Sunday Coffee – Stress and Release

Posted on October 18, 2020 by Thistle

It has been one hell of a week! You know how 2020 feels like it’s been about ten years long? That was this week for me. Each day was a week of its own. Sheesh. I’m not going to go into a whole lot of detail here because most of the stuff happening involved other people, but in the general: four different people in my extended family suffered from major health problems this week, some of which are ongoing and may cause longterm problems. It’s really hard to be away from people re: the pandemic when stuff like this strikes. I can help out my immediate living-at-home family, but I’m out of luck when it comes to anyone else! I can’t even go and see them during their recoveries. I miss seeing my extended family so much.

The one health issue we had this week that was in the immediate at-home family was at least a planned one. Laurence had his wisdom teeth out on Friday morning. His bottom two had grown in this summer but were too cramped, and the top two were impacted. Morrigan had this surgery last year, so we knew a bit of what to expect, but these two kids were like night and day when it came to their reactions. Laurence was overly dazed post-surgery, not awake at all for at least an hour and not really awake for about three hours. His bottom lip stayed numb for almost 24 hours, making us worry that he was the one-in-a-million patients that get nerve damage. He never had much pain, though, and never required any pain meds beyond OTC stuff. Today, he’s still got a bit of pain and he’s still eating softer foods, but for being only two days post-op, he’s doing really well.

So yeah, there was a ton of stress this week, and other than Laurence’s situation, nothing to do but worry. So I drank way too much coffee, and spent a lot of time walking or running in circles around my house. Literally. I walked, ran, or hiked – not in my house of course – a total of 17 miles this week. The last four of those miles were yesterday morning at (somewhat) nearby Hill Country State Natural Area with five other women from the leadership of my hiking group. We hiked our 4+ miles and climbed up about a 400 foot elevation, all in the misting, foggy morning. It was exactly what I needed. Time, wide open space, a challenging climb, and a circle of support. We did yoga poses on the top of the mountain, made up songs about how often we slipped and skidded on rocks, and took pictures in fields of flowers. One of the ladies found a toad on the trail, and not only did I get an awesome photo, I got to pet his cute little back too! On our way out of the park, we ran into a dozen or more riders on horseback, and then we stopped to have lunch in a little sandwich shop about ten miles away. (Notably, this was my first indoor-restaurant experience since March 13th!)

It was an incredibly tiring day, especially given how early that we all had to get up in order to make the 1.5 hour drive out. I’ll admit that when I was driving in the dark with my terrible night vision, and it was rainy, and the roads were unfamiliar, and then construction began…I definitely regretted my choices in life. But I kept going. I knew that after I arrived and found my group, after I’d gotten past that agoraphobic portion of the trip, I would be okay. No, not just okay – happy. Because these women and these group hikes bring out the happy in me. No matter what’s going on in my life or how tough things are, they help me release all that stress into the wilderness and come back to the present. For the first time in so many years, I have my real smile back.

At one point on the trail (above), as the mist was rising and we could see a bit more of the mountains surrounding us, we stopped walking and held still and silent. For a few moments, there was no sound at all. Have you ever heard true silence? It’s an incredible experience that I really can’t put into words. Like everything else from yesterday’s adventure, it was beautiful.

PS – Happy 20th birthday to my oldest child, Morrigan. Because he’s off at college and not here to give me feedback on what he would want, it feels a bit intrusive to write an entire post on the subject. But I couldn’t let the day go by without at least wishing him happy birthday here on the blog!

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One by One, by Ruth Ware

Posted on October 16, 2020 by Thistle

Ten guests arrive at a ski chalet in the Alps for a corporate retreat. One doesn’t come back from a ski trip. The rest may not survive the avalanche that nearly buries the chalet soon after, or the murderer residing among them.

Ruth Ware is a bit hit or miss for me, but this one was more on the hit side. The premise is classic claustrophobic murder mystery, and reminded me very strongly of another snowed-in guests-dying-off-one-by-one thriller I read a few years ago (An Unwanted Guest). Ware tells the story from two points of view: one, a chalet employee, and the other, a guest who is there for this corporate retreat though she no longer works for the company. Tensions start high, as the employees are split in how they want the company’s future to go, and of course the disappearance, avalanche, and murders do not help things. (Ha!)

