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Today was a quiet day and one that made me feel a bit trapped in my house. After all the events of the week, I wanted to get out. I stayed. The rate of Covid-19 infection in Oregon and the rest of the USA is too high.

I started about 9ish and went very slow. Susie and Corwin got up, and Corwin made breakfast-lunch for Susie and himself. I read a book and got dressed. Corwin also did the dishes. I put away the board game Istanbul that I had out from last night.

I invested part of my time with the sourdough starter. I followed directions and now have the second growth in the crock. I will need to use it, feed it, or put it in the frig. This is all new to me, and I am surprised by the idea that I need to feed it every twelve hours. Also, the lid to the crock was destroyed in the box, and King Arthur will be sending me a replacement soon.

I am reading a new book. Imagine a computer guy who decides to get a Ph.D. in history on the Battle of Jutland of 1916. He then goes back to the original sources for everything, including writing one book on how gunner worked in the World War 1 navies, to tell the most detailed and fully footnoted account of one battle. Imagine every source checked back to original and fully footnoted. That is John Brook’s book The Battle of Jutland, published in 2016 for the 100th anniversary. I am on page 116, and John is reviewing every section of the general written orders for the British Fleet and how it applied to the battle. I love the detail, and John covers every controversy as he is going. It is not a very good narrative, but so far, it covers most questions I have had on this battle. Mr. Brooks references the best narrative history I have read: Jutland 1916: Death in the Gray Wastes. I hope to soon read his description of the battle. I have already ordered a reprint of one of the sources. I am resisting collecting an archive of Jutland.

I then did more dishes; yes, Corwin left for me a clean-up in the kitchen. Once that was done, I made pasta and meatballs baked in red sauce with cheese for dinner. I am also rewatching Ken Burn’s Civil War on my Apple. I watch the Civil War while cooking. It gets my focus correct on all the events in Washington DC and politics in general. It is not that bad.

Susie and I watched the old animated movie Hercules on Disney+ while not trying to choke on the absolute abuse the greek myths take from the show. The story freely mixes and invents. The music is fun.

Laundry and dishes await. Sourdough is calling me, “Feed Me, Michael!”

Here is the website I discovered for information on vaccinations in Oregon: https://public.tableau.com/profile/oregon.health.authority.covid.19#!/vizhome/OregonCOVID-19VaccinationTrends/OregonStatewideVaccinationTrends.

Yesterday, 6,505 vaccinations happened in Oregon. I will start following this now that I have a source.

1,792 people are reported counted as dying from Covid-19 today in the USA.

I went with This Is My Father’s World. I have done this one before, but it seemed to fit tonight—Methodist Hymnal #144.

Today started about 9ish and remained slow and pleasantly boring. No bleeding, no coups, no elections, and a few deliveries.

I managed to sleep a regular night’s sleep. I was up as I thought it was later than it was. I think I dreamed it was in the afternoon.

I did stay up to play A War of Whispers board game last night. This is a new Kickstarter Collector’s Edition. I learned that meant all those blurry markings on the board were now replaced by a cool looking 3D piece of plastic. The armies were also replaced with a banner marker that looked well like a banner. The appearance was impressive for a 60-minute play game. It needs to be a visual game, allowing the players to grasp decisions without reading the rules or looking for minutes to find their move.

The game is a new take on a worker placement 4x game. Instead of running the empire and participating in the 4x styled running of the empires, you are trying to get the empire that you support to do well, the one you just support to do good, the one you sort of like to do fair, then one you could care less about, and one is an enemy. You have agents that can get the empires to do things. You can also collect secret powers to use later for any of your agents. All of this would be simple if the other players were not trying to do the same thing, but they have a different set of empires. Thus the one that would make you a winner is the enemy of another player. I played it against myself to learn the game. It appears that the four rounds of play in the game are just enough time to get something done, but not enough for all your plans to happen. When Covid-19 is The War of Whispers is going on the gaming table!

I did the dishes again and ran the dishwasher. And was then informed that we out of coffee.

Corwin made breakfast of Eggo Waffles for Susie, and I dressed and went to Wholefoods for coffee. As usual, I ordered and had groceries delivered yesterday to discover I am out of coffee the next day!

