Lucky accident?

If everything had gone as originally planned, we'd be somewhere in Wisconsin now. The Plan called for us finishing up loading Magee yesterday and heading toward Portage. We were going to indulge ourselves with a high class hotel room for the night (Days Inn located close to the intersection of I-39 and I-90/94), enjoy a gourmet dinner at the truck stop restaurant next door, and then get  on the road toward Iowa first thing this morning. It did not happen.

 The S.O. had some trouble getting the 5th wheel hitch lined up right. When he parked Magee in early October neither of us was thinking at all about what a pain in the ass snow on the ground might turn out to be when the time came to leave. We should have been. Turned out the ever-so-slight slope and the not totally straight back in meant more maneuvering was required than anticipated two months ago. It did not help that the high 20s-low 30s temperatures made the snow especially slick. Things did not go smoothly. Language got colorful. The S.O. wound up having to put the truck in 4-wheel drive to get the traction needed. And at some point the brake pedal got stomped on particularly hard. 

In short, a brake line blew. So today instead of enjoying being far enough south that it's raining instead of snowing, the S.O. will be slithering under the truck figuring out exactly where the break occurred and just what has to be replaced. He is not a happy camper. Neither am I. 

On the positive side, the maybe it really is apple juice in the glass and not piss interpretation, if a brake line was going to blow, parked up by the barn and close to all the S.O.'s tools was a much better location for it to happen than careening down a hill on U.S. 65 in Arkansas.  

News of the weird

I have been seeing various references to Hunter Biden's laptop in recent days. Apparently the new Republican majority in the House of Representatives is looking forward to holding hearings regarding the laptop, a device that may have content on it that isn't exactly the national security issue the obsessives on the Right would like the rest of us to believe. Kevin McCarthy et al. will try to focus on various emails in which Hunter benefited from his family connections landing him salaried positions that didn't involve much work. You know, typical rich kid/child of an influential politician who gets hired to serve on boards or fill figurehead positions, which isn't a whole lot different than one of aWol's daughters ending up as a co-host on Today pretty early on in her journalism career. Granted Jenna isn't a recovering coke addict, but even so her career trajectory went a lot smoother and faster than is typical in broadcast television. But I'm doing my usual heading down a rabbit hole that doesn't have much to do with what I started to say.

Dick pics. The Republicans want to hold expensive, massive hearings discussing the content that was allegedly Hunter Biden's. If any one who remembers Bill Clinton's misdeeds thought the content of the discussions of Clinton's sex life made for television news not suitable for children, they're in for a treat with hearings going after Hunter Biden. The laptop is loaded with dick pics. Everyone viewing will be wishing for brain bleach. 

Whether or not they're actually Hunter's dick is debatable. The device has been handled by enough people that the chain of evidence, if one wants to call it that, has been shattered multiple times. For all any of us know there's been plenty of opportunity to do some photoshopping to provide Hunter with either a massiave wang or a microdick. And wouldn't that make for entertaining television: Hunter looking at a photo, declaring it's not his appendage, and offering to whip his actual dick out to show Jim Jordan what it really looks like. There are also photos of Hunter enjoying intimately good times with women. And, just to show that he wasn't totally obsessed with his love sausage, there are a few standard family photos. Nonetheless, I am hoping the Democrats on any committees push hard for the committee to show slides, lots of slides. Let the American public know in graphic, definitely TMI illustrations just what the Republicans are choosing to waste time and money on. 

As far as I can tell, the sole purpose of any proposed hearings would be to embarrass the Biden family. Hunter Biden was not a government employee nor did he represent the United States in any way. If representatives of other governments or foreign companies thought they could curry favors with the Obama administration by hiring Hunter at outlandish salaries to do not much of anything, that's their problem, not the American taxpayers'. I mean, just how dumb were those foreign nationals to believe that being nice to the son of the vice president would gain them anything? As John Nance Garner, a former vice president, once said, the vice presidency isn't worth a boot full of warm piss. The only power a vice president has is to break an occasional tie in the Senate. Oh, and maybe make their own menu choices when flying somewhere for a funeral when someone important dies. 

Route planning

Sometime in the not too distant future the S.O. and I are going to hook up the 5th wheel (also referred to as Magee) and head South, destination Hot Springs, Arkansas. We know how to get there. US-41 to M-28 to US-45 to WI-17 to US-51 to I-39 to I-55 to I-40 to I-30 to US-70. Nice logical left, right, left, right, left, right, right, right, and right. 

