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Year 2 - Day 117 ...Working Remotely
I'm in the office Monday and Thursday, and working remotely Tuesday, Wed and Friday. Next week? It's in the office Tuesday and Friday, except I'm taking Friday off.
Drab day - it's just overcast, no sun, no rain, kind of boring actually. Been like that a lot this year, actually. Last year we had more sunshine, weirdly.
My father is off again - today he informed mother that he thought she was dead. Apparently he'd just finished planning her funeral and everything.
Father: Whoa. Aren't you dead?
Mother: No, I'm very much alive.
Father: But I just finished doing your funeral and everything.
Mother: Yeah, well, I'm alive. Sorry.
Also, at one point he informed her that various folks had seen her wandering about naked. And a psychiatrist named McCarthy - he had to find the number - had diagnosed her as schizophrenic. Mother just nodded, said hmmm.
This is so not fair - mother has had to deal with this three times now. Both her parents, and now her husband.
ME: Yeah I know. I'm upset about it too. I hate Alzheimers. It's the worst disease. And everyone has it...
Mother: You think we're both doomed.
Me: The Universe and I are going to have words. I just want to ..
Mother: Smack them? (She giggles. She loves my phrase - "smack them". It amuses her greatly.)
**
I'm ignoring politics again. It's irritating me. The GOP needs to be spanked in the worst way, and no is doing it, and it bugs me. There is no such thing as justice, until someone fines the GOP and spanks them.
Also, I'm annoyed at the nitwits who aren't getting vaccinated. You can get them in your homes now. You can get free stuff if you do it. They have pop-up mobile sites. It's available through Pharmacies and Doctors. Come on.
It's not like how it was this past Winter, when people had to line up and work to get a vaccine.
In Tennessee, the state’s top immunization official said this week that she was forced from her position for doing her job educating the public about coronavirus vaccine access.
The official, Dr. Michelle Fiscus, wrote a memo describing a decades-old legal doctrine that suggested that some teenagers might get vaccines without their parents’ permission. The memo came as conservative lawmakers in the state were lashing out at her agency’s efforts to raise awareness of vaccines among teenagers. One Republican lawmaker accused the Department of Health of employing “peer pressure” to prod young people to be inoculated.
But it’s not just Tennessee. A review last June by The Associated Press found that 27 health officials had left their jobs across 13 states during the pandemic.
“It’s a reflection of how challenging the job has become,” said my colleague Rick Rojas, who covers the American South. “Not only is there the exhaustion of dealing with the pandemic, there’s also more recently the political rancor around it. These public health officials have been caught in the middle of it, and for many of them, it’s a new and difficult thing to navigate.”
In Tennessee in recent weeks, lawmakers have pointed to advertisements from Fiscus’s agency on social media and charged that the department was going too far in its efforts to reach teenagers. Lawmakers even raised the prospect of dissolving the department.
“When you have advertisements like this, with a young girl with a patch on her arm, all smiling,” said Scott Cepicky, a Republican lawmaker, who held up a printout of a post during a recent hearing. “We all know how impressionable our young people are, and wanting to fit in in life.”
Fiscus, in a statement describing her departure, said that the actions of lawmakers gravely endangered the public by undermining confidence in the vaccines even as virus cases were rising in Tennessee and as the Delta variant was spreading across the country. She also addressed the attacks on people in her profession.
“Along the way, we have been disparaged, demeaned, accused and sometimes vilified by a public who chooses not to believe in science,” Fiscus wrote.
Rick said that when public health officials leave, taking years of institutional memory with them, it might be difficult to find people to replace them.
“It weakens the ability of the government to respond to a pandemic,” he said. “These people were the experts and now they’re increasingly not there anymore.”
Source: the NY Times. [ Granted it is Tennessee, the Southern United States, much like the Midwestern United States Leadership isn't exactly known for being the brightest bulbs on the planet. But honestly, how stupid can you be? No offense to those who live there on my flist.]
Okay this is just...bizarre.
As South Korea faces its worst virus wave yet, government officials have rolled out a plan for Seoul that includes some unusual restrictions.
