Category Archives: CoronaVirus

October 1, 2022 · 22:31

Side Effects

When last we left our plucky hero, he had chosen to get both the flu vaccine and the latest bivalent COVID vaccine at the same time and at least for the first few hours there were minimal side effects…

Okay, maybe not THAT bad, but the thought to use this occurred to me at about 02:15 when some side effects were kicking my ass, and it seemed funny enough then. Things have been slightly foggy since, so it might be as close as I get tonight to an original or coherent thought.

From 02:15 until about 09:00 I was up every hour with MASSIVE chills. Like, teeth chattering so hard that I thought that I was going to chip a tooth. Meanwhile, on the outside it felt like I was on fire with fever.

Yet, on the couple of times that I was semi-coherent enough to think at all, when I checked my temperature it was fine, never even hitting 99°. And the house wasn’t particularly cold, with the living room thermostat showing about 76°. Yet I was going to pull a muscle I was shivering so hard

Whatever it was, it was over by 09:00 or so. Since then I’ve been a bit foggy and tired, but not like I couldn’t think at all or couldn’t stay awake. Right now a handful of short naps have helped and I’m really hoping for a better night’s sleep tonight, but all in all, it hasn’t been that bad. And, obviously, even with the few hours of last night’s issues, it’s been many, many orders of magnitude better and easier than getting COVID, the flu, or both.

Stay safe. Stay healthy. Make good decisions.

Welcome to October! We’re almost holidays adjacent!

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September 30, 2022 · 23:16

September In The Rear View Mirror

After trying for a while to find the new bivalent COVID vaccine booster, suddenly our local hospital had appointments up the yazoo. It’s also flu season, and while I’ve heard from a number of friends that getting both at the same time will kick your ass, we didn’t have any plans for the weekend, so when we went in we decided to roll the dice.

The flu shot side.

The COVID booster side.

So far, so good! Tired and a touch of a headache, but that just means it’s a day that ends in “y.” The injection sites are sore, the flu side much more than the COVID side, but it’s far from debilitating. Minimal body aches, no fever, no chills…

Knock on wood, and we’ll most certainly see what tomorrow brings, but the first signs are hopeful. And, of course, even if it gets worse, it’s still orders and orders of magnitude better than either getting the flu or getting COVID.

Stay healthy, stay safe, stay cool out there!

 

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July 25, 2021 · 23:35

Home Again, Home Again

It was an interesting foray back out into the “real world” and travel for six days in a time of COVID.

We were masked whenever we were indoors, and a lot of the time when we were outdoors. Other people? Not so much. In Las Vegas it might have been 25% to 33% or so masked in the casinos, about 2% or so outside, even in crowds. About the same in Palm Springs for the general public. In Las Vegas there’s a new mask order for employees, and about 99% of them were masked. I don’t know if there’s a new masking order for the Palm Springs area or San Bernardino County (Los Angeles County does have one) but it seemed that most employees were masked up.

My biggest concern is that the times when we were indoors and had to get unmasked were when we were eating. Of necessity, most everyone else (except the employees) were eating and thus unmasked as well. We’ll see if that bites us in the ass over the next week or two.

Finally, a potential sign of impending doom comes from my fondness for this, which was in the window of a very hoity-toity, upscale boutique in Caesar’s Palace, where I would walk by it a couple times of day:

They probably had someone putting in overtime to get my nose prints, finger prints, and drool marks off the glass.

It should be noted CLEARLY for the record that I do not know how to ride a motorcycle, I have not (to the best of my memory) EVER even been ON a motorcycle, and that even if I were to start to learn how to ride a motorcycle (which could happen, I guess) it would be extremely wise to start with a much, MUCH smaller motorcycle and work my way up with experience. A good analogy would be my flying – I have been trained to fly a small, single engine aircraft such as a Cessna 150 or 172 and no matter how much I might want to fly a P-51 Mustang or an F-14 Tomcat, there’s a serious experience and learning curve between here and there.

And yet… Drool marks.

No doubt signs of a long delayed and well earned midlife crisis, perhaps. Or serious, major league dementia.

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June 25, 2021 · 23:57

The New Normal – June 25th

This afternoon I went to get a smog check on my car. There was just the one guy in the shop. He wore a gaiter, I wore a mask. I was in his open-air shop for maybe ten minutes.

It was not quite up to the standards of “exhilarating,” but by the current standards it was definitely “novel.”