The question is do we really want to go through Rockford, Illinois, again? Rockford itself isn't bad since there seems to be a lull this year in the endless construction projects, although the toll way is now kind of mysterious if a person doesn't have an EZ Pass (and we don't; why would we?). When we went down in April there no longer seemed to be an actual cash money lane for folks who are just passing through and don't plan to ever get on an other toll road in Illinois. 

But I can live with mysterious toll ways. I had actually been exploring alternatives to I-39 for awhile because there's a stretch of highway just south of Rockford that is remarkably rough -- it made the Guppy bounce around so much back in 2020 that the stove almost got jolted on to the floor, and it hadn't improved much when we went over it a few months ago. So, blue highways instead of Interstate. 

Google maps came up with one that involves zigging a bit west south of Madison, Wisconsin, and then doing some zigging east and then zigging west, all while more or less aiming south toward Bloomington/Normal while paralleling the Interstate. It didn't seem to make much difference in total miles, but I am of course dubious. The real trick is coming up with a route that will allow us to make reasonable stops, even if it's just in Walmart parking lots, because days have gotten shorter and it will be Real Winter by the time Magee is loaded and hitting the road. And we're old. 

Another alternative would be to skip Illinois and eastern Missouri completely. Just angle over to Minnesota or Iowa, go west until we hit I-35, and follow that down to where we could get on to I-49 and then aim for Hot Springs from the Fort Smith side of Arkansas. Maybe. A lot really will depend on the weather. The more miserable it is, the more likely we are to stick with a route we've traveled before.

The mind wanders

Insomnia does strange things to a person's thought processes. When you're wide awake at 3 a.m. do you count sheep like a normal, cliched insomniac would or do you go wandering down strange mental alleys?

Tool set for castrating chickens (available from Amazon)

Do you, for instance, ever think about capons? I mean, who was the first person who decided castrating chickens would be a good idea? Large livestock, sure, it makes perfect sense to lop the balls off bull calves or male sheep. It doesn't take much of an agricultural genius to figure out that turning your livestock gender neutral will make the beasts easier to handle and, major bonus for carnivores, fatter. But chickens?

Among other considerations, birds don't have external genitalia. If you want to know if a chick is going to be a rooster or a hen you have to shove a finger into the wee feathered friend's cloaca. Which brings up another question, naturally. Who was the first person to figure out that's what you needed to do if you wanted to determine sex before the birds fledged and  you could tell at a glance which ones were pullets and which were cockerels. One of my friends in grad school was a woman who once worked in commercial poultry production as a sexer. That's what she got to do for her 8-hour shift: shove a finger up a chick's ass and pronounce it male or female. It was not a fun job, albeit one that was apparently not hard to learn. For sure it makes for an interesting line on one's resume. 

In any case, capons are not as common in supermarkets and butcher shops as they once were. Maybe it's because commercial poultry operations have managed to breed broiler-fyers that are a whole lot meatier than chickens used to be -- some breeds now have breasts so large in comparison to the rest of the body that those breeds can no longer reproduce naturally because the rooster can't get close enough to the hens; their chests (the roosters') get in the way (and wouldn't that be a fun job, too, being the person who artificially inseminates chickens). Back in the primitive days of poultry production it would take many months for a castrated cockerel to get to Sunday roasting size; now there are broiler-fryers who go from hatched to marketable in barely 8 weeks. Why think about getting a capon when you can find individual chicken breasts that weigh as much as a whole bird used to? Call me old-fashioned, but it strikes me as profoundly unnatural for one boneless chicken breast to weigh over a pound. Mutants. Birds on steroids. Definitely not the same breed as the yard birds we raised in our back-to-the-land phase in the '70s.

Lies, damn lies, and political ads

A bizarre political flyer landed in our mailbox the other day. The right-wing nut jobs have decided the way to defeat the reproductive freedom proposition that's on the ballot here in Michigan is by enrolling the specter of prepubescent children being allowed to request elective hysterectomies without bothering to obtain parental consent first. Apparently the Betsy DeVos crowd believes the average person is so brain dead that he or she will believe that allowing adult women to obtain abortions is going to lead to children deciding to change genders. 

