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| Sunday, 07 Feb 21 |
So yes, I'm taking a night off from the war, there's a big event coming in the lives of our Saxons in the next couple of days which was touched on briefly in the comments yesterday. It may take a few days for word to reach the front, but I will have to touch upon that event. (If you are curious about what event I'm talking about, start by looking up the capital of Saxony. Then dig around for events in that city in February of 1945.)
Anyhoo, we've had a bit of snow this winter. About six inches fell back in December, all of that had melted by the time we returned from Maryland on the 2nd of January. We've had a couple of smaller storms since then, the one depicted above dropped maybe four inches on us.
We normally don't get a lot of snow in Little Rhody, this year was an exception. We all thought that because our next door neighbors got a brand new (and ginormous) snow blower that we'd see no snow at all this year.
Wrong!
The next door neighbor's son described it well, "You know when you buy something on Amazon it recommends other products, for the snow blower it says 'People who bought this also purchased six feet of snow.'"
Heh.
So yeah, I should mention the virus-thingee, yup, I had it, no fun at all. A mild case which is still bugging me, fatigue, shortness of breath, no fun at all. The Missus Herself also got it, no doubt from Your Humble Scribe.
We survived, I was out of work for two weeks on disability (company has pretty good insurance, which I help pay for) and the state does as well. But damn, I don't want to do that ever again.
If someone tells you "It's just the flu," please tell them from me that they're full of shit. It ain't the flu, I've had the flu, twice, this was longer lasting and kinda scary at times.
But enough of that.
So yeah, taking a break from the war, not sure where the troops will be headed in the next few days. I mean historically I know where their unit is going, but what happens to our boys when they get there? I don't know.
My writing process is simple enough, I think about where I think the story should go, then I start writing, oft times the Muse will deflect me down a path different from what I expected, so there are times when I'm just as surprised as you are. Just earlier.
So we shall see.
I will say this, at the Battle of the Crossroads one major character came within a whisker of the Grim Reaper. It might not be who you think either. Time (and the Muse) will tell.
Speaking of whiskers...
The feline staff enjoying a moment of sunlight in the dining room whilst their minion (that would be me) prepares their meal. Anya is at the top, Sasha at the bottom of the picture. They are seventeen years old, still doing quite well for their age, heck, they're more spry than Your Humble Scribe! Good cats, good friends.
More snow, then I'm going to go binge watch something.
It sure looks pretty, and it is, provided you don't have to go out in it!
Supposed to get more this coming week, I don't mind, I'm a New Englander...
Before I forget, Happy Birthday, Mr. President.
I'm old school, there are two (okay three¹) holidays in February, Lincoln's Birthday and Washington's Birthday. Presidents Day, meh.
Also (a BIG deal for my family)...
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¹ Valentine's Day is the third, one of those "not a real holiday holidays."
Wife got the Hong Kong flue back when it was going around. She was down for four weeks, and this was back when she was young and super-healthy.
ReplyDeleteEvery once in a while, a flue bug goes around that seems to be on steroids.
Frank
Flu - not flue.....
DeleteSome are deadlier than others.
DeleteThough the flu can make certain orifices feel like a flue.
Delete🙄
Few of my coworkers at checkout line already ended upon hospital due to COVID. Myself thankfully seems to be going strong with inmune system working as intended. Or just lucky.
ReplyDeleteI think it's a touch of both with many people.
DeleteAnd regarding things to come to Saxony, ouch. But considering what just happened to Warsaw, i doubt any Poles back then felt sorry...
ReplyDeleteOr Londoners, or Coventry...
DeletePaweł - True, but this is a novel, not a text book.
DeleteSTxAR - What I said to Paweł.
DeleteI get it, but as the man said, "War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it."
Not with v-2 still falling on London!
DeleteAt random, had to be even more unnerving.
DeleteWe in the States think Pearl Harbor was an atrocity. Or rumors of the Bataan Death March. We never experienced any real population loss except by the normal means of industrial accident. Which we had after the war, in Texas City.
DeleteMost Americans think the Twin Towers was oh so horrible.
