Month: November 2020

Yes, I give thanks, even in 2020

crisis consumerism

Give ThanksSince I need to give thanks in 2020, I have to figure out how I should frame it. Usually, at the beginning of the following year, I address a series of questions. I thought I would try one of them right now.

Are you richer or poorer?

The answer is yes. On one hand, I/we are quite grateful that my wife managed to keep her job during the pandemic, no small thing since her husband is retired. She didn’t get laid off then rehired as a full-time substitute, which reportedly happened in a local school district.

On the other hand, we have taken on additional debt. We got a new car. Plus we took out a home equity loan to fix the back porch. This is not an aesthetic decision, either. The inside of the porch roof is falling down and, when it rains, the stairs are like an ice rink.

Still, it was nice to discover that the assessed value of our house is greater. The improvements we made in the past decade, replacing the front porch, redoing the bathroom, and even replacing the shed proved to be worthwhile investments. In fact, we could have borrowed more money; we chose not to.

Government work

I made some extra cash working the Census. This meant that when the batteries on the lawnmower died, it was not a source of distress. I could just get more. In fact, the Census was good because it forced me to get dressed and leave the house. Because none of us were going out much in the spring, we saved on clothes. We also didn’t go out to eat as often, even when we tried to make up for it with takeout from the local restaurants.

With a full year on Medicare and supplemental insurance under my belt, so far, so good. I didn’t know whether the money I get from my former employer would be adequate to cover the costs. Since my wife and daughter are still under my insurance, even though I am not, this works out well, too. Even though I was inarguably underpaid, the benefits have proven to be good.

I also got unexpected money, from my local newspaper’s contests more than once to $150 from Wells Fargo.

It occurs to me that I’m not really thinking of this year over year. I’m surely better off since I got married. We were really broke when we got hitched. My bride decided to quit her decent-paying but soul-sucking job. Buying anything seemed ill-advised.

Now, I can indulge in what a friend of mine called crisis consumerism. I’d pretty much swore off buying any more music when I retired. THAT’S off the boards. An Elvis Costello reissue on eBay. Linda Ronstadt from a dealer on Amazon in the UK. Graham Nash and Lucinda Williams from a library sale for $1 each. And more Rhiannon Giddens.

Oh, yeah

I’m thankful for more than filthy lucre and what it can buy me. I am quite thankful for people, even if it’s mostly on ZOOM or some such. I’m sure I’ll get more into it in a few weeks.

Fresh, frozen or canned vegetables?

There’s always room for JELL-O.

When I was growing up in the 1960s, I associate most lunch and dinner food we ate as coming from cans. Campbell’s soup. Fruit juice, usually DelMonte or a store brand. Canned fruit, ditto.

Carnation evaporated milk, which my late great aunt Deana put in her tea. My sisters swear she said she poured it until the drink was as light as she was. For a black woman, she WAS quite fair.

And canned vegetables. The corn and peas weren’t too bad. I would eat spinach because Popeye cartoons had indoctrinated me. But other veggies went from tolerable to inedible. In the latter category, beets. They were vile. I would – seriously – put mustard on them just to kill the taste.

In the 1970s, I was off to college and beyond. My vegetables of choice were generally frozen. They were SO much better than the boring canned varieties. And even better than the Swanson frozen TV dinners we occasionally had in the previous decade.

It wasn’t until the 1980s that I actually discovered fresh vegetables to a large degree. It was A Whole New Dimension in dining. In the last couple of years, I happened to try canned spinach, though I don’t recall the brand. It was terrible! How did I eat that stuff?

Sauté

I was thinking about this because I tend to be the person who cooks the eggs in our household. Usually, when I’m making an omelet, I’ll sauté onions and spinach beforehand. I’ll add mushrooms only if my daughter isn’t eating them. I use Olivio because my nutritionist says it’s better for me than using butter. It cooks the same and works better than most butter/margarine substitutes.

Recently, my wife offered me thawed, chopped, frozen spinach to use. My instincts said this would not work for me. How does one know when frozen spinach is sautéd? When fresh spinach/mushrooms/onions start to wilt, that’s my visual cue. Frozen spinach offers me no visual cue. And it didn’t taste as good.

