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My daughters just sent me this from Cardiff museum. My dinosaur being used to show what 2 meters separation is for COVID social distancing.

I'd wager that most of us here have found our passion because of our local natural history museum. I know I did, ever since I was a child and visited the LA County Natural History Museum frequently. COVID-19 has proved a profound challenge to our beloved local institutions. A large part of their revenues have come from museum visits, which has not been possible during the current pandemic. Vaccines are available and museums have gradually begun to reopen, but the need remains. Our museums need our support now as ever before. In that spirit, I'm going to donate $200 to the Los Angeles County Natural History Museum Invertebrate Paleontology section. I'd also like to encourage anyone else to make a donation to their own local museums. Let's make sure these institutions are around for our children and grandchildren!

It looks as though the entire 2020-2021 school will be on-line in my part of California. The CSU system recently made the decision to go on line only through the spring semester and I am sure the local school districts will do the same. Carter and I have have had many discussions lately about the current COVID related issues and possibly doing on line supportive education. The biggest impact our education programs had was the hands-on aspect and interactions with students that the hands-on experience afforded us. We both feel that we really will not be able to design an on line program that will come close to what we do in person. Plus teachers, students and parents are all trying hard just to develop the basic aspects of on line education so outside educators would not be a great help right now anyway. Even if there were in person instruction, we would not be in classes for safety reasons which we understand. We are working on figuring out how the sterilize fossils and how it may work should we get back into classrooms. We have a plan to present our programs in a way that will respect COVID safety standards in the state so the down time is being used to prepare for a possible return. We will continue on hiatus with no idea when we will resume Fossils on Wheels. It sucks for us but there really is not anything we can do. We still have a lot of shark teeth (probably close to 400) that are ear marked for give aways and we intend on resuming our work at some point but for now, we are still stuck on the sidelines. As always, we want to thank all of the very supportive TFF members who have helped us and encouraged us so much. I just wanted to offer up an update to let you know where are at. Or not at as the case may be lol

People are free to debate Covid risk to the general population, but the indisputable fact is that whatever risk is present is magnified and projected disproportionally onto our brave and respected health care workers. For that reason, I developed and prototyped a device to help keep health care workers safe during in-vehicle patient testing. This project was done on evenings and weekends outside of my normal work responsibilities. I'm hoping to get some clinic time with it within the next few days.

I've been working from home lately like many other folks. I always thought I'd have a hard time concentrating at home as fossil collecting and prepping might be too tempting to maintain an honest lunch hour. But I've actually set the fossil stuff down and begun additional "skunk works" projects with the remainder of my waking hours to help the company where I work pivot part of its production capacity to face the Covid pandemic head-on. The first thing I spearheaded through design and into production was a medical face shield, drawing on standard industrial face shield designs, as well as clinical feedback from my wife and a couple other docs who are buddies since grade school, now seeing Covid patients, some of whom have since died. I also drew on my own medical device design experience from 25 years ago. Certain feature preferences of docs and nurses never change... such as comfort, easy breakdown and reassembly requiring no tools, light weight, reasonable cost and minimal fogging. Face shields represent mature technology with no liability concerns, so many companies have also taken this route. But it is still interesting to see from an engineering and manufacturing standpoint what different companies are doing using established in-house processes and material supply chains. Some shields are durable, others disposable. Even "the little guy" can get into the mix with 3D printing, but material procurement can be quite a problem for what you can't print. I took some photos of my wife wearing one before she went off to work and we had a sales flyer together quickly. One distributor tried to buy 5000 within the first 12 hours....which would have stripped our material on-hand immediately. I'd rather we provide them directly to the end user. The president of my company magnanimously gave a bunch to the clinic where my wife works, and I've trained production personnel how to build and sterilize the things, then seal them for cleanliness. Now I'm off on other projects, some of which may have never been done before, scrambling as fast as I can before the Covid peak rolls through Texas while upholding my normal product development duties. Stay tuned.

All I did was find a couple fossil spots.