Thanks, COVID!

My office has a group text we use to communicate back and forth when we are not in the office or there is some sort of emergency. With this COVID thing we’ve been wearing it out. But it’s also been nice to keep up with how everyone is getting along. Yesterday however, I was the bearer of perhaps the worst news of all...

Me: I regret to inform you all that April Fool’s Day has been cancelled at our office this year.

As most of you know, AFD is the greatest day of the year on my calendar. It has been the occasion of some of the most epic pranks ever attempted. I have terrorized all of them over the years, resulting in a wave of anxiety filling the office in the days leading up to April 1st. I would hear empty threats from some of them, “Doug, I swear you better leave me alone this year. I am not in the mood for your foolishness!!...or this classic, “I suppose its too much to ask that you grow the heck up!!” Still, the pranks kept coming, from the classic clove of garlic implanted in the mouthpiece of Blaire’s phone, to the cabinet and refrigerator filled with orange ping pong balls. But, with the events of 2021, I thought it best to give the Tomfoolery a hard pass. Besides, nobody will be in the office anyway. Thanks, COVID!!

Of course, my announcement provoked a couple of responses from two of my preferred victims:

Response number one: That’s the best news I’ve heard in weeks!!!

Response number two: Amen to that!!

One of those responses came from a hospital bed! 

I felt the need to offer this caveat...

“It should however be noted that—as we all know—AFD pranks are cumulative, which is to say that ones not pulled off in year A roll over to year B, making year B twice as awesome as it would otherwise be. It’s just as well, the remote controlled WUHAN bats I ordered haven’t arrived yet.”

Response number 3: I thought all of us testing positive for COVID was the April Fool’s joke...

Indeed...sigh...

What ARE the Rules, Exactly?

There are eleven people who work at my office. One of them returned from a recent trip and tested positive for COVID after being exposed while away. He only discovered he had been exposed two days after he had returned to the office. Accordingly, the rest of us had to quarantine and be tested for COVID. As of yesterday, six out of eleven have tested positive. So far I am not one of them. I have completed my quarantine and have received two negative COVID tests. Of the six people who have COVID, each has a different set of symptoms, with varying degrees of seriousness. 

All of this brings with it lots of questions. This past Saturday I got my first vaccine...Pfizer. I read an article just yesterday that stated that a preliminary study done with over 4000 vaccine recipients shows that after just two weeks of the first vaccine, the effectiveness rate climbs to 80%! Great news. But this morning I read in the Wall Street Journal an article from the CDC that offered more confusion than clarity. In the piece the question was asked, For fully vaccinated people, what exactly are the rules for engagement going forward, first with other fully vaccinated people and then with the Un-vaccinated? The answers were all over the place.

It appears that fully vaccinated people can have dinner parties, go to restaurants etc etc with other fully vaccinated people with no restrictions. However, when in the presence of Un-vaccinated people or people of unknown vaccination status, full social distancing/masking will still be required. Wait....what?? If all that getting a vaccine does for me is make it so that I can hang around other vaccinated people, how does that help me return to my life? I have labored under the assumption that once two weeks has passed after my second vaccine, I will be 90% in the clear from the risk of COVID. At that point, I would be free to go out and about largely without the ubiquitous mask except on the rare occasion when I might find myself in a packed to the gills indoor tight venue rubbing shoulders with total strangers...like a music concert or something. Of course, other things would not change, such as the much better personal hygiene habits I have developed since COVID, washing my hands multiple times a day, the use of hand sanitizer after touching potentially germ infested surfaces like toilet handles etc..but with a vaccine, I thought I could mostly ditch the mask. Apparently not. If an unvaccinated family member were to drop by the house, the mask is still to be worn?! WHY? If I do not have COVID and my chances of getting it is only 10% thanks to the vaccine...what’s with the mask?

Another problem I see with this is the power that this has to separate us, to segregate us even more than we already are as a nation. All strangers will have to be viewed with suspicion, since their vaccination status is unknown to us. Furthermore, unvaccinated people will now become the new shunned class, I guess. Maybe that’s as it should be. If someone chooses not to get the vaccine, I suppose that person must accept the social consequences of that decision. But the whole thing makes me uncomfortable for some reason that I can not adequately describe in words. Will we at some point be required to wear some sort of identifying badge so strangers will know our vaccination status? That’s Orwellian creepiness!!

