COVID Archives - Page 4 of 10 - Ramblin' with Roger

Maladies Melodies Allergies

my second COVID booster

There’s a Paul Simon song that starts Maladies Melodies Allergies. I so relate.

My allergies to pollen and the like have been quite severe this season, the worst in years. They were so awful that every time my head hit the pillow at night, within five minutes, I would start to cough uncontrollably. Even trying to sleep with my head propped up wasn’t sufficient. One night I woke up four times, after about 90 minutes each time.

Finally, I started taking the generic version of Nyquil just so I could sleep for six hours in a row. It has a cough suppressant and a nasal decongestant. Likewise, my daughter suffers from seasonal allergies which affect her sleep. She actually stayed home from school a day last week, from sheer fatigue.

I decided that we should each take a home COVID test. As I expected, they were both negative. The other motivation for mine was that I was scheduled to get a second COVID booster. I understand that getting the booster while you actually have COVID is contraindicated. Incidentally, I had no bad reaction, as usual, as long as I didn’t lean my arm on the injection site.

We now have several COVID test kits, some from that time not so long ago when they were a bit difficult to come by. Now they are practically ubiquitous, which is good since I’ve used them a total of thrice in a week. The CDC guidelines in Albany County changed this past Thursday from GREEN to YELLOW, which means masking is no longer optional in church. So before Maundy Thursday and Easter Sunday, I took a rapid test.

Expiry

I was curious about the fact that all the tests we currently own have an expiration date of June 30. This article from Health News Hub states: “The Food and Drug Administration countered Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidance by extending their expiration dates. The FDA says it’s OK to add three months to any expiration date printed on a test kit box. (The BinaxNow test kit received FDA approval for an extended shelf life after tests showed the kit components were effective for up to 15 months.)

“Beyond the extended expiration date, results are not reliable.”

Also: “Most manufacturers of at-home tests recommend storing the kits between 35 degrees and 86 degrees. The greatest threat now is delivery during the cold winter months. A test kit left for a day or more in your mailbox at frigid temperatures could freeze the liquid reagent inside a cartridge that comes with the kit, invalidating the test results.”

So, if you see me going into a coughing jag, it’s unlikely that I am spreading COVID, only hay fever. It’s because I’m going to be getting used to sticking a cotton swab up my nose for a while.

Oh, yeah, that Paul Simon song.

Changing up the morning ritual

Quordle

Daily Quordle #51
6️⃣9️⃣
5️⃣7️⃣
quordle.com
⬜🟨⬜🟨⬜ ⬜⬜🟩⬜⬜
⬜🟨🟨⬜🟩 🟨⬜⬜⬜⬜
⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜ 🟩⬜⬜⬜⬜
⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜ ⬜🟩⬜⬜⬜
🟨🟨⬜⬜⬜ ⬜⬜🟩⬜⬜
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 ⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜
⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛ ⬜⬜🟩⬜⬜
⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛ 🟩🟩🟩🟩⬜
⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛ 🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

⬜🟩🟩⬜🟩 ⬜⬜🟩🟨🟩
⬜⬜⬜⬜🟨 ⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜
⬜⬜⬜⬜🟩 ⬜⬜⬜⬜🟩
⬜🟨⬜🟨🟨 ⬜🟨⬜🟨🟨
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 ⬜⬜🟩🟩🟩
⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛ 🟩⬜⬜⬜⬜
⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛ 🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩
I’ve been changing up the morning ritual in the past, lessee, two years. Formerly, I would get up, check the email, and perhaps work on the blog, But at 7 a.m., my wife and I would go downstairs and watch CBS This Morning, now CBS Mornings, to watch “your world in ninety seconds.”

When the headlines were unrelentingly about COVID – the spread of COVID, the death toll of COVID – I sometimes passed on the opportunity to start my day with misery. Presently, I’ve been feeling similarly about Ukraine. I guess I’m more equipped to deal with distress in the evening. Besides, I tend to get enough news from various news outlets during the day.

Instead, I do the daily Wordle. I should note that my wife is MUCH better at this than I am, just as she’s better at Boggle. My daughter is better, too. Wordle has become an odd family bonding experience.

I’ve repeatedly told my wife she’d rule on Wheel of Fortune. We actually have the home game, a consolation prize from when on JEOPARDY! and our comparative scores prove my point. But at least we all still have our Wordle streaks going, unlike some people.

FOUR words

Then I attempt Quordle. The first several times I never got the four words in the nine tries. My mistake was to work it like I played Wordle. I know now to try to expose as many letters by finding three or even four words that hit most of the consonants. I’ve been much more successful.

