Year 2- Day 139..Dispatches.
Aug. 4th, 2021 06:32 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shadowkatWhen I visited my brother's family - I realized that my biting sardonic wit is genetic, I come by it naturally. It's not going anywhere any time soon. You'll just have to continue to deal with it.
Me: Kind of envy my brother and all these friends coming in and out -
Mother: I don't know, from what I hear about them - do you really want his friends?
Me: No, you have a point. They were complaining about them when I visited. It was odd visiting them - I felt like I was invisible or a fly on a wall, they openly complained about folks as if I wasn't there. Sometimes explaining it, sometimes not.
I talked to Jay today - and told her about the fact that our new crazy agency had sent us all an email asking for volunteers for the Rent Relief Distribution Program, they basically need people to volunteer to review applications, determine if the requirements have been met, and doll out the relief. The email, however, wasn't asking me to volunteer - but for me to list my staff who wanted to volunteer in an excel spreadsheet, and advise if they wanted to do it part time or full time.
Jay: What?
Me: I was thinking of doing it - but I don't want to volunteer for anything I don't understand, and they don't provide a lot of direction.
Jay: I have issues with this - shouldn't you be trained? Also that's confidential information that they are giving you.
Me: Also full time or part time? What about doing our jobs? Do they not want us to do our actual jobs?
Jay: That's very weird. What are they doing?
Me: Apparently they are desperate and have a staffing shortage?
Jay: I wouldn't do anything with that.
ME: Well now that I've read it - it appears they want me to provide staff who want to volunteer, except I'm not a manager and have no staff to provide. It's very odd.
I'd been considering it, because I want to help people - also I want to meet new people. But I've learned one needs to be careful about volunteer activities - it's not a good idea to volunteer just to volunteer and meet folks. That can blow up in your face in a major way.
New York is a very transistory city - you kind of half to constantly meet new people. Why? People have a tendency to move far away on you. Constantly. It's like a bloody revolving door. One poor twenty-eight year old woman on the neighborhood feed - or nextdoor neighbor social media page for my neighborhood - stated that she'd just moved to NYC, and out of a toxic/abusive relationship which resulted in losing all of her family and friends. She also lost her job. And oh, her dog died. She was lonely and hunting a way to meet new people. I conveyed all of this to mother.
Mother: Good lord.
Me: Yeah, my thoughts exactly. And she dumps all this on the social media neighborhood page. Wants to know if there's any activities she can do or join to meet people - because she's lonely. Meanwhile people are like - ack. The ones who respond tell her to try volunteering at the local animal shelter - not get a dog, of course -
Mother: She has no money.
Me: Yeah dog's are expensive. They'd advise against that - plus they don't know why the dog died.
Mother told me that one of my cousins has engaged in a long-distance internet correspondence with a young man in Colorado. She lives in Michigan. He's coming with his mother to visit her. He's 20, she's 19. He'll be staying with his mother in a hotel nearby. They will spend a week together.
Me: Yeah, that thing has never panned out well for me. I've met guys online, but it never worked out well - I finally gave up.
Mother: I corresponded with my roommate's brother or cousin - who was in the service when I was in college. We finally met up in New York, but there was no sparks, nothing. He hit on me, but I felt nothing for him.
Meeting new people is hard normally - during a pandemic - seemingly impossible.
**
COVID
* The known global virus caseload has surpassed 200 million infections.
* The W.H.O. called for a moratorium on vaccine boosters to help each country get more people vaccinated.
* The F.D.A. could grant full approval to Pfizer’s vaccine by early September.
* Apparently the Delta is attacking younger folks or below 50 pretty severely. (Most likely because everyone over 50 got vaccinated? Or most of us did? And a lot of the under 50 bunch did not?)
* Oh and there was a major outbreak in China who is struggling with their containment of the virus...
My colleague Keith Bradsher, The Times’s Shanghai bureau chief, recently traveled to Beijing from a reporting trip in Zhengzhou — where roughly 13 million people had to stand in line for virus testing starting last weekend — and sent me an update. His experience illustrates how demanding the virus-control system from the government can be.
I came to Beijing by high-speed train on Thursday of last week. Over the weekend, Zhengzhou unexpectedly announced that it had nearly three dozen cases of the Delta variant.