The television equivalent of the print ad is pretty strange, too. As the text of the proposed resolution is displayed on screen, the word "sterilization" is highlighted while the voice-over talks about protecting children. The reason sterilization is in the resolution, of course, is that women often find it next to impossible to obtain procedures such as a tubal ligation if they're still of child-bearing age. Adults can make fully informed, conscious decisions that they do not want to have children and then discover doctors will refuse to perform the minor surgery involved because "you might change your mind." Doesn't matter if you already have multiple children and have decided that's enough, you've learned your family's medical history includes some potentially nasty disorders, or you simply do not want to be a parent, many physicians will still refuse to allow you to obtain a voluntary sterilization. Somehow that anti-choice crowd equates that with allowing minors to receive care for gender dysphoria.

The part where the stupid truly burns, of course, is when they suggest that children as young as 10 or 11 will be able to obtain prescription drugs or elective surgeries without parental consent. Does anyone with even half a brain believe there are physicians practicing who'd treat pre-pubescent minors without a parent or guardian present? Would a child even make it past the clinic receptionist?    

Then again, I find the whole trans-phobia phenomenon pretty strange to begin with -- trans people are not exactly everywhere so I don't get the fear factor at all. Ditto the paranoia about an occasional trans girl participating in sports and thus having an unfair advantage just through the possible possession of a penis. A few months ago there was a lot of fulminating about a trans woman on a college swim team who's came in first in a meet or two. Lots and lots of ranting about unfair advantage, especially from the young women who lost to her. What was totally ignored is that particular college athlete had been in quite a few meets and lost a bunch of them. If the having been born with a dick gave her a special advantage, her winning stats would be better than they are. 

In any case, it's definitely weird how the known existence of one trans person participating in a sport will suddenly have the bigots freaking out and apparently seeing trans people everywhere. I'm willing to bet that if you were to do a survey of college swimmers asking how many trans women are on swim teams the nation-wide answer would be "one." But that one person's existence has insecure cis people freaking out and warning that pretty soon hordes of men pretending to be trans will be trying to get on swim teams everywhere. It must be exhausting to be that paranoid and fearful all the time. 

And while we're on the subject of sports, why isn't anyone freaking out about girls playing traditional boys' sports, like football. One of our local high schools has at least one girl on its football team. I can't recall what position she plays*, but no one that I know of is throwing fits about it. On a macro level, I've noticed a number of articles this fall celebrating female high school football players, like the quarterback in Pewaukee, Wisconsin, whose team won their homecoming game 66-6. Of course, girls playing boys sports aren't view as threats because societal ingrained sexism doesn't take them seriously. It's more like, "How cute. She'll outgrow it."   

*I'm guessing either kicker or quarterback, as those seem to be the positions girls most commonly end up playing, although if she's fast on her feet running back would be a good bet, too.

There is probably a nap in my future

 Kind of wondering just how the S.O. is going to react after he's up and realizes the time showing on the clock radio is about 90 minutes fast. I got up thinking it was a little after 6, came downstairs, went through my normal first-thing-in-the-morning routine, and then after I was thoroughly awake discovered it was actually 4:45. Realizing I was up almost two hours earlier than normal did not thrill me. The power was out for maybe 7 hours last night, and obviously the clock radio no longer saves the time as accurately as it once did.

The power actually went out multiple times yesterday. It had gone out sometime during the night, came back on before I got up, was on for most of the morning, went  out again, then back for a few hours, and then gone again right about the time I normally crawl into bed to read for awhile. Heavy, wet snow and winds gusting up to 45 mph had the REA linemen working pretty much nonstop. We talked to one of them who said trees were toppling a lot faster than they could keep up with them all. He came through our yard twice checking for limbs touching the line. Never heard a chainsaw running, though, which surprised me. There is a section of power line that has never had a brush cutting crew go through it. It went from being open  field in the 1970s to thick trees, spruce and birch that's now pushing 40 years in age and growing a lot taller than the line, without ever seeing an REA crew, at least not doing routine tree trimming in decent weather. 

I am curious as to how much damage the snow did. I heard trees snapping each time I stepped outside yesterday.  There are a couple trees down close to the driveway -- a decent sized birch for sure and maybe a small black cherry. The yard is littered with pieces of apple trees. The lilacs got flattened, but they should spring back once the weight is off them. The S.O. said he noticed limbs down in the orchard, too, when he walked up to the 5th wheel to retrieve a battery-powered lantern.

