Rain and thundershowers in the afternoon yesterday. Today, the same. Or so Alexa says. Do we trust Alexa?
I don't know how much news is filtering into anyone's consciousness, but the news out of Texas is frightening and it also highlights how corrupt the Supreme Court has become. Covid is also infecting and killing people left and right--though you wouldn't know it from how people are acting. There's this funny idea, pushed by politicians and endorsed by the media, that the pandemic is over and that we can all go about our business. In fact, if trends hold across pandemics, we have at least another year of this and a whole lot more people are going to die from Covid.
In the first year, Covid killed off the easy ones, mainly the elderly and people with severe comorbidities. This year it's infecting and killing off children (who most people were told and foolishly believed were more or less immune to the virus) and people who refuse the vaccine. We also tend to forget that it's killing off people who aren't getting Covid, but who are unable to receive timely and adequate medical care because the hospitals are filled with Covid patients. People are dying of heart attacks and strokes and even gunshot wounds because there are no hospital resources or even, in some cases, ambulances to use to treat them. This is how it's going to be for at least another year.
So that's what I woke up thinking about this morning. I'm having to take a news break and to stay off twitter. It's just too damned depressing.
Let's focus on something more positive for a moment. Our bright spot yesterday was the arrival of a box from Bokksu, a company that finds and ships high-end snacks and treats from Japan. Our first shipment was filled with lots of things. We tried tonkatsu senbei and kinako dusted puffy rice crackers. I had some ume-shiso potato sticks, which were sour and earthy and really good. We also tried a white chocolate-infused freeze-dried strawberry. There's still a bunch more snacks in the box. We don't usually go for things like this, but they advertise fairly heavily on some of the youtube channels that we watch from people vlogging in Japan and we finally succumbed and signed up for a three-month subscription. It's not cheap, but I think this box was worth it. Let's see how the next two are. And if they're not, even the short-term novelty is good and besides that we all know that food makes everything better.
Speaking of food, I'm still on my vegan diet. Because of my GI issues, I've been eating a mostly bland, soft diet. Last night's dinner was rice and tofu with a handful of zucchini and mushrooms sauteed and flavored with miso. (I had the leftovers for breakfast.) It seems to be helping, so I'll continue, but it is boring as hell.
I'm still reading Notes from A Small Island by Bill Bryson. I generally find him amusing, but he is extremely fat phobic, which is off-putting. I generally have to skip any pages where he notices a fat person in public, because I've learned that he will spend pages insulting anyone who he considers to be overweight. Just by existing where he can see them is enough for him to attack them. I skipped a four page description of a family of three--mother, father, young son--who happened to be seated across from him in a restaurant and because they were fat, he focused on mocking everything they did. The amazing thing to me is that if you flip to the back to look at the author photo, you can see that he is easily forty pounds overweight and he grows a full beard to try to hide a double chin. Self-hatred turned outward is something else, no?
Let's see what else is going on.
Dave made bread last night. I didn't have any as bread has been irritating my stomach recently--or maybe it was the vegan butter I put on it. Anyway, something of the bread and butter I had last time irritated my stomach, so even though the bread looks and smells amazing, I didn't have any. Boo-hoo.
So that was my Saturday.
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