Under the new regulations, gyms can remain open, but the treadmills must run no higher than 3.7 miles per hour. (A standard walking pace is a bit more than three miles per hour, making 3.7 roughly the speed you might move at if someone else was holding a door open ahead for you.)
And the music played at the gyms must be no faster than 120 beats per minute, roughly the speed of “Call Me Maybe” by Carly Rae Jepsen, “Born in the U.S.A.” by Bruce Springsteen, or “Bad Romance” by Lady Gaga.
Health officials said the measures were intended to prevent people from breathing too hard or sweating on other people. But gymgoers were confused by the guidelines, and some experts called them “absurd” and “ineffective.”
South Korea has managed to keep levels of infection low throughout the pandemic but is now contending with the Delta variant and a flagging vaccination drive. Just 11 percent of the population is fully vaccinated, with 30 percent having had one dose, and appointments have been halted because of a lack of vaccines.
The gist? If people don't breath to hard or sweat on other people, the virus won't spread, so they are playing music no faster than 120 beats, and treadmills must be slowed down. Gymgoers are understandably confused by the guidelines.
* Israel is allowing those with weakened immune systems to get a third Pfizer-BioNTech shot. (There's a booster shot for Pfizer-BioNtech that is being debated.)
* More than 1.3 million people in France booked vaccination appointments after President Emmanuel Macron announced that inoculation would be made mandatory for health care workers and that proof of immunization or a negative test would soon be required to enter restaurants and cultural venues.
[Now that's not a bad idea. We should do that.]
*A 24-hour concert to benefit the global recovery after the pandemic, with the Weeknd, Ed Sheeran and Billie Eilish, was announced for Sept. 25, The Guardian reports. [Well, that's wishful thinking. I'd wait for 2022, personally.]
*The pandemic promised the end of cities. Why was that prophecy so alluring? [Except for those of us who actually studied history and know that this isn't going to happen. Honestly, did the stupid media never read about the Bubonic Plague, the Spanish Flu, the Cholera Pandemic, Polio, etc? I've come to the conclusion that a lot of journalists are really dumb.]
* Hee - Norwegian Cruise Line Holdings sued Florida’s surgeon general on Tuesday, accusing the state of preventing it from “safely and soundly” resuming trips by barring it from requiring customers to be vaccinated against the coronavirus.
The filing represents the latest twist in a monthslong fight over the resumption of cruises from Florida, a hub for the industry. Under Gov. Ron DeSantis, the state has fought vaccine requirements by cruises and other businesses, claiming that such policies are discriminatory. Supporters of vaccine requirements have argued that requiring vaccines is necessary to protect public health.
I hope Norwegian wins - but I no longer trust our judicial system to make rational decisions. Too many dingbat Republicans in there.
* Sigh...
Thousands of subway trips in New York City have been canceled in recent weeks because the pandemic and a related hiring freeze have battered the work force and left a shortage of train operators, conductors and workers.
And with fewer trains, many passengers on the largest transit system in North America have seen their commutes become less reliable and take noticeably longer. Nearly 11,000 trips were eliminated last month alone.
The Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which operates the city’s subway and buses, expanded an existing hiring freeze in the early days of the pandemic to include operations workers like train operators. The agency made the move as it faced financial calamity, after more than 90 percent of subway riders disappeared and critical revenue vanished.
It was the first time the agency had included such workers in a hiring freeze. Since then, the work force has been whittled down by scores of retirements prompted in part by worries over the coronavirus, job changes and the deadly outbreak, which has killed at least 168 workers.
Though the hiring freeze was lifted for operations workers in February, after $14.5 billion in expected federal pandemic relief stabilized the agency’s finances, officials said it would take time to hire and train new workers, including up to nine months for train operators.
Oh god, I didn't know about that. I'm going to have to plan extra time - to make my Amtrak train next week. Morning commutes are okay so far.
Okay, enough of that.
Here's another photo..
