Tag: COVID

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In the aftermath of COVID

I submit that we have returned to near normal after the past three years of COVID. That does not mean that it is gone. It is still out there, lurking in the shadows of everyday life as another virus that can interfere with us. I am hopeful that we have learned something as a society in the aftermath of COVID, but I am afraid not.

I was on travel the other week for work. Airplanes and airports are very busy. I am afraid that this is a simple fact that we have more people than our country can support, as much as it is of a return to near normal. Anyway, when I got to my work travel location, I was informed that a coworker had tested positive for COVID and was home. Of course, I, sitting in an office across the country, heard this and had to wonder if I too was going to test positive, get sick, or contribute to a new outbreak. As you see, as I was being told this, I wasn’t really feeling 100%. But I was on travel, and I always feel bad for a couple days after being locked up for hours in an airplane. It goes without saying but I always get ill after air travel. They claim that they have micropore filters and that they clean after every flight and that all is well. Doesn’t matter, I still get sick.

However, in my case, it turned out to not be COVID. The pollen count was up from the pine trees. Some loratadine and Flonase and I was back to my old self. And to be safe, a few COVID tests confirmed that I was not a walking typhoid Mary.

Conversely, my son missed most of February due to a sinus infection. It lingered for about four weeks after first not getting any antibiotics, to getting the wrong antibiotics, to just missing so much school and homework that he was suffering. Yet he didn’t have COVID either, although we had to test him multiple times for strep, RSV, COVID and the flu.

But it is still around. It will be with us forever they say. Biden still has all of the emergency aspects in place that were around with COVID. Pretty sure that he would try to spend billions more in COVID emergency aid if he could. The truth is now the subject of hearings, as to its origins. Perhaps they will have hearings as to how drugs were brought to market so fast, as the real complications of the vaccines emerge.

In my annual physical with my primary doctor, he had asked if I had all my COVID boosters. I said no. I had the original two shots, the 3rd shoot (the booster after the fact) but that I did not have the new COVID vaccine cocktail. I asked why since I managed to get COVID anyway. His response was that it probably wasn’t as severe, as I have a couple of health matters that would put me at higher risk, it would be advantageous. I argued natural immunity. In the end, we agreed to disagree. I keep looking for the data just to see how well things are since we have had inoculated millions, including myself. What health effects will we see down the road?

I’m guessing that the concept of masks will be with us forever. Every time I go to the hospital, I am required to wear a mask. The COVID aftermath created new litter that I see along the road, in the parking lots, all over. The mask! Whether it is cloth, KN95, something else, it now represents additional trash produced by our society and discarded without abandoned.

As we had mask, antibiotic, food and other shortages for basic good as they are no longer manufactured in this country, I would hope that we invest in returning the basic manufacturing needs for everyday life in this country. I’m not saying that we should make toasters, but there are things that we still experience shortages because of the supply chain.We go for the cheap but fail to understand the costs when we are without. They can be significant. Antibiotics is a key one. How many people would stay ill, or get worse, or die if we didn’t have access to antibiotics? I understand that we don’t make many of these drugs today here. We have drug shortages for many drugs important to our daily lives. The only drug that appears to be in unlimited supply and has Chinese origins is Fentanyl. We can thank Joe Biden for that!

As for now, both my son and I want to lose that extra weight that I attribute to COVID. The inability to go out and about, the daily sitting, has contributed to our individual BMI’s. As daughter got out every day to feed the horses, she didn’t suffer as much as we did.

However, the consequences of the COVID aftermath are all around us. Closed restaurants and other businesses that we enjoyed and shopped at; long lines in those places that remained open as there are fewer people to support the business. Lines are longer, waits are more. Shortages still exist as some of the isles in the grocery store remain baren. Small business is critical to towns and society. Sadly, our society continues to rot away. A frayed moral fabric continues to show our decline. Less civility has been replaced with more senility.

