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Friday the 13th, 2020 Style

Friday the 13th, 2020 Style

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Hard to believe that it’s Friday, November 13th  in this year of 2020.

Thanksgiving is in less than two weeks and it appears that our end of year holidays, so heavily invested in family, are in jeopardy.

Covid concerns are ramping up again.

 

Thankfully, the election has come and gone.

And lucky for us, all those celebrities we couldn’t have lived without got to stay in America.

I don’t know about you, but I would have liked to have been a fly on the wall in Bruce Springsteen’s house about 12 midnight on November 3 when Trump was posting a comeback.

But seriously, when it got right down to it, I had to remind myself…”Curt… John Legend and Chrissy Teigen are threatening to leave the country if Trump is re-elected…”

I just couldn’t imagine.

The Voice without John Legend?

That did it for me!

 

My Friday the 13th started a little early on the evening of Thursday the 12th.  My wife had got a new gadget to cut up all those ingredients for making her potions, tinctures, and syrups.

In addition to using it for the above, I quickly determined I could use it to cut my cucumbers for my salad.

But it didn’t take me too long to learn that it works really well on fingers too.

Not wanting to waste the cucumbers I had already sliced I tried to find the lost portion of my finger amongst the cucumber slices.

“What are you doing?” my wife asked sternly as she watched me putting pressure on my bleeding finger while using my other hand to go through the cucumbers.

“Looking for my finger, I don’t want to waste my cucumbers,” I responded.

“Throw them out you are not eating them that’s disgusting!” she said loudly.

Disappointed, I threw out my cut cucumbers and the piece of my finger and focused more on controlling the bleeding.

Then I cut up another cucumber.

 

One day many years ago when Kim and I first moved into our house in Herndon, Donny brought home a baby wild rabbit.  We had lots of rabbits in the yard back then.  We don’t see too many anymore, maybe because of the foxes.

But Donny was really happy about his little rabbit and wanted to keep it as a pet.  I, however, in my sometimes to a fault need to do what I think is the right thing, told him he couldn’t.  It wasn’t right to keep an animal from the wild and it should be returned to its habitat I explained so very parentally.

Needless to say Donny was very disappointed and not at all happy with me.

After Donny’s accident whenever I thought about this incident with the rabbit,  I always felt really bad about how I made him feel by not allowing him to keep it. Even now as I reflect back on this memory I think to myself, what a jerk, you could have loosened up a little.

A year and a half or so later, I think it was Martin Luther King’s birthday weekend 2004 when we had no kids because they had extra time off from school and they were off with their friends, I had this great idea that I thought would show I could be spontaneous and selfishly, would make up for some of the guilt I felt over denying Donny that rabbit, even though I couldn’t share it with him.

I marched Kim into a PetSmart that weekend in Tyson’s Corner, Virginia on a mission to adopt a cat.

When it was all said and done we not only adopted one cat, we adopted two.

They were sisters.

Molly and Mona.

We agreed to all the rules and requirements, not to declaw them, and to keep them as house cats.  The house cat thing didn’t last long though because Mona it turned out, was like Mufasa when it came to the kingdom of our backyard.  She would roam the yard and protect us from critters.  Molly on the other hand enjoyed just hanging out on the deck more like her humans.

After about seven years Molly would succumb to cancer and be put down.

That left Mona alone who now could claim the inside of the house has her domain as well.

And she lived a good life.

Until today.

On this Friday the 13th Mona made her last ride to the vet after 17 years.

 

This year continues to be one of challenges and changes, some foreseen some unforeseen.

Like the year Donny died, for Kim and I, we just have to realize that God’s got this.

And though my little guys from Florida won’t be visiting me for Thanksgiving as planned because of the increase in virus cases, I will get through my disappointment.

And I will admit it’s a little weird without the cat meowing at us this evening, it’s nice to know Mona is interred in one of the gardens in the backyard which was her kingdom that she liked to roam so much.

And thinking and writing about elections and celebrities brings back with a smile another memory of the profound and grounding wisdom of a young boy who once reminded his Pop Pop that “Everybody in Hollywood Farts” and who also this very evening demonstrated to me very graphically through video the devastating aftermath that the different categories of hurricanes can have on the toys in his bedroom.

 

But let’s face it, like it or not, this is the year where you won’t find the finger in the cucumbers.

Might as well toss it out and get a new one ready to slice.

But God’s got this.

And we will continue to be held.

We will continue to find reasons to laugh in the face of sadness and turmoil, loss and distancing.

We will continue to adapt.

Because God’s got this.

And we have God.

Would You Like a Lime with That?

Would You Like a Lime with That?

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It’s Friday the 13th.  If you believe in that sort of thing, you might think it a fitting way to end this week.  For me it actually came complete with being attacked by a black cat.  How appropriate!

