Landscaping and Social Distancing

The guys from Copper Standard came yesterday to dig up the old bougainvilleas and plant the bottle brushes.  I am so happy we outsourced that.  Those plants had been in there for 20 years and had giant root balls.  They had to use a pick to get them out, and I am just not comfortable swinging a pick that close to a wall.  So, new plants are in.  I like them, they're low growing and not a showy plant.

They also planted the cactus we impulse bought at a nursery in the north end.  We must stop doing that!

Looking down the wall at the new bottle brush, my mini stonehenge and the recently deflowered geranium.

We got propane today at the tack and feed store.  They have baby chicks.  They're so cute, I want to pick them up and pet their heads, but it is forbidden.  Cute, just little fluffy balls of cuteness with legs.

The weather was very unsettled.  When we got back from Trader Joe's we thought we'd go for a hike, but then the temperature dropped a bunch, clouds rolled in and it rained.  So we steamed the floors instead.  They needed it.  Update to post:  at 5:15 we had hail bouncing two feet in the air.

This afternoon we got a text regarding future happy hours and the end of season pot luck.  I figured those events would continue as scheduled, since there seems to be some poo-pooing of Covid-19.  Jim and I are social distancing, other than brief forays running into stores, we're isolating from other people.  Anyway the question was put to the people on the street as to whether or not future events should be cancelled.  Cancel won.  We're an elderly neighborhood, some people have underlying conditions, so I'm happy that people are paying attention to the CDC guidelines.

Who remembers Y2K?  It was feared that all electronics would crash, bank accounts would be wiped out, civilization would collapse.  January 1, people woke up and nothing happened.  You know why?  Because programmers like myself went through thousands of lines of code looking for the hard coded use of "19" with the last two digits appended.  Preparedness won the day.

CDC wants us to practice social distancing.  Covid-19 is coming, the rate at which it arrives will determine if we end up like Italy, or if it can be managed in hospitals along with the current bad flu outbreak.

The area under both curves is the same.  How fast it spreads through the community will determine how many people die and how many don't.

Photos of Hoarding

We were at Safeway and Target today.  Safeway was very entertaining.  They had put all of the toilet paper on sale.  All of the Charmin was gone.  Much of the Cottonelle and Scott tp was still on the shelves.  I guess people don't like those brands.  We don't like them, either, but it may come to that.

Then it was on to Target.  Here is the toilet paper aisle.

All that was left was these few four packs of really terrible house brand tp.  They're probably gone by now.

So that's it!  This is how it looks in Tucson.

Update:  March 11, 2020 was the official start of Covid season.

Plant Muggings and Covid-19

Well, color me aggravated.  I had two really pretty plants that I would put out by the wall.  They added a nice splash of color and pleased me greatly.

This is what I found yesterday morning.  We've been moving them up to the sliding glass doors at night, believing (erroneously) that the deer and javelinas would not come that close to the house.  We were wrong.  The deer ate all of the flowers.  I am so pissed.  The geranium will bloom again, the Gerbera daisy was too much eaten.  So now the geranium has to come in the house at night.

The hopseeds are blooming.  They are such pretty plants.  The deer hate them, so that's good.

The northend Costco is out of toilet paper.  There is no, none, not any.  I am surprised it happened this quickly since there are only three cases in AZ.  Well, that's three cases that we know about since there are no test kits available. Updated post:  Well, there were three yesterday, today there are nine.

There is some very cool science happening.  Various labs are sequencing the genomes of the Covid-19 strains that are moving around the world and are uploading data as soon as it becomes available.  So, much is known about the mutations and where they went.  Plus, data is being shared and not hoarded as it was during the race for a test kit for HIV.  It's published on nextstrain.org/ncov.

This was on twitter yesterday.  Chestmedicine is asking about the best way to wean people with Covid-19 off of ventilators.  Calvinball's response was fairly chilling.  He's an ER doc in the Seattle area; they do have higher than average mortality due to the people coming from the nursing homes.

More has been published on why Covid-19 is so bad.  The novel coronavirus known as Covid-19 is new, we know very little about it.  No one, except those who catch it and survive, has immunity.  It is believed that 80% who get it will survive without medical intervention.  Many of the 80% will not feel particularly badly, and thus will go about their days, possibly infecting everyone they come in contact with because they are still contagious.  Twenty percent will not survive without a hospital.  The bad thing is, it's flu season.