Wholefoods was busy. Everyone is careful and keeping to masks (fully on). I picked up the coffee, Mexican Fairtrade, non-GMO, every cup the taste of liberal. I have been drinking Mexican board-crossing coffee since Trump was elected, a small protest. Today, I got just one more bag. I grabbed the Rainforest blend for the second bag. Time to move to other issues!

As I was driving home, the police were out with shotguns on my small local roads. For a moment, I had a flash to the words of the song Alice’s Restaurant, “We don’t like your kind.” I imagined some southern drawl saying, “this yours” while lifting up the coffee. “Yup, he is a liberal–he has a fresh piece of Parmigiano cheese in his bag,” from a dreamed-up deputy. “Creampuffs from the Bakery,” says the officer with an eye-roll and reaching for his cuffs.

But none of that happened. The peace officer was putting the shotgun away, not pulling it out. Some drama was already over, and I suspect it involved a scary animal; we get them sometimes. But I was smiling that I escaped with my coffee.

I made dinner of bratwursts baked in the oven. We had the creampuffs as a snack.

My baking plans are more complex than I had hoped. The sourdough start is here, but the crock I purchased lid was smashed to pieces in the mail. I have contacted King Arthur Flour already. I have begun the feeding process. It will take 24 hours to start the process. I will likely get to bake bread in a few days, sourdough. Yes, Covid-19 had driven me to baking bread! I use the hook on the KitchenAid mixer to knead.

Dan Gray is working in Visual Basic, and I looked up how TRY works for him. My memory was it was added to the Borland version so many years ago (when I used it on IBM PCs), but I did not know if Microsoft had included it. I was happy to see they added it in the 2018 documentation (it was likely there before–but that is the first date I found it). They added the whole Ada-like version with FINALLY. This takes me back to my days before finishing college doing BASIC programming.

Tonight, I wanted to play another practice game, so I grabbed the board game Istanbul off the shelf and set-up a two-person basic game. I love the look of the board, and the play is easy, even just against myself. So something to do while waiting for the sourdough starter to well start.

That was all to this quiet day. We will have a cup of liberal Sunday morning Coffee soon.

3,235 people died in the USA today from Covid-19.

Today I opened the Methodist Hymnal, and it opened to #512, Stand By Me.

I managed to get some real sleep. I did awaken when Susie was up getting a snack but went back to sleep. I slept-in until 9:30ish and able to start slow and easy. I took Friday off as I was too tired to return to work without any good sleep for most of the week. I am still a bit fuzzy, but I can find my way.

Susie was up at 10ish and was catching up on her medications. Her Thursday pill was missed in the chaos yesterday from the bleeding from her surgery. Today we got back to more normal. I had replaced all of the bandages yesterday, and we had no extra bleeding today. I replaced a few today, and the wounds look as expected.

Susie had three Eggo Waffles with peanut butter. She rested while I waited for the groceries. I had them delivered from Safeway. I was surprised that it was a Dasher who delivered them; it used to be a Safeway truck. I put away the groceries and waited for the physical therapists. There was no shredded cheese; I worked out how to put in a claim. About 1/2 of the Safeway orders have been short or include things I did not order. This time I thought I good to tell them. Before, I thought I should just accept what I could get as it is a pandemic, but I think now, we should deliver right after all this time. Be it a bag of cheese or a Covid-19 vaccine.

I tried to put PT off, but today is an insurance day. Susie was assessed to need more PT, and we were also assessed to pay 100% of the cost as it is a new year. I have not yet reached 2021 out-of-pocket maximum, and so I must pay 100%. I have money, pre-tax, put in an account to cover these kinds of things. I had doubled it for 2021, and it looks like I will quickly exhaust it and reach my out-of-pocket maximum. I might not get to February this time! March was the last record for reaching the max.

I could complain, but I am happy to get Susie the help she needs and use the tools available to me to reduce the cost. Susie was timed again, and the hallway trip using her walker was 47 seconds today, better than her best. This with holes punched her legs covered with bandages!

I made beef stew and cornbread muffins for dinner. I cannot get the flavors right; it is only average stew. Someday I will get the hang of Instant Pot cooking.

Susie took a nap. I watched a terrible movie, Solomon Cane. I then caught up on the TV series The Expanse. It was another excellent episode.