The tear of our social fabric is long and deep and will be with us longer than the mutations of COVID. I really do not care where it came from, although I believe more in the lab-leak theory. One of the lingering issues from the COVID years is that many conspiracy theories have turned out to be closer to the truth than the fake media wants you to believe! I do care as to whether it was natural or created by man and accidentally released. More to the point, what are we going to do to keep that from happening in the future.

The world is comprised of evil despots who want to destroy us. It would be nice if we could live together.

The whole inflation situation that we find ourselves in today, I am afraid, will be with us for a long while. I believe that the two separate issues of inflation and the COVID support are tied together. Free money allowed people the opportunity not to work. Yet, now that there is no more free money, where are all of the workers? They all did not retire. They all did not die or develop a health condition that keeps them from working. Did the free money allow people to unleash their rugged individualism? Allow them to develop self-sustaining farms? Unleash millions in investments so that work was no longer required? In all cases, the free ride that America has taken, since before COVID and continues to this day, is a bill that will soon be coming due. I am afraid that it will get worse before it gets better.

Sadly, our children suffered. They suffered way too much. Issues associated with their mental health are increasing. They lost critical educational years of school but will probably not be noticed given how bad the American educational system has become. Sadly, yet another indicator of our declining society. Yet another aspect of the simple truth that we are not leaving our country and our world, in a better place than what we inherited. I wonder, and I worry how bad things will become for my children.

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the week in review

It’s seven o’clock on a Sunday Morning.

Greetings from New Mexico. It is Sunday January 16, 2022. It is cold outside. It is early in the morning. I am trying to get into the trend of getting up early on Sunday to post. Certainly no mutant messages are being heard here. But the mutants did pay a visit.

It has been a wild week since my last post. Last week focused on the continuing COVID pandemic. I wonder if it was foreshadowing for this weeks events? Well, this week it managed to hit home. Daughter was notified about contact tracing at the high school and started feeling bad last Sunday. Everyone who I know that has been flagged by contact tracing has turned out to be positive within a few days. If you are lucky enough to get a test!

By Monday, daughter tested positive. Son tested negative but stayed home awaiting for the inevitable. By Wednesday, daughter was starting to feel no worse, son tested positive. And since they were with their mother, she too was hit with the symptoms. In all cased, it was the equivalent of a bad cold, with congestion, cough and a low grade fever. Of course, not to be outdone, their aunt in Louisiana was working through her second bout of the Chinese virus.

In all cases, everyone was fully vaccinated. The adults had the booster. What is obvious is that the vaccine, nor having the earlier mutations, does not protect you from getting the virus. However, it appears that it reduces (thus far) your symptoms and complications.

Needless to say, by the middle of the week, I was taking care of the horses, making food deliveries and keeping track of my kids from a distance. Elements of work were moving to working at home. Aside from hating it, aspects of my job simply cannot be performed at home. By the end of the week, I was still in the office every day but the Los Alamos High School and the Los Alamos Middle School returned to remote learning, and both kids had already missed almost a week of in-class education.

At this juncture, I need to pause my thoughts and go feed the horses…

Roman (on the left) and Ruby (on the right) at morning feeding.

As it has been getting in the low 20’s here at night, the horses need to have blankets. Roman is still confined to a smaller paddock area months after his surgery. Daughter was riding him on the Saturday before she fell ill. Ruby, who spends her days starring at the neighboring stables and horses, and goats, and donkeys, likes it when I feed her because I always have cookies to greet her.

As you can see, there remains some snow in the background of the photos. We had some several weeks ago but it is slowly melting. We clearly need more, much more in order to recover from the drought that has hit the state, and much of the southwest over the past few years.

…What I thought was going to be a brief pause for feeding turned out to be almost 12 hours. I went and fed the horses. Then I went for my usual Sunday morning coffee at Starbucks. My friend and coworker managed to return from Florida late last week. Almost a week later than he normally planned, but air travel experienced a number of flight cancellations over Christmas, New Years, and into early January. After coffee, I managed to run a few errands and returned to the stables to move some hay.

