Finally a Newsletter

And a sincere apology

I’ve been badly remiss in my writing for weeks. I’m truly sorry for that. Before getting into the news, here’s the gist of what’s going on.

1) Garden harvesting from Labor Day till mid October always takes added time away from common pursuits.

2) One longtime friend entered hospice care less than 2 weeks ago after a long battle with covid. This person also had a problem with bone marrow not producing enough white blood cells. That recently flared into full-blown leukemia. Aggressive chemotherapy usually follows, with a 70+% success rate. But after 4 ER trips for covid since last winter, they’re too weak to have the chemotherapy. The friend lost their spouse to covid when they both caught it initially. When this friend passes, the cause of death will officially be Leukemia, but clearly covid played a major supporting role.

3) The past 10 months has been a series of tragedies for me. I lost my brilliant, vivacious, kindness champion, funny sweetheart to sepsis on Pearl Harbor Day last December. I launched the newsletter about 6 weeks later, in part because she would have wanted me to. I was still processing through the stages of grief and in many ways, still am.

4) Quickly following in January, a friend of more than 3 decades had a severe downturn in the progression of Parkinson’s disease, which had been diagnosed 8 years earlier during the friend’s service in the Peace Corps. In March, the friend moved in with a very caring adult offspring who’s provided excellent care since.

As the friend could only tolerate doing stuff for 2-3 hours at a time since, together, we sorted through a lifetime of belongings, donated, yard-saled, dumped some and moved some to storage over the next three months. Then I advertised and sold the home.

After deeper research into the disease, much thought and several conversations, I offered to become my friend’s caregiver. Parkinson’s has no set timeline, it progresses differently for everyone. In this case, I estimate the friend might need my assistance for as long as a dozen years.

5) Another dear dear friend I’ve known since I was 16 lost an adult offspring to suicide just after we lost Marlene. This pandemic has been hell on everyone, without regard for what you think or who you voted for.

5) In May, a 52 year old nephew died unexpectedly which rocked my entire family. That occurred only a few weeks after my brother in law (his Dad) had emergency surgery that saved his life.

6) In June, I attended Marlene’s memorial service, assisting her son and daughter-in-law with the prep and cleanup for that. By that point, I could maintain social graces but couldn’t speak of her as I wanted to say so much and instead just mumbled something brief and insufficient.

7) Also lost an older cousin to cancer this year and in the past month, the son of another cousin I was close to passed away after a long struggle.

8) To do the caregiving ahead, I have to move to a single story home. In the tight rental market where I live, this has required constant monitoring of Craigslist, several property management firms and more. I mean several-times-a-day monitoring since rentals move so fast now.

We now appear to be on the verge of landing a nice place that fits my friend’s needs well. If it happens, I expect to begin moving things sometime next week, hoping to get the whole process complete by Halloween.

And though I’ve been a caregiver before, I had to pass a background screening and now have to do some online training during this period as well.

9) My Fall Harvest should be complete by next Friday as the serious rainy season will begin next Saturday.

10) And there’s more. One friend nearly succumbed to the hunger and cold that was caused by the Texas power grid failure last winter. One friend I’d known for almost 50 years - since junior college - succumbed to a rare cancer last Spring. Other friends with varying stages of serious illness are hanging in there but I can’t even begin to reach out enough to some of them. And there’s other older cousins or their spouses who also have late-life ailments who also cross my thoughts daily.

I keep hoping things will slow down so I only feel ‘whelmed’ again.

Over the past two months, I started writing three newsletters that I never completed. There’s been additional projects and other issues including brief health scares of my own (What I imagined could be a major abdominal illness proved to be nothing after several tests. And a couple of weeks ago, an arm/hand issue that I thought might be stroke symptoms turned out to be carpal tunnel syndrome. Now it’s in both my limbs.)

But I can still keyboard just as badly as I did before.

11) I’m certain this bad run will end. In fact, a niece is due to have her first baby before the end of the year. My own adult kids all appear to be well. And since only the good die young, I’m well covered for any pending demise for more than a decade to come. Trust me, Santa doesn’t even bother to check his list even once on me, anymore.

I’ll publish newsletters through summer next year to meet my obligation to my paid subscribers. A little while longer and I’ll be back to a regular schedule, right after my move and after I get familiar with my friend’s routines. I’m tardy, slow and inconsistent now, but not always.

12) Please don’t give me added credit for helping out my friend here. Along with Marlene, these are among the kindest people who ever walked this earth. And were the situations reversed, they’d do the same for me, and for others. Plus my friend will now be a daily hostage to my worst puns, so there remains a bit of malevolent intent in my offer.

(Note: outside of the family, I tried to keep names and pronouns hidden to grant them maximum confidentiality. )

And now, just a little spot of news…

Covid, still

As I’d predicted, the covid peaks almost all occurred around 8-9 weeks from their May/June bottoms. The world as a whole has seen declines for over 7 weeks now. The global death rate has fallen to its lowest level since last October. (Global charts follow)

The US lags a little behind the global decline

Russia currently has a far grimmer daily death total but the three largest countries by population in the Western Hemisphere aren’t looking so hot either.

Why does Russia have fewer daily cases but so many more daily deaths? Only 29% of its population was fully vaccinated as of September 30th. It’s also possible that the availability of the most successful treatment options in the world is more limited there. And let’s not discount the fact that - after the collapse of the USSR due to its poorly run economy - several oligarchs emerged bearing huge amounts of wealth. Some bearing a thin veil of legitimacy like Vladimir Putin and some loosely described as the Russian Mafia.

And they still choose Stupid Human Leader Political Tricks over running an efficient economy. Russia ranks near the bottom of European nations in its vaccination rate, but its oligarchs are invested heavily in real estate purchased in the US and elsewhere.
Priorities, I guess.

Back in the USA

With 8,562 new daily cases on October 7th, Texas tops the nation. That’s more than the next three states (Georgia, California, Ohio) combined. With 392 daily deaths on Friday from Covid, it’s only two weeks past its daily deaths peak of 443 on Sept 23rd.

States that began the fresh summer surge of the Delta variant like Florida, Missouri and Arkansas peaked and declined earlier. But Nevada took 12 weeks to peak and Texas, Florida, Georgia, Alabama and West Virginia have been standouts with a longer 10 week rise to their peaks in daily new cases, while every other state peaked at 9 weeks or slightly under.

A political ploy commonly advanced by racist politicians appealling to racist members in their voter base is to blame the high and extended rises in covid on Latino immigrants. But Alabama, West Virginia and Georgia have relatively small percentages of that immigrant group and big states with high percentges of immigrants like NJ, NY and IL have fared much better.

What the six long-rise states share in common is low rates of full vaccination. Only sparsely populated large area states like ND, MT and WY can get away with low vaccination rates without such dire results.

A little brightness needed to close this newsletter?

Then there’s a certain Quaker guy I know who’s Rasputin’s double. Todd’s tad has grown a little in 12 years. He gets a button and be sure to click the ghillie suit link that leads to his Instagram, for context.

And for short sweet musical desserts, here’s Joe Topping from The Voice- UK
(Adjust the volume up from mute with these)

And from The Voice - Norway, here’s Ash and Thorns

May the week ahead bring you more pleasant things. Money to repair the rotted, crumbled infrastructure in the US would be a good start.