Covid-19: We don’t talk about 1-18

Growing up I thought "Polack" was just a word for a really dumb guy, don't think I learned those jokes were about Polish people until I was a teenager. Small suburban town near LA, and we basically had white kids, Mexican kids, and Asian kids (and that town is now majority Chinese descent). Only white kid in my grade who wasn't generic northern European was from Yugoslavia, and he was a novelty.

 

I wanted to get a top-notch swamp for my house instead of AC, and my contractor said it would cost twice as much upfront. Lame.

 

According to your president, the Democrats are proposing to do just that, by allowing those pesky black and brown people people to invade through lax zoning laws.

 

My wife manages a thrift store in a small coastal town in the Bay Area (at least for the next week, she was so pissed at the nonprofit they're a part of forcing them to reopen that she put in her notice last month). And rumor has it that the Ace Hardware in that town had literally every employee test positive recently.

 

Pacifica?

 

I went to Ace on Tuesday, and everyone there was masked up. Two employees and one other customer. Now, that was very early in the morning and inside the building. I don't know if the guys who buy the building materials outside were masked or not, and I don't know what happened later that day. The last time I was in Wal-Mart I figure 70-30 masked, which includes employees. When I go to Publix, most of the customers are masked. I'd say 90%. All of the employees, too. They have a dispenser for alcohol wipes so you can sanitize your shopping cart and hands before you go into the store. Two weeks ago, they were sanitizing the carts themselves. I wonder if pressure from conservatives and centrists caused them to allow the public to make their own choices...

My mom orders her groceries online to be delivered. When they arrive, I pay her for my half, go get them from her and return home. I go to Publix only because she refuses to buy produce because too many people put their hands on it (plums, maters, lettuce, onions, cucumbers, grapefruit, etc.). I'm just learning how to cook- not going to cook out of a can any more than I have to. Plus, she has acid reflux which acts up from time to time, so she doesn't really eat raw veggies much anymore.

Absolutely.

 

ACE is a franchise. You're going to get very different situations from store to store.

I thought you were learning to cook them?

 

Wow you think Covid is a problem take away AC in the south and people will die in the hundreds of thousands the first summer.

 

I do, some of them. Stuff like sauteeing bean sprouts and onions and mushrooms and snap peas, or shrimp . But you're right that I leave most veggies raw, by choice. By "cook", I don't mean boiling greens or cabbage or green beans in a pot. I do fry the okra, tho (will not eat boiled okra). I already know how to grill or pan-sear beef and fish, of course, and while most of the veggies are raw, it's the daily grind of putting it all together for a meal that I avoided for so long.

I guess I should have said, I'm preparing my own food on a 3x daily basis now instead of the 2-3 fast food meals (plus soft drinks and candy bars and chips and shit) I've been eating for the last 39 years.

I did break my routine a couple of weeks ago and went to a Korean-run deli for some pastrami sandwiches. My next goal is to make a decent gyro- gotta find strips of lamb for that.

 

If you have no idea, I will count you as luckier than I that you didn't hear his words of wisdom today, espousing the idea that the suburbs will be "defunded" by way of what I mentioned.

 

Nope, Point Reyes Station.

And I've since been informed the rumors regarding the hardware store vary widely, from just a couple people to almost everybody. But regardless, they never closed.

 

Great town, completely different world than SF. We used to love getting lunch at station house cafe on a weekday.

 

Yeah Station House is great (and yes much better on a weekday), but unfortunately their landlord is jacking the rent and they have to close by the end of summer. Kind of the way things are going out that way, the money keeps coming in and the longtime locals keep getting forced out.

 

Yep. Hard to wrap my head around.

 

They passed that stage 3 weeks ago, at least. Once they hit double digits for states consistently clocking 4 digits per day in new case, it was game over. In terms of "controlling" the pandemic. Short of massive shut downs, country wide,on March like levels, its over.

Now it becomes a game of fatality mitigation as they race to a vaccine or viable mass treatment.

 

Tracing? Impossible to have a tracing program with an outbreak this large. We would have to lock down for a good month before we could even THINK about a serious tracing program at this point. And even that may be too soon with the level of infection we are now experiencing.

 

James, you beat me by seconds. I mean, seriously, we essentially wrote the same post at the same time. The notion of tracing, at this stage, is a fantasy. We would have to shut the country down at this point for a lengthy period of time, and we all know that is not going to happen.

 

The country is already shutting down; just without government help. Despite the photo here and there, people are already retreating into their homes. They don't want to die.

 

Unfortunately there are enough fools who refuse to take the appropriate steps without government direction. And though you and I might retreat to the confines of our cozy abodes, along with millions others, there are still millions who are twitterpated by the idea of the president's next tweet, and believe every bit of blatherskite emanating therefrom. There are enough of those people to keep this thing at best simmering, and at worst still raging.

 

I think that was always the plan in the US.

 

Well school is about to start, and it appears most places are planning on having in person classes. I think that if we are going to do that we may as well accept as a given that social distancing is definitely done and mask wearing is going to be an exercise in futility. .