Pandemic Diary #28 – 13 Nov 2020 – Yes!!

It was a squeaker at first, but Biden won GA by at first 1k votes for a while… then slowly trickled in and up to 14k lead. (0.3)

Pretty funny watching the national folks saying “oh, Biden would have to hit 64% of remaining ballots, tough” and I’m like uh it’s absentee ballots in Dem districts, going to be 70-80%.

On Wed. night I bet it’d be Biden flipping GA and up by 6k. Pleasantly surprised!

Okay, but it’s dumb that SoS GA is ordering a manual recount which will be paid for BY THE COUNTIES instead of the trump campaign.

It’s really repugnant and alarming watching these people (e.g. Senators who called for their own person, SoS, to resign) care so much about their power and careers over just basic decency and fighting against autocracy and lies. Depressing.

That first day after, and the headlines were all about Biden’s new team forming etc. What a relief!!

Then after that started hearing about Trump Trump Trump again, but it was such a beautiful relieving moment.

Of course we are off to the GA Senate runoffs… I don’t have much hope, but going to put in as much as I can.

Goals for the next few years: Do that living abroad for 2 years thing, take some language classes (French, Arabic, and Russian) beforehand, sail down ICW and across the ocean.

I’m stressed to be making little progress in research. But in the end it is my own life, and I am only stressed because other people around me are stressed. If I look inside I’m totally happy to be taking this semester a little easy, and I have pretty good confidence that I will get these two papers published and graduate within the next year and a half or so, including a summer internship. I’ll find contract work if I can’t find funding. And hopefully still get to take those classes I always wanted to… sigh. I guess the goal is to pass quals… then enroll in all the classes ever, while TAing two sections…

I’ve sort of lost enthusiasm about Russian as I hit the parts where it’s clear I should be learning the grammar / conjugations. And still can’t even just have a 3 sentence conversation. So losing motiviation… feel like I need to take a class somehow. Do homework.

The virus is just out of control in the US. Depressing. 100k+ new cases a day a week ago… now we’re at 160k+ new cases. It’s crazy. Yet still barely see it on the news. Or the comparisons to Australia / how well things *could* be.

The wave in Europe is kind of shocking to me. But I guess there must be two cohorts at play: individual responsibility and government responsibility. And like a forest fire, a small spark can grow rapidly out of control…

I really want to go back to my own life soon, but with the way cases are going… vs January… the peak in April looked so scary at the time – exponential growth – but the growth right now is insane compared to that, just a sheer straight line up. Why is news about the stock market mixed into the coronavirus section of washingtonpost. It’s easy I guess to cover businesses and harder to cover the impact on individuals? Not sure what’s going on there.

I scraped a bunch of poll waiting time data. I ought to do EDA on that.

Pandemic Diary #27 – 06 Nov 2020 – maybemaybemaybe

We had a house seat flip!

GA may flip blue! Biden currently has the lead in GA. (And probably the nation?)

Two runoffs that may determine control of the Senate!

Drove around yesterday helping inform people who may need to fix issues with their absentee ballot. (Apparently, super easy – just a photo of id and signed form and email it in to county chair). Felt like I did my part. Maybe two thousand of these in the whole state.

Satisfied with social distancing measures – a door hanger with the form. Knock. Then step 6 ft back and wait.

Nail biting finish. Winning the runoffs may be rough. We may not have final results for another week – too addicting to watch play by play (and definitely silly to do so for three days lol).

Trying to still get work done.

My county is still counting ballots – hopefully will add to the lead. My hope/bet is/was for closer to a 6k lead in the end … we will see! Going to be tough.

Pandemic Diary #26 – AHHH!

Just slowly eeking down tenths of percentages from Trump’s count. Will GA flip Blue?? Will Perdue and Ossoff go to a runoff??

Who knows, but seems like I’ll be vote “curing” all day tomorrow!

On that note, time to sleep. Battled python2 vs python3 conversion all day today to little success.

projects blog (nouyang)