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Health care

Shenanigans Update…

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So a variety of shenanigans have been in progress here at the Funny Farm, none of them very momentous (because you can’t get up to a whole lot during a covid quarantine). It’s been hotter than a by-god here, 111 and up. But today is a little cooler, following yesterday’s monsoon showers — the first we’ve seen in the Valley this summer.  A lovely, hazy 180-degree rainbow stretched across the eastern sky yesterday afternoon, as the sinking sun lit up a broad curtain of virga and rain.

Adventures in Medical Science have proceeded — at a stately pace, but still proceeding. I’ve developed peripheral neuropathy, an unending, annoying tingling in the hands and feet. Turns out this can be related to the pre-diabetes the Mayo decided, lo! these many years ago, that I harbor. As usual, they assign me to a resident to assess my current hypochondria. And what a lovely, brilliant young woman. I want her as my forever doctor!

Before I left the house for the appointment, I checked my blood pressure: 124.4/81.8, average of five, the first of which (always the highest) was 131/85. This bit of intelligence invariably leads to one variety or another of mystification or amusement.

And yea verily: I get to the Mayo and as usual they slap a blood pressure cuff on me. They make me sit up straight on the edge of the bench seat (you’re supposed to sit with your back supported, according to the video published BY THE MAYO for training its employees…). It’s 141/74.

Say what? a serious diastolic of 74…did you happen to notice whether I was conscious at the time? 😀  Well of course…my BP goes right into orbit every time I set foot inside a medical facility, so much do I just love visiting those places. But that reading was pretty hilarious.

So the two docs — one the resident and one an old hand — listened to my sad story, provisionally hypothesized that the tingling is from drinking too goddamn much wine, proposed that I knock it off (easier said than done, ladies…), opined that they don’t THINK it’s diabetes, at least probably maybe likely not, and arranged for a blood draw the following morning. So works well: it’s at the (much closer) hospital facility at 7:10 tomorrow, a straight shot north of the coveted Fry’s supermarket.

I felt marginally encouraged, since it was clear that they weren’t very concerned. Or if they were, they sure hid it well.

Senior doc was not pleased with my boozing habits. I figured out how much is in one of my wine glasses and concluded that a typical serving for me is about 4 to 5 ounces. So if I drink two glasses — which I typically do, because I start tippling while I’m cooking the meal — then I’m drinking twice as much as the amount currently deemed OK for women. Note that this reckless behavior has been going on since I was about 29 years old…46 years!

But she had another suspect: she also told me to knock off the vitamin D capsules I’ve been dropping every few days. Not just because 4000 milligrams is about three times too much for a normal dose, but more to the point, she said, merrily OD-ing on the stuff can make you good & sick. In the vitamin department, though, she observed that a deficiency of vitamin E can cause peripheral neuropathy. So that’s one of the things she wanted to test for. Not likely, since I’m given to scarfing down salmon with gay abandon, but…any fishnet in a storm, eh?

Vitamin B12 deficiency also can cause peripheral neuropathy, so she’s testing for that, too. Again: unlikely, as it’s caused by inadequate diet and I eat like the Queen of Sheba.

Honestly… I dunno whether knowing all this stuff makes a junket to the doctor’s office LESS stressful or MORE stressful. On the one hand, you have an idea what to expect. On the other, it may be better not to know.

Okayyy… So come the crack of Thursday’s dawn, I traipse up to the Mayo Hospital in Paradise Valley, where we hoi polloi are greeted with a phalanx of covid-checkers. Their phlebotomists are so skilled you can barely even feel them puncturing your vein. So that was fine.

Our honored highway department had the righthand lane leading up to the freeway off-ramp that takes you to the hospital ripped up for at least a year. What they’re doing is unclear, but whatever it is seems to involve making no progress. My guess is, what they’re doing is pumping money through a boondoggle. At any rate, if you’re doing 70 on that freeway, you’re just barely keeping up with traffic — you’re actually moving too slow. And of course everybody has to get there first! So you have a bitch of a time maneuvering on to the freeway from SR 51 and then an even bigger bitch of a time getting off at 56th Street. Basically, you have to threaten to kill someone. That is why I always drive a car of hefty build…and why I vaguely covet a candy-apple-red pickup, bigawd!

On the way, I realized dayum! i left my credit cards at home!!! So much for the planned early-morning sneak attack on Fry’s Supermarket. Just as well, though: I’ve become too accustomed to eating breakfast, so by 7:15 when I walked outta there, I was starved. But neverthless decided to head back toward the ’Hood on the surface streets, the freeway being too annoying to contemplate further. Amazingly, there was almost no traffic. I flew across the city and shot into the ’Hood at an astonishing 7:25 after that 7:10 appointment, just freakin’ unthinkable! At any time of day, to say nothing of rush hour on a Thursday morning.