Drab day - it's just overcast, no sun, no rain, kind of boring actually. Been like that a lot this year, actually. Last year we had more sunshine, weirdly.
My father is off again - today he informed mother that he thought she was dead. Apparently he'd just finished planning her funeral and everything.
Father: Whoa. Aren't you dead?
Mother: No, I'm very much alive.
Father: But I just finished doing your funeral and everything.
Mother: Yeah, well, I'm alive. Sorry.
Also, at one point he informed her that various folks had seen her wandering about naked. And a psychiatrist named McCarthy - he had to find the number - had diagnosed her as schizophrenic. Mother just nodded, said hmmm.
This is so not fair - mother has had to deal with this three times now. Both her parents, and now her husband.
ME: Yeah I know. I'm upset about it too. I hate Alzheimers. It's the worst disease. And everyone has it...
Mother: You think we're both doomed.
Me: The Universe and I are going to have words. I just want to ..
Mother: Smack them? (She giggles. She loves my phrase - "smack them". It amuses her greatly.)
**
I'm ignoring politics again. It's irritating me. The GOP needs to be spanked in the worst way, and no is doing it, and it bugs me. There is no such thing as justice, until someone fines the GOP and spanks them.
Also, I'm annoyed at the nitwits who aren't getting vaccinated. You can get them in your homes now. You can get free stuff if you do it. They have pop-up mobile sites. It's available through Pharmacies and Doctors. Come on.
It's not like how it was this past Winter, when people had to line up and work to get a vaccine.
In Tennessee, the state’s top immunization official said this week that she was forced from her position for doing her job educating the public about coronavirus vaccine access.
The official, Dr. Michelle Fiscus, wrote a memo describing a decades-old legal doctrine that suggested that some teenagers might get vaccines without their parents’ permission. The memo came as conservative lawmakers in the state were lashing out at her agency’s efforts to raise awareness of vaccines among teenagers. One Republican lawmaker accused the Department of Health of employing “peer pressure” to prod young people to be inoculated.
But it’s not just Tennessee. A review last June by The Associated Press found that 27 health officials had left their jobs across 13 states during the pandemic.
“It’s a reflection of how challenging the job has become,” said my colleague Rick Rojas, who covers the American South. “Not only is there the exhaustion of dealing with the pandemic, there’s also more recently the political rancor around it. These public health officials have been caught in the middle of it, and for many of them, it’s a new and difficult thing to navigate.”
In Tennessee in recent weeks, lawmakers have pointed to advertisements from Fiscus’s agency on social media and charged that the department was going too far in its efforts to reach teenagers. Lawmakers even raised the prospect of dissolving the department.
“When you have advertisements like this, with a young girl with a patch on her arm, all smiling,” said Scott Cepicky, a Republican lawmaker, who held up a printout of a post during a recent hearing. “We all know how impressionable our young people are, and wanting to fit in in life.”
Fiscus, in a statement describing her departure, said that the actions of lawmakers gravely endangered the public by undermining confidence in the vaccines even as virus cases were rising in Tennessee and as the Delta variant was spreading across the country. She also addressed the attacks on people in her profession.
“Along the way, we have been disparaged, demeaned, accused and sometimes vilified by a public who chooses not to believe in science,” Fiscus wrote.
Rick said that when public health officials leave, taking years of institutional memory with them, it might be difficult to find people to replace them.
“It weakens the ability of the government to respond to a pandemic,” he said. “These people were the experts and now they’re increasingly not there anymore.”
Source: the NY Times. [ Granted it is Tennessee, the Southern United States, much like the Midwestern United States Leadership isn't exactly known for being the brightest bulbs on the planet. But honestly, how stupid can you be? No offense to those who live there on my flist.]
Okay this is just...bizarre.
As South Korea faces its worst virus wave yet, government officials have rolled out a plan for Seoul that includes some unusual restrictions.
Under the new regulations, gyms can remain open, but the treadmills must run no higher than 3.7 miles per hour. (A standard walking pace is a bit more than three miles per hour, making 3.7 roughly the speed you might move at if someone else was holding a door open ahead for you.)
