So Covid is over, right? Let’s have huge holiday parties. WOOHOO!
In Massachusetts, we have had three days in a row of 5,000 new Covid-19 infections. The US has had about 140,000 new cases a day this week. That’s fun too.
So yeah, go out without a mask and have yourself a merry little huge gathering. Covid-19 is over and everything is back to normal.
Hashtag sarcasm.
So I guess I have to put christmas lights on the house now, eh?
December 2021. Heading into Covid month #19 and somehow things are getting worse again? Figures. Lock downs forever.
I guess I have to start christmas shopping now, eh?
It’s not that I don’t enjoy the holidays, it’s more like I just don’t want them to be here yet. It seems like they were just here yesterday and it was Covid and all that and now it’s back and it’s still Covid and I just don’t want to deal with it. I want my old christmas back, and with each new day I become more convinced that the old christmas is never coming back. Covid crap isn’t abnormal anymore. Everything else is now abnormal and it makes me sad. I guess.
The upside is that we’re just a few weeks away from the kids being home again. Bellana is going to school in Europe next semester so she won’t be here for long, but she’ll be here for a while and that’s good. Harry will be around for his whole break.
I am not sure what I want to do for music in December. I can promise you that I won’t be writing a christmas song. Guaranteed. I want to start sneaking over my parents house and doing some cleaning. I want to start on the second floor and work my way down. More sorting than cleaning, I think. A pile of stuff to save, a pile of stuff for other people to review, and a pile of stuff to donate/trash/junk/whatever. I just want to do something. I’ve been wanting to do something for months but haven’t yet.
What else. I’ve got 20 minutes until I have to punch in to work and last night’s episode of The Flash is still playing so what else should I write about?
I have no idea what to get anyone for christmas. In other words, this December is kicking off exactly the same as every other December. HoHoHo and all that.
Okay. I have a shit load of work to do today so I guess I should just get to it. Time to punch in. Welcome to December, everyone.
Yesterday was Monday and somehow I was feeling optimistic about the state of the universe. Today is Tuesday and… sigh. Something about tomorrow being the start of December is messing me up today. I’m not sure exactly why, but it’s probably Covid-19 and holiday related. We’re not getting a normal Christmas for the second year in a row, which implies that our Covid Christmas is actually now the normal. Shit.
I had three projects to do at work in less than two weeks. I picked off one of them yesterday and was feeling pretty good about the state of things. Now, simply because it’s the next day, I am feeling a little defeatist about the remaining two. Why? Where is my rational brain hiding? Come out and play, brain. Pretty please?
I took the barrels out to the street this morning. The barrels are full to bursting, partly with Thanksgiving detritus, but they’ve spent the whole week in the new little shed thing so the squirrels weren’t able to get at them. 10 minutes after I took the barrels to the street I looked out the window and saw a squirrel sitting on the barrel snacking on some stuff. Sigh.
Okay. Time to punch in to work. Here’s hoping the state of the universe improves a little. Fingers crossed, folks.
I took my mother to a doctor’s appointment today. It went well, thank you.
Based on the massive traffic I struggled through getting home I would say that pesky pandemic is over. If that’s the case, why was I freaking out so while hanging out at the hospital?
I was cool as a cucumber on the outside, but a basket case of Covid worry on the inside.
I am so ready for this bullshit to end. Get the damn vaccine.
As crazy days go, today was definitely one. There’s a situation at work that has had a bunch of us running flat out all day every day for a full week. Some of us are going to be working on it through the weekend. I’m not going into specifics, but there are things that no one has done before that we suddenly have to do. Entire workflows are being built on the fly. In a word: craziness. I think we are going to pull it off though and when we do it’s going to be epic.
I already mentioned 50/90 in the last post. I’ve played guitar two days in a row. Yesterday I played like shite. Today was a smidge better but only a smidge. Tomorrow… I want to do some car singing in the morning but I’ve been so beat each bed time that I’ve actually been sleeping kind of late each morning. We will see about tomorrow.
There isn’t much else going down right now. I visited my folks at their new place on Tuesday. It was all right. Neither of them seem thrilled with the new normal, for different reasons, but they are managing. I really hope they are okay.
The COVID stats aren’t getting any better. We are more or less back to pre-vaccine lock down levels in our house. It’s been 18 months. I’m so sick of this shite. Am I using the word shite correctly? I don’t know. I just like the sound of it… shite.
Probably going to turn in soon. I’m going to get myself a bottle of water and then lay down. I want to be up early tomorrow, but who are we kidding.
G’night, folks.
The five day weekend is over. Not that I had a five day weekend, but I digress. I’m still isolating in Harry’s room, and today is the first day that I will be on video conferences with folks at work. I’m going to have to explain the Harry Potter book cover poster on the wall behind me. It’s actually not a poster, it’s a puzzle. Harry was able to put it together and hang it up without having it fall apart. How amazing is that? What the camera can’t see is the Star Wars poster off to my right. That one would need no explanation.
I have the windows open and the mini USB fan on low. The goal is to keep the air moving. Something about all of that time at my parents house in the sweltering heat with fans blowing right on my face all day has made me really want to have the air moving around me as I work.
