We Interrupt Daily Life for This Important Message

• Don't touch your face.
• Stay at least 6 feet away from everyone around you.
• Do not shake hands or hug or touch anyone else.
• If you feel sick, stay home.
• If you believe you've been infected, call the Covid-19 hotline at 800-HOLYSHT.

The past two weeks have been unprecedented in my lifetime. I've never seen such a fearful response to a virus, to the point that we are indeed in a pandemic, complete with panic-buying and supply hoarding.

It started in Wuhan, China, moved to London, then to Washington State. Now it's in 39 of our 50 states.

It's the flu.

It's a respiratory sickness, one that is worse than usual, and people who are immuno-compromised or have respiratory issues in general are at high risk, as are the very old and the very young.

Markets have crashed. Whole industries (cruises, travel, airlines) have been practically shut down. Grocery stores have been emptied.

Local retailers at kiosks closed their businesses at Southdale Mall. National retailers still open but mostly empty. 

Our local Walgreens, all paper products and hand sanitizer are out of stock.

Local grocery store. No onions? I think we can live without onions...

And as of today, Marissa's school is closed for the next THREE weeks. Three — two for quarantine time and one for their regularly scheduled spring break which they can't possibly cancel in case some families still plan to make the trips they had planned previously. Which is not advised, but you can't stop people from going.

No word yet from Lindsey's online high school, which, I suspect, will be business as usual since it's 100% remote anyway. Wayne's company is asking everyone to work remotely starting tomorrow as well.  And I, well, I work for myself part-time out of the house anyway, so there's no change there.

Which means...we're gonna have a full house. Except Wayne volunteered to be the only person physically in the Minneapolis office, to bring in the mail and what-not. He will be there by himself, because, as he told his boss, they would have to "pry my cold, dead hands off my office to get me to work from home." That's how much he was looking forward to attempting to be efficient and work while at home with his family.

I've never seen a societal response of this kind to a flu warning. Don't get me wrong, I'm not downplaying the illness, but the human response to it appears over-the-top. As public health officials say, if we do our jobs in hindsight it will look like over-reaction. If we don't, well then, buckle up, we're all in for a ride.

I mean...why are people just NOW buying hand soap? Don't we all normally have hand soap in our homes? Do people not normally wash their hands often? To make sure a family doesn't run out of hand soap for a three-week period you may need three, four bottles of hand soap tops. So...why are people buying cases of it? Don't get me on the toilet paper hoarding. That seems like such an American response.

One family meant to purchase 48 rolls of toilet paper through Amazon but accidentally ordered 48 cases, so now they've got enough toilet paper for a small village. Or for their family for the next 3 years, however they choose to use it.

I went grocery shopping this past Monday and got everything I needed for the week. I bought toilet paper at the grocery store (which I usually don't do) because Costco was out the last time I was there; I hadn't thought anything of it at the time. By Friday, grocery stores were emptied, their shelves silent witnesses to the scramble of the early morning crowd who had emptied them of their contents, snatching toilet paper and disinfectant wipes from each other's hands in a frenzy.

Here's the most frustrating part for me. We have two beautiful, wonderful, amazing daughters whom I love dearly who both also have mental health issues. Lindsey has thrived in her Normandale College classes. She's back in a traditional classroom, interacting with "real" people and loving the social engagement. She is always more excited to work on those classes homework than her online high school courses because she has to be prepared for the next class discussion. Now, one of her college classes is moving online for the rest of the semester, and there's a strong possibility that her other college class will as well. Her spring break was last week, but classes are suspended this coming week as well due to the coronavirus.

Most college students would be thrilled — YES! No more slogging to class, sitting in classrooms, having to work on group projects and talk to other people. Lindsey, on the other hand, is incredibly disappointed. This was her only social interaction outside of family, her only necessary trip out of the house three times a week. She enjoyed talking with the other students, she loved the debates and discussions. And now they are canceled.

