Musings of a marginally sane feline-appreciating female.

We all knew the trial in Wisconsin would turn out this way, but I just hoped for better.

No good comes from this.

That murderous shit knows he can quite literally get away with murder if he cries. Don’t think the rest of the white supremacists out there aren’t taking notes.

And I know, this isn’t new – the whole damn country was built this way, white supremacy is just baked into every system we have. And I honestly don’t know how we dismantle it when whites on the right love it so much for its own sake, and whites on the left benefit so much from its existence.

I don’t know where that came from, but I had to get it out of my head. But – you made it to another Friday! Half day of work here, and the afternoon chock filled with errands.

When we got our boosters last week and the pharmacist said, “two weeks and you’ll be boosted!” I thought, fuck, we’ll be back to bad levels by then. Welp, our numbers have taken a hard turn and I’ll be shocked if we don’t hit substantial again when today’s numbers come out. Sigh.

I swear, we’re never gonna get out of this.

Please, get your booster shot – if you’re thinking, “I don’t qualify” – oh, but you do – the list of “underlying conditions” is a mile long and if you don’t make it on the bullshit BMI numbers, MENTAL HEALTH ISSUES are a condition – and I swear, if you haven’t been experiencing anxiety and depression over the past 20 months, well…

And not getting a booster isn’t going to make a dose appear in an underserved country.

Please, get vaccinated.

I’d like to have an indoor cocktail before May.

But, I keep reminding myself that also means it’s a get off work early Wednesday as well. But damn, that alarm going off an hour early suuuuuuuuuuuuucks.

On the Covid front, we got our boosters just in time for cases to start ticking back up again…ARGH. We’re still in moderate transmission in the county, but it’s done a little u-turn. Could be a blip, but also could be the start of a damn surge. DC is still in “substantial” transmission and they’re dropping mask mandates this weekend, while Montgomery County up in MD is reinstating them. And Virginia hasn’t had any in places other than government buildings since May.

Not sure where our “regional approach” went.

And I saw that earlier this week, Beto O’Rourke announced he’s running for Governor of Texas. I like the guy, I think he’s a decent person and he cares, but I do not see what has changed since his Senate run that makes a statewide win realistic. I will be very happy to be wrong on this, but it’s getting a little quixotic.

You have a great day and get your booster shot!

So, last March, I kept seeing ads online for the Van Gogh Immersive Experience and it looked cool, so I got tickets. (Could have gotten them for July or November, but I thought July would be too soon pandemic wise, HAHAHAHA.)

Holy crap, it was amazing. It’s divided into 3 parts, and all of it is great.

The first section is like a traditional museum exhibit – lots of historical information on Van Gogh himself and lots of his paintings. Granted, the paintings are actually projected on the wall in this section, but I don’t think that takes away from anything – I’m not sure you could get his entire Sunflowers series in one place like this. (Yes, I found myself looking for one that said, “For Amy” on it – I couldn’t help it.)

That on its own was lovely – but then you go into the 360º room. Walk in, plop yourself down on the floor (well carpeted) and just…watch the walls. They went through his whole career, all projected on these huge walls, and they animate his paintings (which was SO cool) and all these awesome animated transitions along the way and it was just SO neat and well done. And they have it setup in a way that it doesn’t really matter what wall you’re looking at, you won’t miss anything. Just really well done and super cool.

Then the last bit is a VR experience. I was a little iffy on that, cause other VR type stuff has made me dizzy. But, I did it, and WOW WOW WOW. You get a VR headset (they were scrubbing those suckers down between folks) – and it takes you through the French countryside of the scenes that inspired 7 of his works. That was also SO DAMN COOL. You could look behind you, all around, up, down – they have you sit for it, which is good, though I almost fell off the seat, LOL. And even though the scenes you’re walking through are illustrated, your brain is going, “Yup, this is real” – I caught myself trying to reach down and touch a chicken at one point. VR has come a LONG way, though they need to make those headsets lighter.

Overall, just a really neat exhibit and I’m so glad I got the tickets and it was totally worth driving into DC for it.

YAY YOU! Booster aftereffects aren’t bad, sore arm, little tired (but I was also up late last night) and my hip joints are kinda stiff? My brother has the same things going on – the hips are a little weird but it also could be that we both slept like rocks last night and didn’t move at all while sleeping.