Late Monday afternoon, a courteous official from Beijing called me on my mobile phone. Her records showed that my mobile number had come to Beijing from Zhengzhou, and she wanted my passport number, my hotel in Beijing, and my train number, along with my train car and seat number. She needed my details to put in a local government database. She also wanted me to get a free Covid test.
I had anticipated this and had already gone for a test late Sunday afternoon at a local hospital, with the usual overnight return of results (it was negative). The official also told me that an official from the neighborhood would also call our Beijing office manager about me.
Fortunately for me, the automatic health tracking code on my phone stayed green. That meant I had not been in the actual neighborhood of Zhengzhou with the cases. Zhengzhou did lock down a sizable area of the city, but my hotel had been about three-fifths of a mile north of this area. I would not be ordered to stay in my hotel room. I would not be required to submit to frequent temperature checks.
My colleague from the Shanghai bureau of The New York Times, who had accompanied me in Zhengzhou, was slightly less lucky. Her housing compound in Shanghai ordered that she show up for temperature checks twice a day.
* A study in England found that vaccination reduces the risk of getting Delta symptoms by 60 percent.
* After much cajoling and even some threats, Pakistan is vaccinating a million people a day.
* The governor of Illinois announced a mask mandate for schools and a vaccine mandate for some state employees, the Chicago Tribune reports.
*Britain will extend vaccination to 16- and 17-year-olds.
*In NYC - you now have to provide proof of vaccination to get into certain areas and do stuff. There are a few main ways to prove you are vaccinated, Mr. de Blasio said: a new app released by the city, called NYC Covid Safe; the state’s Excelsior Pass; or by simply showing your paper vaccination card or a copy of your official vaccination record.
On Wednesday, a City Hall spokeswoman said that all vaccines approved for emergency use by the World Health Organization — including those offered by AstraZeneca, Sinopharm and Sinovac — would also be acceptable to meet the mandate. People vaccinated abroad can show or submit their vaccine record from the place where the vaccine was administered.
* With the eviction moratorium back in place, the Biden administration is racing to distribute aid. [And folks, they are ridiculously understaffed and unorganized in the states.]
* Israel reintroduced some virus restrictions in the hope of avoiding a full lockdown. [Frigging hell, Israel was 95% vaccinated.]
* The latest response to the Delta variant: Pfizer issues a vaccine mandate for its U.S. workers, and the New York auto show is canceled.[That auto show was kind of doomed from the outset.]
*A survey found that unvaccinated Americans are less likely to wear masks and avoid crowds, the Kaiser Family Foundation reports. [Sigh.]
*Obama scaled back his 60th birthday party, citing the spread of the Delta variant.
*The Offspring’s drummer says he was dropped from the band over being unvaccinated.
*Greece’s synchronized swimming team withdraws from the Games as several members test positive for the coronavirus.
This concerns me: New Covid-19 outbreaks among vaccinated nursing home residents and staff are putting pressure on owners to impose vaccine mandates, especially in states with low inoculation rates where the Delta variant is spreading fast. The nursing home industry has stopped short of endorsing a vaccine mandate for all staff, but some homes are now requiring them. [The owners of these facilities need to mandate vaccinations. I worry about my parents. Although they are mandating vaccinations or regular testing right now, similar to my workplace. Mother says three employees have come down with it, and they have a shortage of workers. So far my father's area is fine, and she's not had anyone who is associated with her care come down with it. They all wear masks in her home. Fingers crossed. I had a distant relative die of COVID, he'd been vaccinated, because some idiotic independent contractor who hadn't been vaccinated came into his rehab facility and gave it to him.]
***
During the Staff Meeting From Doom, we joked about the Governor.
Breaking Bad: Any word on who the new boss of Crazy New Agency is?
Boss: Didn't you hear? It's Andrew Cuomo.
Breaking Bad: The women will have to armor up.
Babs: No, we won't. We can take him.
***
Got a doctor's appointment tomorrow around 8:20 am - for blood work etc. Ugh. I hate doctor's appointments, and I see this one way too often - but being on diabetic meds and high blood pressure meds, requires it.
Been interacting with a woman (G) that I met on a trip to London in the 1980s. She's 82. Older than mother, and in much better shape than mother. Mother at 78 is getting a hip replacement and is immobile and worrying over father. G is 82 and planning another trip to Britain, she's been nine times, best was in 2019. She wrote an unpublished children's story about a Teddy Bear in a window in Derwent Water in Britain.
