Charlie

No. (Firefox)

Palm Springs is much larger than Key West, Saugatuck or P-town (where I met my spouse 52 years ago!), and of course it is more accessible from a major urban area than those three; there are even residents of Palm Springs who commute to work in the L.A. area daily. I have never been tempted to try out Eureka Springs. If you make it to PS next year, I'm sure you will be welcomed.

The whole Coachella Valley has a smaller population than Paradise and Spring Valley, NV (never heard of either of them, didja?), a pair of suburbs of Las Vegas. The Coachella Valley, including Palm Springs, feels like a big suburb without an urban center. The Agua Caliente Casino is the tallest building in the valley by far, and is only about 15 stories. There is only one shopping mall, which contains the only big department store (Macy's) and the only bookstore. The only "international" service at the airport is to a few cities in Canada. There are three hospitals. What the valley does have in common with a city is lots of good restaurants and bars.

The comparison between NYC and Austria is not logical: the fact that they have about the same population ignores the more important fact that the population density in Austria is 276 per square mile, while the population density in NYC is 28,700 per square mile. In other words, New Yorkers are packed together one hundred times tighter than Austrians! If social distancing has any validity, the time at which each location began imposing restrictions could not be the only important determinant of the difference in number of deaths at the peak. Austrians are naturally more physically separated from one another than New Yorkers than any decree could make them. The average New Yorker comes in danger zone contact every day with many more persons than the average Austrian possibly could.

And don't forget the self-employed service providers who suddenly find themselves being told they are not needed right now, like your cleaning lady, dog walker, barber, etc.

Antonio, one thing I would remember is to not beat yourself up with guilt feelings because you can't take care of everything and do everything exactly right. Just do whatever you can and accept what you can't control, which in this case may be a lot.

My nephew's wife is a mobile physical therapist, and I know that the service she works for is not sending her out for house calls now, but I don't know if that is due to some public health policy or simply the policy of that company.

Aha! Finally someone who looks more like a client than an escort.

Maybe the more important question is how the English will feel about Charles as monarch. They have never felt the kind of respect and affection for him that they have for his mother. With the Windsor genes, it is possible he could spend a couple of decades on the throne.

One of the knocks against the Adamses in the early 19th century was that they seemed to think of themselves as a kind of royal family. Part of both the attraction to and instinctive reaction against the Kennedys and the Bushes is that they seemed to fall into the same pattern. Some people are comforted by the notion of royalty, others are disturbed by it.

Phoenix and Las Vegas are big cities, Palm Springs is not (longtime residents still refer to it as a "village"); Tucson is somewhere in between, an urban area in the desert, but without the huge suburbs. A late friend of mine grew up in Scottsdale, lived much of her adulthood in Orange county, and spent her retirement in Palm Springs. She went back to Scottsdale once every year for a nostalgic visit, but said she wouldn't want to go back there to live because it had become too much like Orange county.

That is one of the reasons why I hate buying things online instead of going to a store.

Since you are from the Garden State, as am I, you probably suffer from the same kind of seasonal allergies there that I did. I moved to the southwest expecting to escape those allergies, only to discover that I am equally allergic to many other things that bloom in the desert suburbs. How was I to know that my allergic reaction to olive trees is off the chart? You might want to make a temporary move to AZ in the spring to test it.

Although I appreciate your intention, the queen is a political figure despite her careful attempt to always appear non-partisan. Anyone who has constitutional power within a government is by definition a political figure, as the automatic comparison/contrast here with the other heads of state makes clear.

I don't know any dog walkers, but I do know a pair of dog boarders, and their business has come to a dead stop.

And has he been back in touch?

Only for the right person...I meant reason!

I have never been able to sleep on my stomach, but I have always had sinus problems, and when they seem particularly bad, I often flip over to my stomach long enough to breathe comfortably again.

California is one of the few states that already has border control checkpoints on all major highways entering the state from other states, but positioning a checkpoint on every road along its enormously long border on the north and east would be difficult.

The first cases were in China. The first cases on the west coast were connected to people who had been in Wuhan. I think most Americans do think spatially, and the east coast is still a long way from the west coast, so folks in New York and DC thought about the flow of disease as a trans-Pacific problem. The first tests of the strains of the virus now seem to show that the initial infections in New York/New Jersey were brought across the Atlantic from Europe, not directly from China. The first US bans were on flights from China (most of which land in cities like Los Angeles, San Francisco and Seattle). It took a lot longer for the US to start banning flights from Europe, even though the disease was already established there. That probably explains part of the reason why New York, rather than Los Angeles as people might have expected, exploded into the major hotspot in the US. The reason why there are so many cases in group housing for the elderly, like nursing homes and assisted living, is that most of the staff in such facilities are very poorly paid; they come to work when they are sick because they don't get paid sick leave, and they often work extra shifts in more than one facility, because it is the only way they can make ends meet. The same is true for in-home caregivers, who are frequently untrained and don't have the same kind of supervision as someone in a managed care facility. My house cleaner, who is self-employed, has also done gigs as an in-home care-giver for sick and elderly people, even though she has no training for it, and will probably do so again now that she is losing many of her house-cleaning jobs. I have given her a paid holiday for the duration, because I know she needs the income, but I don't want her possibly bringing the virus into my home.

Average temps in PS have not been reliable this year. March was ten degrees below normal. Here it is April, and we are still in the 60s.

The Public Health Officer in Riverside county, CA, has now ordered that no gatherings of any number of people can take place except for members of a family residing in the same place. You can't get much more restrictive than that. Also, everyone must wear some kind of face covering in public; it's no long just a recommendation.

My spouse and I both had appointments this month for cleaning at the dentist. Today I got a call saying the appts must be rescheduled. The earliest I could get for my spouse is in July, and for me it's the 1st of September. I'll be flossing and brushing assiduously this summer. My spouse also has an appt in two weeks with the neurologist who monitors his Alzheimer's. I wonder how they will handle that. I don't know whether telemed will work.

I have two friends at high risk who are doing the same procedure.