39 thoughts on “December 10, 2020: Conifer”

  1. We'd been going real, but bought a fake one this year and that will probably stick, largely because of the dog.

    1. We'd cut our own for several years, but ~5 years ago we bought a real nice 9' artificial, and I'm not going back. Gotta have a pine-scented candle around though.

    2. I have never had a real Christmas tree and I never will. I used the same one for almost 30 years, but I recently bought a new one, which will last me for the rest of my life.

    3. We've been fake, and small, for some time now. Our parsonage is nice in many ways, but it doesn't have the sort of large room that you need for a large tree to look right. So, we have a small table-top model. We do have other decorations up, of course.

    4. We received a nice fake tree as a wedding gift 22 years ago and have used it all but one year when the kids were younger and we tried the real tree thing. With our 2 crazy cats I doubt we will go real again. Pine scented air freshener works pretty nice for the ambiance.

      1. Heh, we're having more problems with the cats and the fake tree. They generally left the real tree alone but are biting the crap out of this one.

        1. Our cats pretty much leave the tree alone. That might be because Jags is a Buddhist and Theo(dore Finkle) is Jewish and they don't celebrate.

        2. One of our cats is a fake pinetree-biter. I think she just likes the way it feels on her teeth and gums. She has better dental health than the other one.

    5. My wife has multiple family members who have owned Christmas tree farms, so she has always been big on real trees. But, since we often spend the holidays traveling across the country that we rarely have the chance to get one. So, a few years back we got a pretty nice fake one, so that we can still reasonably set up a tree even if we won't be around the whole time.

      I'm very much in favor of going the fake route. Since holiday setup time hits right when final exams do, I don't know how we would ever find the time to be able to deal with getting a real one, setting it up, keeping it watered, etc., especially when the fake one can be up and lit in about 10 minutes.

  2. Real. We have a relatively local business that was purchased a little over a year ago. It's seems that the former owners were planning for retirement and not the continuation of their tree farm, so the new owners have a lot of work to do. Last year was their first year, and we found a good tree. This year they were much more focused on "these are the tree's we're getting rid of so that we can develop in the future," so we ended up with a monster of a tree. But it works, and it was actually pretty cool to see just how much they planted this past year, and you can see how nice the selection will be in a few years from now.

  3. This morning, ESPN has released their #nbarank top 10. Just a note to brianS -- my list yesterday was about the players that were left (i.e., who ESPN had in their top ten) and not my own top ten. I might have had Embiid at about 10, but Kyrie not in the top ten now. He was at 25 in the ESPN list, which is a pretty dramatic fall off. Anyway, here's the top ten as compared to my top ten.

    Player SBG RANK ESPN RANK Comment
    LBJ 1 1 18th year. Still the best player in the world. Astounding. Also, from ESPN: "Come playoff time, however, there's still nobody you'd rather start your team with than LeBron." Exactly.
    Giannis 2 3 Basically, what I said. He needs to become a more well-rounded player. Crazy athleticism, not yet fully actualized.
    Steph 3 8 I’ve always been a Steph apologist. ESPN cites “availability”. I think his biggest issue is can he be the guy he’s been when teams can defend him more aggressively?
    AD 4 2 I said he might be underrated at 4. ESPN agrees in a huge way.
    Kawhi 5 5 Fingers pointed at his meltdown in game 7 of Denver series, but also recognition that he can move up
    KD 6 6 Yep. All about the injury.
    Harden 7 9 The reputational damage Harden has inflicted on himself cannot be overstated. He’s got crazy numbers, but he’s shrunk in the playoffs and he projects an aura of “I don’t really care, do you?”
    Luka 8 4 I guess when I said that he was the future of the NBA, I understated his case. The future is NOW.
    Dame 9 7 There’s a lot to love.
    Jokic 10 10 He’s like the everyman on this list… the 7 foot everyman, that is.

    2. How different would the narrative be on Kawhi if that shot hadn't gone down a couple years ago?

      I wonder that about a lot of great players. If Brady and the Patriots had a worse kicker, they wouldn't have had nearly the playoff success that they've had. Would the narrative have been that he choked in big games?

      1. Let's see how Kawhi's Clipper career plays out. Maybe 2020 is just an anomaly, an adjustment year. True, he won the title in Toronto in year one, but that was Lowry's team. LeBron needed two years in Miami, two years back in Cleveland, and two years in LA. Five years from now, Kawhi's story could be how he grew into his role as the #1 in Clipperville. Or not.

    1. Seven days after our schools went all remote, the case numbers in our county, which were rising at a frightening rate, stopped rising and started falling. Huh. And that was before the restrictions that the governor put restrictions in place. Still bad, but things have stabilized and are going down.

        1. Thanks Algo.
          SBG's school correlation against this study info points to my largely unsupported inkling that managing virus transmission is as much or more a sociological issue as it is a medicological (sue me) one. We can choose to avoid transmission and be sufficiently successful in doing so. The closing of things has a psychological as much as epidemiological effect and is a signal that things are bad and we need to change our behavior. I have no particular evidence to support this position.