Before you know it, the Mayo ALREADY HAS THE RESULTS of that damn blood test posted on its portal. And…it appears that “glucose” is just slightly high. According to the Mayo’s squib on subject, I could bring that down by losing about 10 pounds.

Wouldn’tcha know: that’s exactly the amount by which I happen to be overweight just now. Except for a low bilirubin figure, which is described as “not a concern.” Jeez…if you believe these figures, there’s not only precious little wrong with me, I’m healthy as my horse-like Christian-Science forebears. Those women lived to be 94 without ever once seeing a doctor. But….

Well then…what the HELL is causing this crazy zinging in the paws?

***

Okay, so I learned early this morning that peripheral neuropathy can ALSO be caused by pre-diabetes, not just full-blown diabetes. Sooo…that explains the condition and releases me from the guilt trip laid on me about my daring to have a glass of wine with dinner every day. (How un-American can you get, eh?)

So, what to do about it?

Medication includes drugs used as antidepressants. I happen to know, from Connie the Long-Haul Trucker and from a couple others of my more stressed-out friends, that these have some amazingly undesirable side effects.

Reading along here, we discover that one factor in this ailment is lack of exercise.

Uh huh.

Well. I’ve been loafing either on the bed or in my chair with my feet up on an ottoman since the covid fiasco crashed down on us — since April 1. I’ve gained 10 pounds. And though the dog and I walk two or three miles a day, that seems not to suffice. Literally, days and days go by when that is the ONLY exercise I get.

You don’t register how much walking you do across grocery-store and big-box parking lots, and around and around inside malls and big-box stores. Though I laid the cleaning lady off as soon as the contagion started, I’ve thoroughly cleaned the house only a couple of times. It’s too hot to go hiking on the mountain now, even in the wee hours, and with the craze for exercise, that place is so mobbed that walking through the desert preserve there is not what you’d call a nature stroll.

People don’t realize how far their voices carry across the desert — especially women’s voices, with their higher pitch. So they’re out there yakking…and you can hear them a half-mile away. In detail. Yakitty yakitty yakitty yakitty yak yak yak!!!!! Sometimes I feel like turning around, walking back to a pair of them, and saying, “Ladies, I do not want to know the gossip in your office. I don’t want to know how your kids are doing in school or what allergies they’ve got right now. I don’t want to know about your husband’s best buddy’s peccadillos. I do not care what color you got your hair dyed, or how your stylist baked cookies, or what a bitch her sister-in-law is. Will. You. Please. SHUT UP!”

But of course one can’t get away with that. {sigh}

Point is, the swarms of humanity out there have ruined what used to be a good (if sometimes sketchy) place to get some decent hiking or mountain-biking exercise, with lots of up and down hill and plenty of rock-hopping. Now you can’t hear the birdsong for the nonstop yapfest.

So that’s one excuse. The other is it’s just too hot at this time of year to go out there safely. Heat exhaustion is a real thing. And it can kill you.

Soooo…one thing that might help is to get off my duff and clean this place up. And keep it clean.

The garage had gotten so dirty and messy that it was uncomfortable to walk around barefoot out there. So this morning I pulled the car out onto the driveway, hauled out the shop-vac, and started vacuuming. There was bird seed scattered evenly all over the garage floor. Whaaaa????? Finally recalled that one of those Instacart delivery folks had kindly carried a 50-pound bag of Costco bird seed into the backyard…we would have cut through the garage…the bag must have had a little leak.

Finally got up all the dust and dog hair and bird seed. Hauled out load after load of precious valuables like empty cardboard boxes from Amazon (who knows when you’ll need an old cardboard box, right?). The problem with these little projects is that they multiply…you go to fix something and that leads to another thing that needs to be fixed which causes you to realize something else could be reorganized and cleaned up and on and on and on. Hauled 30# of soda ash out to the pool, where I’m going to offer it to Jim the pool dude. If he doesn’t want it, at least maybe he’ll help me lift it into the trash barrel, since I can barely pick it up.

***

That chore done, we moved on to a mighty fine HOLY SH!T moment. 

As I’m cleaning up the litter on my computer and go to close out of the Mayo Clinic’s “portal” page, I notice that three items in the blood test report are higher than normal: hemogolobin, hematocrit, and erythrocytes.

What, wonders my hot little brain, does that mean? So I look these up — also on a Mayo page —and discover that if hemogolobin and hematocrit are both elevated, that indicates something called polycythemia.

And what is THAT, you might ask?

That is a blood cancer.

This revelation causes a moment of panic. Nay verily….an extended chain of moments of panic.

I call MagaDoc’s office, trying to get in touch with one of the RNs and PAs they have fielding calls from panicked Mayo patients. Mind you, since one day is the same as the next for me, it escapes my attention that today is Saturday….  However, the woman I reach arranges for me to talk with an MD on call.

Shortly this doc calls me. She looks at the test results and says the high numbers, especially since they’re inconsistent with earlier test results, don’t indicate anything more threatening than dehydration.

