Shutdown Diary
The latest stats from WaPo:
On a side note, I noticed a problem with WaPo's main COVID-19 page (first link). There is a vaccine tracker link which I thought would link to my second link; nope, it's some dated version from several weeks back because the real numbers are much higher.
Bill Clinton's Health Issues
One of my daily email digests, from MedPage, one of my sources for the above regular segment, had a link to former POTUS Bill Clinton's recent hospitalization. I wasn't aware of it; maybe it was on national news or a Twitter trend, but I didn't see it. Basically the story was, Clinton was in an ICU with a urinary track infection in sepsis. And I'm immediately thinking, "Oh, shit!"
I immediately flashed back to August 2014. My Dad was at a San Antonio military hospital after back surgery. The surgery was successful, but I was disturbed over reports that Dad was somewhat listless, not wanting to do some post-surgical therapy. He had had a prior surgery over a decade earlier and had a much better response. I had the distinct feeling something was wrong (I was living in WV at the time and hadn't seen him). For some reason, the hospital delayed releasing him, but they released him to a rehabilitation center near my folks' house. I still recall my baby sister, visiting from St. Louis, wrote us a promising update the next morning.
Then all hell broke loose. I've written this story before in prior posts. Dad's first therapy session had gone well. Mom then briefly went out to get a bite to eat, when all of a sudden Dad's blood pressure fell below the floor. It took all they could do for the ambulance to get him to the hospital alive. Sepsis. He was in a medically induced coma in and out over the next, final 2 days. I don't think they caught it fast enough to be able to treat it with antibiotics; Dad's organs were already dying; at minimum, he would have to go through dialysis for the rest of his life. My Mom called me that first night he was in the ICU. He was coding and I thought I was going to hear him die over a phone call. My Mom was pleading for me to get a flight ASAP if I wanted to say my goodbye to him. But the nearest airport was nearly an hour north, Pittsburgh, and I couldn't get a flight out Tuesday (the next day). My third sister called me urgently the next morning. I could get a flight early Wednesday, touching down around noon. My sister and brother-in-law were there to pick me up; less than 2 hours later, Dad was gone. They had kept him alive long enough for me to say my goodbye. He had a tube down his throat so he couldn't talk, but he was conscious and his eyes followed me around his bed.
I wouldn't want anyone to go through this (yes, we learned it was a urinary tract infection that I'm fairly sure must have started at the hospital), not even a piece of garbage like Clinton. Clinton was lucky; they caught it early enough they could treat it and apparently he wasn't in the ICU that long, soon walking around his room. (There was some weird reporting at CNN and/or other media sources, implying he was in an ICU for privacy reasons. I doubt that. I'm sure he could get a private room.)
I have to admit I'm not happy my Dad, a good man, suffered a different outcome versus a piece of garbage like Clinton. But bad things sometimes happen to good people.
Life's Little Problems
Sometimes problems surface in unexpected ways. I transitioned from desupported Outlook Express to Thunderbird several years back. I've gone through numerous updates since, and I recall being concerned when Mozilla spun it off. Not sure what I would do if Thunderbird is desupported. I could probably develop more sophisticated filtering in Gmail et al. I prefer to have a local copy of emails, and I do have alternatives like Mailstore. But the bottom line is I've invested time in developing my filters and using certain add-ons over the years.
The big issues with major Thunderbird upgrades is that add-ons may lag the release and not be unavailable. Of all things, the first thing I noticed were my calendars were missing. That's not a big deal because, e.g., I can get my Google calendars in a couple of clicks on my cellphone or my PC, of course. Now it had been a while since I dealt with my calendar integrations. There were buttons to enable my calendars in setup and sync buttons but nothing. What was going on? I remembered at one point manually integrating Google calendars. At some point, I began to realize I had added a Provider for Google Calendar add-on, apparently not compatible with the new Thunderbird version (91). So I searched for alternate add-ons when all of a sudden I got a message that there is a compatible version, I just had to manually update my add-ons. Yup, although this was confusing because I thought Thunderbird automatically applied add-on updates; I will routinely get notices about updates in Thunderbird panes or sudden notice a familiar add-on feature in the interface. But yes, my calendars are back to normal.
Other Notes
The blog had an excellent recent week but readership for whatever reason has recently dropped by half.
My Astros are once again fighting for a spot in the World Series. On the downside, my Texas Longhorns seem to have blown big leads against Oklahoma teams in the last 2 weeks.
The ALCS preempted my Friday night wrestling. No big deal Usually it shifts to another Fox cable channel not in my cable bundle, it wasn't on Peacock yet (I hate their clunky interface, by the way: Amazon Video's is much better). I do think, though, the recent episodes are available on the Fox portal.
It seems like we're less than a week away from Hallmark's Countdown to Christmas. Yup, not even Halloween yet. I think Lifetime may, too, but to be honest, I don't like most of their movies in general about psycho grannies, killer cheerleaders, and the like, so I don't see their promos. I did see they had a few holiday movies on, say, Friday night, but this may be just a competitive response to Hallmark running a Christmas movie on Fridays all year long.
