This is sea foam, not pollution, the product of heavy seas and plankton, not soap.
A family member believes that Paul McCartney has been dead for years and is being impersonated by a stand-in. You can tell he’s dead because he has bare feet on the cover of the Abbey Road album. Oh, and Queen Elizabeth II is a reptile. I watched a silly video of a white horse showing “distress” because the Queen is reptilian or reptoid or something. (The video has been obviously messed with, the sound track is entirely fabricated, and if that horse is shy at all, it’s not of the Queen but of the man beside her.) Nevertheless, here’s what YouTube knows about reptilian royals:
“The Reptilian Collective consists of several branches.
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- Reptilian: (Pure DNA).
- Reptoid: (Human- Reptilian Hybrid).
- Reptilian Hybrid: (Non-Human – Reptilian Hybrid).
- Draconian: Similar to the original Reptilians, but they are physical.”
But then again, we are talking about scenarios that insist we need a Paul too much to let him go and both Elizabeths are concealing their true forms with crystal magic.
It should be funny. I laughed, but then I considered that a member of my own family does not get the joke. This isn’t even the person with diagnosed mental illness. If I let slip that this family member voted for Trump and reportedly has a picture of Putin on the wall, does it make more sense? Maybe not.
But then the President asked the CDC on camera last week if the flu shot would help with the COVID-19 epidemic and later claimed (also on camera) that he had no idea people could die from flu. Who knew? His grandfather died of flu in 1918.
More recently, in the 2017-18 season, 61,000 Americans died of flu, in part because “The flu season was exacerbated by a shortage of IV bags caused by IV bag plant closures in Puerto Rico following Hurricane María,” according to Wikipedia. But never mind that year was on Trump’s watch, and he didn’t even know people could die of flu?
In Washington State, Echo Lake Elementary School where I attended grades 1-6 has been exposed to the novel coronavirus by a father attending parent-teacher conferences. “Everyone who wants one” cannot get a test, and we have tested less than 1 in a million Americans for the disease. South Korea has tested thousands more per million. It is only one of the reasons they have diagnosed more cases.
A University of Washington medical team began developing a diagnostic test in January mostly for the heck of it because they wanted to see if they could. They could and did and they have been up and running since last week, providing a thousand results in 24 hours while the CDC needs 3-5 days to confirm diagnosis.
I have friends in cancer treatment, a tenant who just had a triple bi-pass, and many of the people I care about are over sixty. I am not panicking, but I have said for years, only half joking, that it would be a virus that killed me. I am susceptible to respiratory infections. (Second hand smoke throughout my childhood, scarring on my lungs, a history of bronchitis and pneumonia. But I got the flu shot in 2017 and did not get sick.)
Another friend, young and with no risk factors, is supposed to be a keynote speaker at an out-of-state conference in a few weeks and wonders if flying is safe, if the conference will go forward, if exposure in another state might endanger relatives who do have risk factors such as age and illness. I have tickets to an event in Portland in a couple of weeks and am seriously expecting the speaker to cancel and to cancel my hotel reservation and stay home.
It will be at least a year before we have a vaccine for COVID-19, but the vast majority of people who become ill during the next 12-18 months will not die or even get very sick, though I might.
So what scares ya’, Baby? Reptilian royalty, fake Pauls, or large crowds?
An update from Friday the 13th, four days after I wrote the text above. All the public school in my state are closed. My son who works on computer was (finally) told today that he should work home for the immediate future. My other son and his wife work in the theater, usually big shows. My daughter-in-law is not prepping for the opera in Portland today, she is striking the show (dismantling it). All the larger venues are shutting their doors, so they will be busy for a few days striking shows that are postponing their openings or flat out cancelling. He has one still planning to open tomorrow in a small theater in Washington.
So when we think about how and whom to help . . . consider the children with little to do and no school-provided meals, parents who may or may not be working, contract workers who not only have no benefits from their employers, but minimal options for lost work.
From The Atlantic today:
“The U.S. remains dangerously behind on testing for COVID-19, thanks to “bureaucracy, equipment shortages, an unwillingness to share, and failed leadership.”
“An investigation co-led by The Atlantic could only confirm that 16,471 people in the U.S. had been tested as of this afternoon. For comparison, at this point in its own outbreak, South Korea had tested more than 100,000 people.
“When asked at a press conference earlier today if he takes responsibility for the lag in availability of testing kits, Donald Trump replied, ‘No. I don’t take responsibility at all.’ ”
Just for a bit of perspective, we have about 330 million people in the United States. Do the math.
The last person I hugged other than my husband was Paul at the Twist sale on the 6th of March. That was a couple of weeks ago. By last Tuesday, I was not hugging anyone. I cancelled my Scrabble game. We took stock of supplies and are self-isolating. Gary was listening, just now, to Irish music of the sort that makes me cry even before I listen to the words. Continue reading 
My husband is 70 and I am 67. Neither of us have health issues except thinning bones. We walk for an hour or two each day on the beach without coming closer than ten or twenty feet from anyone other than dogs. Both of our tenants are over 65. One just had a triple bi-pass. When emergency vehicles showed up yesterday, we feared they were for him, but no. It was another neighbor who is also over 65 and had a heart attack, then a more serious one and was eventually Life-Flighted to a Portland hospital yesterday.
A massive study involving over 43,000 cases of confirmed covid-19 in China estimates that young children are not at risk. That’s the good news.
It was pure chance. It always is. We went out this morning intending a quick walk. We were halfway home and Gary was anxious for his breakfast but I was determined to gather plastic bottle caps and poly-styrene foam anyway. I had turned back for a blue plastic bottle cap when I saw it. I knew, just knew. It was covered with sea growth and I still knew it was glass. the narrow necks at each end would have accommodated ropes in nets that might have been strung for miles in the ocean.
It didn’t look like much on the beach but to us, a glass float is a huge find. It’s been years since either of us found one on the beach. These days the floats are plastic. We’re finding those too. Bell-shaped floats in white and orange. The round ones are usually black with loops on opposite sides or a pair on one side. I hauled home a huge lime green one the other day loaded down with gooseneck barnacles.
IMPERFECT PATIENCE 