Well, that certainly would make sense, since we’ve had temps between 100 and 111 every day since…the birth of Adam, far as I can tell. She adds that if the docs feel any concern about it, they’ll ask me to come back for another test — and be sure to drink some water, for cryin’ out loud.

Yes’m.

She adds that doesn’t think the figures have any dire significance whatsoever.

So aside from the prediabetic level of a couple of indicators, there seems to be nothing wrong with me that losing 10 or 15 pounds won’t help.

Literally, other than the daily doggy walks I’ve been inert ever since the covid panic started. Have rarely left the house (except for sneaking an occasional junket to Sprouts) since the first of April. And, since laying off the Cleaning Lady from Heaven, I have not been throwing myself around to do all the work she did.

And that woman DOES heave around! Right now I need to dust, vacuum, mop the floors, and clean the windows. But…one wonders if those antics count as exercise…given the portliness of CLfromH, who cleans at least one house and probably a couple every day, one tends to doubt it.

I hope she’ll come back whenever the plague abates. But don’t think I want a return to happen until a vaccine comes available. Among the many potential plague-carriers she works for is young couple here in the hood. These two are extreme Evangelical Christians. He—the husband—told a neighbor that (hang onto your hat!) they will not wear masks and will not get vaccinated if and when the time comes, because they do not believe covid-19 is “real,” and because even if it is and they do get it, God will take care of them.

Can you imagine? This guy is teaching high school here! At least he isn’t teaching science.

Ask the Hive Mind: What IS the percentage of covid cases here? And what does it mean?

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Okay, for those of you who are competent with math: check this and tell me how crazy I am.

We are told, on a page at Wunderground, that as of today, June 5, 2020, Maricopa County, AZ, has seen 12,091 confirmed cases of covid 19, of which 432 resulted in death. (Maricopa County is home to the city of Phoenix and its many sprawling suburbs.)

What percentage of the county’s population do these figures represent?

Maricopa County supposedly had a population of 4.485 million, as of 2019.

Am I right in thinking you calculate a percentage by dividing x (the number you want to compare with the total) by y (the total number)? Thus to determine what percentage 5 is of 10, you divide 5 by 10 and then move the decimal point two spaces to the right: so  5/10 = .5 = 50%.

True?

If so, then would this calculation be correct?

4.485 million = 4,485,000 (correct??)
12,091/4,485,000 =.002695875
Move the decimal 2 characters to the right to get .269587%, or, rounding up, about .3%.

Three-tenths of a percent? That represents the total number of known cases as a percentage of total population, almost 4½ million people.

Can that possibly be right?

We are getting ourselves in a frantic sweat over an ailment that affects less than 1% of our population — a lot less. An ailment whose death rate is thought to be around 1.3% of those afflicted? Theoretically, then: of those 12,091 cases, 157 patients should have died — many of them already seriously ill or very elderly.

Now, this is 157 people we would prefer not to lose. However, in terms of the county’s total population, it would seem not to be much:

157 deaths/4,485,000 = .0035%
Am I right in thinking that is way less than 1%?

The actual number of covid-related deaths in Maricopa County, if published figures are correct, is 432, out of 12,091 known cases of covid-19. That’s 3.57% of covid sufferers, and .0096% of Maricopa County residents.

For .0096% of our metropolitan area’s entire population, we’re shutting down our economy, closing schools, and running around with decorative but not very effective cloth or paper masks strapped over our faces? We’re enduring such a panic that you can’t find a roll of toilet paper, that beef is selling for $22 a pound, that grocery shelves are half-empty, that you can’t buy a bottle of household cleanser…because 3.57% of our population may die of this dread disease?

That’s assuming the figure given for total cases is correct. Many may not have been reported, and some may have been misdiagnosed.

Now, it’s true: we would like not to lose any fraction of our people to some bizarre new virus. The death rate for influenza is estimated to be around .1%. That is much lower than some estimates for covid-19: possibly around .6%. Unless the death rate shown for Maricopa County is accurate, in which case we have a very sickly population or we have much better case reporting or national figures are pretty far off-base.

Meanwhile, we’re told that 70% of deaths from the disease here occur among residents of nursing homes and long-term care facilities. That would explain the “very sickly” impression: Arizona has a LOT of elderly, because a lot of people retire here. We’re the home of the Del Webb’s Sun Cities, and Webb had a slew of imitators. Thirty-seven thousand people, with a median age of 73, live in Sun City alone, and that appears not to include Sun City West (24,535) and Sun City Grand (14,385). Or Sun Lakes (13,975). Westbrook Village…Pebble Creek…Robson Ranch…Sun City Festival…Leisure World…Verrado…the Trilogy developments…Ventana Lakes…and many more in and adjacent to Maricopa County. Plus all the “active retirement communities” in Tucson, Flagstaff, Yuma, and waypoints. And that doesn’t count the residents of apartment-like warehouses for old folks like the Beatitudes and the Terraces. Add them all up and you’ve got hundreds of thousands of people over the danger age of 60.  Indeed…many hundreds of thousands. All living together.

