I made $10/hour the $1600  for a four week month (before taxes) I would have earned for 40 hour was only $1280 (again before taxes) for 32 hours. After taxes that was abut $950 per month which is almost $200 less than my social security check is now. Also at no point would I have been able to live anything above a hand-to-mouth pay check to pay check existence either way.

Naked Capitalism has a good post today. I have been following the handling of the Coronavirus pandemic and the various responses. We have had an unfortunate situation in that the Former Guy and his faux "administration" saw the health crisis that morphed into an economic crisis as a political problem--one that threatened him directly. They strove to dismiss it as inconsequential or as a problem that they at the lofty level of the Federal Government shouldn't be concerned about. The result was mixed messaging which turned innocuous recommendations (masking and distancing for example) into political bombs. And as the author of the linked post noted local/state officials did everything from nothing at all to imposing lock-downs, school closures and quarantines. We have no real measures by which to judge what was beneficial/harmful or to what extent. China imposed stringed lock-downs in Wuhan and the surrounding provinces. Italy followed suit as did the rest of Europe and we followed them. It seemed like a reasonable idea. But I wondered: what if we had had a serious, concerted effort to persuade people to wear masks, to keep distant, to curtail their travel and limit family gatherings; what if we had provided conditions that would allow sick people to stay home without losing the pay checks they depend on.