As far as mysteries go, this was all right. For quite a bit of time, I equally suspected all the guests, including the one who goes missing. From the way they were written, they could all be guilty or innocent. However, not long past the halfway point of the book, it becomes painfully obvious who the culprit is. So obvious that you have to wonder if it’s going to be a decoy. That didn’t bother me so much, because I was interested in watching the situation unfold. I would have preferred if the book hadn’t “split the party” as they say, leaving the two narrators in one room trying to figure things out, or if there had been more than two narrators so that we could spread the viewpoint around if they had to all split up. But that’s a minor complaint. The story was interesting outside of the mystery aspect, and I never felt my attention flag even after the truth is revealed so early in the book.

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Vote! 2020 Election

Posted on October 14, 2020 by Thistle

Early voting started in Bexar County yesterday. Apparently we had a turnout of just over 33k folks on Day 1, down slightly from the totals we had in 2016 and 2018 (likely due to pandemic, mail in ballots, etc, since we also have the highest number of registered eligible voters here ever). Unfortunately, because of the pandemic – limiting indoor spaces, six feet of distance between people – the voting lines are insane…and outdoors. In Texas, in October, which means HOT.

(representing about 1/5th of the line, including the part that wraps around)

But you gotta do what you gotta do, right? So this morning, Jason dropped me off at the library, where I walked to the back of the line (nearly a quarter mile down the street and around a corner), and slowly moved up over the course of the next two hours. Around the two hour mark, I made it into the building, and fifteen minutes later, I had finished the voting process.

I wore my F*uck Trump lipstick, as promised, underneath my mask. And I was also quite irritated with some of the things I saw out there while I was waiting: campaign volunteers not wearing masks properly; one of the poll workers – the one in charge of handicapped voters, no less! – refusing to wear a mask at all, even as he leaned into people’s cars; people discarding their plastic gloves (we each had to wear one) all over the place so that they were blowing around the park and trails attached to the library grr. People can be so awful! But whatever. The voting is done. I’ve done my part, and I hope this election isn’t a total farce like in 2016.

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Voices in the Snow, by Darcy Coates

Posted on October 12, 2020 by Thistle

Clare is in an accident during a major snowstorm, and wakes up in a stranger’s house in the middle of the woods. Dorran seems kind, but something about the house is forbidding, and something lurks out in the unnatural weather beyond.

1) I think I’ve gotten a bit more of a measure of this author now – she tends to write creature-paranormal, not ghost- or psychic-paranormal. The stories are very imaginative and the creatures are horrifying.

2) Though this book only came out in January, there are three sequels already published! Notably, the story of this volume mostly wraps up, but leaves plenty of things to uncover in future volumes.

3) This is a post-apocalyptic novel, with very little discovered about what’s going on beyond the house-in-the-woods where Clare winds up. We see all the crazy weather, and experience all the crazy creatures, but as for the rest, much of it is still up for discovery. Makes me anxious to read the next books, but so far my library doesn’t have any of them. Boo!

4) Somehow, I managed not to see the face on the front cover. I saw the eye, of course, but didn’t notice the contouring of doll face under the snow. Not until I was heading to bed, with the spine of this book facing me, and suddenly there was a smaller version of the face staring at me in the dark. Needless to say, I turned the book around when it was on my nightstand! No need to wake up to that in the morning!

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Sunday Coffee – A Day of Sorrow and Hope

Posted on October 11, 2020 by Thistle

It’s been awhile since I posted about Ash’s situation. As a recap:

In December, we moved into our current house. About a week later, Ash stopped eating, and began to lose weight. In the past, he’s often done this after a move, and we spend some time giving him special/extra food in an area where he’s by himself (no competition from the other cats), until he recovers. This time, he didn’t recover.

January saw a flurry of vet visits in which we learned that Ash was extremely jaundiced and dehydrated. Our vet said the unexpected words “complete liver failure” and “discuss quality of life.” We had an ultrasound that revealed abnormal nodes on his liver and in his digestive system, and at the emergency vet where we had the ultrasound, they wanted me to decide right then and there if we were going to sedate him and get a biopsy. It was overwhelming and terrible, but in the end, his blood numbers weren’t healthy enough for sedation anyway, so we brought him home. Our vet called and said that the treatment was the same regardless of what the biopsy found (in other words, no need to do the biopsy), and we started a round of steroids.