The mortality estimates are very vague, and as far as I can tell not provable — because no one knows for sure how many Americans have already been infected with covid, an unknown number asymptomatically. And no one really knows how many cases of the flu go unreported.

But still…one is left wondering: are we getting our panties in a twist for less cause than we imagine? What if that 3.57% death rate is artificially elevated because we have so many residents here who are in the high-risk over-60 set? And so many segregated in long-term care, life-care, and retirement venues?

What if, rather than locking down the entire community, we took a different tack, primarily targeting high-risk groups? With covid-19, we know the over-60 population is most at risk of dying. What if we locked down only retirement communities, nursing homes, and long-term care facilities?

That alone could knock the death rate down significantly.

We know children can be silent carriers — and of course we do know that every bug in heaven goes crazy in a school setting. So what if we closed schools during an epidemic? What if we trained teachers to instruct online, and always had the software available for online education?

We know that large gatherings spread the disease. What if we canceled athletic events and closed theaters and other crowd-gatherers during an epidemic?

And knowing that about gatherings, what if we closed down only those businesses that house workers in open-plan bull-pen settings, and had them move to the work-at-home mode? Businesses whose employees have their own offices and whose employers are willing to pay to disinfect work spaces every night could stay open.

Restaurants? Well…most of them serve up pretty unhealthy food, and it would be next to impossible to serve customers in a dining-setting without spreading bugs. So it seems more justifiable to close restaurants in time of plague. However…what if government funding were provided so restaurant owners and chains could install drive-up windows and hire delivery services during times of plague? It would give those businesses at least a shot at hanging on for the duration…and customers could get their junk-food, processed-food fix, even if they’d have to eat it at home, in the car, or at a park. And what if all restaurant employees had to be tested for the bug on a regular basis, like once a week?

Then we have the problem that our hospitals are overwhelmed by a deluge of sick and dying covid victims. Could the problem be not that everyone in sight is keeling over with the dread disease, but that our medical system leaves a lot to be desired? (But…we already knew that, eh?) If our medical system staggers when faced with illness in a tiny percentage of the population, what would happen if we had to cope with, say, a nuclear war? Even one bomb would disable a region’s hospitals. Bombs over several cities would wreak catastrophe in hospitals all over the nation.

What if we threw out the lunatic patchwork that is our medical care system, took insurance companies’ sticky fingers out of the picture, did the same for the hugely profitable and rapacious Big Pharma industries and lobbyists, and restored sanity to medical care in America? Could we not then manage to afford to supply our medical providers with enough protective gear to handle an epidemic, and build hospitals large enough and strong enough to cope with a sudden influx of dangerously ill patients?

Given that your chance of dying from this disease is fairly low unless you’re already sick or unless you’re elderly, it seems as though blanket shut-downs amount to over-kill. Targeting high-risk groups and high-risk activities would be more complex and expensive than just telling everyone to go home and stay home. But it would also be a lot less destructive to the economy and a lot less disruptive to our society.

Cleaning the rot out of our medical system would help a lot, too.

Are we coming at the whole covid-19 mess from the wrong direction?

Choir in the Age of Covid

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To Choir or Not to Choir…that is the question. It’s not all that many weeks till choir season resumes. If the covid epidemic hasn’t passed by then…well…???? Then what?

Our church has been closed for weeks, and with it the wonderful, exceptional music program. This is a huge loss to our community…not just the religious types, but parents who avail themselves of the outstanding youth music training programs, open to all kids in our city, not just those of our co-religionists. And indeed, before I became a co-religionist, occasionally I would attend a Sunday service just to listen to the music: a typical Sunday morning service amounted to a free chamber music program. Still does, come to think of it.

For me, the prospect of an extended closure for the program, even if religious services resume, is difficult to contemplate. Choir is my main source of social interaction. As a hermit, I don’t really need human interaction to chug along happily enough. But…I’ve come to like it. I’ve gotten used to it. And I’m already missing it.

Meanwhile, I remain hunkered down at the Funny Farm, avoiding human contact as much as possible. This is not much of a problem for me, because I’m a solitary being that, weirdly (from what one can tell), enjoys solitude. I’m not going out until a vaccine is developed — and that’s likely to be a couple of years, pace our moronic excuse for a President.

Even if the present wave of infection subsides, in the absence of a vaccine the disease will certainly resurge, very likely with a vengeance. And a likely source of vengeful resurgence is a choir. Obviously, any interaction in public places will put you at risk. But choir groups, in particular, are high-risk environments during a contagion. This is because when you are singing and projecting and socializing and sharing snacks and generally carrying on in a group, you are also sharing your microbes.

In Washington state, one person suffering an active case of covid-19  (yes, that’s 1 person) attended a choir practice. Within two days, six other choir members came down with it. A total of 53 members ultimately developed the disease, and two died from it.

