The Grouch Speaks

Mellow Greetings fellow humans.  How are things with you?  I've not been posting as of late because I've been very grouchy and did not want to expose you to my generalized ire.  

The cheerful things I can now report are as follows.  We found a handyman outfit who actually answers the phone, and dispatches people in a timely fashion.  The grout in the shower cracked in a few places.  It had almost reached the stage of letting water out of the shower.  We watched a bunch of youtube videos and decided we could fix that.  Hah!  Double HAH HAH HAH!  After wielding the grout saw for a bit, we realized we would die of old age prior to getting the grout removed.  The guys from Faithful Hand Handyman came today, dug out the cracked grout and put in new.  It looks really good and it's done.  We're going to have Josh come back to install a new kitchen faucet.  We've done it before, but the way the plumbing was done in this house makes it very difficult.

After a long and arduous search I found a table cloth (oilcloth) to replace the old one.  This is the old one.

Here is new.  The giraffe print was ok with the previous fabric on the chairs, but not with what we have now.  Although this is a fake wood grain pattern, it reads as a solid if you just glance at it.  It will take a few months for the creases to sort themselves out.  I am wildly excited to be done with the giraffe.

There are new socks.  I now have a complete winter wardrobe of varying weights of wool socks depending on which boots I am wearing, and how cold it is.  Socks are good.

OK, so much for the happy stuff.  The republicans are making me very angry, and they're putting even more hate in my heart.

Texas wants to make it possible for any relative of a rapist to sue the victim of the rape if she aborts his child.  They also want to make it a crime to take a trans child out of state for gender affirming treatment.  They're also thinking they'd like to impose the death penalty for women who abort, as well as their doctor.

Missouri would make it illegal for women to cross the state line into Illinois for an abortion.  They want to control what their citizens do in other states.  Missouri Rep. Brian Seitz proposed a bill that would classify removal of an ectopic pregnancy as an abortion, which would be illegal after 10 weeks.  When asked if he understood what the procedure entailed and why it was performed, he allowed as how no, he did not know these things.  An ectopic pregnancy, if not removed, will always result in the death of the woman and the fertilized egg stuck in the fallopian tube.  Contrary to what republicans might believe, it is not possible to remove it and place it in the uterus.

The Idaho House would like to make the penalty for taking your trans child out of state for gender affirming treatment punishable by life in prison. 

The gas companies are infuriating me with their price gouging.  The price of a barrel of oil has dropped, yet prices at the pump have not.  The republicans supported Biden's decision to not buy Russian oil, then turned around and blamed gas prices on Biden.  Gas prices are up everywhere, yet it's the US president's fault.  This will be a big campaign issue in the mid-terms and I don't see the Democrats developing any convincing talking points to counter the Tucker Carlsons of the world.

The Senate republicans would not approve further spending for covid testing, antivirals and monoclonal antibodies, or research on how to treat new variants.  Covid is over! We don't need to spend any money on that - right?  Well no.  BA.2 is on the move.  China is shutting down large swaths of the country trying to get it under control.  Hong Kong has lost the battle, hospitals and morgues are over run.  Cases are increasing in Europe.  And yet, this is what we saw on the digital copy of Washington Post today.

This is from a tweet thread Andy Slavitt put up.  "In the UK and Germany, BA2, a variant of omicron we first saw in Denmark, is driving new case growth. BA2 is over 50% of cases. And cases are on the rise in the U.K.  In the US, cases are still down. But 2 things are worth watching. 1) Only 10% of cases are BA2 and since BA2 spreads approx 30% faster than omicron, expect it to follow Europe, 2) About 1/3 of our early warning wastewater sites are showing increases.  As we have seen throughout the pandemic, the US has followed Europe by several weeks in our waves of cases. That may happen again here. But what happens next is going to be different in every country based on what happened this last year. The factors that will influence how a rise in cases might look in the US are: -the proportion of the country with prior omicron infection -the percentage of non-omicron infected who are vaccinated, or if higher risk, boosted -the state of US hospitals. An estimated 45% of the US has had omicron recently. That should be highly protective. Those fully vaccinated but who haven’t had omicron should be vulnerable to infection from BA2, but largely won’t be hospitalized or worse. Those who haven’t been infected but also aren’t vaccinated or boosted will be at highest risk of hospitalization. So we could see lots of cases, but an even lower portion of ppl hospitalized than last wave."

What he did not mention is the tsunami of people already disabled by long Covid, and BA2 will bring even more.  Very little research is being done on why there is long Covid, or what can be done to fix it.  Surviving Covid is only half the battle.

In closing, I'd like to post this from Hillary.