We have nothing really, as a nation (not including the really smot people here on Der Chant) to use as a scale to understand what regularly happens to other places, due to war, natural disaster, politics etc.
True.
DeleteClosest US had to true total war was Civil War. And it was quite civil by comparison to ww2...
DeleteAbout 80-90% of losses were men in uniform.
Only southern cities saw massive destruction. Vicksburg, Atlanta, Mobile...
DeleteSomething the Southerners remember and the Northerners and Westerners just don't understand. And, sadly, too many Southerners are forgetting or have forgotten.
I'm not fibbing: I remember my great aunts cussing a certain president on the $50 bill. If his name was spoken at all. The M4 tank namesake was never to be mentioned, or there would be h--- to pay.
DeleteWhy do we remember?
DeleteSo we don't do it again. Political stupidity led to massive bloodshed. A cautionary tale for our time.
So far been lucky that the China Flu has passed over this household, guess painting the transom with hydrochloroquine worked. ...:) Went below zero yesterday and not expected to get above until Monday afternoon....minus eleven now....frost on the pumpkin Sarge!
ReplyDeleteWe've had a cold snap lately, nothing like further north, but the twenties in Little Rhody for this long seems odd. Of course, I've only been here twenty-two years.
DeleteWe've had quite a few down at work. One kid seems intent on dying from it. He has avoided the medics. Last I heard, he had lost 50lbs in about a month... I'm glad you are making it through. Some folks seem more susceptible than others. Just my observation. One's experience is not empirical data.
ReplyDeleteThe snow looks like a fairy tale. I'm expecting ice down here. Forecast says teens... They don't bury water pipes very deep down here, and pipes are in walls that have no insulation. Some even run through the attic. Plumbers will be busy, pvc stock should go up in the short run. This is the very first time I can remember that every day I check the weather, they LOWER the forecast temp, instead of raise it.
STxAR. Because we had little to no wind, and little to no sun, the snow is still among the tree branches and it does look like a fairy tale.
DeleteBut a steady diet of fairly tales wears on your nerves.
STxAR - And the symptoms for this thing seem to be all over the map. At work they check your temperature before they let you in the building, my temperature remained normal the whole time I was down. For me it felt like a really bad cold but with a bad headache. It's the aftermath that's worrisome. Fatigue, shortness of breath, son got us a pulse oximeter, so far we've been good! (Knock on wood.)
DeleteJohn - Yup, too much fairy tale can get old. I don't mind it though, prefer it to the dull browns of a normal winter here.
DeleteI stood up the other day and had a swimming head. I bought a pulse-ox for the haus. I like facts, clarity, and real data. This morning the forecast low for Monday night was 16, now it's 14. That is gonna wreak havoc down here. Got a chance for snow. Yeeehaw!
DeleteFacts, clarity, real data? You're an engineer, ain't ya?
DeleteTrained in the classic scientific method and real engineering by engineers practicing in the 30's to the 70's. I miss them terribly.
DeleteOutstanding!
DeleteI'd talk about Philly's Covid shot program, but my blood pressure is OK this morning and I want to keep it that way.
ReplyDeleteThe "NO SNOW" warranty on our new snowthrower ran out this year, and we used it again yesterday. We'd checked out the new snowfall, found it wasn't as wet and heavy as the previous falls, and decided that we would just shovel and push it away.
Seconds later I expressed an Anglo Saxon expletive and shortly afterwards the snowthrower was put to work.
Much like an insurance policy, I'd rather not use it, but I'm very glad we have it.
Any program administered by politicians will be effed up.
DeleteHeh, the "NO SNOW" warranty.
I am curious how the events in the capital of Saxony will affect those at the front.
ReplyDeleteAs bad as it was....look at the Pacific and what happened in Tokyo the next month. Carnage. Met a man who was a B-29 pilot on those raids. He told me he could see the glow 600 miles away, and over target the plane leapt into the air 5000 ft because of the heat.
DeleteCoffee Man #1 - So am I! (I won't really know until I start writing.) But if I was an Allied airman, I'd avoid bailing out over the Saxon's lines.