It turned out to be a beautiful day with temperatures in the middle 40’s. Moved hay and took Ruby for a walk. Her, and my first real exercise outside in months. Fed the horses dinner and then tended to myself.

Ruby was all excited when I grabbed her halter to take her for a walk.

So we managed to walk the outer loop at the stables, which is over a mile. She was thirsty when we returned, as she started to eat the snow. I have never seen a horse eat snow.

Ruby eating snow after our walk.

We also managed to see Roman, who was outside on such a great day. We caught him lying down, sunning himself and taking a nap. As I said, he is still taking it easy after his surgery. And with his rider out with COVID, not much for him to do. He finally got up and we were able to snap a good picture of him.

Up close with Roman.

So the end of the week was very different than normal. I spent it outside with the horses, doing a bit more than just feeding them. While I do not ride, maybe someday I could learn. At least I had fun spending time with them. Here is to the kids getting better, me keeping from getting sick, and to the horses. Until next time. Much to be done.

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ramblings of a madman

Happy Sunday January 9, 2022

It’s Sunday morning, after the first full week in which I returned to work from the the Christmas/New Years vacation. Jewel and I are spending a quiet day here at the house. Relaxing, drinking coffee. Well at least I am drinking coffee; Jewel is sitting next to me on the sofa.

It has been weeks since I last enjoyed my Sunday morning coffee cabal with my coworker. My friend left before Christmas to go to his house on Sanibel Island and now finds himself trying to return today. He is caught up in the COVID induced travel cancellations that have been pretty significant around the Christmas/New Years travel period.

COVID is significantly on the upswing in the US, with over a million new cases reported each day over the past week. The increase certainly keeps me from going out unless I need to. In Los Alamos county, COVID cases are up. Ditto at work, where we were reminded to resort to video meetings and to work at home if possible. Earlier in the week I received e-mail from both the middle school and the high school, indicating multiple students with positive tests and others identified for possible testing and quarantine by contact tracing. Important information since both schools have some importance to me in that both of my children are enrolled in each. So far, I am glad that they are continuing to push in class teaching. Both my son and daughter (and I) hated the on line stuff, and it is clear that they suffered from the video instruction. Overall, the pandemic has taken much from kids growing up over the past few years.

For some COVID cases, I understand that people have been vaccinated and still catch the virus. For others, this is a repeat infection. Either way, the virus is still with us, and will probably be around for ever. It will mutate and it will infect all of us at some point. Two points emerge from this, the 670-plus days into the pandemic. The first is that I, like many, are just fed up with the virus and how our government has handled it. Early on, it was shut down everything. It was the need for testing. Today, we still find ourselves short on testing. Shutting down the economy, not so much probably because the 15 days to slow the spread just didn’t do it. Government and employers still push masks and while I wear mine as so directed, I have to conclude that it only offers marginal protection. And while treatments exist, they are difficult to obtain, others are just now coming on-line, and others have may have been altogether discredited by the mainstream. The second is that while the vaccines offer some degree of protection, they do not make us immune. I expect as the virus mutates, it will be like the common cold or the flu and that we will be living with it for a very long time. But don’t take this as medical advice. It is just my opinion.

Today, much of the news is less about reporting events. It is more about reporting the opinion of events. I think objectivity has been lost in the modern age because of how quickly information travels and gets reported. Events can be seen real time. Stories are written and reported across multiple outlets, and the flaws, misinformation, lies, all can be shared without any evidence of truth or facts to back it up. The same story can show up in five, ten, or more newspapers, websites, twitter feeds, etc. Objectivity is now replaced with opinion.

The dictionary defines opinion as a belief, judgment, or way of thinking about something : what someone thinks about a particular thing. Newspapers now have opinion sections, where experts tell the story based on their beliefs, judgement, or way of thinking. Even what I write her is my opinion, based on my thinking, beliefs, education, background, experience. Included in that is political thinking and ideology. It is important to understand as much about the person who conveys the story as part of how one understands and interprets the story itself. This is the objectivity that people need today to understand what is going on around them.