          1. Here are the numbers: Dakota County new case per day 7 day average
            Oct. 25: 96
            Nov. 1: 144(!)
            Nov. 6: 216(!!)
            Nov. 11, about when schools closed: 312(!!!)
            Nov. 16: 446 (!!!!)
            Nov. 18, schools closed plus 7 days; 466(!!!!!!)
            Now: 377 <--- still bad, but going down and not through the roof We were on a path toward an absolute breakdown. The closing of the schools coincides perfectly with the stop and reversal of that trend. Correlation does not necessarily imply causation, but the correlation is practically punching us in the face. About now is when the state restrictions and T-Day are going to muddle the data, but it appears that the decision to go remote was, quite literally, a lifesaver.

            1. Everyone stuck at home teaching and no longer able to mingle as much. I will note South Dakota imposed restrictions and masks on November 13. Teasing out causes is so hard with such a patchwork of restrictions and regular flow of people across those lines.

              Our district is going full remote on Monday. Our school went remote last Friday because of COVID-19 exposure from a staff member, requiring many to quarantine themselves for 14 days, including ourselves. I wonder if cases will flatten starting December 21 or not. The district plans to re-open in mid-January but I'm dubious.

              1. We would expect, then, an impact about a week after that date. Nov. 18 was the peak. By Nov. 25, the day you might expect to see a start in the impact from closing of bars, the slope of the new case curve was already dramatically affected and none of that can be attributed to bars being closed.

                1. In other words, there are multiple factors and it's impossible to come to a good conclusion by just looking at the totals.

                  For instance, aren't all Minneapolis schools virtual? If so, they shouldn't have had a growth in cases this fall if your theory holds. Plus, I would think a majority of the case growth should be in school age children and their 35-54 year old parents.

          2. Zee, I agree with what you're saying. Also, schools are one significant variable, but they are not the only significant variable by a long shot.

            And while keeping schools may have an effect (whether directly or indirectly), it's also exacerbating all kinds of equity and access issues.

            1. And while keeping schools may have an effect (whether directly or indirectly), it's also exacerbating all kinds of equity and access issues.

              THIS.

              Our experience has been that there's not been a great deal of student infection (especially in the lower grades, where there's been practically zero student-to-student infection). We've had trouble keeping teachers off quarantine, but those cases have largely come form outside sources. YMMV, of course. It's my pretty firm opinion that K-2 at the VERY least should be back in school.

              We're losing an entire generation of women (especially underprivileged and non-white women) in the workforce. The inequity of this will be felt for decades.

              1. Our 1st grader and 7th grader have had very different experiences--it sure seemed like the impact of COVID on the 1st grader's school was pretty minor, practically unnoticeable. The middle school, on the other hand, had to close earlier than the rest of the district because of how many staff members and students were on quarantine--it was an untenable situation.

                My wife and I are very fortunate for many reasons and only have to manage schooling one day a week and both have flexible jobs working from home. But that one day , whew, it can be a long week in and of itself if the kid isn't in the mood for school. Especially because young kids can only do so much independently on asynchronous days.

                And to your point nibbish, despite my best efforts, a majority of the work from the start (when we had full-time duty) has fallen on my wife.

  5. Always real, but we've only had a tree twice at our house. We stopped once Honest Abe was born because we're trying not to get him too confused about navigating Hanukkah and Christmas. Instead, we always go help my parents pick out their tree and decorate it as a family. Plus, he knows Santa visits their house but not ours.*

    *we're going to have to figure that out shortly

    1. physical distance from relatives, and temporal distance from cousins, helped us a great deal in navigating that path. Ours were the only grandkids on the hanukkah side for several years, and 5-7 years younger on the christmas side.

  7. Milwaukee's new AAA team is in Nashville, a city with a larger population in the city itself and the metro area than Milwaukee. Their previous AAA affiliate was in San Antonio, an even larger metro area. At least they're moving to a location that isn't obviously much larger than the MLB club.

  8. We used to do a real tree but came across a fake one we liked at Target post-Christmas a few years back and couldn't pass it up at 75 or 80% off. Certainly easier to keep the floor clean, which we need since the dogs are shedding like crazy.

  9. 6/10. Ham and cheese would have been .5 better.

    Side note on sides. I had two half portions of chips left on the counter this morning. I combined the French onion and cheddar sunchips into one serving. Turned out to be a great mashup of flavor. Better than the sando.

    2. I'm sad to lose Akil Baddoo, but mostly because his name lends itself so easily to a Bermanesque nickname. He did really well at Elizabethton in 2017 but hasn't done that much since then. He draws a lot of walks and has speed. He's 22. If he can hit, he'll be a good player. Of course, that could be said of hundreds of 22-year-olds.

      Tyler Wells did very well in the Twins' minor-league system, reaching AA in 2018. He then had Tommy John surgery. If he recovers and is the same pitcher he was, he could be pretty good. But he's 26 and hasn't pitched competitively in two years. Worth taking a flyer on, in my opinion, but you'd have to know more about his recovery from surgery to make a judgment about it.

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