How long the slush will sit on the ground is debatable. The temperatures are supposed to climb out of the 30s by the end of the week so some of it will melt. Every time we get snow in October there will be people claiming it's too early or it's not normal. Pshaw. I can recall slogging through snow trick-or-treating in Ishpeming in the 1950s. There was a reason so many parents opted for the basic ghost costume -- it's easy to wear a sheet over a snowsuit. The big question with October snow isn't why is it here but will it stick? Will we see bare ground again this fall or is this snow going to wait until May to melt?

Supply chain issues

Our local community is currently reeling from the aftermath of a horrific accident that wiped out the Holiday gas station in L'Anse late Thursday night. A semi-truck veered off the highway, wiped out multiple pumps, struck and killed a customer pumping gas, and wound up smashed into the front of the building. An employee in the store was inured and required hospitalization; a customer talking to the cashier wasn't hurt. The fire resulting from the crash pretty much totaled the building. 

The truck driver and his passenger, a driver in training, were uninjured. The state police arrested the driver on suspicion of OWI (operating while impaired). He'll be in court on Monday for an arraignment on charges of OWI that resulted in death. And this the part that struck me: the dude is 22 years old. Twenty-two. Barely old enough to legally possess a Class A driver's license that allows for interstate operations. And he was training another driver.

Holy wah. In the weird way my mind operates the first thing that hit me after hearing the driver's age was just how fucking desperate is the trucking industry for drivers that they're resorting to using novices as trainers? The S.O. used to have a CDL. He did OTR for awhile. The company he worked for required all new hires to go through training regardless of their prior experience before they got turned loose on their own. His memory is that trainers were old. They were the guys who had hundreds of thousands, nay, millions of miles of experience. Just how much experience is it possible for a 22-year-old to have?

Then when I was going in to town yesterday to drop off my overdue library books, I saw the guilty truck being hauled up the highway, no doubt to a secure impound lot where the squints who do forensic analysis can go over both the tractor and the trailer with the proverbial fine tooth comb to make sure there's no possibility of a mechanical failure -- because you know that's going to be the driver's defense. It wasn't him: the steering crapped out or the brakes failed just as he came around that tricky curve on US-41.  And I did a double take. The name on the cab door of the incinerated truck was C. R. England.  

C. R. England is one of the more venerable names in the trucking industry. They're been around since 1920 (thank you Google). Unlike some other companies, they aren't the subject of jokes or general derision (like Swift, which has one of the more ironic names in the business). They're well established. They're not small. They don't (so far as I know) have a shady reputation. Just how pathetic and thin is the applicant pool when a company like C. R. England is resorting to using 22-year-olds as trainers?

I'll admit that I had been thinking the company involved would be one of the odd ones that to me always seem a little seedy, like Covenant. In fact, until I heard there was a trainee along for the E-ticket ride, I kind of assumed it would be a local owner-operator hauling wood chips to the bio-mass plant. Some of those guys do push the envelope when it comes to driving more than legal hours or skimping on equipment maintenance. But nope, C. R. England.  

I do find myself wondering just what happened to the trainee. Something tells me that person just might be considering different career paths now. . . Then again, having survived one dramatic truck crash, what are the odds they'd ever be in another?

So what's new at the museum, you ask?

Well, no one is actually asking but I'm answering anyway. 

We're living in exciting times. I was finally able to erase one of the "action items" off the list on the white board in the office. Number one for the past several years has been "flagpole." A few seasons back one of the flag clips broke. We bought new clips and then discovered the method of fastening the clips to the lanyard was a tad fucked up. The lanyard is a metal cable; the clips were clumsily safety wired in place. I brilliantly figured out there had to be a better way of doing stuff. 

At about the same time, it struck me that the flagpole didn't look real good. The dominant color for the metal pipe was rust. So the museum manager made an executive decision that we wouldn't settle for just safety wiring a new clip in place: we would paint the pole and replace at least one of the pulleys that was twisted in an odd way. Flagpole went on to the action items list. Time marched on. 

Tank float or finial? Inquiring minds want to know.

