I don’t have to supervise Biden

Madrone Courtyard

THIS IS WHY I HAVEN’T BLOGGED

No, not the picture. That is just a photo of part of our lovely campus at the University Retirement Community.

If it’s warm enough, this is where we have our ‘younger women (<= 75)’ First Wednesday lunch every month, a way for the youngest members of URC to meet each other and connect. Since people move here at all ages, it isn’t the newcomers, per se.

But one of our residents decided to start this group, and it has been nice to have lunch with my contemporaries, some of whom have just moved here.

Most people at URC are older than we are.

Which brings me to my first topic: the coronavirus and the vaccine.

Because we live in a community where most residents, from independent living to skilled nursing, are over 75, when it came time for Yolo County to offer residents in Independent Living the coronavirus vaccine, they decided to include those of us under 75, but living here, the vaccine at the same time they vaccinated older residents and offered the vaccine to the whole staff.

We found out and signed up, along with most of the residents, a few days ago.

So, on Jan. 7, the day after the Capitol riots in DC (more about that later), husband and I got the first shot of the Moderna vaccine. We had very minor side effects, and I got an odd one (but so did others): a slightly red, slightly itchy upper arm around the injection site – but over a week after the shot! It went away before I reported it, only lasting a couple of days, but that was unexpected. Which is why I mention it.

We are scheduled for the second shot Feb. 4, four weeks after the first, and, if all goes as expected (management reassured us yesterday, but that means nothing as they have no official notice, no vaccine on hand, and no control – BUT have not been informed of any problems), two weeks after that, or from about Feb. 18, 2021, we will be as protected as this vaccine can make us.

Almost a year since we went into virtual hibernation, we may be able to move about in the world. No one knows how long it will be before our kids qualify – they are late 20s, early 30s – so this place will be more like a bubble or relative safety, and we may be able to socialize more with our peers. But it’s a big first step.

The stress has been hard to take, especially since some people don’t seem capable of keeping their mask over their nose.

The said Jan. 6, 2021 Capitol riots in OUR capital city

Along with most people, we watched horror as the day when a simple procedural count of electoral votes, certified already by each state, were supposed to simply be read into the record!

Now that 45 has been gone, and Joe Biden and Kamala Harris have pledged to uphold the US Constitution (as their predecessor promised, and then failed to do), it is hard to remember the enormous stress it has been to watch and read about the waning days of a wannabe dictator who attempted to reverse a legal election, and tried to get his sycophants to keep him in power via an attempted coup.

It will be a long time before that is all sorted out, but the days from Jan. 6 through Jan. 20, 2021, will not easily be forgotten, as the authorities slowly regained control over a situation that never should have been allowed to happen, and scared the heck out of the rest of us in the process.

The stress, predictably, made it difficult to write fiction – and made it impossible to blog. Anything I wrote might have been proved false within minutes.

I couldn’t.

I couldn’t make myself find some relatively stable and harmless topic, and I couldn’t write about what I was seeing and reading second hand.

Too volatile.

A real rollercoaster ride of ‘this has never happened in my lifetime.’ And my lifetime has included the Cold War, the Vietnam War, the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, and the moon landings.

I’ll slowly recover – because of the title of this post.

The grownups are back in charge of the country.

Not that I could do anything about anything while they were not, except express outrage on FB, forward liberal posts there, and end up blocking or unfriending people who used hate language.

But, like many of us, I could not take my eyes off the trainwreck, even if I managed to limit it to a quick look several times a day into the headlines, and watching the coronavirus death toll.

Biden and Harris have, as the cliche goes, ‘their work cut out for them.’

I think that means that now they have to sew it into something resembling a garment. Or a shroud.

The sympathy for the victims and their families that was not expressed in the past year was given attention before the grownups even took office, in front of the Lincoln Memorial.

The choices for people in charge have, some of them been a bit surprising, but I don’t have a reservation about the selections that I know anything about. If Ben Carson, who doesn’t seem to care about anything, could head HHS, the Biden appointees can learn whatever they need to learn, and at least are people of integrity – and not all white men, by a huge margin over 45’s.

Nothing will be perfect, and not soon.

As there is incredible damage to stem, and then reverse, it won’t be fast.

I want accountability. Silly me. I hope we get some.

But even then, I leave that to the politicians, to the grownups.

I can’t help, and my opinions are not based on knowing enough to offer solutions.

I will sign petitions, such as the one to provide more funding for ME/CFS research, which, had it been done in a timely manner over the last four decades, would have been ready to help the long-covid survivors who end up with a raging post-viral syndrome.

I will vote, and urge people to take seriously both voter registration and voter intimidation before the midterm elections.

I HAVE NO FEAR OF VOTERS.

But removing post boxes so people can’t vote by mail, removing polling sites so they have to wait in line at the few remaining ones for HOURS, and the rampant intimidation of AMERICANS by domestic terrorists so they dare not cast their votes, is WRONG, makes any elections ‘won’ that way illegitimate, and is a nightmare to leave our children.

Anyone scared of legitimate votes is a FASCIST. There seem to be a lot of them.

We have a long way to go on so many fronts that were made so much worse by 45 and his minions.

But I don’t feel I have to be aware of every action any more: legitimate authorities will tackle the problems one by one.

I never was in charge, but now I’m getting out of the fray as much as possible.

I have NETHERWORLD to finish THIS YEAR. If God gives me life and brain.

*****

How have you been affected?

Will you now be able to move on?

*****

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