Welp, I cannot tell you how many times I’ve picked up colds and the flu from fellow choir members. Choir practice requires close contact with your fellow singers, and often people show up whether they’re sick or not. This habit, it appears, is a part of American culture: gotta keep on going no matter what.

The state of Arizona is busily “re-opening” — prematurely, in the view of many experts. This will mean a lot more of the virus will be circulating than we had during our half-baked “quarantine,” when plenty of disease has been on the float. One of the risk factors that ups your chances of severe disease and death is simply having survived to age 65 and beyond. I am 75. And though I have no (zero, none) underlying conditions, just the fact that I’ve managed to cling to life this long puts me in the high-risk category.

Well, wait: we do have one underlying issue: I am exceptionally, irrationally susceptible to respiratory infections. If there’s a bug on the float, it’s not a question of whether I will catch it but when I will catch it. One doctor I had, noticing this predilection, ran a series of tests — just out of curiosity. And what did he come up with? Turns out there’s a small factor in my immune system that is essentially missing, so weak is it. And that, he hypothesized, explains why I pick up every bug that comes down the pike.

It is, as a matter of fact, surprising that I haven’t caught the covid thing yet. That probably is because a) I don’t live in a nursing home or life-care community; b) I rarely socialize; c) my son has been trying the best he can to keep me supplied so as to persuade me not to leave the house; and d) Arizona’s covid figures are relatively modest compared to other parts of the country.

Returning to choir in the fall, before a vaccine comes available, will almost guarantee that I catch it. And since there’s no such thing as “just the flu” for me — the flu is a serious thing when I catch it — that means I would be most foolhardy to go back to singing until such time as I can get a shot for covid.

I dunno. Maybe I’d druther be dead than linger on indefinitely without human company.

Maybe….

Can’t Win for Losin’: Covid Variant

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So I’m sitting here, as usual, like some unrepentant murderer in solitary confinement at San Quentin when…. DING DONG!!!!

Amazon dude.

He has the flour I ordered. And failed to notice was not 5 pounds but a piddling 2 pounds. This package would have been overpriced at 5# but at 2# it is the ripoff from Hell. But that’s neither here nor there.

The delivery dude is this kind of adorable Hobbit of a character. Within five minutes we learn he is Bosnian, he adores dogs (Ruby is attempting to love him into submission), he has German shepherds, here lookit the pictures of them on my phone, they’re Czech and German pedigree, and his wife is working at home, which sure saves a lot on the commute time, and he loves dogs, and he madly rubs his hands all over Ruby’s fur (uhmmm…Dude…did you realize that face mask is supposed to go OVER your mouth, not over the beard on your chin?) and as I’m thinking i’ll have to wash the damn dog and dry her before she can be allowed on the bed tonight and won’t that be fun goddamit!, he picks her up and PLANTS A BIG SLOPPY KISS ON HER ON THE HEAD.

Ho. Lee. Shee-ut!

’Bye! He finally leaves.

I drag Ruby into the backyard, grabbing a bottle of shampoo on the way — therewith to launder her.

Have you ever tried to wash the top of a dog’s head without getting soap in her eyes, while the dog squirms like an angry octopus?

Ruby puts up the Battle of the Titans. We fight and we struggle and we struggle and we fight and the minute I get the top of her head wet she goes SHAKE SHAKE SHAKE SHAKE and splatters dirty, very likely virus-laden water into my face, my eyes, and my mouth.

Meanwhile, I’m late to go pick up the home-made face masks my neighbor has made.

I finally get the soap out of the frantic dog’s fur (I hope) and dry her off, perfunctorily. Race to the bathroom, scrub my hands and face with soap but there’s not much I can do about the dirty water that’s been sprayed into my eyes and mouth so try sloshing horrid mouthwash around in the maw. It has enough alcohol in it to burn like Hell, so maybe it will kill whatever viruses I haven’t swallowed. As for the ones that have made their way into my gut, the alcohol in a glass of wine is gunna hafta do the job.

Now I fly out of the house, leaving the confused dog standing in the middle of the kitchen, leap into the car, and charge down to the neighbor’s place. Discover this part of the ’Hood has become considerably eccentric since the last time i walked through that little cul-de-sac. Weird. Grab the face masks out of the mailbox, leave some bucks for the artisan, fly back to the house. Throw my clothes in the washer, jump in the shower, scrub my hair, scrub my face again, scorch my mouth with mouthwash again, curse one WHOLE helluva lot. Dry the dog off some more (corgis have thick fur, even when they’re not the long-haired variety).

F**kkkk! We have an interesting article reporting that by far the largest number of covid cases requiring hospitalization in downstate New York has occurred among people who dutifully self-isolated, a report we had just begun to read when Amazon Moron showed up at the door.

Yeah. This episode would explain that, right?