At some point we noticed a strange object on the ground near the flagpole. The wind (which down in Baraga blows more or less constantly) had managed to dislodge the finial from the top of the pole. After first doing a 'holy wah, what a clever hack' when it sank in just what the finial had been, new finial got added to the flagpole's refurbishment supply list. I toyed briefly with going looking for a new copper toilet tank float, but then remembered the eagle in the storage building. If the wind had managed to dislodge the original tank float finial, sooner or later it would blow an equally lightweight replacement off the pole. Granted, the original hung in there for over 20 years, but still . . . The eagle, which appeared to be solid cast iron, was definitely not lightweight. If there is ever a wind strong enough to blow that eagle off, it will mean the museum is probably gone, too. 

Where the cast iron eagle came from to begin with is another one of those unknown provenance cases that the museum is rife with.We have absolutely no clue where the thing originated. The bird weighed a ton (well, at least 10 pounds, possibly 20), had peeling gray paint, and was mounted on a broken cast iron base. After I remembered the bird existed the S.O. removed the base, figured out what size pipe was needed to fit neatly inside the flagpole, and then tack welded the eagle to an appropriately sized 3-inch nipple. (And exactly why are short chunks of threaded pipe referred to as nipples? It's a gendered part because both ends are threaded as male, so why is it a nipple? Why isn't it a dick?) The eagle turned out to be perfectly proportioned for perching on the pole:not too big, not too small.

Long before we figured out the eagle would be the perfect finial, I started spritzing penetrating oil on the nuts on the bolts on the base for the flagpole on a regular basis. That can of penetrating oil lasted a remarkably long time, through at least three summers, and it's not empty yet. I figured penetrating oil was a good idea because the bolts, nuts, and washers had had a couple decades to rust solid in. Turned out it wasn't that bad. When the time finally came to remove the bolts, the nuts came loose without much effort. 

The flagpole is set up in what is probably the classic fashion: two very solid supporting metal posts on either side of the metal flag pole; a couple of long bolts going through all three. If we pulled the bottom bolt, the pole would pivot and we would paint it and fix the lanyard pulleys. The trick was just going to be lining up some muscle to pivot the pole: it's got to be twenty feet long, maybe longer, and is an iron pipe about 3 inches in diameter. It has, to say the least, a fair amount of mass. 

We got the muscle in July. That's when we discovered that whoever set up that flagpole was determined it wouldn't go anywhere. In addition to the two very obvious bolts, it turned out there was a third one at ground level that didn't show until we got the middle bolt out and nothing was happening. I tend to view that as overkill but it's also typical of the museum: the things that don't matter were over-engineered; the ones that count are half-ass or worse. (One of these days I'll do a rant about the wiring: the open junction boxes, switches that don't control anything, and the ceiling fans that can only be controlled by turning a circuit breaker on or off.) 

So now the flagpole is back in position, We painted the pole silver and jazzed up the eagle with gold so the pole is looking good. We can start flying an American flag again and hope that the spotlight on the side of the building really does illuminate the flag after the sun goes down.. The only question left is just how long the current flag will last. The same wind that rips toilet tank floats off the top of flag poles does a remarkably efficient job of shredding fabric.

When are we going to stop wasting our time?

The S.O. and I made a classic mistake (for us) last night. We decided to watch Real Time with Bill Maher. Once again we found ourselves being relieved we don't actually pay for HBO -- the S.O. has become quite adept at figuring out how to stream stuff free that is supposedly only available by subscription so the only cost was to our time. 

Maher really has crossed pretty far over the line into old-man-ranting-at-clouds-you-kids-get-off-my-lawn ridiculous geezer territory. Some of the shit that emerges from his mouth definitely falls into the totally out of touch moron category, some is flat out stupid, and some is. . . I don't know. Bizarre? I mean, one of the weirder things Maher did in his latest show was disagree with the idea that good comedy should punch up, not down. You know, have the balls to make people in power wince instead of attacking folks already being shit on by society. This was in reference to Dave Chappelle getting chastised for doing exactly that: punching down with transphobic jokes.

Of course, Maher himself is pretty transphobic. He's right there with the TERFs in saying that if you emerged into the world with a dick instead of a clit you can never be a "real" woman. He's jumped right on the right-wing bandwagon that is pushing for doing actual genital checks of female high school athletes to make sure the girls are really girls. Unreal. Why don't these concern trolls ever talk about doing similar checks in boys' locker rooms to make sure everyone claiming to be a dude actually has a penis? (Obvious answer: because the middle-aged male perverts who come up with these ideas have no interest in seeing dicks; they want an excuse to sexually abuse adolescent girls.) 