There was a brief improvement on the steroids, but Ash quickly went back to his lethargy. He had IV fluids and several rounds of subcutaneous fluids, and we switched him to all wet food with extra water for the dehydration. The jaundice cleared up, and Ash began to eat and drink a little again. It wasn’t enough, though, and he was mostly eating gravy and cat treats, refusing to eat any regular dry food or even the meaty chunks in wet food. We went through every brand we could find, but pretty much the only thing we could get him to eat regularly was treats. Even then, he’d sometimes ignore them.

His weight stabilized somewhere in the 10-11 lb range (he’s supposed to be around 12 lbs), but we knew something was still very wrong. The hair they shaved for the IV and ultrasound in January wouldn’t grow back, and the eye infection that we’d been treating for two years still wouldn’t go away. More vet visits, new eye meds, and the process of quarantining our baby continued. Oddly, he did have a random period of improvement, with his eye healing briefly, and his energy and weight suddenly going up in June. He grew the hair back during that month as well. Then just as suddenly, the improvements quit, his energy dropped, his weight dropped, and he started to get the eye infection and jaundice again. Furthermore, he began vomiting more often (something he was already prone to, since he was about three years old).

Things didn’t improve over the last few months. He was skin and bones. He wouldn’t try to jump if it meant going more than about a foot of distance. He walked gingerly and sometimes winced if you touched him wrong. He had liver spots on his face even though he’s only 11 years old. Whatever food he managed to lap up went straight through him. While he used to leave his quarantined room sometimes, he no longer did, and spent much of his time hiding in the back corner under the bed.

Cats don’t really show outward signs of illness unless things are really bad, and after ten months of worsening conditions, we knew it was time to have hard conversations with the vet. He went in this Monday afternoon, and Jason and I braced ourselves to say goodbye. Then oddly, the vet said 1) Ash shows no sign of jaundice, 2) his muscle condition hasn’t deteriorated, and 3) he weighs more now than he did in January. She gave us some new meds to help with joint pain and stomach issues, and we’re giving them a few weeks’ trial. It might just be delaying the inevitable, but it’s a ray of hope. Maybe our baby will get a little bit of his life back. We’re really love him to be able to. But we also know that we’re ready to give him peace if that’s what it comes down to, no matter how much grief that gives us. He’s been with us since he was four months old, and whether he’s with us another three weeks or another few years, we’re going to spend as much time doting on him as we can.

*****
In the days since, a couple of things have happened, all of which feel hopeful. The pain meds seem to help, and he’s not wincing and walking gingerly anymore. We went down to the pet store and bought half a dozen different specialty brands of food (new store, new brands), and there was one brand that Ash actually ate the entire can of! Not just the liquid! He hasn’t eaten any solid food except treats in months. It’s not just the medicine, either, as he ate the first can before receiving any of the new meds. All of the other specialty cans we got, he ignored, but this one brand (Tiki Cats), he’s eaten every single variety we’ve opened for him. He also hasn’t once thrown up since he began eating it, and for a cat that was throwing up daily, that’s major improvement! We’ve actually gotten him to play with toys again, wrestling around with catnip balls and such, which is such a 180 change in his behavior that it’s nearly unbelievable. We just hope this isn’t a temporary boost from the meds and that he can continue to sustain the energy and improvement over time!

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Bad Moon, by Todd Ritter

Posted on October 9, 2020 by Thistle

On the night of the moon landing in 1969, ten-year-old Charlie Olmstead disappeared. The official report said that he’d been in an accident – slipped into the creek on his bike and washed over the falls – but his mother never believed it. Now, forty years later, her dying wish is for her second son, Eric, to find his brother. Eric was only an infant when Charlie disappeared, but lived his entire life in the shadow of his missing brother. He calls in Nick Donnelly, now no longer a cop but a private investigator of cold cases, and Nick brings in the town’s police chief, Kat, whose father investigated the initial disappearance.

This is a follow up to Death Notice – the next Perry Hollow story involving the recurring characters of Kat, her son James, Nick, and many other folks in the small Pennsylvania town. The cold case brings them through unexpected twists to five other unsolved cases of missing boys between 1969 and 1972. To note: this isn’t a true sequel but more of a separate, standalone story that involves the same characters. It could be easily read without first reading Death Notice.