Last night around 8:00 p.m., I finally settled down after I made a trip to Sam’s Club. That was an experience. You had to forage for your own shopping cart from the parking lot and the lines were long.  The obvious things were gone: toilet paper, disinfecting wipes, hand soap.

But other items too you wouldn’t expect, like chicken. There wasn’t a piece of chicken to be found, rotisserie or otherwise.  I sent a photo of the egg cooler to Kim, totally empty, and told her not a chicken or an egg was to be found in Sam’s.

Then I couldn’t help myself and sent her a second text asking “I wonder what went first the chicken or the eggs?”

Sometimes I just crack myself up.

Wednesday night the President finally did what everyone wanted him to do. Tell it like it really was. After telling us his plans to try to reduce the severity of the situation he basically said,

“Folks, we’re all screwed”

Well not exactly but based on the hysteria it’s caused since then he might as well have said that.

 

I remember when I was a kid, my younger brother Gary was diagnosed with Scarlett Fever. I remember Gary being out of his mind with fever and hallucinating which my brother Carl and I thought was hilariously funny. My mother had to come into the bedroom and try to calm him down while he talked about monsters and such. It was awesome, maybe not so much for Gary though.

But for the rest of us it was awesome.

Because, we got quarantined and had to stay in home from school! Though I think we were supposed to stay in the house, my mother let us go out in the yard and play. I believe we were off from school the whole week.

 

Though I am not prone to panic I did make that foray into Sam’s Club.

My mission?

I didn’t have one.  I was just curious.

So I wandered around bought some canned goods (“brown beans”) and some vitamins.  I have already been in the habit of practicing a lot of the safety precautions due to my everyday desire to avoid getting a cold or the flu.  The last time I had the flu was back in 1986 but I remember it as being up there with my perforated colon as an experience I wouldn’t to go through again.

They say we don’t need masks and I believe that.  But just as a precaution I am in the process of letting my nose hairs grow long and bushy to add some extra filtering capabilities.

And I was considering allowing my mustache to grow to one of those long “David Crosby” styles that cover your mouth too but that would make it too hard to eat onion soup.  All that cheese and stuff.

We just need to use common sense. Wash our hands with soap and water for 20 seconds

Some are saying sing the happy birthday song twice but I would prefer a couple of verses of Humble Pie’s “I Don’t Need No Doctor” while I am scrubbing.

 

As an adult in 2020, staying home is no longer as much fun as it was when I was a kid. There are certainly more conveniences because now as adult “kid” I can order supplies from Amazon, food from Uber eats or Take out Taxi, groceries from Pea Pod, and according to the sign I saw recently at a local intersection you can even get your beer and wine delivered.

And with my PC, internet and VPN connection I can work at home. With my cell phone I can communicate and have my calls “follow me” if I chose to.

Isn’t progress great?

I would rather play in the yard.

 

How did we get here?

Was it a conspiracy?

Was this China’s way of reducing their population through natural transmission of disease?

Some say it was the CIA!

Was this China’s way of showing us how dependent we are on their country?

Maybe a plot to reduce our country’s healthcare costs by filtering out the older more costly age group of citizens (like me) utilizing our healthcare system as we usher in the new socialized programs?

 

Who knows?  Of course I am making that all up.  But I can see how easy it is to spread fake news.

But the situation is now very serious not only from the health threat.  Not since Y2K have I seen such a response to a potential problem.  Of course in that case nothing ever materialized.

We know COVID-19 is more than just a potential problem we just don’t know yet how much of problem.   We have sickness and some deaths, and the already devastating economic costs are just beginning to be realized.

“Folks, we are all screwed.”

 

We will no doubt get through this like we have gotten through every other crisis to affect this country. And like with terrorist attacks, 9/11 and the wars that followed lives will be lost.

The stock market will go down and eventually the stock market will go back up.

Our vigilance will be heightened though maybe a little different (“hey man, cover your mouth!”)

But it will all be okay again and maybe even better.

Maybe our dependence on foreign manufacturing goods, pharmaceuticals, and foods will be realized and those supply chains will return home to our country.

Maybe research in finding vaccines and treatment for COVID-19 will aid other treatments and vaccines including those for the common cold or other disease.

Then it will all be behind us.

And we will just hear about the mundane deaths we have grown used to like those from cancer.

Or unwanted babies maybe.

And with that the world can be happy again.

 

So on this Friday the 13th and my weekend to follow, I think I just may have to quarantine myself to my deck and my back yard.  I can open up a can of brown beans, drink some Elderberry juice or maybe even a Corona with lime, play in the yard, relax a little, shut out the world, and just pray about it.

 

Just sit back, relax,  and watch the nose hairs grow.