After wishing my wife goodbye, I go back into the office. The cats want to be fed. I HAD been giving them nourishment at 7 a.m. and 7 p.m. But with the stupid time change, if I attend them at 7 and 7, when we “fall back”, they’d be caterwauling to get food at 6 and 6.

This is just one reason that I’m OK with the idea of changing to permanent Daylight Saving Time, even though it’ll be dark on December mornings. I’ve made my feelings about changing the clocks quite clear here. (I’m essentially agreeing with Marco Rubio; this pains me.)

After finally feeding the felines, I take my blood pressure and my pulse to make sure I’m not dead. THEN I eat. The rest is the usual alternating of email/blogging to music, riding the stationary bike while watching TV (JEOPARDY, 60 Minutes, Finding Your Roots, Trevor Noah, et al), washing the dishes/reading the newspaper to music. This may be altered by a medical appointment, Bible study, grocery shopping, or the eternal “something else,” that unexpected task that sucks up hours in the day.

March rambling: quotation marks

Support the Albany High School robotics team!

tractor_beam_2x — **From https://xkcd.com/2579/**

In a world-historic first, microplastics were detected in human blood

The Our World in Data COVID vaccination data

How American conservatives turned against the vaccine

The Lancet: Paul Farmer

Cameroonians fleeing conflict are in dire need of Temporary Protected Status – cf. Inside “the most diverse square mile in America”

What Caused the War? Ukraine and Russia in Historical Context

The Race to Archive the Ukrainian Internet

Ukrainian Actress Oksana Shvets Killed in Russian Rocket Attack

Non-war conflict

Hate and extremism

How did Christianity become so toxic?

The Interactive Theater of Ketanji Brown Jackson’s Confirmation Hearing

Addressing racial inequality in paid leave policy

Sara Jacobs, one of the youngest members of Congress, talks about sexism and ageism in politics.

Writing Women into History

Women in medicine are running up the wrong side of the escalator

Where Does the Religious Right Go After Roe?

Sojourner Truth’s Battle to Free Her Son from Slavery

Actor Tim Reid on addressing racial issues on WKRP in Cincinnati

Texas’ New Voting Law Disenfranchised Thousands Of Otherwise Eligible Voters

The Tangled, Messy Roots of Fake News, long before it became djt’s favorite term

Ginni Thomas demanded Congressional Republicans take the fight to overturn the 2020 election to the streets

John Bolton admits that ‘it’s hard to describe how little [djt] knows’

I Know There’s An Answer

Climate Change Brings Uncontrollable Wildfires

The Illinois town that got up and left

The 1950 Census is Coming: What You Need to Know

Timbuctoo Institute would build opportunities in the Adirondacks

About Those Gas Prices

Concert Tickets: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver

2021 County and Economic Development Regions Population Estimates for NYS

Luka’s mural

Jobfished: the con that tricked dozens into working for a fake design agency

“They’re called ‘quotation marks’.”

Phobias. Aibohphobia is the (unofficial) fear of palindromes. Hippopotomonstrosesquipedaliophobia is used to describe the fear of very long words.

The official Girl Scout cookie power rankings

The Result of a Rabbit Hole

Audience participation

A GoFundMe page for the Albany High School Robotics Team to compete at the FIRST Robotics World Championship in Houston, TX on April 20-23. They placed 2nd in the New York Tech Valley Regional Competition.

Four Open Seats on Albany Public Library Board in May 17 Election. Nominations are due to the Clerk of the City School District of Albany by Wednesday, April 27, at 5 pm.

New York Bike Census

Now I Know

The Biggest Bread Soup in the World and Why Are My Baby Carrots Always Wet? and The First Computer Bug and The Phone Booth in the Middle of Nowhere and Beware the Ire of Caesar and Which Came First, The Algorithm or the Pi? and World War II’s Pre-Email E-Mail

MUSIC

Livinliv – Aleksandr Shymko

Irish tunes

K-Chuck Radio: The musical tree of Ida Red and green songs

Holiday at Ferghana -Reinhold Gliere

Lullabye of Broadway from 42nd Street

Coverville: 1393 – John Cale and Velvet Underground Cover Story and 1394 – The Blink-182 Cover Story II and 1395 – The Smashing Pumpkins Cover Story II

The follow-up post: ice, COVID, more

Half a block away

This is a follow-up post about what I’ve written about, most recently.

Remember that our car was stuck in the ice in February? Of course, you do. After we got out, and the snow and ice subsequently melted away, we discovered that our neighbor’s sidewalk was still very wet. There was water bubbling up from the intersection of their sidewalk and the walkway to their house.

