Though Laughingplace is merely a shadow of its former self; we are happy to be spending a few days with friends we would not know had we not met here.
My son-in-law who is already ill is now in the hospital with Covid. My daughter is a school teacher and has gone this long without getting infected. School just got out and wham! The rest of the family are testing positive one by one. This could be very bad.
My prayers are with you. Our next-door neighbors of over five decades are in the same boat. Not nearly as bad as if it had happened two years ago.
Absolutely!!!! He was given some of the newer antiviral drugs and could go home except... he has dialysis and has to stay until he tests negative. He seems to have dodged another bullet. Your prayers are much appreciated. The whole family is positive but they are vaxxed and recovering quickly.
Neighbors seem to be improving as well. Except maybe for the unvaxed daughter. (My understanding is that she has some medical condition that might interact with the vaccine in an undesirable way, but I suspect that if she and her doctor{s} had tried, they'd have found a way.) I'm fully vaccinated, with one booster (the latter because for a time, it was compulsory for attending concerts at Disney Hall). And I wear a mask unless I'm either at home, or alone in my office. And if I'm going to be in prolonged close quarters with strangers (church, concerts, or docenting at the Museum), then I wear an N95. And I'd much rather see doses go to third-world countries with a high potential for breeding new variants, than giving people in developed countries a small measure of additional protection.
Yutzes, yutzes, and more yutzes!! Why are there so many people who can't seem to push an empty grocery cart a few lousy feet to the nearest corral, and just leave them wherever they damn well please, with no regard to whether they're fouling a parking space? Why can't certain charities get it through their heads that if they got <censored>-listed by a potential donor for attempting to bribe that potential donor, continuing to attempt to bribe that potential donor isn't going to do anything other than to dig themselves in deeper? Why is it that certain people, who know damn well that you are morally opposed to organized gambling, and find state lotteries (effectively a tax on stupidity) to be the most offensive form of organized gambling of all, will give you lottery tickets for your birthday? If I wanted to gamble, I'd gamble on private cribbage games with trusted friends!
Okay 1st things 1st. We did get our 4th shot before leaving on our trip out of state. For the best, as cases are really up here. (WA) I can't believe how few people mask up. Like, "Well, I am tired of this so it just isn't real anymore." I was happy to see that the local theater where we would like to take the family to see "Hair" requires both guests and staff to mask. That really chaps my hide. On the other hand; I do long for the days when an employee wheeled out your cart, loaded your car and took the buggy back. As a non-gambler it all evades me. I do remember a friend many years ago giving me a lottery ticket that yielded me $5. But yes! Offensive. (On my cousin's 60th birthday her daughter gave her 60 lottery tickets. She made like $30 and bought 30 more that yielded 15 so she got 15 more zilch. Happy Birthday \s)
Of all organized gambling, I find tribal gambling to be the least offensive and the most tolerable. But I'd be a lot happier if the Native People went into business selling turnkey Linux systems instead.
The whole gambling thing just plumb evades me. Although, while playing Life with the grandkids today, I did invest in the stock market. It paid off. I also won $300,000 playing the horses.
Depending on what you invest in, and how you approach it, the stock market can be gambling of the worst kind (i.e., get-rich-quick schemes, "penny stocks" [there's a reason why they're so cheap], and excessively active trading), or it can be a very stable investment (the stocks in my own portfolio are [or at least were, as of the last time I bought even a fraction of a share of any given company] 100% open-enrollment DRIPs ["No-Load Stocks"]. The SEC does not approve open-enrollment DRIPs lightly, with the result that maybe at most two out of a dozen turned out to be dogs, with the rest having grown to the point of dominating a portfolio I'd originally built divided equally between stocks, a no-load mutual fund, Treasury Notes, and an insured CD). I will also characterize excessively active trading as not only gambling, but also a form of parasitic investing.
When we came back to the Mainland from Hawaii; we had a 401K that had to be rolled over. We got a guy through BofA who set us up with Mutual Funds and such in an IRA. We were so excited when our money nearly doubled right away. Then it slipped and we were told that is normal blah blah blah. When they had lost so much of our money that they started charging us a service fee we said a few expletives and went elsewhere and rolled what we had salvaged over into an annuity. We were very happy to quietly collect 4% when things crashed. Gambling of any kind is just not in my blood. Dealing with the dead mother-in-law's estate makes me sure I don't want stocks. What a headache getting them transferred and sold!
Just want to say it is good to be home after a month away. The garden has come in nicely, the chickens started laying and one of the goats had twin bucklings. Two plays, a piano recital, three graduations, and a party all topped off with getting our daughter safely to and from her colonoscopy on our last day.
I hope she was able to enjoy the guided tour of her insides. Because if you don't geek-out and find a way to enjoy it, it's a pretty grim process.
Apparently she slept through it. There were a few problems but nothing life threatening. But they did need a good view, so to speak, to rule things out and find out exactly what is going on.
Busy 4th. Not real big on celebrating in view of current events. But today is both our son's and son-in-law's birthday and the SIL's mother is visiting from Hawaii. So we did have a bbq with too much food.
I will say that the current iteration of The Main Street Electrical Parade is good, worthy of a 50th Anniversary celebration, but that the Don Dorsey arrangement of Baroque Hoedown (and by extension, his score for the entire Parade) is still the best (to the point where his arrangement of Baroque Hoedown is actually better, to my ear, than Jean-Jacques Perrey and Gershon Kingsley's own arrangement (as heard on the recording, The Essential Perrey & Kingsley).
I want to see the MSEP so bad. Hope it runs in February. I remember seeing it in 1973. Back then it knocked people's socks off!
I have two. I will say that I was a bit disappointed at how the actual article -- a vacuum-formed dome and cradle on a cardboard base -- didn't exactly live up to the artist's rendering. And the materials don't appear to have been chosen for their archival properties.
Agreed and I think my sister felt the same way. When I opened the present it took me several minutes (probably only seconds but a definite pause) to figure out what it was. Also have a VHS of the *final* performance. My sister's family actually went that day. I am glad we did not even try as the Park was so crowded they only got on 2 attractions the whole day.
