December 1, 2023

I have a rare night off from rehearsal. I’m starting to feel pretty good about Seven Santas. The monologue is solid and the lines for the big complicated scene are mostly coming out where and when they are supposed to. We have one more week before a paying audience so I can relax a bit. I find that if I run my part in my head when I first wake up in the morning and again at least once during the day, it serves to keep it sitting in the part of the brain where I can access it appropriately. I just have to make a couple of simple props tomorrow sometime and then I think all the other pieces are in place. My five pound tin of Danish butter cookies came in. No, I’m not eating them all at once but I do have to eat about a dozen each run. This show may cause me to put my Covid weight back on.

Speaking of Covid, as we all know, it has not yet gone away. I haven’t looked at the numbers for a bit as they are no longer gathered and parsed in an easily digestible format as they were during the pandemic emergency. From what I have been able to find, there are a couple of things going on. First, ER visits and hospitalizations have gone up about 10% this past week over where they were. It’s probably due to the change in weather and behavior that accompanies as we enter the traditional cold and flu season. It’s a bit early for Thanksgiving travel to have had much of an impact. Covid numbers are way up in Nursing Homes, likely due to the reduction in precautions and the weakened immune systems of those who reside there. As far as mortality, for the month of November, Covid was responsible for about 2.5% of deaths. This is way down from peak pandemic numbers but still alarmingly high.

The current rapidly spreading variant is known as BA 2.86. It’s still from the omicron lineage. There hasn’t been a major shift requiring a new Greek letter for a couple of years now. It has the same general profile in terms of infectivity and symptoms. It’s numbers, however, are accelerating rapidly in wastewater sampling and other epidemiological measures, having tripled in prevalence over the last few weeks, suggesting it’s pretty good at out competing earlier omicron strains. The recent booster, which was formulated against the later omicron variants out there, appears to be covering it and other currently circulating variants relatively well so it remains a good idea to stay current on vaccinations.

The thing that’s really spreading at the moment is RSV (respiratory syncytial virus). Pediatric hospitals are inundated nationwide. It’s quite a nasty disease in young children. In most adults, it’s a bad chest cold (unless you have serious underlying immune issues or pulmonary disease). This is the first fall in four years that the majority of the population has been living in relatively normal patterns. This means we have four years worth of young children who were not exposed to most circulating viruses as we tried to keep them free of Covid who are now running into RSV and other such things and so a large population is getting them all at once. The good news is there is an RSV vaccine. If you’re a healthy adult, it won’t hurt you to get jabbed, but I don’t think you need to race out and get one. Most everyone I know has had the sniffles recently. It’s the same thing. You’re just running into what was always there and the viruses are making up for lost time in terms of spread. There are also a few running around locally that are causing some nasty diarrhea. Avoid those. Do you need to mask up? If you want but the most important thing you can do is keep those hands washed.

I try to read or (audio listen to) at least one literary classic every six months or so that I missed along the way. I also have a goal to make sure I read all of Dickens’ novels before I check out so my current car book is Martin Chuzzlewit. I knew the title, but really knew nothing about the book other than it was not one of his more successful novels from the height of his fame. And I’m wondering why more of us don’t read it. It’s really quite good and I am enjoying it a good deal more than some of his more famous titles. I assume the reason it is not as well thought of this side of the pond is due to it’s nasty satirical look at America and American society of the 1840s. The chapters involving young Martin’s adventures in New York, full of Dickensian side characters worshipping at the altars of land speculation and profit, are so incisive that they could be about our society of some 175 years later. Donald Trump would fit right into the story. He even has an appropriately Dickensian name. Next up for me is Ken Follett’s most recent sequel to The Pillars of the Earth taking fictional Kingsbridge up to the Industrial Revolution. I enjoy soapy historical fiction but I wish Ken would either learn how to write a sex scene or would just leave them out. His are painful to get through.

Today is my father’s 91st birthday. I had the good fortune to be able to see him in the flesh last week. He continues to do quite well for his age, stumping around independently with his stick and his scooter for longer distances. I hope I got some of the good pieces of his genome along with the bad British teeth genes that put me in the dentist chair far more often than I would like. Raise a glass and give him a toast this weekend. I know I shall.