And then there's Marissa, my social butterfly. The thought of not seeing her myriad of friends in person for three weeks is devastating to her. What will she do when she can't joke with her friends between classes, chat at lunch and give hugs? She loves to hug her friends. She is an incredibly genuine, kind-hearted girl who is always thinking of others. She is going to wither under three weeks of distance relationships.

I, in the meantime, continue to work away at my various projects, do housekeeping duties and guide my girls in their daily lives. I can understand why Wayne wouldn't want to be at home when everyone else is home. When he's working, he is 100% focused on work. I rarely call him at the office, he is there to be efficient and get things done so he can get home. He will probably have an amazing two weeks at work with no one else there! Such an introvert.

We'll see how all of this develops. In the meantime, stay healthy, stay away from others, and cough into your elbow, not into your hand.

Pecking Order and Your Food (They are Related, Really)

 You've probably heard the term "pecking order," it usually means something about corporate  or social hierarchy, also expressed as "Sh*t rolls downhill."

Except there's an actual reality to pecking order. They're called chickens.

You know, those pink, small pieces of meat you buy from the grocery store? That chicken. My daughter was 4 before she realized that a living chicken was the same thing as a roasted chicken breast on her plate.

Long ago, back when farmers were farming for their families mostly, and hoped to sell a few items on the side to support their family, they raised chicken by what we now call "free range" methods.

Chickens could roam freely through the farmland. They could go anywhere they wanted, eat anything they wanted. And they established a pecking order, because that's how chickens work as a species.

The strongest chickens would "peck" the smaller and weaker chickens for food and water, which would peck weaker chickens in turn, and a social order was established. Chickens were hurt. Many had wounds, lost their eyesight, their mobility and their lives.

Cartoon of a chicken pecking another because showing an actual photo would be graphic and cruel.

Farmers got frustrated losing so many of their chickens. The birds had clearly suffered. It was expensive. So they started putting the chickens in cages.

In cages, the strongest chickens could not get to the weakest. They could not establish a "pecking order," and they had no need to. Their world was as small as the cage they were in -- they didn't give two clucks about the chicken in the cage over there.

Mortality decreased. Production increased. And farmers could finally sell more eggs than their families consumed.

Yes, this is simplistic. Yes, this does not take into consideration all that is known about animal science today. But...the clamor for cage-free eggs does not take animal science into consideration either. Because guess what: forcing farmers to raise chickens in the old way, the "cage free" way, is forcing them to have more chickens die. Do they get paid more for eggs raised from cage-free chickens? Not necessarily.

As a matter of fact, in California, where legislation has required that shelled eggs, the kind most of us know from grocery stores, must come from cage-free farms. Instead of paying, say, $2.00 a dozen, they cost $4.00 a dozen to cover the losses. (And by "losses" I mean the higher chicken mortality rate.) The people who advocated for and voted this into law order their groceries online, get them delivered to their house, and pay twice as much for eggs as they paid before, and don't think twice about it.

In the meantime, the family that is barely scraping by, the one with a single parent working two jobs, can no longer afford eggs. At all. Since the $2.00/dozen eggs are no longer available due to legislation, they are left with what is available at the food bank; powdered eggs, which are not required to come from cage-free chickens, if they purchase eggs at all.

Then the price of eggs drops, because the demand did not keep up with supply. The cage-free farmers don't actually get $4.00/dozen, they get more like $2.50, because people without the means to buy $4.00 eggs stop buying them. Now the farmers are in a lose-lose proposition, and because this is the law they can't go back to raising chickens the way they used to. Some choose to raise some other livestock, thus reducing the supply of eggs, permanently keeping fresh eggs from the lowest socioeconomic people in our society.

This is not a free capital market.

I am not an economist, nor a food producer. I am a consumer, seeing and hearing the news, and listening to people who don't know what "GMO" means clamor for non-GMO food. (FYI, "honey crisp" apples exist because of GMO practices. So do poodles.)

We are not them. They are not us. 