Now, thawed frozen spinach is great for dips at parties. Remember parties? In pre-COVID days, I used to attend those. [Sigh]

Those ever-shrinking cans of tuna fish – freshwater – are good to have on hand. Do they still also come in oil?

And canned fruit is useful when you put it in JELL-O. Which reminds me, I haven’t had JELL-O since I was sick a few years back. Suddenly, I have a hankering for JELL-O with mixed fruit, topped by Cool Whip. What the heck is in Cool Whip anyway?

Spelling tip: If you write sauté, you only need the D to make it sautéd. But if you write saute, you need the ED to make it sauteed.

FTC whatever: no compensation was received for mentioning these brands.

COVID deniers with COVID

Wear a mask in public. Social distancing. This is news?

donald trump wearing corona virus mask face blinded cartoonI’ve been watching the evening news, masochist that I am. More than once in the last few weeks, I’ve seen someone break down crying about the loss of their beloved family member. I’m not made of stone, so I feel a little sad.

Then they weep, “I didn’t know that COVID was REAL!” I bite my lip. In a recent comment on my blog, the blogger fillyjonk wrote, “I find myself irrationally angry at so many of my fellow citizens. ” I tend to agree with her, except for the “irrationally” part. NOW, they believe?

Still, I was STUNNED to read an article in  Vanity Fair this month. What Do You Do When Your COVID Patient Doesn’t Believe In COVID? The online version is quite explicit: “‘It’s the Trump Bubble.'” OMG. “The Right Has Created a Wave of COVID Patients Who Don’t Believe It’s Real.”

Even before getting to the story itself, this description. “A Texas nurse had a patient in a COVID ICU tell her the virus is ‘fake news.’ A California nurse was mocked for wearing a mask. As a new wave of COVID-19 sweeps the country, health care workers are grappling with the consequences of the president’s misinformation machine. ‘This is insane,’ says one. ‘I have never seen anything like it.'”

I am literally holding my hands to my head, fearing that it will somehow explode. COVID deniers with COVID.

Nothing is real

“Gigi Perez, a California–based nurse… told me, ‘The COVID-19 unit I work in has already lost seven nurses in the last three months due to the burnout from managing these types of patients.’ In the last two weeks, Perez said, nine of her fellow health care workers have contracted COVID-19. Workers are ‘beginning to resent the public for not doing their part to help control the pandemic,’ she said.”

And this. “An infectious disease doctor who asked to remain anonymous told me he had never before experienced politics overshadowing science in the medical field. ‘Before [Donald] Trump I never spoke politics in the clinic room,’ he said. ‘There is no doubt that COVID splits into fact-free and factful worlds. This is why we have a raging epidemic.”

In WaPo,  read about a Missouri county health director. Concerning contact tracing, she says, “Probably half of the people we call are skeptical or combative. They refuse to talk. They deny their own positive test results. They hang up. They say they’re going to hire a lawyer. They give you fake people they’ve spent time with and fake numbers.”

While downplaying the pandemic from the beginning, the despicable regime behavior started in earnest on April 3. That’s when IMPOTUS said his experts were “now recommending Americans wear ‘non-medical cloth’ face coverings.” He said “the recommendations… were voluntary and that he would not partake. ‘I don’t think I’m going to be doing it.”

And the die was cast. Now, hospitals in half the states are facing a massive staffing shortage as Covid-19 surges.

White flag

Here’s a story in the Boston Globe.  With COVID-19 victory in sight, America surrenders. “What’s happened to us? A lifetime ago, Americans endured years of Great Depression suffering, then went off to fight World War II or, on the home front, tightened their belts, stretched their rationed food, and planted Victory Gardens.”

But that’s not us. “Yes, this isolated, socially distanced existence is tiresome, particularly in cold weather. But we have salvation, in the form of vaccinations, within sight… Then life will begin to return to normal.”

This past summer, the writer “had a chance to catch up with an old pal from high school who, long a Republican, has become a Fox News conservative. The good news, said my friend, who has a graduate degree, was that if the Democrats won, the big to-do about COVID-19 would end on Nov. 3. Why, I asked? Because, he said, it was all a big hoax to get Joe Biden elected. We joke a lot, so I assumed he was kidding. No.”

