Matt Holthe's Fleeting Thoughts

 Last week my family and I spent the week in Branson, MO. We chose to stay at a VRBO condo to minimize any potential contact with other guests (like we would see in a hotel). We were a bit concerned at the start of the trip - we did carry out pizza the first night and walked in to pick up the pizza and the 3 customers (2 others plus myself) were all masked but out of the 7 or 8 employees, there was only 1 mask. We did find out that Branson had implemented a mask order on July 31st, so those employees should have been wearing a mask. The rest of the restaurants we frequented during the week were all masked up and had signs telling people to wear masks. Early in the week we went to a show in a theater. People wore their masks coming into the show, but the majority of people took them off when they sat down. I would say the theater was around 15% full. There was nobody in our row and nobody directly in front of or behind us. There were groups in the row in front of us to either side, ...

 Just like a lot of districts across the state and nation, our district is starting school remotely. School starts on Monday, August 24. Initially we were given a choice of 100% remote learning from a different company (outside of the district) or 2 days on site and 3 days remote from the district. We figured that at some point everyone would be remote, so it would be less disruptive if we just did all remote from the start. Turns out, "at some point" was "before the start of school" and now we're just like every other kid in the district learning remote from the district. It's going to be strange, and it's supposed to be "real class" instead of what they were doing last March, April, and May attempting to just make it through the school year. We're talking online web conferences with the different teachers, online videos when they aren't doing web conferences, and so on. An actual structured learning day.  Here's hoping it all goes...