Things continue to be interesting and awful and so yeah I’m doing the bullet thing again. My overall thoughts, though? I think Texas is telling Texas to hold its beer…

• Here are some examples of numbers seen in SA this week: Monday, a holiday, sees a new pandemic county record of 8982 cases! Tuesday, the seven day average went up to 6140! Also Tuesday, our positivity rate skyrocketed again, this time to 39%! Thankfully, we haven’t been up to 9K again, but our average remains around 6k/day, and 18 of the first 20 days of 2022 were higher than the highest number we saw in 2021.
• The feds are giving out home covid testing kits. Only four per household, regardless of the number of people in said household, and it’ll take weeks to ship, much less arrive. But hey, we ordered our allotted four. It’s better than the nothing available in stores.
• Supply chains are clearly screwed up again. My bed frame has been breaking for the last year and has gotten to the point where it’s a bit dangerous for me to sleep in, and yet I have to, because literally all bed frames are out of stock everywhere I go. Office chairs, too. My office chair is now so broken that I have to make sure I don’t fall off every time I turn my head. Sigh. Then there’s the rows and rows of missing…cat food. All over the country. WTF?
• (On the last point, remember how Repub-idiots thought that opening all the stores up without masks or vaccines was the best way to energize the economy, and now literally everything is crashing and no one can keep up and businesses are having to temporarily close because all their workers are sick? Who could have foreseen that??)
• Newest covidiot conspiracy theory: covid can be prevented with female hormone therapy replacement. !!! Honestly? I feel like these guys are being trolled, but they seem stupid enough to fall for it.
• Meanwhile, 22 deaths were reported over the last three days, and hospital rates are starting to skyrocket again. Omicron is only “mild” in comparison to the original virus, y’all!
• I feel like I’m listening to a clock ticking down, waiting for my turn with omicron. Almost everyone I know has it, and Ambrose is still working (at a fast food place!), and Laurence is still going to school (where he has to take his mask off during theatre practice), and we’ve dodged the bullet for almost two years now…
• Speaking of school, we’re getting daily health report letters home now. The news on them is getting more and more vague. We have no idea if they’re telling us about people in Laurence’s classes, or people he knows specifically, or…?
• Also, the school district preemptively shut down yesterday, supposedly due to weather. It was supposed to get down to freezing and stay slightly above freezing all day, with some potential for wintry mix in the afternoon. The school has NEVER shut down for weather the night before, except during the Snowpocalypse last year. This is definitely staffing issues due to covid, and they’ve seized the opportunity to close due to “weather” so they can still get paid by the state, which won’t give funds if they close for covid. (There ended up being no wintry precipitation, so they couldn’t shut down today, too.)
• One school district in town – not ours, but another big one – has temporarily put a mask requirement back into effect, despite that being illegal per our state court system (ugh).
• I had a dream Wednesday night that Ambrose called me to his room because he felt sick, and I walked in and immediately knew he had covid, but I couldn’t get the thermometer to work, and I didn’t have a mask or gloves or anything. Clearly, my brain knows that it’s going to be all of us very, very soon…

So yeah, that’s where life is here these days. I’m to a point where a part of me has given up. On Tuesday and Wednesday, I felt so much weight from the trauma of this whole situation, and despair at people’s failure to try to help, and frustration at how during the good times (when the numbers are low) I’m still playing it safe and limiting my interactions etc and now I can’t even leave the house without fear given how rampant things are. Ugh. So Wednesday night, Jason and I took some time out of the house, not to anywhere dangerous, just to a local nursery (outdoors, almost no one there) and a few other un-crowded places. The photos in this post come from the nursery and later the sunset. It helped, but I’m so tired of this cycle and wish people would just do what we need to do. Even with 9k cases per day and a 40% positivity rate, a full half of folks at the grocery store are going around without masks, and all I can see are walking germ-bags, like upright cockroaches. It’s disgusting.