Covid-19

Tested

I have been to see a couple of doctors recently and every time I check in to be seen, one of the questions asked is, “Have you been tested for COVID in the last 14 days?” My answer has always been, “No.” Why bother? Neither Donna nor I are exhibiting any symptoms…

Today we changed that answer. Firstly, so that next time (at least for the next two weeks) the answer to that question can be, “Yes.” And secondly, although we have no COVID-19 symptoms, for the last week I have been randomly getting when inhaling through my nose a sort of weird sweet smell and occasionally my back teeth will hurt when biting down. These are not any COVID symptoms I have ever seen listed anywhere, but in the past, these things have meant to me personally, that I am coming down with a flu. But in that case these symptoms show up for maybe a day and then I’m sick. Right now I’m not feeling sick.

The local hospital system has a testing site in a parking lot of one of their medical clinics that is right up the street from us. We pass by it at least every other day. There has rarely ever been a line and today was no exception, but by the time we circled the building to get tested there was one car ahead of us. They weren’t ahead of us for long as they were not in the system and were unsure if their insurance would cover the cost, so they pulled through and parked to the side.

The paperwork took the longest, even with us being already in their system. The test took all of 5 minutes total, but just 5 are seconds spent with a long handled mini brush looking thing in your sinus cavity. Not too unpleasant, but I’m glad I am not in any sort of position where I have to get tested daily.

The test results will take a couple days and I’ll be sure to let you know the results.

Football is Back

We watched the Kansas City Chiefs play the Houston Texans last night. It was a slightly toned down version of their AFC Championship game from last year, the Texans scored first then the Chiefs racked up an insurmountable lead and basically cruised to the win.

One thing was really different though, the crowd in the stands. Early in the third quarter when the game was still kind of close, Al Michaels comments on a shot of the stands by saying, “It looks like it is late in the 4th and the home team is up by 50 points.” Later they announce the actual attendance at fifteen thousand something, or roughly 1/5 of capacity.

The broadcast had added some piped in noise to make it almost sound like a full house. I want to know was it the just NBC adding it, or was it piped into Arrowhead Stadium too? And if they did, what was it like for the 20% in the seats to hear the fake sound?

20 Seconds

The rule for washing your hands is for you to do it for 20 seconds to thoroughly remove all the bad germs. Easy way to time this is to sing the Happy Birthday song, twice. I use a different method for timing it. I turn on the hot tap in the upstairs bathroom and when the water turns hot it has been 20 seconds…

Oh, and late to the game, I just picked up on the origin of COVID-19.
COronaVIrus Disease 2019….

Shoot, I Still Need A Chute

In Aiken, we used to be able to pile our yard waste at the curb and the city would come around with a truck armed with the Jaws of Death to remove it. In Klamath Falls, Waste Management takes care of the yard waste along with the trash and recyclables. But here you need to bag the waste and put it out on the curb with your plastic trash & recyclable bins. You get three 30 pound bags a week for free. The first few pickups we used some bio-degradable lawn bags, but when we ran out we bought some paper ones from Home Depot. They are kind of tall and hard to get to fully open. And once you do, they don’t stand still or stay open while loading them, but still nicer than the plastic bags.

A couple weeks back we noticed that our neighbor uses the same Home Depot bags too, but to go along with them she had this cool green plastic chute that fit perfectly inside the bag. It both held it open and standing up straight. It also made it easy to make sure the debris got into the bag…

I just had to have one of those. It was Sunday afternoon and we were in for the evening, so I figured we would just go to the store early on Monday and do Store Pickup. I checked for local availability and the web site said there were 43 of the Plastic Leaf and Lawn Chutes on hand. Since I was paying by charge card online and the chute is a mere $8.97 I thought maybe I should order something else to make it come to something over ten bucks at least. We were down to just one yard bag, so I added a 5-pack of the bags, of these they had over of thousand in stock, for a whopping $2.47 more.

I placed the order and my confirmation came within seconds. A few hours later I received another email from Home Depot, they were cancelling part of my order, the Leaf and Lawn Chute. I guess their inventory was off, way off. So now I had a charge on my credit card and a Store Pickup for two dollars and forty-seven cents.