And then there's Maher's pet obsession. The man really hates fat people. All the troubles in the world apparently can be blamed on obesity. He does say some remarkably dumb stuff when it comes to obesity, like saying there are no fat 90-year-olds. Obviously, he's never worked in a nursing home. Hoyer lifts exist for a reason. There are a lot of nurse aides out there who suffer from bad backs because they've had to work with incredibly hefty old people. If your genetics want you to pack on poundage, it's damn hard not to even when you've lost most control over what you're fed.

Sometimes the people on the panel can make up for the fact that Bill Maher is a shit. Some pretty smart and witty people are still willing to go on his show. Unfortunately, this latest episode wasn't one of those nights. Matt Taibbi used to fall into the smart and witty category but last night he just wanted to do his pet rant about internet censorship. Lis Smith, also a smart person, fell into the same trap of just wanting to rant about one thing. And then there was Maher, who for some reason seemed to view Pete Buttigieg* as endangering the Democratic Party's mid-term election chances by being too openly, happily normal while gay. So basically the audience got treated to three separate monologues. Taibbi would do a couple sentences on his pet theme, Smith would talk about abortion being on the ballot in November (which it isn't, at least not in a literal sense), and Maher would shout at clouds.  

One of these years, maybe we'll learn. . .

*Speaking of Buttigieg, he's changed his residency to Michigan. I am going to be vaguely hopeful that one of these days he'll run for either Governor or Senator. He's smart, he's personable, and he manages to tell unpleasant truths in a way that doesn't piss most people off. Senator Stabenow is 72 now and has been in the Senate for over 20 years; she needs to concede that she's earned a rocking chair and retire gracefully. 

It was finally our turn

For the past couple of years we've been able to say No when asked about COVID: no personal infections, no contact with anyone who has tested positive for COVID. There was always several degrees of separation between us and people we sort of knew who did get sick: you know, friends of friends of friends, people we used to see occasionally but haven't moved in the same circles with in years. That changed this week. 

Am I allowed to complain that it's been remarkably anti-climactic? Nine days ago we went to a small, belated birthday party at a cousin's summer cottage. There were only 9 people there, the S.O. and myself included. As of today, so far as I know, SARS-COV-2 has zapped maybe six of us, five for sure. Every person there has taken COVID seriously: vaccinations, boosters, masking, avoiding large public gatherings, the usual life in the plague years behavior. The virus slithered into our small circle anyway. The S.O.'s cousin messaged him Tuesday to say that four of the people at the cottage had positive rapid test results. The S.O. told me that he'd felt all day like he was coming down with a head cold so he dug out the box of rapid tests a generous government sent us several months ago. His test result? Positive. So I swabbed my nostrils, too. Good news, at least that day, for me: Negative.  

The S.O. turned into a snot mass production facility -- he went through an amazing amount of Kleenex in one evening -- and called his PCP at the V.A. clinic Wednesday morning. She emailed a prescription for Paxlovid to the closest pharmacy; I picked it up Wednesday afternoon. He took the first set of pills and, maybe it was a placebo effect, but snot production slowed rather quickly. He's basically back to normal now -- or as normal as he ever gets. I felt fine but kept testing, kept coming up negative. Then we ran out of rapid tests. 

Naturally, that's when I got sick. Felt fine most of the day then got hit in late afternoon with a massive wave of fatigue coupled with a vaguely feverish feeling and a whole lot of body aches. Crawled upstairs, napped, stumbled downstairs, checked my temperature (101), and mumbled a lot about bad timing: getting sick on a Friday afternoon is not ideal, especially when we'd used all the rapid test kits in the house. I decided that, well, I'll suck it up and if I'm sicker in the morning we'll drag my aching body to urgent care. I must not have been taking it all too seriously because I didn't bother telling the S.O. to call an ambulance if he noticed me turning blue in my sleep.

Except in the morning I wasn't sicker. Felt a little stuffed up and a little more tired than usual, but no fever, no aching. And that was it. It's like I just experienced the world's shortest case of the flu. Okay, I know there's no way to know if it was/is actually COVID (I am not curious enough to do the 45 mile drive to Walgreen to pick up test kits). If it was, the brevity of the feeling like shit must be a good sign the vaccinations worked. If it wasn't, maybe it was a new personal record in getting over a summer cold.

I am vaguely disappointed things didn't turn more dramatic, although I'm not sure why. The appropriate feeling should be relief. Life is strange.