Of course, these apprehensions have been brought on by one article in one newspaper. That’s certainly not the end of the story. The one thing I have learned through this ordeal is that knowledge is power and knowledge has to be diligently pursued. I welcome anyone reading this blog who might be in possession of better information to correct my understanding of the situation if I am wrong. I will continue, every single day, to seek out new information wherever I can find it, from the most reputable sources I can find. You should too.

The Mess in the Suez Canal

So, a freak Egyptian sandstorm has put a serious kink in the international supply chain by wedging a quarter mile long super tanker crossways in the Suez Canal!! Engineers from all over the world are scrambling to figure out how to get the 220,000 ton Ever Given container ship un-stuck. Meanwhile, The Suez Canal Authority has so far lost 95 million dollars in revenue as 350 ships lay still in line behind all the mess...

Progress has been painstakingly slow and expensive. What this process needs is some good old fashioned American Ingenuity:

...I’ll let myself out.

A Wedding and a Vaccine

Big, eventful weekend. Went to The Wedding. Got my first COVID vaccine.

After a long, frustrating, and sometimes tortuous journey, my nephew Isaac Nunn married the girl of his dreams, Bernadette Murphy on a stunningly beautiful March Friday afternoon at the Hanover Arts and Activities Center on the railroad tracks in Ashland, Virginia...the Center of the Universe. Thus comes to an end Bernadette’s ten month stay at our home. In that time, we have gotten to know her, which is another way of saying...we have learned to love her. Of course, we have also gotten to spend lots of time with Isaac since he was over here for dinner practically every night. I have never known a couple who deserved a beautiful wedding more than these two. Although there seemed to be one obstacle after another in their path for the past year, they overcame each one with mostly good humor and truckloads of grace and hard work. To all of the professional finger wagging scolds out there worried about the future because of the alleged deficiencies of the next generation...put a sock in it. I’m here to tell you that we are in excellent hands.

Although Pam and I will miss her terribly, I think that Lucy will have even a harder time. Our dog fell in love with Bern right from the start and, if it were even possible, fell even harder for Isaac. Every evening around 5:30 Lucy would park herself at the front door and peer through the window to wait for their cars to arrive. If for some reason they didn’t she would become agitated. It will take a while for her to stop this habit. She is very much a creature of habit, as well as a dog filled to the brim with love and devotion to her family, to whom Bern and Isaac are now members. Lucy’s wedding gift to the kids was especially heart felt since she “wrote” it herself. Isaac and Bern read it on their way to the mountains and immediately sent this reply:

“We opened Lucy’s card!! Very endearing. We can’t thank her enough for sharing with us and will think about her at dinner this week. However, we do have some questions about how Luce acquired these funds. Is she hanging around with nefarious folks? Is she selling something on the side? Is this just part of her weekly allowance? Regardless, we are honored.”

I offered this by way of explanation:

“This was her the other night trying to figure out if she could afford one bone or two?

As far as my vaccine goes, it was uneventful. The setup at the Richmond International Raceway was very well organized. The legions of volunteers that it took to run an operation like this was impressive. I thanked everyone who I encountered. So far my only side effects are a slightly sore shoulder, a slight fever in the middle of the night and some body aches this morning which by noon had gone away. I did learn something that I didn’t know about the vaccine that I would like to pass along to my readers:

Apparently, the COVID vaccine causes constipation. The nurse who gave my the jab told me that I would have to wait 3 whole weeks to ...get number 2.

Ready for the Next Adventure?

My quarantine is coming to an end. I have tested negative and have had zero symptoms, a very good thing. Most mornings have been fine. My routine is filled with the same things it normally is filled with only I’m in my library instead of my office...oh, and I haven’t shaved in a while. But the afternoons I start to get stir crazy. That’s when I start doing antsy things, going for walks, picking up sticks in the yard, going through the drive-thru at the bank for no good reason, checking Zillow to see if the lake house of our dreams has suddenly materialized since the last time I checked an hour ago.