I am sure there are more factors pressing upon the market than the one I just described. I just ask that people listen and be open to more possibilities than the one being spooned to them by advocacy groups, no matter the intention. Being organic, cage-free, non-GMO is not necessarily better, just different. Choose wisely.

Would You Risk Ruining Lake Superior Forever...for a Job?

I welcome to my blog my good friend and writer, Janey Palmer. She is a Twin Cities-based communications consultant who owns a home on Lake Superior. Janey isn't typically a politial activist. But there's an issue going on right now in our own backyard that has her hackles raised, and I offered to give her this platform to spread the word. 

Read on and get involved. Our environment's future for generations to come is at stake.

Submerged rocks at Split Rock State Park. Photo credit Steven Gaertner

My hair’s on fire.

No, not literally. But if it were, I’d go to the tap and douse it in water. But what if that water were polluted with sulfuric acid?

The reason my hair is on proverbial fire is because our beloved Lake Superior, the world’s third-largest freshwater lake and home to one of the biggest sources of drinking and hair-extinguishing water, is under threat by mining companies—in the guise of “job creators”— looking to extract copper, nickel and other metals in the very heart of the north woods and at the convergence of streams that carry fresh water into the big lake.

The Lake Superior watershed is one of the most special places in the world.

Poly-Met, a Canadian company, wants to set up the first of what will likely be many copper/nickel mines right outside the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness. The byproduct of this mining is the aforementioned sulfuric acid – and the possibility of this leaching into the streams and into Lake Superior is great, despite what the mining companies say (and there is no real contingency plan to mitigate this built into their proposal).

WestVirginians can tell you why clean, fresh water is important. They can also tell you why regulation is important. And they can also probably tell you why regulation doesn’t always stop bad things from happening. 

The offending polluter in that case? Yep, declared bankruptcy.

As a former public relations pro, my hat is off to Poly-Met. They’ve done a great job plying the hearts and minds of the good people of the Hoyt Lakes area as well as labor unions with promises of jobs. Yes, the mine says it will provide 350 jobs for 20 years, but shouldn’t careers be longer than that? And is mining the only way to make a living up there? It can’t possibly be the only choice. I know there are a lot of very smart people who live up there, and I know if given a chance, together we could find a way to bring economic opportunity to northern Minnesota that doesn’t extract such a high price from all of us.

An environmental impact statement said the best case scenario is that this type of mining will require at least 500 years of water treatment. 500 years! Who in their right mind believes anyone would be willing to keep that up for even 50 years? And there is not enough “assurancemoney” in the world to ensure clean drinking water long after the mines close or declare bankruptcy, the latter of which seems to be de rigueur.

So, 350 questionable local jobs x 20 years = 500+ years of pollution. That’s the equation. Does it add up for you?

If not, I urge you to join me in telling the DNR to deny permits for Poly-Met and any other mining operation like it from now on. The time for public commentary is here. We have a short window of opportunity to get our voice heard. Comments will be accepted until 4:30 PM CT on Thursday, March 13, 2014.

To learn more, click here – and be sure to personalize your message. There’s a lot more at stake than my head of curly locks.

Equilibrium

I have a co-worker who is in the enviable position of purchasing her first home. I say enviable because she does not have a house she is currently looking to sell, and most sellers are taking a bath on the value of their homes and their debt load, and interest rates are at a historic low. (30 year mortage rate is currently 4.625%).

She's looking in South Minneapolis and has come across a couple of foreclosed homes, selling well below market value. Other non-foreclosed homes that they've looked at are thousands higher than the foreclosed ones, and on the high end of their price range.

This past week she put a bid in on a foreclosed home -- it's within their price range and they offered the asking price. Today she found out that there are six bids in on the home, so now begins the bidding war.

So perhaps, through all of this, equilibrium will be reached. Some of the foreclosed homes may sell for a more reasonable price, thus not de-valuing neighboring properties as much as homeowners fear. And in the meantime, other homes which are exorbitantly overpriced will have to lower their prices to compete.

Hang tight, it'll be an interesting ride!