When I was done I drove over to the FedEx place to drop off a package. There was one other customer and three FedEx employees in the small-ish, indoor office. I was there maybe five minutes, everyone was wearing masks. I joked with the counter personnel about the truly helacious noise that the automatic sliding door makes every time someone walks in or out. I said it would make me insane, I would have to bring in my own can of WD-40 to lube it. They said they had already tried that and it hadn’t worked – you got used to the noise.

It’s “normal.” It’s not the same old normal.

 

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June 23, 2021 · 23:33

Making Plans

I did some ordinary things today that I was surprised to see felt very much not ordinary. I blame COVID and the last fifteen months of quarantine and pandemic conditions.

First, there was an announcement that Elton John’s final US tour was coming in 2022, and it will end with two concerts at Dodger Stadium on November 19th & 20th, 2022. Tickets don’t go on sale to the general public until June 30th, but there are presale deals for American Express customers, so I was able to get “floor seats” (the stage will be in the outfield, we’ll be sitting on the outer edge of the infield dirt just to the right of 2nd base – which was not ever a sentence I expected to write…) for a very reasonable price. (Let’s define “reasonable” as considerably less than the $500 to $1,000 each, which is what I expected to be paying for those seats.)

So, seventeen months from now, we’ll presumably be at Dodger Stadium seeing Elton John live.

Or at least that’s the plan – what was the world like seventeen months ago and how much has it changed? How “normal” will the next seventeen months be?

Shorter term, the 79th Worldcon (World Science Fiction Convention) will be in Washington, DC in mid-December. It’s normally in August or early September, but a huge problem with the convention hotel going bankrupt due to COVID has caused a change in schedule. It’s also caused the convention to only have about a quarter of the hotel rooms they normally would have reserved. While the hotel room block opened up just on Monday, it’s already sold out. We’ll be staying at the Hilton about a mile away and figuring out how to grab cabs or Uber or Lyft or whatever to get back and forth between the venues. I also went over the schedule with my bosses since that’s a busy time for us and made sure we had a plan for me to be gone then.

So, six months from now, we’ll presumably be in Washington, DC seeing friends we haven’t seen in a couple of years and probably on our first plane trip in over two years.

Or at least that’s the plan – what was the world like six months ago and how much has it changed? On that time scale the changes are mostly for the better, but only because it was so bad at the beginning of 2021. Watching the news, both medically and politically, I think we’re all a lot more sensitive to how fast things can change for the worse and I know that I personally am not convinced at all that we’re completely safe and away from the thin ice.

Yet…

Hope springs eternal. We see threats coming on the horizon, but they’re vague and uncertain. We’re exhausted from the last eighteen months of COVID, and even more exhausted from the previous four years of one political party trying to turn our country into a third-rate dictatorship – yet we’re making plans. Plans for travel, plans to see friends, plans to go to concerts.

It feels normal and simultaneously feels anything BUT normal.

We might need to get used to that feeling, as much as we may dislike it.

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June 20, 2021 · 23:11

Los Angeles Mask Usage Data – June 20th

First of all, Happy Solstice! At 03:32 UTC tonight (20:32 PDT, 23:32 EDT) we were at the point where the Sun is at the highest point relative to the North Pole due to the Earth’s 23.4° tilt relative to its orbital plane. In other words, the longest amount of daylight and the beginning of summer in the Northern Hemisphere and the shortest amount of daylight and the beginning of winter in the Southern Hemisphere. From here on out, the days get shorter a bit more every day, until the situation is reversed and the Northern Hemisphere has its shortest daylight on Tuesday, December 21st, at 07:59 PST.

It’s a cyclic thing.

California has officially come out of the pandemic lockdown and as of Tuesday, June 15th, in most places masks are no longer required for fully vaccinated people.

Key words in there – “in most places,” “required,” and “for fully vaccinated people.”

I thought it would be interesting to see how many folks are still wearing masks in general today. In this section of California, compliance with the mask and social distancing mandate has been pretty darn good in most places. I don’t recall seeing a single unmasked person in the grocery store or any other indoor space in well over a year. Granted, I haven’t been out that much at all, mainly just to the grocery store once a week and the odd other store run here and there. But I figured that now that the mask requirements have been lifted, we’ll start seeing folks ditching the masks. I was curious as to how fast it will happen.

Places like the gas station, where you’re outdoors to begin with? I was sure that we would start seeing masks being a rare thing. Much to my surprise, I haven’t seen it yet. The last time I got gas, last Sunday, everyone at the pumps, without exception, was masked up. Let’s say that it was a pleasant surprise.