Apparently, someone from the city or from National Grid, the power company, nicked the waterline. Their water bill must have been terrible for that quarter. The owner had to contact a company to use their backhoe to dig up a couple of sidewalk panels so that the leak could be fixed.

This explains why there was SO much water around our car thawing and refreezing since our car was essentially in front of their house.

Grandma Agatha

I’ve been trying to access the records of the court case involving my grandmother, Agatha Walker (later Green), and my biological grandfather Raymond Cone from October 1926.

Alas, I got word that they can’t find the records. They may have been misfiled or destroyed. And I know, from the conversation I had with the person at Family Court, that they are very interested in this case.

The unmasking

I’ve noted that our church had been masking during worship. However, the Session, the ruling body of the congregation, had commissioned a group of folks, expert in these things, including current and former members of the state Department of Health. The infection rate in Albany County, NY is presently at Green, or low, as is all of New York State. (Green is good, as we know.)

The bottom line is that, as of March 20, masks are optional during worship. The choir, for instance, had a discussion at the beginning of the St. Patrick’s Day rehearsal. Most chose to unmask while singing. BUT no one had to. I tended to keep my mask on while NOT singing but to take it off when I was.

Moreover, congregational singing was allowed, which made them, and me, very happy. And they passed the peace by moving around, rather than just waving at each other.

I will say that my comfort level with unmasking was based on the fact that the choir members are fully vaccinated. Moreover – and I don’t know how to say this without sounding pretentious – our congregation is of a demographic, educational, and political composition that most, if not all of them have gotten the vaccines and likely wearing masks frequently.

Now I know this could change with the BA.2 variant of Omicron in Europe, Asia, and Africa. The recent BAFTA awards in England may have been a super spreader event. And there are more stringent rules in place at church if the CDC guidance for our county goes to Yellow or Orange.

Former governor

Speaking of my church, you probably WON’T remember that I wrote about New York Governor Martin Glynn nearly a decade ago. The Glynn Mansion is half a block from my church! I have walked by it a few dozen times since writing that post. But only recently did I notice the commemorative plaque.

Still, the liminal COVID time

to mask or not to mask

Somehow, I had missed the word liminal until the last couple of years. One of my pastors used it in a sermon, more than once, referring to the liminal time we were in. And, I will argue, we’re still in it when it comes to COVID.

The word is an English adjective meaning ‘on the threshold’, from Latin līmen, plural limina.” In anthropology and religion, liminality is “the quality of ambiguity or disorientation that occurs in the middle stage of a rite of passage.” And in psychology, liminal experiences are “feelings of abandonment (existentialism) associated with death, illness, disaster, etc.”

Governor Kathy Hochul (D-NY) announced plans that the state mask requirement in schools would end starting on March 2, 2022. What that means is that people have the CHOICE whether to wear a mask in those settings or not. My wife, a teacher, is still wearing one. In fact, in addition to her own safety, she finds it important to model that behavior for her K-8 students. My daughter is also wearing her mask. She guesstimates that 75% of her high school colleagues are doing likewise.

Florida man

So the remarks of Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) surprisingly really roiled me. In 2021, he said, “It is prudent to protect the ability of parents to make decisions regarding the wearing of masks by their children,” and parents “absolutely have every right to equip their student with whatever types of masks that they want.”

Yet, at a Florida high school this month, “DeSantis on-camera Wednesday told the students, ‘You do not have to wear those masks. I mean, please take them off. Honestly, it’s not doing anything and we’ve gotta stop with this COVID theater.’ Clearly angry, he added: “So if you want to wear it, fine, but this is ridiculous.'”

So what happened to parental choice? He claimed he wasn’t bullying, only making sure that HE didn’t want people to think he was mandating their mask-wearing. Of course, I’m unsurprised, given his other policies.

As for me, I’m STILL wearing the masks indoors. Unlike Kelly, I don’t forget I’m wearing one, especially while singing at church. But at least I AM singing at church. And [crosses fingers] maybe that’ll go away soon.

It gets better

I was talking with my wife about how difficult going to the grocery store had been. There were arrows designating which lanes to go up and down. They were violated regularly, but they’d be coming in tandem the wrong way. Not only that but people who needed something where my wife or I were standing – and we didn’t shop at the same place – would reach over or even in front of us. Talk about lack of social distance. And this was WORSE in the pandemic. I theorize that people wanted to get in and out of the store as soon as possible. I seldom experienced the behavior either before COVID or in recent weeks.

My wish is that people show grace to each other in this liminal time. Let the masked be masked. And remember there are still places – some medical facilities, a lot of transportation, and individual business – that still require masks. Don’t be a donkey’s rear end.