"This window in a shack on Derwent Water has a teddy bear in one of the pains. Over the years children see him and write letters and cards to him and they get posted in and all around the window. They address them to "Teddy in the Window”. "
She included a photo in the email but I can't figure out how to transfer it to my journal.
It's interesting, I've spent so much of the pandemic mainly corresponding with folks across long distances. G lives in Colorado - I've not seen her in over twenty years, and College Buddy lives in DC suburbs, not seen her in about fifteen years (?). The people I see are my co-workers on the same schedule that I'm on - which includes cubicle mate, and Gabe for the most part. BYT and Breaking Bad, and unfortunately Boss. Also my super and his wife, mainly his wife and son. Saw Wales. Bro and his family. Not many. Plus a lot of strangers - because I live in a major city, with over 2.3 million people.
**
I'm hanging in there. Trying not to think too much.
Just be.
Meditate every morning. Do my work - lots of writing, analyzing, editing, etc. Read here and there. Watch Television. Correspond. Cook my meals. Talk to mother. Play on a soap opera fan board - I managed to find one without the nasty shipwars - no one has nastier shipwars than daytime soaps. Trick? Find a well-moderated fan board, with a tough as nails non-shipper moderator. I learned that in the Buffy fandom, and it works in all the others as well. Kind of true of everything really - an organization reflects the leadership.
Journal. Walk. Take Photos. Write. Sleep. Try not to think past tomorrow or today.
Life in moments.
Me: Kind of envy my brother and all these friends coming in and out -
Mother: I don't know, from what I hear about them - do you really want his friends?
Me: No, you have a point. They were complaining about them when I visited. It was odd visiting them - I felt like I was invisible or a fly on a wall, they openly complained about folks as if I wasn't there. Sometimes explaining it, sometimes not.
I talked to Jay today - and told her about the fact that our new crazy agency had sent us all an email asking for volunteers for the Rent Relief Distribution Program, they basically need people to volunteer to review applications, determine if the requirements have been met, and doll out the relief. The email, however, wasn't asking me to volunteer - but for me to list my staff who wanted to volunteer in an excel spreadsheet, and advise if they wanted to do it part time or full time.
Jay: What?
Me: I was thinking of doing it - but I don't want to volunteer for anything I don't understand, and they don't provide a lot of direction.
Jay: I have issues with this - shouldn't you be trained? Also that's confidential information that they are giving you.
Me: Also full time or part time? What about doing our jobs? Do they not want us to do our actual jobs?
Jay: That's very weird. What are they doing?
Me: Apparently they are desperate and have a staffing shortage?
Jay: I wouldn't do anything with that.
ME: Well now that I've read it - it appears they want me to provide staff who want to volunteer, except I'm not a manager and have no staff to provide. It's very odd.
I'd been considering it, because I want to help people - also I want to meet new people. But I've learned one needs to be careful about volunteer activities - it's not a good idea to volunteer just to volunteer and meet folks. That can blow up in your face in a major way.
New York is a very transistory city - you kind of half to constantly meet new people. Why? People have a tendency to move far away on you. Constantly. It's like a bloody revolving door. One poor twenty-eight year old woman on the neighborhood feed - or nextdoor neighbor social media page for my neighborhood - stated that she'd just moved to NYC, and out of a toxic/abusive relationship which resulted in losing all of her family and friends. She also lost her job. And oh, her dog died. She was lonely and hunting a way to meet new people. I conveyed all of this to mother.
Mother: Good lord.
Me: Yeah, my thoughts exactly. And she dumps all this on the social media neighborhood page. Wants to know if there's any activities she can do or join to meet people - because she's lonely. Meanwhile people are like - ack. The ones who respond tell her to try volunteering at the local animal shelter - not get a dog, of course -
Mother: She has no money.
Me: Yeah dog's are expensive. They'd advise against that - plus they don't know why the dog died.
Mother told me that one of my cousins has engaged in a long-distance internet correspondence with a young man in Colorado. She lives in Michigan. He's coming with his mother to visit her. He's 20, she's 19. He'll be staying with his mother in a hotel nearby. They will spend a week together.
Me: Yeah, that thing has never panned out well for me. I've met guys online, but it never worked out well - I finally gave up.
