i started working the moment i got up, assembling my addresses and finding contact information. beginning at 10am i started calling, even sending an e-mail to one person using my personal e-mail when i couldn't reach him by phone.
i could've set out later but i went out at 11am. today was cold, temperature in the 60's, i wore a thicker pair of navy khakis and a long-sleeved shirt. my original plan was just to enumerate the one case near me that i could get ahold of a maintenance manager contact then come by and have lunch and go back out at 1pm. but once i was out, i decided to simply do all my cases (call it an early day), even though i hadn't eaten anything yet (i wasn't hungry).
most of my cases were in the harvard square area. of my case list for today, only 2 addresses looked closable, while the rest seemed bleak. but two of the people whom i contacted this morning actually got back to me, including the one i wrote an e-mail to. the woman who called me gave me the name of a possible longtime tenant for a proxy to enumerate two other cases in the same building as her unit. after some searching online (property records owner name that i was able to find a phone number for) i contacted the proxy who told me the addresses didn't exist. i also went back to another building to speak with the apartment manager; he told me his boss told him not to tell the census anything. i came back later in the afternoon and managed to get into the building; the apartment i was enumerating was empty still, but i found a neighbor whom i spoke to yesterday who told me today that the apartment in question had been vacant for a while, even before april, so i marked it as thus. i stopped by cardullo's and treated myself to some salty scandinavian licorice. i spoke with a construction supervisor would told me another address didn't exist anymore, and the whole building itself had been vacant prior to 2019. finally, using notes left by a previous enumerator (who took a deep dive contacting the deceased owner's lawyers and real estate agents), i closed another address as vacant.
that last case put me close to my parents' cafe and i went there to take my 30 minute break before walking back home. i left with some food which i ate when i finally got back by 3:30pm. 
working a total of just 5.5 hours today, i managed to close 8 of my 14 cases. most were vacant or did not exist, 3 were interviews by proxies. even when i didn't think i could close a lot of cases today, i still closed out more than 50% of the cases they assigned me. so much of it still depended on luck. if i was a second late, or if one person didn't give me a hint of a possible proxy, i would be closing far less than i did.
afterwards i biked down to market basket around 4:30pm to get some food containers for my parents and mostly snacks for myself. lounging on the couch after i got back, i was so tired that i fell asleep by 5:30pm, didn't wake up until 7:30pm.
i watched a taped broadcast of patriots all access from youtube tv. as i was getting close to the end of the episode, CBS breaking news interrupted the broadcast with news the ruth bader ginsburg had passed away at the age of 87 from pancreatic cancer. her health had been deteriorating but there was no indication she was this close to death, even though it was announced recently that her cancer had come back. 2020 has been a terrible year for deaths. on top of the nearly 200,000 americans who have died from the coronavirus, we lost john lewis back in july, chadwick boseman in august, and now RBG in september.
ginsburg's death marks the beginning of a political fight between republicans and democrats. even though mitch mcconnell halted the nomination of obama's pick for the supreme court in 2016 (for nearly a year) when justice scalia passed away (on the ground it was an election year and the new president should pick the next justice), he already announced he will procede with whomever trump nominates as the next justice, despite it being another general election year (just 46 days to go), such is the hypocrisy of the republican party. a new justice won't get confirmed before the election - already a few republican senators said they wouldn't go along with it - but the big fear for democrats is during the lame duck session after november, when the still republican congress could push the confirmation through.
my supervisor sent one of her evening text, said we closed 77 cases today, but didn't say out of how many enumerators. if we can assume it was the same amount of census workers as yesterday (13), that means each enumerator closed an average of 6 cases. i still came out ahead with 8 closes, which accounted for 10% of all the closed cases today. unfortunately for the census i don't work weekends. i wish these enumerators all the luck over the next 2 days, especially since it's rosh hashanah, and jewish families might be praying during this new year, so it could be a challenge getting them to answer.
later in the evening i chatted with maureen for a few hours on the phone. we talked about hot smoothies and how ube is a purple yam not to be confused with purple potatoes, amongst other topics.