The Strange Benefits of “Lockdown”

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So we’re told that the “lockdown” of America’s population — basically urging everyone to stay in their homes, to shut down businesses, to stay at least six feet away from other people (preferably more), to stay away from church services, movie houses, athletic events, restaurants, and whatnot — has apparently begun to work. The coronavirus wildfire is beginning to cool. But we won’t be safe, not a chance, until a vaccine is produced. And when will that be?

“Given the current severity of the crisis, there are efforts to fast-track a vaccine for COVID-19 in as little as 12 to 18 months,” Dr. Abe Malkin, the founder and medical director of Concierge MD in Los Angeles told Business Insider.

A year to a year and a half? As little as? Seriously?

Our honored leader, dumb as a post as usual, craves to reopen the economy ASAP even though at the moment our country has the highest covid-19 death toll of any in the world: 20,000 of our people killed. This ill-advised desire of his is hardly surprising given that we’re headed into a depression the likes of which we haven’t seen since 1929 and that he campaigned on promises of invigorating the economy.

Meanwhile, those who understand economics warn that we’re skateboarding down the tubes at accelerating rates. “The pain will deepen,” opine the august editors of The Economist, “as defaults cascade through domestic payment chains.” Far as I can see, they’ve got that dead right. Recovery from this fiasco in the short term will be miraculous; in the long term it will require fortitude, patience, and — hang onto your hat — intelligent leadership.

If this thing goes on much longer, we could find that the measures we’re taking to save lives could alter the fabric of our society: change the ways we do things permanently.

On the other hand, not all is angst. Let us consider the strange benefits of “lockdown.”

• It has given Mr. Trump a royal opportunity to display what a bumbling clown he is. Maybe his performance will move voters off the dime to get him out of office.

• There’s almost no traffic! Even at 7 or 8 a.m., I can get across Feeder Street N/W without risking my life. The horrid Conduit of Blight Blvd. is relatively quiet and clear. Driving on a freeway is not the usual nightmare.

• I haven’t bought gasoline in a month! And the car’s gas tank is still three-quarters full!

• My auto insurer is refunding 15% of this year’s car insurance premium! Hafta say, it had crossed my mind to quietly resent having to pay to insure the tank for the weeks and possibly months that I’m not driving it. Since the cost of insuring that damn Venza is in the vicinity of $750, a 15% refund will go a ways toward next year’s tax & insurance budget.

• With people home all the time, the neighborhood is safer: fewer burglaries, fewer car break-ins, less harassment of women.

• Delivery services are growing. Getting someone else to bring your groceries to you instead of having to do battle with traffic and crowds is kinda nice. Walmart, Sprouts, Albertson’s, Safeway, Basha’s (a local grocery chain), Fry’s (Kroger), CVS, Walgreen’s, and Home Depot will deliver whatever your heart desires, right to your door. Right now I could order 20 pounds of (much-needed) birdseed from Walmart for a tiny fraction of what the same stuff goes for on Amazon.

• Restaurants are turning themselves into grocery stores. In addition to selling cooked meals to go, many are selling grocery items. One proprietor here will sell you a margarita to go, too, with your upscale gourmet “Mexican” meal.

• My son has been working at home for the past three weeks. He says his employer, a large nationwide insurance company, has closed and locked its large building in the East Valley. He’s afraid they won’t re-open it. Whether that means he thinks they’ll move their operation to some other city, laying off all their Phoenix workers, or whether he suspects they simply will ask everyone on their staff to telecommute has yet to be articulated. But…

Why not have all office workers work from home all the time? Companies wouldn’t have to rent expensive office buildings — these could be converted into homeless housing or retail space. Or  torn down to provide some green space. All a company would need is a meeting room to bring staff together once a month or so, and private space for one-on-one meetings.

• Meanwhile, my neighbor across the street, a high school teacher and English-as-a-second-language specialist, appeared to be relaxing on his front porch the other day, talking into his laptop’s microphone. In response to a quizzical glance, he announced “I’m teaching!“

Yep. I’ve done that. Created the Great Desert University’s first online course in the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences. It surely has its advantages over standing in front of a roomful of students for 90 minutes to three hours.

Why not put schools online all the time? Where schools exist to provide free lunches and baby-sitting services, why not frankly make them child-care centers? For single parents and couples who both have to work, existing school buildings could be converted into baby-sitting facilities with computer hookups to have the kids do their schoolwork online. Is it really necessary to congregate kids in prison-like facilities to teach them?

