March 2021

I had a mini meltdown on social media today. After doom scrolling through too many successive posts of glee around receiving COVID-19 shots I decided I had enough and decided to vent. I don’t understand how this is working, I don’t understand why young people apparently healthy enough to go out partying for St. Patrick’s Day are getting vaccinated when the rules are something like 65 and older for us in Chicago right now. I read about people coming from Iowa and Wisconsin and Indiana getting vaccinated because it’s easier. I’m told to hang out around the back door of certain Walgreens locations to maybe get injected with some Moderna or Pfizer scraps that weren’t claimed during the day.

This is how the “greatest country on Earth” is vaccinated its citizens. By living The Hunger Games dreams, politicizing the event beyond any sort of reasonable thought processes, and people paying and/or lying to get to the front of the line.

I read that NASA found another meteor the size of three football fields. They always promise something big with meteors but it never happens. I don’t want an Extinction Level Event, I just want a meteor to come so close that is makes a lot of wind and dust and scares the shit our and some sense into the populace.

Front line workers, essential personnel, and our elderly should be at the front of the line. Full stop. Now the Instagram Influencer dude or chick making idiotic cash by talking about their COVID-19 vaccination experience online? Get in the back of the friggin’ bus.

Anyone that has had to deal with cancer. People keeping society moving. Doctors. Nurses. And all the people that support the medical profession. Teachers. All the folks in the public sector trying to keep our economy afloat. Vaccinate them. Don’t make them have to pledge their unborn children in a sacrifice to get a few drops of J&J from the back door of a CVS.

The Biden Administration is making up for a lot of lost time. I get that. But there should have been a federal system based on zip code and population. And stop dividing the public up into groups of “ones”, “phase 1A, 1B, 1C”, etc. We’re not all number one. For God’s sake, group one, group two, group three. I don’t need the ego boost.

I just want my husband to get vaccinated. I at least want to know when I’m going to be vaccinated.

And when it happens, I will NOT be broadcasting the event. Anywhere.

I still have my “band jacket” from my high school years. It’s a little snug 37 years later, but I can still button it up. I wouldn’t wear it in public, as one of the snaps might break loose, but I’ll gloat here on my blog.

It was 10ºF in Syracuse, New York when we departed our hotel this morning at 8:00 a.m. By the time we were west of Cleveland, Ohio and stopped for lunch, it was almost 50ºF and the forecasts on the various radio stations I was hopping around on indicated it could be nearly 70ºF tomorrow and Tuesday.

Spring has sprung?

I have a feeling this is fake spring and there will be another winter storm before Mother Nature gets her act together. But when we got home the Chicago forecast also indicated very spring-like weather this week, and that has me in a sunny mood.

We’ll be packing this last week of Standard Time for 2020-2021. At least we’ll have some warmer temperatures outside to make the task more pleasant.

In the meanwhile, a selfie from a Service Plaza on the Ohio Turnpike.

We took a walk around a local mall during our travels this weekend. Still concerned with COVID-19 and the behavior of society in general, we’ve been social distancing as best as we can, while wearing our masks whenever we’re out in public. But sometimes nature calls and the closest bathroom is in a mall.

I was very surprised to see how busy this mall was.

To be fair, everyone we saw, save for one person who looked confused in general, was wearing a mask in some way. Too many people weren’t doing it properly; if people are wearing condoms the way they’re wearing masks it’s no surprise how many accidental births we have in the country today. For the uninformed and/or confused: the mask goes over the nose and mouth. Covering just your chin (what the hell is that about?) or only your mouth is like putting the condom over the testicles instead of the penis.

I decided to word that in a way that isn’t as crude as it probably should be. Today’s finer American needs “crude” to understand concepts.

While we maintained plenty of distance from the mall patrons, I couldn’t help but feel very anxious and trapped as we made our way from finer fashions to the mall bathrooms. Folks still ignore signs on the floor that encourage social distancing. People congregate in packs. I said to my husband, “let’s get out of here”. So we did.

This particular mall has four anchor stores. Two of them are gone: JCPenney had departed and Macy’s was in its final days of a store closing sale.

I do believe the retail landscape has been changed forever.

In the early 1990s the New York State Thruway Authority spent millions and millions of dollars to rebuild all of their service plazas along 496 miles of the toll road in Upstate New York. Old Howard Johnson’s and other 1950s buildings were razed and replaced or heavily redecorated to get the facilities ready for a 21st century motoring experience. Sit down restaurants were replaced with fast food selections, often alternating in either direction between McDonalds and something else. Sometimes the alternate was Burger King, other times it was Roy Rogers, and then there were Tim Hortons on the western half of the roadway. Other franchises made an appearance: Arby’s, Checkers, and Pizza Hut showed themselves at one time or another.

We made a trip to my old stomping grounds to say hello to the relatives before our move to the desert southwest later this month. On our way we stopped at one of the Service Areas to grab a bite to eat. We hadn’t had Checkers in forever, so we stopped at one of the services areas that had a Checkers.

Nope, it’s closed down. And so was the pizza place there.

We hopped back on the Thruway and stopped at the next service area. I wanted a sandwich, and Tim Horton’s has decent sandwiches. Except, Tim Horton’s has also been closed down.

We opted for Arby’s. They don’t have brewed iced tea.

I believe all of these closures are a sign of the pandemic times. Theoretically there’s less people traveling. Before we moved to the midwest the Thruway Service Areas were starting to look a little sparse during the week; the pandemic has just made it worse. Thank goodness for Arby’s Curley Fries.

Apparently the Thruway Authority has a new vision for the service areas and will be ripping them down and replacing them again.

I have a hunch they won’t be as huge as the plazas today. That’s part of the past.