Kevin M. Lerner recently wrote an article on the online website The Conversation in June 2020 about “Journalists believe news and opinion are separate, but readers can’t tell the difference”. Lerner is Assistant Professor

https://theconversation.com/journalists-believe-news-and-opinion-are-separate-but-readers-cant-tell-the-difference-140901

of Journalism at Marist College and edits the Journal of Magazine Media. His research focuses on the intellectual history of journalism through press criticism, satire, and magazines. The basic premise of the article is that the newspapers of today have sections that report news, and tell opinion. But is difficult for today’s reader to tell the difference.

The title of today’s post is “Happy Sunday…” It is my opinion that this Sunday is a happy day. I got a good nights sleep. I awoke in a good mood. I am not angry at my surroundings for the moment. But that could change as the day goes on.

There, I just gave you my opinion of his article. But we see it in the newspaper, on TV. Whether it is the Washington Post or the Wall Street Journal, or CNN versus FOX News. It is everywhere. Now more than ever, objectivity is needed as the world becomes a more troubling place. Russia looks poised to invade the Ukraine. China looks like it will use force to take over Taiwan. The Middle East continues to be in constant turmoil. And in the USA, the media continues to push the January 6 coup. The left hijacks the story line as an attempt to overthrow the government while the right pushes it as political protest.

We could write more about all of these political situations but I will save that for another time. Several things are still clear. It is Sunday. I am still happy. But I need more coffee. Until next time, be safe, enjoy reading TheMcKeeSpot and come back often. Drop a note if you like or dislike what you see here. I enjoy reading new things and conversing with new people.

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the week in review

Today is Sunday November 1, 2020.

Alas, another two months has gone by since my last post. Not what I have wanted to do but I guess that time flies. I thanks those people who periodically check in. Sorry that I didn’t post something new. It’s not like I have been tied up or anything. I often have ideas on things to write about; happenings in the daily world of myself worthy to be posted on TheMcKeeSpot. Call me lazy, call me whatever. No excuses here. I had ideas that never materialized into words and a post on the blog. So let’s catch up.

Am I still in the ongoing condition that I have written about in the past, namely a Frustration and a funk? Or should I correctly differentiate between the two. Am I frustrated? Am I in a funk? Still not sure so I will say that I probably continue experiencing both situations. Need something to stimulate where I am or where I am going. Not sure but I am guessing that I will know it when I experience it. Whatever it is…

How does the reading of books go? Well last year, I continued to indicate that I was reading Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand. I can report after approximately 18 months, I am up to page 125. Over a thousand more pages to go. Over the years, I have tried reading this book.

Same photo from May 2019. But I can tell you that the book is still on my table, next to my work computer.

I think this my fourth attempt. Not sure why I cannot finish it, or for that matter why I have to read it. Do I really need to find out “Who is John Galt”? Yes, Yes I do! I find it odd for someone who is not religious to have read the Bible twice, in having so much trouble trying to get through this book. I need to because Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is next on the list. Perhaps I need some discipline.

Last weekend was my weekend with the kids. Madison had a borrowed horse and was off at a competition. I planned on spending time with Dylan, playing Minecraft of perhaps starting his latest Lego set, or even helping him with his homework. Neither activity materialized because Ruby was injured. She had stepped on a nail was what I discovered on Saturday, after trying to get a vet to visit. By Sunday, we had to keep her injury free of dirt. That includes soaking the hoof in a bath of Epsom salts with some betadine, an IV with antibiotics, and sedation. Of course, this was being done inside as a snow storm was making its way into the area. The expectations were for wind, cold, and at least 12 inches of snow. Wind chill dropped temperatures to single digits in the afternoon. Blowing snow covered paddocks, only to become mud puddles days after the storm.

From Sunday through Tuesday, the wind howled, and the snow fell. When it was over, I think we may have gotten up to 16 inches of snow. It was cold, often in the 20’s during the day. Jewel and I would be cold and subsequently reduced our morning walks. Yet everyday, we managed to push forward and get Ruby’s foot washed and covered.