When I was teaching at the university’s westside campus — a commuter campus smack in the middle of a district where you really don’t  wanna put your kids in a public school — I was surprised to discover that a bunch of otherwise perfectly sane adult students were homeschooling their kids. Nooo, amazingly, they were NOT religious nuts or end-of-the-worlders. These were people who had tried the public schools in that part of town and found them beyond wanting. And because most were working-class folks, few of them were earning so much that one partner’s salary would be sorely missed. Several classmates explained that after doing the math, they realized that if one parent stayed home to supervise their kids’ homeschooling, it actually cost the family budget nothing — and indeed in some cases they came out ahead. This was because if one parent, usually the mother, stayed home, they didn’t have to pay for office clothing, for gasoline to commute, for higher auto insurance to cover commutes to two jobs, for lunches out, for day care, for summer child care, and so on. Not only that, but these people were convinced their children were getting better education — and having taught the products of Arizona’s public schools after they reach our universities and community colleges, I’d say they had somethin’ there. Not one but several of them reported that their kids could get through a whole day’s classroom instruction in two hours, sitting at the dining room table. They said that if they sat their kids down shortly after breakfast, the kids would go through the lessons, do the homework, and finish by noon.

They would then spend the afternoon in field trips, learning projects, music lessons, or other creative activities. Kids had no problem passing the standardized tests and no problem with the SATs.

Think o’ that… As for socialization, the public schools here are required to let home-schooled kids join in extra-curricular activities, so many of these kids were on track teams, baseball teams, band, debate clubs, even football teams. In addition, the Phoenix area has large kids’ soccer and baseball leagues, so there are plenty of PE-like things for home-schoolers to join.

I’m tellin’ you…if this lock-down maneuver goes on for very long, a whole lotta parents are going to figure that out. Why would you put your kid in a prison-like school where they’re going to bring home a disease, a pack of cigarettes, or a baggie of weed…when you could teach them better at home?

If that happens, school districts will (one hopes) respond by providing extensive online instruction. And then maybe all teachers will be able to hold forth from the comfort of their front patios.

And speaking of change in the offing…

• Sheltering in place is about the same as aging in place. This fiasco is giving me a chance to see what will be involved in staying in my house when I’m too old to go out and bat around the homicidal streets of Phoenix, and to figure out how to make it happen, while I’m still “young” enough and clear-headed enough to figure anything out.

Being forced to figure out how to get damn near everything delivered is good preparation for the Aging in Place Scheme. If all the places that are doing home deliveries now continue to do so into the future — and they probably will, because most of them are contracting out the service — it would be relatively easy to stay in your home (assuming no crippling disability) well into your dotage. All these delivery services essentially co-opt the largest part of one’s need to drive.

For other purposes — entertainment, for example, or church, or clothes shopping — Uber or else catching rides with younger friends will do the job.

What’s good about social distancing and self-isolation in your parts?

Of Groceries and Gates

by

The major grocery chains in lovely Arizona are posting special Old Folks’ early-morning shopping hours on certain weekdays, by way of minimizing covid exposures to the most vulnerable segment of our population. If you’re 65 or older, you get to make a dawn shopping trip in a low-population store.

So yesterday, armed with shopping lists from the Old Folks (who are literally locked up in the Agèd Rabbit Warren Arms) and from WonderAccountant, who as you can imagine has her nose on the proverbial grindstone. Out the door in the wee-hours darkness, I arrive at AJs as the door opens, a little before 5 a.m.

Me and a bunch of other old buzzards.

We dodder around the store and pick up…uhmmm…whatever is left. I managed to find almost all the stuff I needed, which wasn’t very much, and the couple of small items for WonderAccountant were on hand. But finding the loot that Joan had ordered up was a whole ‘nother story.

She wanted eggs, preferably boiled. There were none. Nothing, zero: no eggs at all.

Whipped topping: I did find some of the squirt-on stuff. Not sure that’s what she wanted, but that’s what they had left.

1/2 gallon lactose-free milk. She was in luck: no one wants lactose-free milk, so there were two cartons there; otherwise, nary a drop of milk in the dairy cabinet.

Speaking of the which, I wanted a container of heavy cream: no such thing.

Pepperoni pizza for Lee: after much searching I finally found one. Didn’t look very good — frozen. They usually get one of those huge freshly made numbers from Costco. I fear he will not be happy with this factory…thing.

Large bag frozen blueberries: not a frozen berry of any variety in the entire store. I grab a package of fresh blueberries, which will last them all of, oh, probably one breakfast. Better than nothing, I hope.

Cat food: managed to find a couple cans of stuff (looked like one serving apiece, weirdly enough) and a bag of kibblish stuff, neither of which I believe their cat will eat. Also got a roll of Freshpet cat food — Freshpet, apparently, is so overpriced as pet food goes that no one will buy it even if it does look like their furbaby is going to starve. Otherwise: that cupboard was bare.

I was able to find all the things I wanted except the cream:  tea, Jet Dry, avocadoes, coconut-flavored paletes, lettuce — so felt pretty smug about that.

Okay, so after I got the WonderAccountants’ items delivered to them, I called Lee and told him I was on the way down to the Beatitudes with their loot.

You simply would NOT have believed… When I’ve yammered “prison guards” in earlier communications, I imagined I was joking.

