When I read about wildfires in San Diego County, California, or flooding in Mecklenberg County (Charlotte), North Carolina, I contact the appropriate sister to check out if she’s being affected. Usually, the answer is no, though one year, a fire was uncomfortably close.
They do the same for me. Flash floods five miles from Albany made the national news, but the actual storm missed me.
I was thinking about this because my friend Karen, who I’ve only known since 1958, has been in Bhutan and Nepal. Cyclone HudHud created some landslides in Nepal. So when we heard that a blizzard and several avalanches in the Himalayas in central Nepal are reported to have killed more than two dozen people, her friends, including me, were concerned.
She explained on Facebook(!), where I purloined her picture, that, according to the local paper The Himalayan, “rescue missions are underway on Huinchili,” one of the mountains visible to her on the trek. Fortunately, she went no higher than 7000 feet; she did have to endure hiking uphill for six hours in “incessant raw rain.” But the snow was at much higher elevations, causing the avalanches.
Some guy in Albany riding a bike got shot, apparently in the head, at 9:40 a.m. on Thursday. I found this more than a little unsettling. When I started riding my bike to the choir that evening, I realized that I just didn’t want to be out; totally irrational, I know, but nevertheless true.
Mistakes were made in treating Ebola in the United States. The second nurse who got infected should not have been allowed to fly. I’d bet money, and I seldom do, that at least one of the two US nurses who got infected were exposed when they took off the protective suits.
But all the conspiracy theories about Barack Obama, that he, e.g., wanted the disease to come to the US to get back at white people shred both common sense and common decency.
The case of the guy who got shot riding a bike on South Pearl was a long-standing personal dispute that ended in violence. And the police showed up rapidly and cornered the shooter, taking him alive. I think you should go back to worrying about speeding suburbanite cars mowing down bicyclists. That’s the real and present danger to you.
While this turned out be true – and I didn’t know about the relationship at the time – I never said it was rational; it was how I FELT, not any rational fear. Yes autos certainly present the greater threat.
Well, to tell the truth, I understood that. I posted the comment mainly so that everyone reading this knows that was NOT a random act of violence in the South End, but a personal altercation that could have happened literally anywhere.
BTW, you know that recent killing of a family or four in the suburb of Guilderland? We have friends who live literally around the corner from that house. The Wife frantically contacted them to see if they were alright. Naturally, their reply was “We wondered what all the emergency vehicles and commotion was all about.” Except for the nearby traffic obstruction, for them the incident could have happened on the other side of the world.
I thought about you and your family when I heard the forecast for the northeast this week. They used the S-word…..snow! Much too early for that nonsense.