Sorry, not a very interesting day. I also started to edit the most recently written and very long Howard story: Howard In Florida. This is the longest Howard story today, more than 11,000 words. Howard attends a computer convention in Florida that resembles the one I have attended. It will take a few weeks to get it all edited.

3,914 people in the USA died from Covid-19 today.

I thought God of Grace and God of Glory, Methodist Hymnal # 577, was a good choice with all the crazy.

Today started to get better in the afternoon. The dressing on Susie’s wounds from her skin cancer surgery was no longer bleeding beyond the ability of my dressing to keep it controlled. The simple bandages from the doctor’s office did not contain the blood. Previously, all the dressings took care of this. We were surprised to have to deal with a lot of blood.

I made some trips to RiteAid and purchased more of my go-to for this stuff: Nexcare’s Tegaderm. I often put a pad under the tape-like product. This stuff does not work on burns or infections; that takes you back to old school dressing if you need to do that. For these new dressings, you need all sorts of sizes for this work. I was low on some sizes. Now I back to being ready.

Today, I changed all of Susie’s dressings except one pressure bandage from the doctor’s office. It appears to be working. I also have to use the tape from Nexcare. Susie will get blisters from regular tape or bandages.

Last night, I stayed up and watched and checked in on Susie every hour and replaced dressings and cleaned up any bleeding. I managed to remember some EMT training from college. I took those classes as electives for my degree so many years ago. Years ago, Susie joked it was part of our wedding planning.

I watched the electrical college count between checking on Susie and was very happy to see it completed. I am heartbroken to hear that one of the injured Capital Police passed away. When I lived in the Washington DC area, I loved to visit the Capitol Building. We even did the Capitol Fourth live on the grass there with my parents years ago. I know the US Capitol Building very well, and I am very angry with the hoodlums that smashed their way into and trashed our Capitol Building. I truly love the smiling Capitol Police, who seemed to enjoy their job of watching confused and overwhelmed tourists. The rotunda is awesome. I am not looking for revenge, well, not too much, but I expect the hoodlums to soon understand our criminal justice systems from the inside. Our justice system can be a bit brutal, and taking selfies while committing a serious crime would be recommended by no defense lawyer.

Returning to today’s story, lunch was delivered by GrubHub from Red Robin. I put on Disney+ and watching Finding Nemo while eating fish and chips (Hmmmm). Susie had a Banzai Burger with no veggies as usual. I forgot how much I liked that movie.

After waking from another nap, I did the dishes, laundry and got the trash and recycling out (only to remember that it is lawn debris week). I have redone the paperwork to extend my time off to include Friday as it has been a nap-only two days.

Susie was hungry; I made scrambled eggs and bacon. Added in a little Christmas ham from the freezer.

I then put in my order online for delivery for groceries from Safeway. I have resisted ordering for a while as we had sooooo much in the pantry and freezer. It will show this coming afternoon.

Trying to be safe. The covid-19 vaccine is expected this Spring here in Aloha, Oregon–I asked at RiteAid.

I am hoping for the later ones. It is made, from what I read, from genetically engineered monkey flu. Yup, that just seems a fitting end to the 2020 virus, Shock the Monkey!

4,143 people died in the USA from the virus just today. Yesterday was a slightly lower number.

I do feel like picking the Battle Hymn of the Republic after the disaster in Washington, DC, but instead, I picked Where He Leads seems best for the loss of life. I also picked another as I missed yesterday: It Is Well With My Soul. I actually can sing this last one.

 

Susie had surgery to remove some pre-cancerous and cancerous skin cells today. We slept in just a bit and then headed to Portland to make the 10:30 appointment. We know the routine, and I sat in the car while Susie had the procedures. They called me when she was done.

We then stopped by McDonald’s to get Susie’s fav of a Chicken McNugget in Portland. I had two cheeseburger meal. We then headed home.

Susie then rested. Blood leaked from the wounds. We did not know that the doctors did not dress the wounds. Blood everywhere. Not what we expected. I had to dress the wounds and clean up the blood.

That done, Susie rested, and I checked in every hour. I did not notice that the ankle was bleeding too. Soon a pool would look good in a horror movie. I then dressed that wound too and cleaned, the floor, carpet, bedding, and clothing.

I made Susie a late dinner of chicken soup. I am doing laundry and ready to replace bandages.

It is a tough day. I will stop here as I have to recheck bandages.

Michael R Wild