So it makes “sense” that when the CDC urges against Thanksgiving travel, it will be largely ignored. In the New York Times, a writer traced his COVID-19 bubble and it’s “enormous.” He was thinking a dozen or two, but it was over 100 people.

And much of the blame for the current explosion of cases must fall on a regime that has announced in October, “We are not going to control the pandemic.” That’s the truth. About four dozen of them have had the virus.

I am SO angry with the regime’s handling of the crisis. Americans are dying unnecessarily. And the buck stops there.

I wouldn’t bet on it

Pirates

betI have no moral antipathy toward gambling. Heck, I even played a lottery ticket when the prize last approach a half-billion dollars. But I’ve never bet anything more than literally penny-ante poker.

That’s not entirely true. I’ve wagered on something that I knew was a sure thing. One time in the 1980s, I won $10 from my boss over whether the orange juice was from concentrate or not. I don’t know the answer now, but I knew it then. I’ll bet on things I know to be true.

The last time I bet on a non-sure thing was on games five and six of the 1979 World Series. I picked the Pittsburgh Pirates, who had lost three of the first four games and bet only a buck or two, and they won. But I chickened out and didn’t pick them for Game 7, which they also won, and of course the Series.

The horses

Sometime in August, I won a $50 card from something called NYRAbets from the local newspaper, the Times Union. One uses the site for wagering at various racetracks, notably the one in nearby Saratoga. And because I was a new user, I got an extra $25.

That day in mid-August, I bet $2 each on nine horses to win, or $18. The next day, the $75 was now $66. That was fine. I’m picking these horses by name. Anything with black, or green was a likely choice. The following day, down to $53, then to $37. I stopped because life was so busy I didn’t even have that five minutes in the morning.

Then on Labor Day, I made my usual $18 wager. The next day, I went from $37 to $56. I must have picked a long shot to win. And I have no idea which one because I just wasn’t paying attention. And I haven’t played since.

Casino Royale

I particularly hate casinos. It had to be 1996 when the family was in the San Diego area for the niece’s graduation. We drove for nearly an hour to go to a casino. My father loved it. I was totally bored.

On the way back from a work trip to Syracuse, my boss’s boss wanted to stop at a casino. I hear he lost $150. I lost $10, played on the “free” machine” for a time, then read a magazine.

In 1999 or 2000, there was a work conference in Niagara Falls, NY. We were encouraged to cross the border into Ontario and go to a casino there because they hadn’t yet been built on this side of the border. Some sponsors even provided us $10 to wager. I started on the slots and was actually winning. This made me actually queasy; my addictive persona could start to like this. So I switched machines and promptly spent my allotment.

I have a lot of vices. Wagering just isn’t one of them.

Thank you very much for music

Sly is especially thankful

Thanksgiving is coming. To the degree that I have maintained sanity this year, it’s been from listening to recorded music. A lot.

One of my friends envies how invested I am in music. It’s not as though I made a choice. It has always been omnipresent. I still remember chunks of my father’s singles collection. I sang in school, in church, with my father and sister. I’m appreciative of that, but there’s never been a point when it wasn’t a big part of my life.

Thank you very much for music.

Some songs about thanks

Sam and Dave – I Thank You  (“I want everybody to get up off your seat And get your arms together, and your hands together And give me some of that o-o-old soul clapping.”)

Led Zeppelin – Thank You   “If the sun refused to shine, I would still be loving you.”

Sly and the Family Stone – Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin) –  I was a sucker for songs by artists who refer to their other songs. See Creeque Alley by the Mamas and the Papas, Glass Onion by the Beatles. This includes Dance to the Music, Everyday People, Sing a Simple Song, and You Can Make It If You Try. Thank You For Talking To Me Africa  A stoned version of the above.

Boyz II Men – Thank You. The first song on their second album, and my favorite

Andrew Gold – Thank You For Being A Friend. The late son of the late, great Marni Nixon. This is the theme of the TV show Golden Girls 

The Beatles – Thank You, Girl. The perennial B-side, of the single From Me to You in the UK, of the single Do You Want to Know a Secret in the US

Alanis Morissette – Thank U  

John Denver – Thank god I’m a country boy 

Neil Diamond – Thank the Lord for the Nighttime.  My absolute favorite Diamond song.

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