At the grocery store last week and this, I again was pleasantly surprised to see all employees and all customers masked up. I’m betting that a lot of places, particularly those handling food, will keep requiring their employees to be masked for some time, just to reassure  their customers that it’s safe. (And health care and hospital facilities are exception to the lifting of the mask mandate – EVERYONE’s still required to be masked up there, and my money says that requirement will stick for quite a while.) But I was sure that this week I would see at least one or two of the 50-60 customers in the grocery store going unmasked – nope, not yet!

At the restaurant where I pick up our to-go breakfast every week, it was packed due to Father’s Day and folks who were eating were of course unmasked. But of those waiting for a table or waiting to pay or waiting for a pickup order, all except for two young guys (20-ish?) were masked.

So we’ll see how long this goes on. I think there are a lot of other variables, in particular how the Delta variant affects infection, hospitalization, and death rates. We’re down to less than 10 deaths a day in LA County, and while that’s not zero, it’s a LOT better than the hundreds and hundreds per day that we saw just five or six months ago. But if Delta doesn’t cause a huge fourth wave, opening up the theaters and ballparks to full capacity doesn’t trigger a new outburst, and more and more people can finally get convinced to get vaccinated, we’ll see if mask usage becomes an “only when required” (i.e, hospitals, public transportation, etc) item within a few weeks.

Personally? I’ll still be wearing one in public and indoors for a while longer. I want to start getting outside for more exercise ASAP and I’ll carry one them should I end up in a crowd or indoors someplace (i.e., stopping at 7-11 to get something to drink while out on a walk or run) but I won’t use it or need it when I’m just walking down the sidewalk. On the other hand, any time I’m in a situation, indoors or outdoors, where someone else asks me to put a mask on, I will. It’s not a big deal.

As for anyone who wants to ask me why I’m still wearing a mask indoors when it’s not required? Well, they’re “special,” in particular those who want to be in your face out of nowhere about something that’s absolutely none of their god damn business, so they’ll get full frontal snark right between the eyes from the beginning. Just sayin’.

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June 16, 2021 · 23:34

Calm

I’ve heard of the “Calm” app, used for meditation, relaxation, white noise, stress relief, and so on. A couple of folks at work (back in the days when we congregated in this odd place called an “office“) swore by it.

These days I was thinking about something like that, and checked it out. Okay, I can give that a shot, skeptic though I am.

$59.95 a year.

I’m also an incredibly cheap skeptic about certain things, for the record.

But then I remembered that we were told a year or so ago, once the pandemic was really picking up steam and ye olde shite was really hitting ye olde fan, that Kaiser Permanente Medical clients could get it for free. Was that deal still on the table?

Yes, it is! Score!

No meditation yet, no time. (Yes, I know the old joke. Guru – “You must mediate twenty minutes a day.” Student – “BUT I DON’T HAVE TWENTY MINUTES TO SPARE!” Guru – “Ahhh. Then you must meditate forty minutes a day!”) But I am enjoying the white noise background sounds, particularly the variety of rain noises.

Am I calmer today? Maybe, maybe not. But I sure have to pee a lot more often!

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April 1, 2021 · 23:51

2021 – Three Months In

So on the one hand in the blink of an eye, on the other hand with the passing of a couple of eons, we’re now three months into 2021, almost 25% of the year gone by.

Okay, it’s definitely better than 2020. We did have that whole little attempted coup on January 6th and we had to put up with “the previous guy” for about three weeks in January. But those are small potatoes compared to the unrelenting disaster that 2020 was.

Since then, the vaccines have started to flow, there were actual plans put forward to get them into arms, the infection rates and ICU usage rates are way down, and if we can avoid being morons (the percentages of folks not wearing masks at all or just not attempting to wear them properly at today’s Opening Day baseball games don’t bode well) then in another three months we might actually be able to see the end of the tunnel instead of just a dim glow off in the distance.

And MLB’s Opening Day is here! There’s still an undiluted joy to seeing and listening to the game, to hearing the crack of the bat, to feeling that pop of the glove into the catcher’s mitt, to smelling the cut grass of the field. Okay, so we weren’t there, and it will probably be late May at the very earliest and probably early June before we can get to a game. It was just the smell of cut grass from our back yard, but any port in a storm!

While most stadiums were at 20% or maybe 50%, at least one stadium will be at 100% capacity when they open at home next week. That’s just stupid, which raises the immediate question – is we talking about a stadium in Texas or Florida? (It’s Texas.)