Mother: I corresponded with my roommate's brother or cousin - who was in the service when I was in college. We finally met up in New York, but there was no sparks, nothing. He hit on me, but I felt nothing for him.
Meeting new people is hard normally - during a pandemic - seemingly impossible.
**
COVID
* The known global virus caseload has surpassed 200 million infections.
* The W.H.O. called for a moratorium on vaccine boosters to help each country get more people vaccinated.
* The F.D.A. could grant full approval to Pfizer’s vaccine by early September.
* Apparently the Delta is attacking younger folks or below 50 pretty severely. (Most likely because everyone over 50 got vaccinated? Or most of us did? And a lot of the under 50 bunch did not?)
* Oh and there was a major outbreak in China who is struggling with their containment of the virus...
My colleague Keith Bradsher, The Times’s Shanghai bureau chief, recently traveled to Beijing from a reporting trip in Zhengzhou — where roughly 13 million people had to stand in line for virus testing starting last weekend — and sent me an update. His experience illustrates how demanding the virus-control system from the government can be.
I came to Beijing by high-speed train on Thursday of last week. Over the weekend, Zhengzhou unexpectedly announced that it had nearly three dozen cases of the Delta variant.
Late Monday afternoon, a courteous official from Beijing called me on my mobile phone. Her records showed that my mobile number had come to Beijing from Zhengzhou, and she wanted my passport number, my hotel in Beijing, and my train number, along with my train car and seat number. She needed my details to put in a local government database. She also wanted me to get a free Covid test.
I had anticipated this and had already gone for a test late Sunday afternoon at a local hospital, with the usual overnight return of results (it was negative). The official also told me that an official from the neighborhood would also call our Beijing office manager about me.
Fortunately for me, the automatic health tracking code on my phone stayed green. That meant I had not been in the actual neighborhood of Zhengzhou with the cases. Zhengzhou did lock down a sizable area of the city, but my hotel had been about three-fifths of a mile north of this area. I would not be ordered to stay in my hotel room. I would not be required to submit to frequent temperature checks.
My colleague from the Shanghai bureau of The New York Times, who had accompanied me in Zhengzhou, was slightly less lucky. Her housing compound in Shanghai ordered that she show up for temperature checks twice a day.
* A study in England found that vaccination reduces the risk of getting Delta symptoms by 60 percent.
* After much cajoling and even some threats, Pakistan is vaccinating a million people a day.
* The governor of Illinois announced a mask mandate for schools and a vaccine mandate for some state employees, the Chicago Tribune reports.
*Britain will extend vaccination to 16- and 17-year-olds.
*In NYC - you now have to provide proof of vaccination to get into certain areas and do stuff. There are a few main ways to prove you are vaccinated, Mr. de Blasio said: a new app released by the city, called NYC Covid Safe; the state’s Excelsior Pass; or by simply showing your paper vaccination card or a copy of your official vaccination record.
On Wednesday, a City Hall spokeswoman said that all vaccines approved for emergency use by the World Health Organization — including those offered by AstraZeneca, Sinopharm and Sinovac — would also be acceptable to meet the mandate. People vaccinated abroad can show or submit their vaccine record from the place where the vaccine was administered.
* With the eviction moratorium back in place, the Biden administration is racing to distribute aid. [And folks, they are ridiculously understaffed and unorganized in the states.]
* Israel reintroduced some virus restrictions in the hope of avoiding a full lockdown. [Frigging hell, Israel was 95% vaccinated.]
* The latest response to the Delta variant: Pfizer issues a vaccine mandate for its U.S. workers, and the New York auto show is canceled.[That auto show was kind of doomed from the outset.]
*A survey found that unvaccinated Americans are less likely to wear masks and avoid crowds, the Kaiser Family Foundation reports. [Sigh.]
*Obama scaled back his 60th birthday party, citing the spread of the Delta variant.
*The Offspring’s drummer says he was dropped from the band over being unvaccinated.
*Greece’s synchronized swimming team withdraws from the Games as several members test positive for the coronavirus.