The good: I was worried that this book wouldn’t live up to the first, mainly because cold cases aren’t my favorite topic, and they can be plodding and unfocused. It also seemed from the description like the story mostly involved a forty-year-old history, rather than the present-day characters. Neither of these turned out to be true. This was an engaging story, with lots of fun new routes discovered while in pursuit. I learned a lot about subjects I’d never heard of before, like the Centralia mine fire. There were interesting new characters, too, ones that I hope will reappear in the final volume of the series.

The bad: There were a lot of loose ends and weird assumptions. I can’t talk about the rest of this without spoilers, so skip the next paragraph to avoid those.

Spoilers: Eric talks about leaving a note for his mother (Maggie) when he left home, but his mother told Kat that no note was left. It was a big enough discrepancy that I expected it to come back into the story as more of Maggie’s illness was revealed. Instead, it just seemed to be a plot hole or unanswered question. Maggie’s illness was also a bit weird – like the assumption that if she had postpartum depression with Eric, it made no sense that she didn’t have it with Charlie – as if all women must experience each birth the same way? That’s just weird. (And wrong.) There was also the oddity of one character being able to resist the strength of the current right before the falls – more than once, and once when elderly – but others having no control when stuck in it. There’s also no answer to whether those around the killer suspected him, or why the murders stopped after 1972, or what the perpetrator’s psychology was like in the years since – all of which seemed rather important to the story. The whole cold case and current psychology hinged on a lot of coincidences that just felt a bit farfetched. End spoilers.

Anyway, while that’s a long paragraph of “bad,” I enjoyed most of the book. The bad bits were relatively small in comparison to the rest of the story, and I sped through this novel a lot faster than I expected. I’m definitely looking forward to the next installment, and I’m sad that there are only three books in the series.

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Race Report: Gourdy’s Pumpkin Run (Virtual) 5K

Posted on October 7, 2020 by Thistle

It doesn’t appear that Covid is going to allow any in-person races any time soon, so even though I’m not the hugest fan of the virtual thing, I decided to run a few this fall. First up on my list was the Gourdy’s Pumpkin Run. This used to be called something like the Great Pumpkin Run, and the swag I saw out of 2019 was frickin’ awesome. I was less enamored with the medal this year, but the shirt swayed me. Heh. And I figured this would work well as an “autumn” event for my Running Bingo, since the event evokes images of pumpkin patches and turning leaves and apple cider.

The problem with virtual 5Ks is that you can do them whenever, and there’s no festivity or cheerleaders to sweep you up into that excitement of a true race. There’s also no one to map out a specific course for you, or hand you water/snacks throughout. Really, there’s no difference between a virtual 5K and just going out for a practice run. So that’s essentially what I did. I decided on a date (9/30), mapped a route (8x around my running park is 3.12 miles), and set out.

The weather started quite chilly at 52 degrees – hence why I chose that date! – but I wore a tank top anyway, knowing it would be almost 70 degrees by the time I finished. It took a full half-5K for the weather to warm up. The second half was much warmer, with lots of direct sun in places. I was glad I chose the tank top! I was less glad that I chose my newer shoes instead of my older Hokas. The Saucony pair was only 12 miles old, and while it didn’t cause problems due to newness (I’ve used Saucony for ages), these shoes seem better suited to walking. Even when I tie them loosely, my feet swell when I run, and then there’s too much pressure on the tops. It caused a lot of leg strain for most of the 5K, a strain that I don’t feel in the Hokas. Lesson learned.

I stuck to general 60:30 run:walk intervals for this event. Honestly, I think I prefer longer intervals for longer distances (and a 5k, for my slow-runner self, is a longer distance!). Still, I didn’t do too bad for time, considering that I only managed about a dozen runs since finishing C25K in May, and have only run seven times in the last ten weeks. (Thank goodness for cooling temps and potentially getting out there more regularly again!) I finished the Gourdy’s 5K in 50:12 – just shy of the under-50 mark that I strive for – with a mile average of 16:05. Not my best time ever, but I’m really okay with that. Especially, as I said, with how little I’ve been running, not to mention the leg strain re: my shoes.

My swag package (above) with my shirt, medal, etc finally arrived on 10/24 – almost a full month after running the 5K! Sheesh. I do really love the shirt, especially the unexpected little zipper pocket on the left side seam. The medal is excruciatingly heavy, though – it probably could have been smaller, but I guess they wanted runners to feel like they were getting their money’s worth, heh.