Hospitals are full to the gills with people with the flu.  Covid-19 is not just another flu.  It has a doubling rate of about 4 days.  The best mental image of this (borrowed from WAPO) is that you have a pond with one lily pad, it reproduces every day. So you have, 1, 2, 4, 8, 16 and etc.  If it takes 48 days to cover the pond completely, how long will it take to cover the pond half way?

The answer is 47 days.

Here is more from that WAPO piece.

During the current flu season, they point out, more than 250,000 people have been hospitalized in the United States, and 14,000 have died, including more than 100 children. As of this writing, the coronavirus has killed 29 people, and our caseload is in the hundreds. Why are we freaking out about the tiny threat while ignoring the big one?

Quite a number of people have suggested that it’s because the media just wants President Trump to look bad. Trump seems particularly fond of this suggestion.

But go back to those lily pads: When something dangerous is growing exponentially, everything looks fine until it doesn’t. In the early days of the Wuhan epidemic, when no one was taking precautions, the number of cases appears to have doubled every four to five days.

The crisis in northern Italy is what happens when a fast doubling rate meets a “threshold effect,” where the character of an event can massively change once its size hits a certain threshold.

In this case, the threshold is things such as ICU beds. If the epidemic is small enough, doctors can provide respiratory support to the significant fraction of patients who develop complications, and relatively few will die. But once the number of critical patients exceeds the number of ventilators and ICU beds and other critical-care facilities, mortality rates spike.

That could happen here.  The fact that the administration does not want to say "don't fly", "don't go on a cruise", is just shameful.  They're putting profits over the health of the populace. 

Italy is now in the position of having to decide who gets treated, and who doesn't.  Currently they're giving young people priority access to ventilators and beds.  You can read about that here.  For them to have closed the entire country so they could get a grip on it is just astonishing.

 The over arching goal is to flatten the curve.  That is, to keep the number of infections below the threshold of what the health system can handle.

Here is yet another missed opportunity to find the virus. It's a good read about how researchers proactively went looking for the virus using flu swabs.  They found the virus, circulating in the general population, but then were told to stop testing; they were a research facility and could not test the flu kits for Covid-19.  Valuable time passed due to intractable regulations.

So, do what you can for you and yours.  Quit shaking hands!  Wash your hands and stop touching your face!!!!  Avoid large groups of people.

Cards, Bikes and Cactus

Today I have odds and ends and a trip to a nursery.  I screen grabbed this off Twitter awhile ago.  It has long been a mystery to me why Bernie was so popular with the millenials, given his advanced age.  This sort of makes sense to me. 

We're residents of Arizona now, they have closed primaries.  We recently received a nice card from the party welcoming us.  That has never happened before.  I guess there are so few Democrats here that they can take the time to hand write and mail cards.

Their art appears to be a riff on the Great Wave off Kanagawa, a Japanese woodblock print first produced in the early 1800s.  I guess by now there are no issues with copyright infringement.

The weather has been weird.  Thursday it was really windy.  We rode up the Santa Cruz trail, coming back was very unpleasant due to headwinds and the occasional gust from the side.  I hate the gusting side winds, they're unpredictable.

Friday's wind was even worse.  We gave up on the thought of riding.  We went to visit a friend who has a very nice looking flat handle bar bike.  I'm liking this bike a lot because it's a more upright seating position, which may decrease the pain in my shoulders.  I also like it because we can put 28 mm tires on it which will further protect us from the horrible roads in Tucson.  More air, more comfort.  So I rode his bike and it rides very nicely.  Then we went out to bikes direct dot com and they're sold out!  It's not fair.  So there you go.

Later we drove out to a nursery on River Road.  We keep seeing their ads so we decided to go look.

This is a Moroccan Mound.  They're kind of cool looking.  A neighbor has one that's pretty big, I may ask if I can break off one little finger of the plant.

Roses do well out here.  In Seattle it requires propitiation of the plant gods to keep them alive.  Out here thrip, rust and mildew are not so much of a problem.

A Hibiscus.  They pretty much define not cold hardy, so no, none for us.

This really surprised me.  Those are pansies.  Pansies are a cool weather plant.  I do not understand why they are growing them here.  Very soon it will be in the 90's and the pansies will die.

I love these.  What could be better than teeny tiny baby cacti attractively planted in terracotta pots?

It's only $8!

In the end we did not impulse buy anything.  If you're in Tucson it's the Green Things nursery, which is co-located with Zocalo Village.  They're out on River Road in horse country.  It's a cool facility.

The Desert and Stuff

Well, it's the day after Super Tuesday.  Biden seems to be snatching victory from the jaws of defeat.  Bernie is still leading in the delegate counts, but big donors are sending money to Biden, so perhaps he has a chance.  Nope, I was wrong.  Biden has the lead in delegates now, and big money donors are sending him money.