I closed all three exercise rings yesterday. I weighed myself today. Closing the three rings once did not magically reduce my weight at all. What the hell? It was my first weigh in since mid August and I was up a pound and a half since then. I think we can probably attribute that to stress eating over the weekend so I think maybe what I have learned is that Intermittent Fasting is helping me hold my weight steady more than it’s helping lose weight. I will take that as a huge win. Now the exercise can start lowering that astronomically high weight total, and then we can throw in some diet and some bariatric surgery to get it down the rest of the way. Wait, what?
Okay. Punching in to work. Have a good Tuesday, everyone. Labor day is past, summer is over, it is officially winter in New England. Bite me, Mother Nature.
Until next time……
I was able to sneak into the cellar and play the guitar twice today.
I got a lot done for 50/90, which was nice, but I reached the point on the second go-round where my hands just wouldn’t do it anymore. That’s actually not a bad thing. I really need to build up more stamina, but I’ll get there.
On a gear note, I have my little recording nook in the master bedroom that has my current recording pedal board and my little 15 watt Fender amp. My big use-with-the-band pedal board and my Vox 15 watt amp (and my 30 watt Fender amp) are all in the cellar because Covid was slowing down and I thought they would be traveling to Mike the Bass Player’s house soon… and of course that hasn’t happened because the universe has intervened. The upside is I could set all of that stuff up in the cellar to keep working on 50/90 while I’m locked out of my bedroom. I bring my new Les Paul and my MacBook Pro up and down with me, as there is no way in hell those puppies are staying down there in the humidity. I set everything up far away from the flood zone, but you may note from the previous pictures that none of the electrical stuff is actually on the floor. The pedal board is, but the pedals themselves are not. That’s for flood damage prevention reasons.
So that is what I am doing to keep 50/90 going this week.
I also wanted to start with the exercising again. I started a couple of weeks ago and then fell off the wagon. I wanted to start up again today, what with it being a Monday and the iPhone Activity app starting its week on Monday. Jen wanted to do the same thing and she totally kicked ass all day today. Me? I was at two minutes of exercise as of 7:00pm tonight. Looked like I was going to fail for the day. Well, screw that folks. I’m up to 17 minutes now with 3.5 hours left in the day. I’ll get to 30 minutes, you betcha.
Okay. I need to go get a bottle of water and do another few minutes of exercise.
Looking for the bright side of self isolation. It’s tough to find, but it might be out there. Probably not, but maybe I might be able to pretend.
Just had a knock on the door. Were we expecting someone? Nope. Is there a global pandemic that has killed 600,000 Americans? Yup.
In this case though, it was less than disturbing. There were two people at the door. Both wearing t-shirts with the word Vax on them. They were there to distribute vaccine information. When I told them I was already vaccinated they asked if I needed any masks. Nope. We’ve got mountains of them.
Now, is it really the smartest thing to do to go door to door during a pandemic to spread the word about the pandemic? Well… when you think it through and do the math… nope, it’s not.
Still, the thought was nice. Also, if they manage to convince a citizen or two to take their shots? Then I suppose it’s all good, right?
So… what day is it today? It’s the second full day of our little self induced quarantiney thing-a-doo. Does that mean it’s day two or does Friday count as a day even though it was only a partial day? How do these things work? I’m going to call it day three. I don’t know how long it’s going to go. I don’t have the ‘rona so I am never going to get my pabst blue ribbon test results (you gotta read back a few posts to get that joke. I think I pulled it from two previous posts… sorry about that) so when am I clear to re-enter society? We’re thinking about another rapid test on Wednesday or so? If that comes back clean maybe we’re okay? Maybe another pabst blue ribbon to go along with it? I don’t know. Maybe I just stay in Harry’s room for the rest of eternity? Fun, huh?
I didn’t forget to liberate the CPAP machine last night. On Friday night I slept for four hours and 45 minutes and the restful sleep percentage was something stunningly low, like 46% or something. Last night I got seven hours of sleep and the restful sleep percentage was 71%. That’s more like it. I did wake up around 5:00am and didn’t get back to sleep until almost 6:30 so that’s a pretty colossal fail. Other than that, the sleep was pretty good. I feel almost awake now.
When I came home from my pabst blue ribbon test on Friday (that joke getting old yet?) I told my beautiful wife that I was going to need junk food to get through this. It was all like, engines full, stress eating ahead! Then last night I finished dinner before 7:00pm and didn’t have a single bite to eat afterward so I guess the stress eating commences today. I guess. I started my intermittent fast two hours early, which means I can start eating again two hours early, which means 11:00am which is 14 minutes from now so… there is likely to be a significant amount of M&M’s devoured during much of today’s weekend work day and shit.
Okay. Back to it.
Shit.
On September 1, 2020 the state of Massachusetts had 355 new cases of Covid-19. The United States as a whole had 41,976 new cases.
On September 2, 2021 (after having multiple vaccines available for over seven months) the state of Massachusetts had 2,037 new cases of Covid-19. The United States as a whole had 187,489 new cases.
What the fuck is wrong with us?
Take the god damned vaccine, you fucking morons.
Inside the Red Head's Head 