Yesterday I spent some time chatting up my friend in Buena Vista. It’s been 18 months since her cancer diagnosis. She has completed her course of treatment and is now making the adjustment back to normal life. She has good days and bad days, just like the rest of us. But yesterday she said something in passing that stuck with me. She had remarked about a thirty minute nap she had just taken and said, “Now, I’m ready for the next adventure.”

What an amazing statement.

Here’s someone who has been buffeted by one catastrophe after another since September of 2019, the latest being one of her best friends receiving a cancer diagnosis, and yet she wakes up from a nap prepared for the next adventure. That, my friends, is simply a marvelous way to live. It’s so full of hope and optimism. The great songwriter, Steven Curtis Chapman, calls it...the glorious unknown. It takes a great deal of confidence to live this way, eagerly awaiting the day, confidence in the future. There are many ways to come by this confidence, but for people of faith it amounts to confidence in the one who holds the future. Still, there are days when its easy to fall back into pessimism and hopelessness...days like yesterday, when a young man walks into a grocery store and starts killing people. But even the most devastating news serves as a reminder of the words of Jesus more than 2000 years ago, “In this world you will have trouble, but take heart, I have overcome the world.”

So, this morning, I am choosing to prepare for the next adventure, charging into the glorious unknown with confidence. 

Just to be on the safe side...no news for me today!

Another Mass Murder

A week or so ago now a deranged young man went on a killing spree at a massage parlor in Atlanta, Georgia. Although reports were that he might have been mentally ill, suffering from some sort of sex addiction, the narrative which arose out of his horrific acts was that it was a hate crime, specifically since the shooter was a white male and all of his victims were Asian women. The incident has sparked a nationwide conversation about the spike in anti-Asian violence that has accompanied the COVID-era landscape in the United States.

Now, today we have another young man on a killing spree. This time in Boulder, Colorado. The killer also is said to have been mentally ill, suffering from being bullied in high school and being highly anti-social. Using a Ruger pistol he had purchased just one week ago, this young man walked into a grocery store and began randomly killing people. As of this moment his victims include 5 women and 3 men, one of which was a police officer. It is not known whether this shooting will spark a similar nationwide conversation about hate crimes, since the shooter was a Syrian born Muslim and all eight of the dead were white. I am unfamiliar with the mechanics of hate crime law, but I imagine that the designation probably will not apply unless the victims are members of a minority population.

Regardless, both of these mass murders are horrific. No matter what the motivations might have been, once again in our country, a bunch of innocent people are dead at the hands of a mentally unbalanced man with a firearm.

A Surprising Pun Throw-down

My soon to be er...niece-in-law(?), Bernadette, did a brave yet odd thing yesterday. There I was, minding my own business, when out of the blue she sends me the following texts...

Bern: Did you know that the earthworm is one of millions of kinds of worms? And they’re not even native to the US. Once they arrived here they had already taken over the rest of the world. It was called...global worming.

Ok, up until this point, the poor girl had only been on the receiving end of the various puns and dad jokes I routinely send out. Now, she had inexplicably decided to go on offense. Her next text was informative as to her state of mind...

Bern: I’m really thrilled to be on this side!

At this point I still wasn’t sure what was happening. Then this:

Bern: Nematodes, a type of worm, make up four fifths of ALL animals in the world. When they fall in love, they’re called soil mates.

Wait...was this child challenging me to a pun-off??

Bern: I once saw 2 silkworms get in a race. It ended in a...tie.

Yes. Bernadette was challenging me. She was boldly walking into my family domain. Obviously, I had to do something and fast!

Me: ...of course you know this means war.

How did the earth room react to being cut in half? 

....he was beside himself.

What is an earthworm’s favorite food?

...wormicelli.

My dad had a earthworm farm once. He named all the worms Jason. When I asked him why he answered...

“because they’re all bait, man.”

Where do earthworm’s play baseball?

....Wiggly Field

Bern: Darn. That was good...

Gotta hand it to her though. The kid has guts. She’s going to fit into this family quite nicely. 

I just hope she doesn’t try to compete with me in the one area where I currently have no rival...the after dinner belch.

Poor Isaac...