And the music played at the gyms must be no faster than 120 beats per minute, roughly the speed of “Call Me Maybe” by Carly Rae Jepsen, “Born in the U.S.A.” by Bruce Springsteen, or “Bad Romance” by Lady Gaga.
Health officials said the measures were intended to prevent people from breathing too hard or sweating on other people. But gymgoers were confused by the guidelines, and some experts called them “absurd” and “ineffective.”
South Korea has managed to keep levels of infection low throughout the pandemic but is now contending with the Delta variant and a flagging vaccination drive. Just 11 percent of the population is fully vaccinated, with 30 percent having had one dose, and appointments have been halted because of a lack of vaccines.
The gist? If people don't breath to hard or sweat on other people, the virus won't spread, so they are playing music no faster than 120 beats, and treadmills must be slowed down. Gymgoers are understandably confused by the guidelines.
* Israel is allowing those with weakened immune systems to get a third Pfizer-BioNTech shot. (There's a booster shot for Pfizer-BioNtech that is being debated.)
* More than 1.3 million people in France booked vaccination appointments after President Emmanuel Macron announced that inoculation would be made mandatory for health care workers and that proof of immunization or a negative test would soon be required to enter restaurants and cultural venues.
[Now that's not a bad idea. We should do that.]
*A 24-hour concert to benefit the global recovery after the pandemic, with the Weeknd, Ed Sheeran and Billie Eilish, was announced for Sept. 25, The Guardian reports. [Well, that's wishful thinking. I'd wait for 2022, personally.]
*The pandemic promised the end of cities. Why was that prophecy so alluring? [Except for those of us who actually studied history and know that this isn't going to happen. Honestly, did the stupid media never read about the Bubonic Plague, the Spanish Flu, the Cholera Pandemic, Polio, etc? I've come to the conclusion that a lot of journalists are really dumb.]
* Hee - Norwegian Cruise Line Holdings sued Florida’s surgeon general on Tuesday, accusing the state of preventing it from “safely and soundly” resuming trips by barring it from requiring customers to be vaccinated against the coronavirus.
The filing represents the latest twist in a monthslong fight over the resumption of cruises from Florida, a hub for the industry. Under Gov. Ron DeSantis, the state has fought vaccine requirements by cruises and other businesses, claiming that such policies are discriminatory. Supporters of vaccine requirements have argued that requiring vaccines is necessary to protect public health.
I hope Norwegian wins - but I no longer trust our judicial system to make rational decisions. Too many dingbat Republicans in there.
* Sigh...
Thousands of subway trips in New York City have been canceled in recent weeks because the pandemic and a related hiring freeze have battered the work force and left a shortage of train operators, conductors and workers.
And with fewer trains, many passengers on the largest transit system in North America have seen their commutes become less reliable and take noticeably longer. Nearly 11,000 trips were eliminated last month alone.
The Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which operates the city’s subway and buses, expanded an existing hiring freeze in the early days of the pandemic to include operations workers like train operators. The agency made the move as it faced financial calamity, after more than 90 percent of subway riders disappeared and critical revenue vanished.
It was the first time the agency had included such workers in a hiring freeze. Since then, the work force has been whittled down by scores of retirements prompted in part by worries over the coronavirus, job changes and the deadly outbreak, which has killed at least 168 workers.
Though the hiring freeze was lifted for operations workers in February, after $14.5 billion in expected federal pandemic relief stabilized the agency’s finances, officials said it would take time to hire and train new workers, including up to nine months for train operators.
Oh god, I didn't know about that. I'm going to have to plan extra time - to make my Amtrak train next week. Morning commutes are okay so far.
Okay, enough of that.
Here's another photo..
no subject
My sympathies. It's a hard thing to go through, much less multiple times.
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I pray it doesn't happen to anyone else. It's my worst nightmare.
no subject
No offense taken. (-:
no subject
Well, you are Tennesse by Scotland and Boston, so...
no subject
no subject
It really is. And so painful to watch. I keep wanting to take a Tardis back in time. Thinking 1990s.