And lastly, here is my updated Running Bingo card:

The Gourdy’s Pumpkin 5k completes my 5th square of the Bingo – that orange one off to the right – with more to come soon! This is the first of at least three virtual 5Ks I’ll be doing through the rest of 2020.

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The Whisper Man, by Alex North

Posted on October 5, 2020 by Thistle

Twenty years ago, a serial predator known as the Whisper Man terrorized the town of Featherbank. Eventually caught and jailed, the community felt safe again…but now another boy has gone missing, and the details are too similar to those of the Whisper Man’s crimes for comfort.

So. I read North’s book The Shadows this summer and quite enjoyed it. It was fast and twisty and really caught me off-guard. The Whisper Man is referenced and some of the characters are shared between the two books, despite the books being unrelated. So I held on to this book until RIP, and (very slowly) read it a couple chapters at a time for all of September.

My two experiences of these books couldn’t be more different. This book is slow and meandering, and felt like a mishmash of crime and literary. Neither felt fully fleshed out. The literary sections (Tom and his son Jake dealing with the loss of wife/mother, Pete’s problems with alcoholism) were often plodding and repetitive, and none of the characters were developed deeply enough to feel entirely literary. There are chapters told from the perpetrator’s point of view, and you learn who he is in relation to the original Whisper Man, but there’s no way for a reader to learn his current-day identity before it’s revealed, as he’s a character that never shows up prior to then except in his own narration. So the crime/mystery element was also lacking. Furthermore, some of the plot points were well beyond suspension of disbelief – the perpetrator, for instance, expects a certain victim not to recognize him despite the two of them having interacted daily. WTF?

A couple of times, I nearly gave up on The Whisper Man, especially in the beginning during Tom and Pete and Jake’s soooooo-slow chapters. But then I’d get to a moment when something spooky or intriguing would happen, and I’d keep going. I flipped through to the end to figure out the mysteries, and learned many things in advance. Eventually, by the halfway point, things started to pick up a little, but until the last few chapters, I never fully engaged. Still, it felt like an okay book, if a little messy and scattered, until the last chapter. I can’t talk about details without spoilers, but the things that happen in the last chapter are abhorrent and stretch belief to breaking. It left a really nasty taste in my mouth, and makes me wish I’d given the book up during my early boredom.

Oh well. I guess you can’t like them all, right? I still wouldn’t mind reading other books by North, because The Shadows was quite awesome. I’ll be a little more cautious going into them now, though.

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Sunday Coffee – Favorite Photos of September

Posted on October 4, 2020 by Thistle

Back again to share my favorite photos in September. As always, these photos are taken by me and unfiltered. They aren’t necessarily great photography, just photos that I love for one reason or another.

Left to right: pumpkins! I really love the color in these; Atticus looking all cute as he drapes himself over the edge of the piano; a false daylily popped up through the tines of a cactus – and every single person on that particular hike stopped to take a picture of it!

Top left: tough hikers! I love these ladies so much. Bottom left: some of my favorite Halloween decorations, including 2019’s yoga skeletons, a very old Halloween snow-globe, and some LED “candles” that Nat gave me since I can’t have real candles with the cats. Right: shadow after my most recent 5K.

Left to right: my new F**k Trump lipstick!; sunset over Comanche Lookout Park; Atticus curling up on the crocheted hats in the basket on top of my dresser (cats do love yarn art!)

Left to right: Gavroche enjoying the new carpet; a stack of mushrooms along a rock border in the front yard; brown boots! (which as of now, have yet to be worn because it’s still not cool enough during the day!)

See y’all next month. Hopefully there will be lots of fun fall pics to share!

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Quarantine Diaries – Weeks 26-29

Posted on October 2, 2020 by Thistle

It’s been fairly quiet in terms of the pandemic here for the past month. September 13th saw the six-month mark pass since our first case of Covid. Things are holding steady, and we’re all trying to figure out a good balance between keeping as much open as possible while also keeping safe.

