Happy New Year

 Happy New Year?

We had a quiet new year, sitting at home watching the Covid numbers rise. The positivity rate in the state is 20% (more now, I'm sure). The World Health Organizations says that anything greater than 5% is unchecked spread. People are saying that omicron is more mild than delta, but nothing could be further from the truth. Doctors are starting to note an incredible rise in D-dimer readings in patients who have even very mild infections. Most people don't have any idea what that means, but D-dimer is a protein that indicates blood clotting and is used to diagnose thrombosis. I would guess that we're soon going to see a lot of people with mild infections dying of pulmonary embolisms, strokes, and heart attacks. 

We're still in a pandemic.

My plan is still to outread it. I don't recall what I was reading when I last wrote, but I'm done with that, whatever it is. Ah, it was People Are Unappealing, which was...meh. The book was unappealing. (I think it was supposed to be funny.) After that, I re-read She Got Up Off The Couch by Haven Kimmel (a kind of sequel to A Girl Called Zippy). I enjoyed it much more this time than when I read it the first time.Then I read a book called Bento Box in the Heartland: My Japanese Girlhood in Whitebread America by Linda Furiya. I enjoyed it.

When I was done with that, I started in on two books, one that I read about on one of the blogs that I read regularly (Living La Vida Loca in Japan--thanks, Helen!) called Hokkaido Highway Blues (or Hitching Rides with Buddha, depending on when it was published) by Will Ferguson. Interesting so far; about a man who follows the blooming cherry trees from one end of Japan to the other, mostly via hitchhiking. (Hitchhiking is still largely safe to do in Japan--or at least it was when I lived there. Not that I ever did--I'm too paranoid to ever do anything like that--but one of the young women who worked for the same company as I did had hitchhiked from Tokyo to visit some Ainu village in Hokkaido.) So I'm reading that and alternating it with a book called The Undertaking by Thomas Lynch. Lynch was an undertaker and wrote this book of essays about his job. I found out about it reading an interview with another undertaker/mortician/funeral director who became something of a minor youtube hit after he was in a video answering questions about his job. 

What else? Lined up behind those books are others. But I've also been binge watching things on the net, too. I started watching season two of Emily in Paris (total fluff, but so what?) and today I rented Edge of Tomorrow, the Tom Cruise movie. 

We've also had Zoom coffee with a couple of friends, which was nice.

Ugh. I'm tired. I did not sleep last night and now I'm trying to power through to a 4:30 therapy appointment. I may cancel...