This concerns me: New Covid-19 outbreaks among vaccinated nursing home residents and staff are putting pressure on owners to impose vaccine mandates, especially in states with low inoculation rates where the Delta variant is spreading fast. The nursing home industry has stopped short of endorsing a vaccine mandate for all staff, but some homes are now requiring them. [The owners of these facilities need to mandate vaccinations. I worry about my parents. Although they are mandating vaccinations or regular testing right now, similar to my workplace. Mother says three employees have come down with it, and they have a shortage of workers. So far my father's area is fine, and she's not had anyone who is associated with her care come down with it. They all wear masks in her home. Fingers crossed. I had a distant relative die of COVID, he'd been vaccinated, because some idiotic independent contractor who hadn't been vaccinated came into his rehab facility and gave it to him.]
***
During the Staff Meeting From Doom, we joked about the Governor.
Breaking Bad: Any word on who the new boss of Crazy New Agency is?
Boss: Didn't you hear? It's Andrew Cuomo.
Breaking Bad: The women will have to armor up.
Babs: No, we won't. We can take him.
***
Got a doctor's appointment tomorrow around 8:20 am - for blood work etc. Ugh. I hate doctor's appointments, and I see this one way too often - but being on diabetic meds and high blood pressure meds, requires it.
Been interacting with a woman (G) that I met on a trip to London in the 1980s. She's 82. Older than mother, and in much better shape than mother. Mother at 78 is getting a hip replacement and is immobile and worrying over father. G is 82 and planning another trip to Britain, she's been nine times, best was in 2019. She wrote an unpublished children's story about a Teddy Bear in a window in Derwent Water in Britain.
"This window in a shack on Derwent Water has a teddy bear in one of the pains. Over the years children see him and write letters and cards to him and they get posted in and all around the window. They address them to "Teddy in the Window”. "
She included a photo in the email but I can't figure out how to transfer it to my journal.
It's interesting, I've spent so much of the pandemic mainly corresponding with folks across long distances. G lives in Colorado - I've not seen her in over twenty years, and College Buddy lives in DC suburbs, not seen her in about fifteen years (?). The people I see are my co-workers on the same schedule that I'm on - which includes cubicle mate, and Gabe for the most part. BYT and Breaking Bad, and unfortunately Boss. Also my super and his wife, mainly his wife and son. Saw Wales. Bro and his family. Not many. Plus a lot of strangers - because I live in a major city, with over 2.3 million people.
**
I'm hanging in there. Trying not to think too much.
Just be.
Meditate every morning. Do my work - lots of writing, analyzing, editing, etc. Read here and there. Watch Television. Correspond. Cook my meals. Talk to mother. Play on a soap opera fan board - I managed to find one without the nasty shipwars - no one has nastier shipwars than daytime soaps. Trick? Find a well-moderated fan board, with a tough as nails non-shipper moderator. I learned that in the Buffy fandom, and it works in all the others as well. Kind of true of everything really - an organization reflects the leadership.
Journal. Walk. Take Photos. Write. Sleep. Try not to think past tomorrow or today.
Life in moments.
no subject
Date: 2021-08-05 02:51 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-08-05 03:08 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-08-05 01:00 pm (UTC)Accusations that people promote paedophilia because of shipping late-teens male characters with their only slightly older mentor figure.
Accusations of promoting incest by shipping two unrelated characters, purely because their canon relationship was considered "brotherly".
A fan participant in a studio tour secretly photographing storyboards with spoilers for later episodes, and threatening to release the photos online unless their ship was made canon.
no subject
Date: 2021-08-05 03:03 pm (UTC)Soap fans are notorious for these things. They are also rather kind to each other. Similar to Buffy and Doctor Who fans, just less on the scholarly side of the fence. They have a lot in common with comic book fans - although a touch less scary, in that there's less of misogyny element that one often sees in sci-fi and comic fandoms. I'm not saying it's not there - it is, people are people wherever you go, but there's less of it.
A fan participant in a studio tour secretly photographing storyboards with spoilers for later episodes, and threatening to release the photos online unless their ship was made canon.
Okay, no - they've not done that. But, the soaps are run by CBS, NBC, and Disney/ABC - these guys run tight productions. If a fan is on a studio tour - their camera was confiscated prior to it. And they don't have access to filming. And if they tried to blackmail the studio - they'd have to deal with the network lawyer team - which uhm, no. We're talking about the difference between a small animation studio that does a Netflix series - and well Disney.
Don't get me wrong - they'd definitely do it if they could - but there's no getting past Disney. Right now they are very upset with the writers for splitting up all of their ships, and creating new ones. The writers are ignoring them.