By Wednesday, the snow had stopped. The wind subsided, and the sun came out. By Thursday, it had melted around the paddock area, and it was actually warm enough to soak and treat Ruby outside.

Ruby’s paddock area Friday, October 30. It was covered in snow several days earlier.

Using tape after soaking the foot was not the best approach since the paddock went from snow packed to mud in a couple of days. We managed to get her one of those boots so that we could keep her injury contained and dried. This is the second time that she has managed to injure this hoof with a nail. And it’s not like she has had a hard summer, since she was being treated for arthritis. We will know soon if the inflammation has subsided to where she can practice and compete, or whether her days of dressage, show jumping and cross country are over.

Halloween was last night. Sadly trick or treat was cancelled because of increased cases of COVID here in New Mexico, as is being seen throughout the United States. So this year, there was no Trick or Treat on Main Street, no Almond Joy’s for me to get from the kids, no stops at houses for the special adult beverages while we walk from house-to-house with the kids. We all wear masks and so far have been successful in avoiding the virus. I continue to split time in the office and working from home. The kids continue to have school from home. They get lots and lots of homework but they are not really learning. So much homework that they often cancel visits with me. Limited contact for many months will school friends and teachers. No band, choir, or movies. It is taking a mental toll on all of us and not sure when the end is in sight. It is obvious that American’s have grown weary of the whole lock-down, masks, the bull shit that is surrounding the pandemic. Medical science often suggests that the cure is often worse compared to the disease (paraphrasing here). This ain’t no cure. This is prolonging the inevitable.

This week we have an election. The future of our country, in my opinion, hangs in the balance. I have already voted. In person, wearing a mask, standing in line. Easy, simple, no Russian collusion. Four years ago, I voted for the Libertarian candidates, Gary Johnson and Bill Weld. Gary was a great governor during my time here in New Mexico. He was decent, and actually did well for the people of this state. I despised Hillary. Not because she was a woman. Not because she was a Democrat. She was crooked and evil. She was never about the American people. I hated Donald Trump, not because of his policy positions, but rather how he communicated his positions. He wasn’t Presidential in my opinion.

Four years ago, Trump won. Then as a nation, we had to endure four years of the other side contesting the election. There were never any debates about his policies. It was always a discussion about him. The other side never gave him a chance. They immediately concocted one BS story after the next. Under Russian Control. Fake reason for impeachment. Four years of lies. Four years of fake news. Four years of phony politicians trying to undo what the electoral process in the country put into power. Four years of total Bull Shit. Time wasted when we could have been working to solve the problems of this country. Before 2016, we wasted eight years of apologizing to the nation and to the world. That too was total BS. Now we wasted four more years because we hated the individual who was trying to do what was best for a country that did right by him.

And now we are within days of another election. The democrats have chosen another bad ticket. Neither Biden or Harris represent my values. They are corrupt and do not represent the best of America. I am suppose to vote for the lessor of two evils. Except it is clear to me that the principles that this country was founded upon are also under attack. The planned policies of the Democrats will undo how I have lived my life. Hard work. Rugged individualism. No handouts. I have worked and sacrificed to get where I am. Put myself through school. Borrowed money and then paid off my student loans. Got a job. Worked long hours. Lived by the rules and played by the rules. That was how my family did it. Those are the values that I try to instill into my children.

As I get on in years, and inch closer to retirement, I do watch what happens daily with the stock market. That is my money that I worked hard for. Invested. I sacrificed the nicest car, the biggest house, fancy vacations and lifestyle. The economic policies of the Democrats will serve only their own self-serving interests. They will not help those in poverty, those who have suffered because of the pandemic. They will not provide better jobs, make the middle class better, provide for clean air or clean water. The environment will not get better after the clean new deal. To treat the patient, you need to know the disease. They do not know the disease. We are heading down a path that will result in depression, unemployment, increased crime, and probably war.

Four years ago, Trump won. I hope he wins again!