Day 35 – down to just an intermittent asthmatic cough from time to time. I’ll take it. I actually felt relatively normal this past week and stamina for work and other activities and managed to make it through all of my usuals without too much trouble. I actually thought I sounded rather good in my voice lesson this past Wednesday. It made a nice change from croaking. Wednesday also brought a rather unexpected piece of news regarding the performance career and a rather high profile gig for next season. I have to vaguebook about this one as I have not yet signed the contract. I’ll spill the tea once that happens. I’ve been walking around all week thinking that this proves I have moved from the Birmingham performers C list to the B list. I just don’t think I’m versatile enough for the A list. Maybe I should learn to unicycle while playing the mandolin – but then again, I’d rather not fracture a hip.
The week has been uneventful, consisting mainly of work duties and board meetings. I really need to stop saying yes to serving on non-profit boards until after I retire and have the time to devote proper time and attention to civic life. At the moment, I’m on the board and executive committee of Opera Birmingham, the board of The Virginia Samford Theatre, the board of Central Alabama Theatre, the board of Alabama Equality, the executive committee of Bell Tower Players, the advisory council of Birmingham Music Club, and the Alabama Symphony Orchestra Volunteer Council. That doesn’t include the other things that are health related and are rolled up under my day job. I get it from my parents. My parents were that couple in the neighborhood who stepped in and ran every organization and ran it well – PTA presidents, Boy Scout and Girl Scout leaders, Soccer coach and ref, community club etc. etc. I was raised to be civic minded and to want to give of my gifts to improve things that are available to much wider circles than just me and mine. Pity our politicians have abandoned this.
The weather is warming. This has produced a nasty storm front which is even now barreling into the greater Birmingham area. The weather reports have been full of hyperbole as to how bad it could be and the high likelihood of tornadoes. My condo building is a cast concrete bunker. I think I’m safe. I’ll just move into the master bath if the windows start blowing out. The last really bad tornado day was in April 2011 when a chain of tornadoes, began outside of Tuscaloosa, ravaging the center of town and then moving northwest as far as the Birmingham suburbs while other storms touched down outside of Gadsden and in various rural areas. 338 people died across five states, more than 200 of them in Alabama. The Tuscaloosa tornado was a late afternoon storm. I had finished work a bit early and gotten home. Tommy and I had heard the weather report so we made an early dinner, and went down the many flights of stairs to the basement to watch a movie while we ate. While we were there, both of our phones started to ring like crazy. Various friends from out of state who had put on their five o’clock news and wanted to make sure we were OK. We were fine. We didn’t even know how serious things were until we got those calls. That’s when we switched over from whatever we were watching to the news. I found a piece of someone’s roof on our top deck the next morning and a couple of pieces of paper floated down from the sky into the yard but none of them was of particular interest.
The cold and flu season from hell appears to be retreating, another effect of warming weather. Along with allergic rhinitis. I’m going to blame the Bradford Pears as it’s fashionable to blame them for any number of horticultural ills these days. How bad flu season was is difficult to discern. The current administration’s knee capping of NIH, CDC and withdrawal from WHO has made it difficult to find accurate numbers regarding cases, morbidity and mortality from the usual respiratory viruses. From what I have been able to discern, Influenza A and B are both in retreat. RSV is hanging out at a low level and Covid continues to be an ever present issue with about 10% of the population infected over the winter. The continued rising and falling of Covid makes me worried about how the prevalence of long Covid or other sequelae is changing in the general population. It’s pretty much impossible to know currently due to politics.
The FDA cancelled the usual meetings regarding the formulation of next year’s flu vaccine and debate over what strains should be covered and what likely patterns will be. They gather data worldwide through WHO and use Southern Hemisphere mid year data (their winter) to make best guesses. If additional work on the 2025 flu vaccine is canceled due to politics, we will miss the deadlines necessary for the manufacturers to gear up production in mid to late summer so that it is ready for distribution by early September. My reading of the tea leaves is that the US will not have a flu vaccine in 2025 (and likely not in 2026, 2027, or 2028 either). If obtaining one is important, start planning that weekend jaunt to Montreal now. Assuming we haven’t invaded.
We are also likely to lose our access to covid vaccines for political reasons. The scuttlebutt is that the Department of Health and Human Services will pressure the FDA to revoke the approvals for any mRNA based vaccine (the Moderna and Pfizer Covid vaccines). It will be couched in quasi scientific terms but will basically be the codifying of a lot of junk science, false information, and political imbroglio that erupted once the vaccine became widespread in the spring of 2021. The most recent update of the covid booster was last September. If you haven’t had a booster since before that date, it might not hurt to get one as it’s entirely possible we won’t have them any more in a few more months. The current recommendation for boosters is annual (like flu) but every six months for those who are frail or who have significant immune or pulmonary problems. After my month with phlegm fountains throughout my respiratory tract, I’m thinking about taking that six monther this spring.
There’s been the usual firehose of political bad news. They’re invoking the Alien Enemies act which makes it easy for the federal government to move against non-citizens. It doesn’t apply to US citizens but once the hysteria gets going, you get Japanese American internment camps. The markets continue to tumble, whipsawed by nonsensical tariffs, an economic concept that no one in the Republican party seems to understand. Elon and the Muskrats continue to knock out the foundations of the government by infiltrating data systems. And, the government is not shutting down today as a continuing resolution was passed regarding spending meaning we’ll go through this all again in September. I’m just not sure what game the Democratic leadership is playing. They seem to be stuck using Clintonian tactics for a massive emergency thirty years later. They give the impression of having shown up for a street brawl with a nerf gun, a couple of badminton rackets, and a pointed stick someone broke from a tree. Perhaps it’s time to clean house and send all those over 70 or so home and let Gen X and the Millennials take over. They at least seem to understand what the issues are.
The rains are here and it’s time for dinner. Must lay down pen (actually laptop keyboard).
Life, The Universe, and Everything 