TBH, I’m kinda sick of people whining. Suck it up, a$$holes. It usually takes two years for a vaccine to come out and things won’t be safe again until then. So until a safe and effective vaccine comes out, let’s all stay home as much as possible, wear our masks, keep our bubbles small, etc, and try to adapt to things like curbside pickup and occupancy limits and online shopping. It sucks to miss a year of vacation – trust me, I know; Jason and I had our 20th anniversary vacation canceled! – and to have events canceled and to not be able to hug friends and family when we have socially-distanced gatherings. I know. It sucks for everyone. But what sucks worse is letting businesses keep failing because we have to keep locking them down, and even worse than that is when people keep getting sick and dying because people can’t deal with first-world problems like missing a haircut or going down to the bar. Six months into this thing, and I’m 1000% over being sympathetic at all for selfish, whiny jerks. Sorry not sorry.

Numbers
I’ll be honest: The city has changed how they calculate their numbers. Nearly every week, there’s one day when a backlog of thousands of cases is added to our totals, as well as the backlog in confirmed deaths. Some of these backlogs go back months, some are more recent. It’s impossible to give accurate numbers under these conditions. I’ve read that the entire state is using an antiquated system that has had trouble coping with the influx of data. (September 21st and 22nd, for instance, saw over 20k cases reported to the state’s numbers from a backlog in Houston.) Apparently this has contributed to a lot of false information over time, including a statewide positivity rate back in the spring that was far underestimating true cases/rates, which led to the early reopening plan, which led to the June spike…sigh.

Anyway. In grand totals with the information I have, San Antonio is ending these four weeks (Week 29, ending 10/1) at 57,936 cases and 1,136 deaths. I obviously can’t give accurate monthly numbers, either, so I have no idea how September compared to previous months. I will say that most of these backlogs have been attributed to July, which means that our numbers were even more insane that month than we realized! The above graph represents daily case numbers in Bexar County by event date (rather than reported date) since this pandemic began.

Daily moving average: My last Quarantine Diaries ended on Week 25 of this plague, on 9/3, with a daily average of around 180 cases – a slight uptick from previous weeks that had an average of 138 daily. Over the last four weeks, our daily moving average has been:

  • Week 26 (9/10): 127
  • Week 27 (9/17): 128
  • Week 28 (9/24): 153
  • Week 29 (10/1): 167

Note that these numbers don’t include any backlogged cases, but just the week’s worth as the city gives them. Thankfully, they’re reporting the 7-day moving average during every new brief now (they happen each weeknight). Week 28 is when we began to see numbers come in from the Labor Day weekend holiday and the minimal return to in-person school around the city. The uptick was expected, but far less than feared. Let’s hope it doesn’t continue to go up!

Weekly trackers:

  • Positivity rate: down to 6.7% (wk26), to 6% (wk27), to 6.4% (wk28), to 5.9% (wk 29)
  • Doubling rate: This increased from 65 days to 90+ days during this period.
  • Pediatric rate: These numbers were finally updated in Week 27 after weeks with no data, and remained just shy of 16%. It hasn’t been updated since, so this looked like they’re switching the number to a monthly progression, which seems a bit silly tbh.
  • Hospital trends: Trends continued to drop in the hospitals, until about a week after Labor Day and in-person school starting, at which point it started to tick up. It is currently stabilizing, and will hopefully start dropping again soon. Pic is the graph from weeks 26-28. Blue line is hospitalizations, yellow is ICU, white is folks on ventilators.

Local news
Let me start with a discussion of schools. In-person school began in most districts on September 8th, after the Labor Day holiday. I can’t say what each of the districts are doing for their phasing in process, but I imagine many of them look similar to our district (which is one of the three largest in SA). Our district allowed only five students per classroom with no transitioning between classes in older grades. Just recently, due to the continued improvement in trends (but before the Labor Day data came in – they just didn’t wait long enough…), that changed to ten students per classroom, and starting next week, fifteen per (sigh). The next phase, when it comes, will involve kids actually transitioning between classes, which means exposure to different students at each class period, and potentially more exposure. Last week, the TEA reported the number of cases among students and staff across the state. As of 9/24, there were 86 cases of covid in SA schools – 21 from students and 65 from staff. Our school district specifically had 11 cases from students, 14 from staff, on that day. I haven’t been able to get any information since, despite the TEA saying the numbers would come out weekly.