Welcome to spring. Wear your mask, even if you’ve been vaccinated, especially if you haven’t. Stay safe, stay socially distanced. We want you alive and well to actually hang out at a game in July. Or August. Or better yet, June! But September at the latest…

We don’t have a clue what we’re doing, do we? One foot in front of another.

Masked.

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March 15, 2021 · 22:58

The Ides Of March – 2021

Ditto for 2020. Not so much for 2021 – we’ve gone through so much and learned just how stupid and naive we were a year ago. I’m not sure that makes us any wiser, just more tired and battle worn. For example, take a look at the states and cities opening back up from quarantine now that things are “better,” where “better” is defined as “still a hundred times worse than it was when we first locked down and went into quarantine.”

There appears to be some light at the end of the COVID tunnel as we now have three vaccines available, production and distribution are ramping up, and after the nightmare of the spikes following the holidays in November and December in cities like Los Angeles are starting to see the first phases of re-opening. We can debate another time whether or not that’s premature (pro tip – it is, and places like Texas that are totally open are freakin’ insane) but the fact that it’s happening and based now on some science and data rather than cult politics gives some hope that by this summer there might be some semblance of “normal.”

One of the advantages to having a personal website (and the ego to spew drivel out into the universe in the vainglorious belief that anyone cares) is that it gives me an easy way to see what was going on a year ago. Many folks are writing and commenting about the one year anniversary of their COVID experience, especially around March 11th, which is sort of the “official” start of the government response. For me it’s March 19th, as I’ll explain, and this weekend I took a look back. It’s both unintentionally hilarious at times, and gut wrenchingly depressing at others.

We had no idea what was happening. (Which presupposes that we do now any more than we did then – a depressing thought for another day.)

February, 2020 (The Gathering Storm)

02/01/2020 – Our son was in town for the Super Bowl party, on leave from his military post in Japan. In retrospect, he probably just made it here and back before travel restrictions slammed into place around the world. We went out to see the Kings game in downtown LA and the area around Staples was a zoo with the spontaneous memorial to Kobe Bryant that had sprung up outside.

02/02/2020 – The Super Bowl win by our beloved Kansas City Chiefs. That was a good day and a great party.

02/15/2020 – We went downtown again for a show at the Ahmanson Theater, “The Last Ship,” starring Sting. It would turn out to be the only show of the five or six in the series we had purchased that wasn’t cancelled due to COVID.

02/19/2020 – After putting it off for months because I was too freakin’ busy, we got out at the last minute before it left movie theaters and saw “Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker.” It would be the last time we’ve been in a movie theater since.

02/20/2020 – Another Kings game at Staples, this time with truly excellent seats down by the glass that we had purchased at a charity auction. Again, although we didn’t know it then, our last live sporting event for a long, long time.

02/27/2020 – One more trip downtown, this time to the Disney Concert Hall, to see Dvorak’s New World Symphony. My article title, “It’s A New World,” was a not-so-original play on the music’s title, but looking back it said so, so much about what was right around the corner in reality. I guess if we need to have a last, great event before the shit hit the fan, you could do a lot worse than this.

March, 2020 (The Only Way Out Is Through)

03/08/2020 – A short post about Courage, and how we were going to need it. The first week of March was filled with my usual posts – pictures, attempts at humor, lizards, astronomy. But as the “Courage” post indicates, things were anything but normal or calm. I haven’t gone back and looked up dates or emails, but I remember that by this point it was becoming obvious that there were humongous changes coming really, really fast. At work we were trying to figure out how to set up EVERYONE to work remotely, re-inventing our entire company and procedures almost overnight. It’s a good thing we didn’t know how hard it was going to be or how insane it was to be trying to do what we were trying to do. In retrospect, being a part of that team and doing what we did in those circumstances and under that kind of pressure is probably going to be one of the things I’m most proud of in life. It was epic – I’ll be happy not to have to do it again, particularly given the way that so many key facets of the federal government were actively working to make it worse. I have a lot of reasons to want a lot of members of the previous Administration in jail until the heat death of the Universe, but the way they failed in that time of need is #1 on that list.

03/11/2020 – The normal world order was crashing to a halt and it was obvious that this was not a drill. The NBA had shut down and the NHL was right behind it. I was so frazzled that I had written a post on the 10th and then simply forgotten to post it, waking up at 3:00 AM to realize what had happened, but being too exhausted to care. In many parts of our country and all across the world, the first signs of panic over COVID were setting in.