When we finally made it to Home Depot on Tuesday morning, I almost pulled into the “Pandemic We’ll Bring It To Your Car” parking spot, but my not wanting to be not rude about it made me go ahead and enter the store. When I arrived at the the Customer Service Desk there were two representatives working and both were helping people. So I stood back my six socially distancing feet and waited. And waited. And waited. Finally someone came free and and helped me, but it seemed like it took so long it might have been quicker if I had walked back outside, moved the car, called the number and had them bring it to me.

I still need a chute, but I guess I can hold off until fall when maybe they actually will have some in stock (the web still says 43 on hand in Klamath Falls.)

Post Office Picture Book

Decades in the making!1 A book about Donna and my traveling the state of South Carolina taking pictures of every Post Office. Back in the mid 2000’s we poked our head into every nook and cranny of SC taking pictures of the Miata in front of Post Offices, the results can be seen right here on Life of Brian by going to the PO Galleries here.

I’m using my old friend Shutterfly which I used to make calendars of Miata photos and other picture books of our travels. This book will include photos of all 456 Post Offices and will be over 90 pages long when I get done with it. All my previous books were 20-25 pages and cost around $25 dollars, this baby will be right around $100. That is if I decide I want to spent that much… Or this might just end up as a really nice way to kill several days while I practice our “Stay at Home, Stay Safe” COVID-19 lock down. Right now, after 3 days, I’m about 60% done adding photos and their captions to the book. Her is a little sneak peek:

It’s August in May

So, 3-1/2 weeks ago I started reliving the the 2018 Boston Red Sox World Championship season. I down loaded the schedule from that year in CSV (comma separated value) format and edited the year from 2018 to 2020 so I could import it into my Google calendar. I also changed the start times to 6:30 AM because, so far, almost all of the games have been watched with, or after, breakfast.

I was not sure when “real” baseball would return for 2020, or if ever, so I planned to just keep watching 2018 games on the day they occurred all the way through the World Series in October. This was assuming that MLBTV would keep offering free access to their archives. I was also basing this assumption on that they wouldn’t be playing baseball in 2020 at all, because I’m sure if they did, access to the 2018 archive would disappear.

This past Sunday I read an article in the paper that they are proposing to start an 82 game season on the 4th of July weekend. Uh, oh! The regular season ended on September 30th, so now I probably need to finish watching the season by June 30th. This morning I edited my CSV file by eliminating three month’s worth of games. Today’s game I watched was an inter-league game against the Philadelphia Phillies and originally played on August 14, 2018.

The downside to jumping ahead 3 full months and MLB does shut off my access when they start playing ball in July is that I won’t see any of the playoff games. The final World Series game was played on the 26th of October, so to see these games I would have to had jumped ahead 4 months and that would left only 2 weeks worth of regular season games. I do remember that they beat the MFY in the Divisional Series, the Astros in the ACLS and the Dodgers in the World Series, but I don’t know how many games it takes in each of those match ups. If the 2020 season doesn’t start in early July or they don’t shut off access to the archive I’ll watch those games.

It’s Super Bowl Sunday

Not only that, but every Sunday in May is going to be Super Bowl Sunday. So, not only has Major League Baseball opened up their archive of games to watch for free, but the National Football League has too. From now until May 31st you can get NFL Game Pass for free and watch any football game from 2009 to 2019. You want to watch preseason games? Sure, why not? Every regular season game? Check. Playoffs? Absolutely. The Super Bowls? You got ’em! You can even watch the Pro Bowl games, but for the life of me I can’t figure out why you would.

The nice thing about Game Pass’s football games, is unlike MLBTV, they have nicely edited out all the commercials2. They have even chopped out half time as well. Three and a half hour football games come in a little over 2 hours.

The bit of papercraft above is called Papercraft Propaganda and was created by someone who called themselves PaperTom and it is supposed to put you in mind of an old school Soviet statue. His web site doesn’t seem to exist anymore, so if you want to create your own, download the PDF here.