DeleteCoffee Man #2 - Thing is, the Japanese soldiers and sailors would not hear about any of that, they were isolated across those vast miles of the Pacific. I don't think even the flag officers knew, Tokyo was not very good about informing the people.
DeleteBut yes, it was bad. My in-laws lived in Japan during the war, I was surprised back in the day when my mother-in-law glanced at a book I was reading, saw a picture and said, "B-29." In Korean, of course. She had seen them in action.
Mangred is from Dresden. Funny I was just talking about a post I made some years ago visiting Dresden in 1992. You could still see the blackened walls and roofs
DeleteI did like those pictures from the old DDR.
DeleteHad a friend's mom, in the early 70's, who remembered, after the war, oblviously, running out to line the streets when American convoys rolled by. Because, even in the late 50's and early 60's, Americans tossed out Hersey bars to the kids.
DeleteYou remember important things in your lives. The shape of planes, or chocolate bars...
Yes, that would be remembered.
DeleteSarge, I find sometimes I go through phases when writing fiction - it can be exciting when the Muse takes hold, but it is also emotionally exhausting at times.
ReplyDeleteGlad you and The Missus Herself have recovered and sorry you had it in the first place. Both my parents and my in-laws are now vaccinated and I can rest a little easier. The Ravishing Mrs. TB and my sister both received their first inoculations, leaving only my brother-in law and myself to wait (at least until the end of the month for me).
It does sadden me a great deal that individuals whom I otherwise seem to have a lot in common with treat it rather cavalierly. Most of the testimonials I hear from people that have had it is that it is not "The Flu" - as you expressed - and you do not want it. I wish people could accept that there can be a severe illness AND that the government can handle it very poorly, but that it does not change the fact of the illness.
Enjoy your break!
Emotionally exhausting, aye!
DeleteWe seem to be on the same page on a number of things!
I take that both as the compliment of the week and a very good thing indeed!
Delete😁
DeleteMan, am I in your head or what?
ReplyDeleteIt's weird, you can niggle a city to death slowly and it isn't nearly as shocking as 3 days of Hell. Or in the case of Tokyo and other firebombed cities, it is easier to take one city burned in 3 days than in 1 minute.
As I said in a comment above, scale. We Americans just don't have any scale to judge things by. By February 1945 there's not a German industrial city that hasn't been plastered by American daylight 'precision' bombing and British night-time carpet bombing. A house here, a block there, deaths here, deaths there, over days, weeks, months just isn't frightening to Humans as some place being smited out of existence in a very short time.
Like, well, places in Indonesia where the average death toll is huge daily (in comparison to US or Euro normals) so, yeah, people die, no reason to fix the sewage or water or food or housing situation. But one hour and one tsunami and half a million gone? Something! Must! Be! Done!
As to Covid, our collective doc thinks Mrs. Andrew got it back in late Nov or early Dec, 2019, and it hung on for 5 months as a low-level, just screwed her up, sucked the fun out, booger of a bug. Not the seasonal flu or the other seasonal flu of 2019, but flu-like. Took treating her with whole-body bug killing antibiotics (to kill the secondaries) for her to shake that bastige off. And then, because we didn't get all the secondaries, we ended up with her having walking pneumonia showing up later (as our doctor suspects, but nobody's shoved a q-tip into her brain to check at any time in the process.) As to temperature, with a dead thyroid her temp runs 2 degrees below normal. So when she's normal for normal people she's showing signs of fever but since she's not normal then nobody believes her. Which is annoying.
I think I got hit by it, but... yaknow, much like the attack face-hugging shingles I got, how would I ever know? I mean, let's see, on a normal basis I go in and out of constant sinus infections (only kept at bay by rinsing said sinuses out 3-4 times daily) and constantly have fluid and chunky stuff building in my lungs thanks to really bad allergies, so smell and taste go in and out. Because of low-grade sinus infections, I get fevers regularly. And my sense of balance has always been not good, but made worse by the shingles really screwing up my balance (like, I can be walking normally and just suddenly list or pitch to the side, doc says it's unfortunately normal for the location of my shingles... sigh.) Every spring and fall the allergies are so bad they drive me to bed rest and we live on quick meals and already prepared frozen stuff. How would I ever know I had Kung Pow Lung Pow?