03/13/2020 – The stock market was taking a dive, COVID was completely out of control in Italy, and the first indications of a building disaster in New York City were showing up. The stores were out of toilet paper (boy, did THAT drive home to folks how serious this was!) and even Disneyland was shutting down. It was my first good COVID rant about washing your hands, staying home and away from other people, listening to the doctors instead of the politicians, and not being stupid. Yeah, I’m so glad that so many of YOU listened and agreed, it would have been nice if a couple hundred million other folks had.

03/15/2020 – One year ago today. A theme that I returned to a number of times during this ordeal, particularly in the early stages. Pictures of beauty in the world and a reminder that the flowers, birds, clouds, and moon didn’t care about COVID – they were going to be there and go on, with or without us. So breathe, keep fighting, be smart, but don’t forget to find a bit of beauty and joy in the world, even as it went to Hell in a handbasket.

03/19/2020 – For me, this was the day when quarantine started. For about ten days or so we had been starting to get folks up and running from home, actually shutting down office operations. March 19th was the day I was the last one there before we went into full quarantine lockdown conditions. The City and County of Los Angeles as well as the State of California all issued their “shelter in place” orders on March 19th and we were all going to be in compliance to whatever extent we could be. (For the record, I’ve been back to my office I think four or five times since then to deal with computer issues or to sign paperwork, but I haven’t seen a single one of my officemates in person for a year. That hurts.)

Three phrases from that March 19th post are either hilarious or the ultimate in naivete:

“…everyone should stay home for at least the next couple of weeks.” I remember discussing options and expectations, wondering if we would be on lockdown for just a couple of weeks or if it would stretch on into a second, or God forbid, even a third month. A year later, I’ve not ever gone out unmasked, and my outings have been 100% limited to Sunday grocery shopping, Saturday trips to the CAF hangar every couple of weeks to pick up mail, food pick up runs, and a handful of trips to the store for necessities.

“…we’ve done all we can to prepare, both at home and at work, and now we’ll just do the best we can.” 535,000+ dead in the US so far (plus probably 15% to 20% more uncounted yet for the GOP governors who continue to lie and manipulate the statistics), who knows how many hundreds of thousands of “COVID Long Haulers,” and who knows how much long-term economic damage. And we have so many millions more dead around the world, now with virulent mutations and variants starting to pop up in populations that are hopelessly unprepared to deal with the crisis. We’ll just do the best we can, indeed. Did we have any other choice? It could have been so much better. It’s cold comfort that it could have been so much worse. And still might be.

“…we’ll probably still have thousands or tens of thousands of deaths here, with hundreds of thousands or even millions across the US.” The current death count in Los Angeles County today is 22,476, out of 1.21M cases. For California, it’s 56,606 deaths, out of 3.63M cases. For the United States, it’s 535,000 deaths (officially, YMMV) out of 29.5M cases (officially). I’m so glad that my worst case fears haven’t come to pass. (But I can’t help but add a silent “yet” to the end of that sentence.)

Of course, the reason this date stands out and is so memorable for me is that it’s my birthday. And my second COVID quarantine birthday is right around the corner. Huzzah?

03/20/2020 – Our next concert and play were officially cancelled – the writing was on the wall.

03/21/2020 – The first big US hot spots were starting to heat up, and those of us toughing it out were on pins and needles thinking about every tickle at the back of the throat.

03/22/2020 – The title said it all – “What Will Success Look Like?” I’m still not sure that we know, but we sure know what failure looked like. The other thing I noticed in the posts around this time were that I was swearing A LOT. Not doing that might take some conscious effort when we get back to what is ostensibly a “polite” society on the other side of this life event.

03/24/2020 – This reminds me of how fast things got critical – talking about hospitals putting triage plans in place for when (not if) their ERs and ICUs were completely overrun. And it happened. New York. Seattle. Dallas. Miami. Kansas City. Here in Los Angeles there were times just a couple of months ago when critical patients waited in ambulances outside the hospital for 8+ hours because there was no room inside. And heaven forbid that you had a heart attack or were in a car accident – life-saving treatments that would have been five minutes away two years ago were now out of reach completely in too many places too often. What was the option if you couldn’t breathe from COVID or had multiple fractures and massive bleeding from an accident? Well – you died.