With the limited number in classrooms, many parents are on waiting lists to get their kids back into in-person school. This is especially difficult in areas with young kids, two working parents, and very little resources (including internet access and enough food). So the city is setting up eight virtual learning hubs in disadvantaged areas to open next week. Each hub will allowed students in during the weekdays and will provide wifi, free lunch, and access to teachers for help, all while keeping the kids spaced apart and safe. It seems like a good compromise and I’m glad the city is using some of its little remaining resources to help in areas that are being disproportionally affected by the virus! Other folks have come forward too – a group of philanthropists have founded a private lab to do pre-emptive covid screening for schools (beginning, I believe, with the poorest school district here). This lab will have a 24-hour turnaround on tests and are meant to help stop asymptomatic spread.

Statewide, the governor has increased capacity at many businesses (restaurants, gyms, offices, museums, libraries, manufacturing, and retail), while thankfully NOT opening bars again yet. He also thankfully didn’t remove the mask mandate. (Speaking of masks, I had to laugh over the Labor Day weekend when our mayor got all cheeky on social media with messages that said nothing but, “The mask goes over your nose.” Ha!) San Antonio is following suit the governor’s lead – likely because we dropped into the “safe” zone on 9/8 and have managed to stay there since then. Playgrounds and park facilities have reopened, there’s no longer a ten-person maximum on gatherings in city parks, and Fitness in the Park classes are supposed to resume by the end of October. Announcement about the libraries is supposed to come soon.

Other noteworthy local news:

  • the local MLK march for 2021 has already announced it’ll be virtual this January
  • we’ve had several days over the last month with no new deaths to report, yay!!
  • a local pediatric nurse practitioner recovered from covid after 56 days in a coma
  • not quite local, but the republican chair in TX is suing the governor to take away the extra week of early voting he granted us, grr…

On the home-front
It has been nice to feel a bit safer around here. We’re still taking precautions of course, but we’ve also been trying to get a few things taken care of that have been put off for a time. Dental appointments (can’t do that with a mask!). My annual women’s exam that was supposed to be in April, then July. Group hikes (limited to six people, requiring masks and physical distancing). Things aren’t normal, but they’re getting as close as they can be until a vaccine is here. Hey, Ambrose even got to spend the weekend with his friend Tyler for Tyler’s birthday – the first time they’ve seen each other in person since early March. (We see Tyler every weekend via Skype for the boys’ Dungeons and Dragons game.)

Of course, it’s not all normal. Have you watched the football games with no crowds and piped-in crowd noises? It’s weird. But still nice to watch at all – I hope they get to keep playing, because it provides a little semblance of normal in with all the weird. Like: My nephew Rory’s 3rd birthday party was done via Zoom because my sister and her husband both work in schools and there have been too many potential Covid exposures in her area. (In fact, Rory has spent the last two weeks at home because of exposure at daycare, and my sister has been working with no assistant – she’s an athletic trainer at a high school – because of the assistant’s potential exposure.) Then there’s my mom, who is back working at my aunt’s preschool/daycare, with young kids full of runny noses and coughs (“it’s just allergies,” the parents claim), and a coworker whose daughter tested positive for the regular flu. Sigh. Doesn’t help that my aunt is mask-refuser so the teachers aren’t even wearing them at this school, and my mom refuses to get a flu shot. (Yes, she’s also said she won’t get a covid vaccine either. Oh, my family…)

So far, my immediate family has remained fairly unscathed despite the increase in our potential exposure (including a dozen different workmen-and-women inside our house, some of whom kept their masks under their noses!). I’m really glad Laurence is staying virtual for school, because we got notice recently that there were two students at his specific high school that tested positive. !!! Even Morrigan, up on campus in Kansas, is doing better than expected – we accidentally FaceTimed him when he was out walking, and he had his mask on! I’ve watched his roommate put on a mask just to leave their room to get his laundry. And at the dining hall where Morrigan works, a covid exposure on a different floor led to the entire building and food services department shutting down for a full two weeks, so the campus seems to be taking the situation very seriously. Whew! Now let’s hope we can all continue to stay vigilant and safe in what I’m going to call the “temporary normal” rather than the “new normal.”

Moving forward
Just more vigilance, and hopefully not a third wave in TX as is currently predicted…

And I just heard that the Prumpster has now contracted covid, and I admit that I’m terrified of what that’s going to do to the next month of this already nightmarish political climate…

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