Sorry you and yours experienced it. To many, it's nothing. To a smaller amount of many it's definitely something. To a few it's deadly, especially if they're shoved into murderdeathwards like what Cuomo and DeBlasio did.
Funny how HCQ and the plasma thingy and the light-cleansing-your-blood-thingy, all things that a certain person said was looking good and useful, were vilified while that person was in control but are now A-Otay and A-Number 1 ways to treat the Covidiocracy. That's about as political as I'll get about the whole cluster-copulation. Grrrrr.
Other than that, 82 degrees yesterday, 80 degrees today, might rain and be 78 tomorrow and the next day. We've had one day of heavy frost so far this year. Must be Florida.
There are places in the world where the scale of death and destruction would freak us out. But nothing changes because the powerful aren't touched.
DeleteThis virus-thingee seems to hit in different ways with different people. No fun.
The scale of the need is impressive. My bud from college mentioned his uncle and aunt went to Thailand to be missionaries. They had a nice house on some hill or other, and a couple maids for a $100 a month. On their first day, the aunt opened the rear window shades and there was a cardboard shantytown with hundreds of thousands of Thai folks laid out in front of her... And she clanked up. The American "I fix it" hit the impossible scale of the need. She left within a few weeks and divorced the uncle. Other parts of the world are just.... different. And if you haven't seen it you can't believe it. I am glad we haven't seen the scale of hardship that others have.... at least not yet.
DeleteThe extreme poverty in some countries make our own poor look wealthy by comparison.
DeletePeople misunderstand "it's just the flu".
ReplyDeleteIt's not saying that the course of the disease is similar to catching the flu, it's not. You've experienced the difference.
"It's just the flu," is to describe how many people would catch it and how many would die and look, it's just like three exceptionally bad flu seasons, Hong Kong, Asian and H1N1. Life went on for those, but we upended everything for COVID.
If you haven't had it...
DeleteBut yeah, extremely politicized.
Sorry you had the 'Rona, but glad you're mostly over it. I may have mentioned that my wife got it, but I survived a 16 hour drive with her next to me, during her most contagious period of it, but never got it. Maybe I'm immune, or maybe I just have a super strong immune system. Either way, I go in for my second vaccine dose on Tuesday. To be honest, I so damn tired of COVID, quarantines, shutdowns, masking, mask shaming, political blaming, blame-shifting, stats- both meaningful or meaningless, talking about COVID, etc. Even if the vaccine doesn't protect me 100% and will wear off after a time, I'm happy to get it as part of a collective worldwide sigh of relief that might result in some normalcy.
ReplyDeleteAmen!
DeleteHey AFSarge;
ReplyDeleteI feel your pain, I had the 'Rona last month, I caught it from the Spousal Unit. I had the low grade fever for 5 days,the ache and pains, no appetite, loss of smell and taste and all I wanted to do was sleep. We treated the symptoms, basically the cough, didn't let it settle in my lungs. I am better now, it took time for my appetite to return as my taste of smell. it will pass, Trust me and the cool parts is that you can tell the naysayers, "I already have had the 'Rona" so you don't have to rush to get the vaccine, you already have the antibodies.
Never lost my sense of smell or taste, good appetite throughout. But talk about listless! Had a cough, controlled it with DayQuil and NyQuil, those worked well.
DeleteI had the Hong Kong Flu when I was a kid. In reality the entire family and most of the teacher families community we lived in. It was fairly isolated on the Southern Alberta Prairies. It was also in the depths of winter. Deep snow and-45 to -60 at night.
ReplyDeleteNot recommended.
Two guys that I know in the T-38 AMU got the China Virus. Both are in their fifties and were out for three weeks or so. I just figure that it's a matter of time for me
Glad that you and your Missus are getting better.
ORPO sends.
It's no fun, that's for sure.
DeleteThanks Glenn, my best to you and your Missus.