03/30/2020 – They had finally cancelled the entire Ahmanson season, including “1776” which I was so, so, so, so much looking forward to. They tried later in the year to reschedule it for later in 2021, but that’s long ago been cancelled as well. As was “Hamilton,” this year’s entire theater and concert schedule, football, hockey, baseball, basketball, concerts, marathons, the Olympics… (Jeez Louise, they cancelled the freaking Olympics! And it’s still not 100% clear that they’ll be able to hold them this July instead!) Maybe it’s gotten “better” enough (see above – it hasn’t, but we’re gonna do it anyway…) to allow fans into baseball games for opening day in two weeks, and at least the NCAA tournament is being held this year, even if it is in a “bubble.” And if you want to see a live golf tournament or NASCAR race? Go ahead – but don’t even get me started on Florida!

03/31/2020 – I ended March with a plea / suggestion / recommendation that everyone watch “Zoey’s Extraordinary Playlist.” It was the tiniest little bit of joy and excitement and hope in that bleak month. I’ll wrap up here with a repeat of that recommendation. The second season has been a bit different in tone due in part to what’s happened to the characters in Season One, and in part due to what’s happening out in the real world with COVID. It’s a tiny bit less novel and more somber, but still so very, very excellent. It comes back for the second half of Season Two on March 28th on NBC. Sooooooooo tasty!!

And now?

Well, at least we’re not out of toilet paper any more.

But we have half a million families in this country who are missing someone, or have someone hanging on for dear life, or have someone dealing with months and months of daily trauma despite being “healed” – or all of the above.

Personally, we’ve been lucky. We know people who have died from COVID. We know people who have been ill with “the ‘Rona,” some with mild cases, some with more serious cases. But we’ve been spared. So far. Maybe we were right to be paranoid and obsessed with quarantine and hand washing. Maybe it’s just that our number never came up.

We’re still doing the best we can, one day at a time, one foot in front of the other. I hope you’ve been able to do the same.

We seem to be coming out the other side, but I’m for years to come sure we’ll be wearing masks and giving some serious side-eye to anyone coughing or sneezing out in the open around us. By the end of the summer, maybe we’ll even be able to travel or go to a ball game. It’s all predicated on the virus variants not going ballistic and everyone pulling their weight to not let down their guard too soon. A “fourth wave” (which could easily be bad enough to push us over the 1,000,000 death mark) is about 99% preventable, but that doesn’t mean that it won’t happen.

(And as I’m writing this, the SiriusXM Classical Pops channel serves up Dvorak’s New World Symphony, 3rd movement. Thanks, I wasn’t having a tough enough time getting through this…)

Stay calm.

Look for the beauty around us.

Stay vigilant.

Wash your hands.

Stay socially distant for a while longer. And then maybe for just a little bit longer after that…

We’ve gone through Hell and we can’t forget that, nor can we ever forget those that we’ve lost. But Hell seems to have an exit sign up ahead, if we’re patient enough and smart enough to get there.

Be safe.

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February 17, 2021 · 23:37

Detritus Art

I got to spend way too much time today in a dentist’s chair (root canal – I’ll live, I might be cranky) and then got to stop by the hospital to pick up a couple of prescriptions.

These days, of course, when you want to get into a hospital you have to pass through a checkpoint, get your temp taken, and get screened (at least verbally, not with an actual lab test) for COVID. With a big hospital with a big organization, they need a way to make sure that everyone has been screened, so at Kaiser Permanente they give you a little colored sticker to put on your shirt. Every day it’s a different color, about all that I noticed when I’ve been there before in the last year.

When you leave, you can take off the sticker. Previously on the main exit from the facility there was a board where everyone stuck them. Simple. Easy. Elegant.

The board is gone.

Out in the parking lot, folks have spontaneously started putting their stickers onto whatever surface will hold them, primarily these bollards that are out at the edges of the parking lots.

Is it found art? It’s colorful! It’s an unexpected little bit of random whimsy and joy in sort of a grim and serious place!

Or is it just litter, junk, detritus, a pain in the ass problem that someone is going to have to clean up? One of those little things that no one quite thought through when the focus was on making sure that everyone could easily be ID’d as having passed the COVID checkpoint? An unintended consequence?

Or maybe it’s both?

I do notice now that it appears that every single day seems to have not just a different color, but also a different message. Heart health! Colon cancer, get tested early and save your life! (Yeah, that one, we can relate on a very personal basis!) Practice social distancing! (Some folks need to practice a lot more, they’re not doing it correctly still.) Mammograms! Prescription refills by mail! Exhibit gratitude to make someone’s day! Phone and video exams!

Keep your eyes open for unexpected beauty and whimsy, even if it is just an unintended consequence.

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