Shutdown Diary
Well, hopefully by the end of this week, I've have joined half of my 6 siblings among the fully vaccinated.
I don't think the media have done a good job explaining the nature of vaccination benefits. To a certain extent they've implied it by pointing out vaccinated people still need to practice the regime of masking, social distancing and good hygiene. (See here for CDC guidance.) There are multiple reasons for that, including limited information about effectiveness against new variants and the fact that it takes at least a couple of weeks after vaccination for your body to produce sufficient antibodies. But some people who are vaccinated do get COVID-19, although just a tiny fraction. And obviously people who catch it may not realize they have it and can infect others. Basically vaccination boosts any natural ability to combat the virus and provably minimizes the risk of severe illness requiring hospitalization..
Now that we're a year into the pandemic media sources and other people are doing retrospectives. I remember I was in a job search at the beginning, and all my leads seem to die off without any follow-ups. On the other hand, in the weeks that followed, more employers seemed open to remote work, at least in the interim. That was a huge relief because I didn't know how the pandemic affected moving services. The stock crash decimated my retirement assets; I was nearly all in the stock market, and I worried that I might need to withdraw money to meet my living expenses in the short term. My COBRA payments alone were like a second rent payment. So I largely cashed out taking huge losses, in hindsight at exactly the wrong time and missed the bounce back. If I had an income at the time, I probably would have ridden it out. (I had looked into drawing unemployment, but there were technical issues, and no one from MD DLLR would follow-up.) It could, of course, been far worse; I was in the at risk population and could have caught the disease and been hospitalized.
Bur probably the surface things that immediately come to mind are surface things like runs on facemasks and toilet paper. My oldest sister (about 14 months younger) had made facemasks for her daughters, and I asked her if she could make me one; I got it just before MD Gov. Hogan's mask mandate came into effect.
The toilet paper run/shortage lasted for weeks. Not to mention that stores like Walmart had airline security-type long wraparound lines at entrances and I recall having to wait in a long queue in the drizzling rain at Sam's Club as they let in maybe a dozen shoppers at a time. I remember gaps in freezer cases, empty shelves, and quantity limits on meat purchases at Walmart, which I had never seen before. I remember feeling lucky at finding single toilet rolls on sale at Shoprite and later finding a multi-pack at Walmart, one of 2 or 3 left in stock where they normally had a few hundred packages on sale.
More recently I've become a more regular shopper at LIDL, a German-based grocery chain. (I may separately post about it in my nutrition/diet blog.) There are a number of reasons why I like the chain, a key one being ample supply of competitively-priced grass-fed/finished meats. It's hard to describe; it's almost like a treasure hunt because they'll run limited-time specials on all sorts of things, including non-grocery items. For example, one week they ran a special on breakfast blend coffee pods, like a 100-count box for $20 (take it from me, that's a good price). They also have some innovative coupon rewards. Now supermarket coupons are fairly common, but Lidl's are different. I remember the first one I got was like 15% off "select" beverages. I remember wondering what that meant: did they have a store brand called "Select"? Or did they mean certain brands or types of beverage? Did it include milk, juice, soda pop, bottled water? Which, if any, were not included? I know; I'm overthinking this. But I didn't find anything online, including any fine print on what was excluded. I think I let the coupon lapse unused.
I know: the reader must be thinking where the hell am I going with this? Toilet paper. So one of my coupons was a discount on select paper goods. So they had a good deal on the one multi-pack of store-brand multi-roll toilet paper, like $3 off. I can still recall when I couldn't find a roll on sale in the store. So I wondered, are they going to give me another discount on top of that? I know a number of discounts elsewhere will exclude items already on sale. Yup. The inner bargain hunter in me delighted in finding out they knocked off an additional $2 off my purchase.
The latest stats from Washpo: (Well, after several weeks of sharply lower numbers, a modest uptick across the board. Certainly we would expect to see a leveling off at some point. I had heard some states (including Maryland) had had at least some kind of rebound in COVID-19 cases. Hopefully the ongoing surge in the vaccinated will mitigate another surge such as what we're seeing in France and elsewhere, including an influx of more contagious variants. I do regret , given the mix of one- and two-dose vaccinations, we don't see an explicit tally of the partially vaccinated, because the first dose makes the biggest difference. As of a week ago, though, over 30% of adults have been partially vaccinated
Entertainment
Well, I had two alma maters in the "March Madness" NCAA basketball championship tournament: Texas (MA) and UH (MBA, PhD). Texas had an early exit from the single elimination tournament (I think for the third time in a row) losing to long-seed Abilene Christian, which then got bounced out by UCLA.
As I write, the Cougars have a solid shot at making the Final Four, facing lower-seeded Oregon State tomorrow night, they came close to getting beaten by Rutgers. I haven't been able to see any of their games on my cable package; so on recent games I've had to wait for my Chrome page to refresh. I know Rutgers led for the most part late in the second half and was resigned to seeing the Cougars disappoint me again, like they did against NC State and Georgetown during the Phi Slama Jama days when I was in grad school. More or less a similar situation occurred against Syracuse where they blew a couple of big leads although they pulled away at the end.
I did watch my first WWE PPV (Fastlane) for the first time in a while as a Peacock Premium subscriber. This is supposed to be lead into the upcoming signature Wrestlemania PPV. I just don't understand the booking at all. For example, the two major titles, currently held by Lashley and Asuka, weren't defended. Now I think Charlotte Flair getting infected by COVID-19 probably affected the prospective plans to run her challenge to Asuka. But somehow Rhea Ripley, the recent Rumble runner-up, got a golden ticket without winning a single RAW match. The least they could have done is say hold a RAW women's rumble to decide a challenger. Or have Ripley in a no-title match with Asuka with a championship shot at stake. And for some reason they ran another feud match between former champ McIntyre and Sheamus. I don't even think it had a stipulation like putting up McIntyre's right to challenge Lashley at Wrestlemania or maybe reveal Sheamus had joined Lashley's Hurt Business faction. I thought they might write Lesnar into a 3-way at Mania. I now think they bring in Lesnar into the Wtestlemania match/aftermath to set up SummerSlam.
Similarly I don't like how they've booked the Sasha Banks/Bianca Belair feud for the championship. Basically WWE paired them into a losing a women's tag team championship bid, with Sasha blaming the rookie for the loss. Oh, yeah, like I didn't see that one coming. The issue is that WWE didn't have one of the ladies turn heel. Like, say, having Banks abandon Belair during the match or swerve an attack on Belair, leaving her to the mercy of Jax and Shayna Baszler. I don't know the setup: maybe Banks has her finisher on Jax, and Belair tags herself in to attempt the pin herself.
Not crazy about another Owens/Zahn match. They've done that so many times in NXT and WWE in the past. I have to say, though, I love the narcissist/conspiracy theorist heel Zahn. as well as heel Roman Reigns.
I have to say almost anyone could tell they were going to book Daniel Bryan into the 3-way with Reigns and Edge. This gave them a way to book Edge into a heel. I don't think they book Bryan as the new champ. But this way they can book Edge as champ without weakening Reign's character.
The men's tag titles don't interest me. It seems mostly to book AJ Styles into a high-profile match and introduce the massive 7'3" bodyguard Omos into his wrestling debut. It still bothers me how they book an untested tag team into a championship match. It still smells like the old Dibiase/Virgil storyline where Omos eventually turns on Styles. You almost see this being telegraphed by Omos admitting his favorite WWE wrestler being (I think) Andre the Giant vs. Styles..