Arizona has vote by mail.  Given that it's a red state, I was not expecting that.  People in Texas had to wait in line for up to seven hours to vote.  If that's not voter suppression, I don't know what is.

It's the beginning of allergy season here.  This is round one of the steenking yellow bushes.  The Acacias look like they'll be blooming soon.

The brittle bushes are blooming out in the desert.  They're such an unlovely plant, but they are cheerful.

Teddy bears, they want to hug you.  We hiked for about two hours today, over hill and over dale.  My feet are tired!  It was a beautiful day, warm and not windy.  It's about time.

Today was the annual burning of the Sweetwater wetland.  It's part of Tucson's water reclamation system.  They torch the bullrushes and cattails so that the mosquito poison can make contact with the water and kill the larvae.  Overgrowth of the vegetation is also a fire hazard so they do a controlled burn.  It will grow back, but it's going to look terrible for awhile.

So, we have an outbreak of Covid-19.  Why are people storming Costco and buying up all of the bottled water?  Can someone explain this to me.  It's highly unlikely that enough people will die from this that the public water systems will grind to a halt.  I get buying toilet paper and hand sanitizer, but not water.  We were in Target yesterday and noticed that all the Purell is gone, but there is plenty of soap.  Why aren't people hoarding soap?  It's an interesting psychology.

Other than that I have zippity doo-dah all to report.

HIking and Covid-19

Greetings!  Long time, no write.  The news is just sucking the marrow out of my bones.  There has been hiking.  Hiking is good, there have been no fellow humans in sight.  It's kind of weird, we're wondering where they all are.  I finally figured out how to use the panorama setting on Jim's phone.  This time I did not cut the tops off of the mountains.  It's sort of a distorted image, not sure I'm a fan of the format.

Yesterday we hiked late, we spent a fair amount of time on the phone with Charles Schwab trying to determine why they had locked our account due to not being able to identify me.  They actually could not pin point the problem and after asking me the four questions they can pull from public records they restored us to full access.  The investment guy keeps telling us to stay the course, and we keep wondering just how bad things are going to get.

This was today, it was just a gorgeous day.  White puffy clouds and warm temperatures.  Monday it's going to rain.

See the bites taken out of the prickly pear?  Javelinas did that.  It's hard to believe they can munch on the spines.

There was a sunset, as well.

At the 2/28 rally in South Carolina, the president went on record as saying Covid-19 is a hoax perpetrated by the Democrat (sic) party.  He  followed up with the equally baseless statement that the stock market was tanking because the markets didn't like any of the candidates in the Democrat (sic) party. I can't stand it.  Today, he announced the first US death due to Covid-19.  He then followed up with the statement that most people will survive, they'll just have to go through some stuff.  I still can't stand it.  Dr. Fauci (head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases) was on stage with him, why wasn't he speaking?

The first US death came today in Washington state.  He was a 50ish man, with underlying health issues.  That was bad enough, worse is that several patients at a long term health care facility have tested positive, as have some people who work there.  Now what?  One hundred fourteen nurses at another hospital (different state) are now quarantined because they cared for a sick person that turned out to be positive for the virus.  Things are not starting off well.  The Seattle area Costco stores are running out of everything, people are buying everything there is to buy.
 
It is unfortunate that the team put together to confront the Ebola virus by Obama was disbanded by John Bolton in May 2018. Fifteen years of putting processes and procedures to efficiently run a pandemic response were flushed because it was an Obama sponsored project. Now, the wheel is having to be reinvented, and yes I do blame the president for this. That action was stupid. His personnel decisions have been based on who is loyal to him, and not on expertise. The head of HHS, was president of Lily, a major pharmaceutical company. The head of CDC has long ties to groups who believe AIDS was "God's judgment" against homosexuals, spread in an America weakened by single-parent households and loss of family values.  Having Mike Pence, science denier, who famously declared that smoking did not cause cancer because not everybody who smoked got cancer as the Covid-19 team leader makes little to no sense to me.   I could go on, but I'll stop there. The thus poor response to Covid-19 can be traced to not having qualified, experienced people in place and that problem starts at the top.

Yesterday, we tried to buy hand sanitizer at Target.  That was futile.  The hoarding has already begun.  I keep thinking we should stock up, but can't really figure out what I should be buying.  Pasta maybe?

This is the view from a Seattle area Costco.

So remember, wash your hands frequently and quit touching your face!