Not…so…much…

They had THREE barricades for you to get through. First you have to get past the gate guard. To do that, you’re diverted into a parking lot where TWO guards give you the third degree, quizzing you with about a dozen questions as to your health, your reason for being there, your whereabouts over the past two weeks, your international travel, your local travel, and on and on. They take your temperature — with a thermometer that doesn’t work: it registered something like 96, and I happen to know my temp that morning was 98.0, which is elevated for me…my normal temp is around 97. (Admittedly, I was having a hot flash when I took it myself, but usually hot flashes don’t make any difference in your thermometer-type temperature).

Then you get back in your car and drive up to the front, which they’ve barricaded with tables. There you are once again ordered to state your business. I was able to drop off the groceries with the worthies manning this barrier and get back on my way. Later Joan called and said they’d received them.

Later in the day, the guy I contracted with to install a new gate to replace the tumbledown thing Satan and Proserpine left behind, all these years ago, showed up to install it. He did a beautiful job! I’m thrilled! Now instead of the rotting wood thing that dragged on the ground, we have a fine metal-framed number with indestructible fake wood stuff as paneling, and it has A DEADBOLT!!!

Which brings us to the true, 24-karat gold holy shit! moment of the day….

Once he got the gate hung, he found the deadbolt they’d supplied him was defective. A part inside was bent. So he decided to schlep to the Depot to pick up a new one.

The guy is gone the better part of the afternoon. He finally shows up and installs a deadbolt that works like it was made of silicone. It’s a very nice piece of hardware, and he extracted five keys so I would have them for my son, Gerardo, Luz, myself, and an extra.

What took him so long at the Depot was…they are letting only fifty people into the store at any time! 

He said they make you stand on a spot outside the door and wait your turn to go in the door. Can you imagine?

While he was here, he remarked on the black granules that washed (or were beaten) off the roofing shingles during the latest storm. He lives right around the corner (!!  Close enough that his little girl rode past on her bike while he was working!), and he said they had hail over there. I said I thought it sounded like hail, but I couldn’t see any ice on the ground. He said it was kind of slushy and didn’t last long.

Hm. So I called George the Insurance Dude, who recommended a roofer to come inspect.

Who knows? Maybe I’ll get another new roof out of this!

This gate thing is very pleasing. The incumbent was decrepit when I moved in and had devolved to “tumbledown.” Getting it open and closed was a chore — and the cops having kicked it apart in pursuit of Matthew the Garage Invader didn’t help it.

§ § §

So at any rate, I made a nice discovery in the course of today’s adventures: Hitting the grocery store before dawn cracks is a GOOD thing, not the PITA one would assume.

This kinda pot

Seriously. I was home by 5:40, with the grocery pickup done for three households. That meant I had the whole rest of the day, UNINTERRUPTED, to do more interesting things, among them paying work. The stuff I wanted and needed to do was not, after all, interrupted by the annoying time-sucking shopping chore.

One project: I bought two of those little heads of butter lettuce that come in a plastic box with the roots still on, sitting in a little depression with some water in it. (One actually was a mix of loose-leaf varieties.) Some years ago, Iearned that those things will grow if you stick one of them in the dirt, with a few leaves remaining on the head. Soooo…I pruned a bagful of leaves off the things, then took the pretty new Mexican pots that I’d intended to use for decorative cacti, filled them with potting soil, and stuck the little guys in there. If they take root, I’ll have two handy-dandy heads of lettuce right outside the back door.

§ § §

Later in the day,  it dawned on me that I’d made a MAJORLY mistake. Took those keys from our Gate Guy, the ones he’d had made at the Home Depot, marked them for what they’re for, put them away…and failed to wash my hands. Dawned on me as I was sitting here with my hands…where? on my face, of course. Ohhh shit.

Well, let’s hope he managed to escape HD without getting exposed. So far the covid infections have been mostly in the East Valley, I think. As of yesterday, we had 251 cases in the county, if which 15 were on the ASU campus. As of two days ago, 17 people had been hospitalized, and 1 had died. There were 26 cases on the Navajo, most of them in Chilchinbeto, which is beyond remote. On the other hand, of late some guy flew in to Sky Harbor on a jetliner with it.

George (Insurance Dude) recommended a roofer, who perked right up when it was proposed he should inspect the roof. 😀 The guy just e-mailed to inquire about contact info…sent him the fone number and address.

How kewl would it be if I can extract another $10,000 roof from the insurance company? Holy mackerel! That would make the roof last longer than I will, which means one fewer maintenance headache for the duration of my time in this house. THIS time, though, if we get away with this I’m going to ask to have a light color. The stuff they showed me last time was all pretty dark, which is brain-banging stupid in Arizona.

The fascia board on the roof thingie in front has what looks like dry rot (gulp! termite damage???), so while he’s here I can get him to look at that. If they have the roof off, they should be able to fix that then, and maybe even that cost can be foisted on the insurance company.

So, that which doesn’t kill you fills up every minute of your day.

Life proceeds, in spite of it all.