And when the pharmacist did the shot, she said, “Two weeks and you’re boostered up, just in time for Thanksgiving!” I’ll admit, I deflated a bit on that – I don’t know why I thought it would be any different than the initial shots, but watch, two weeks and cases will be back through the roof.

And speaking of Thanksgiving – that just got a fuckton easier. On the way home from the shots, we hit the Honey Baked Ham store and got some sandwiches and my brother grabbed a catalogue and I was looking through it last night – AND THEY HAVE TURKEY BREASTS.

Last year was such a clusterfuck trying to just find a damn decent sized turkey breast, I was about to call the butcher shop and see if I could order one through them – but yeah, I’ve placed the order with HBH and will be picking it up that Wednesday. And it’s Honey Baked, they don’t put out garbage food, and they also have a new side – Honey Baked Beans, so that ended up in the cart, too, LOL.

And it’s not that roasting a turkey breast is particularly hard, but trading the prep & cook time for “heat up this ready to go item from a trusted source?” – I’m all in. I feel ever so slightly guilty about it but I am sure that will be gone when I can sleep in a little longer on Turkey Day. And there was an older couple in the store and they were buying ALL THE SIDES, and I do not blame them one bit.

Everything is still kinda hard even on a good day – when those shortcuts present themselves, take them.

Of course, not without a little bit of clusterfuckness.

My brother’s appointment was not nuked from the system, but the pharmacist looked at our cards and said, “It hasn’t been six months.”

Um, your website makes a point of saying “Put in the EXACT DATE of your last shot as this determines when you can get the booster.” It then takes that date, adds 180 days (which is the actual timeframe called out by Pfizer, CDC, etc) and the next day is your eligibility day.

And that day was today, which was perfect cause I have today and tomorrow off.

Tell pharmacist, “Walgreens website calculated the date…” She is not impressed. (Understandable given how the website is kinda shit for anything other than just shopping.)

She says she’ll give us the boosters even though it’s 3 days early. (It is not. It has been 181 days.)

I can’t be the only one who ends up scheduling the booster on the 1st day they can for whatever reason.

Walgreens really needs to make sure that their pharmacists know how they’re determining eligibility – 180 days, not “6 months.”

But, it’s done! And next time, we’ll go to the Giant down the street instead!

A sincere thank you to all our servicemembers out there. Sorry our government is kinda fucked up, but hopefully we’ll have a couple years of not starting any new wars.

And for everyone else, I hope you have today off and can enjoy it, and if not – a quiet day at least. This offer not extended to the decision makers at Kingstowne landscaping who decided to have folks work today and start leaf collection right across the street at 7 FUCKING 15 AM. Love to get to sleep in a whole extra 10 minutes on a day off.

It’s vaccine booster day today – at least for me, not totally sure about my brother… Back in April, I made a Walgreens account for him with a second email on the fly when I made the initial appointments. (It was 7AM on a Sunday, it was easier than waking him up.) I thought he had gone in and changed the email address, but when I made the booster appointments, I was still able to log in on the old email. OK.

Well, seems he made a whole new account in May, never logged back in, and last night when he logged in to do the consent form – it deactivated the old account, and the appointments are gone, and he can’t even look it up by confirmation #, because the lookup page field for confirmation numbers is 5 characters shorter than the actual confirmation number. Great webdev there, Walgreens.

So, we have a confirmation number for the appointment, but no idea if it was canceled or if it still exists. If all else fails, the Giant just down the street is doing Pfizer boosters, and they have appointments next week as soon as Monday. (Should have just done that in the first place vs. deciding we needed to go to Walgreens again, but I am an idiot.)

And my fucking brain… Went out to fill up the car this morning, and thought, “I should do the car wash, too”

Me: Yes, it’s fill up the car day, therefore car wash day.
Fucking Brain [FB]: But we have the booster appointments today, and the car wash will take time.
Me: It literally takes 5 minutes, and the appointment isn’t until 12:50 PM and it’s 8:20 AM.
FB: BUT, APPOINTMENT.
Me: It. Will. Be. Fine.
Get to gas station, pump #10 is broken and spewing at gas by the single drop…
FB: I TOLD YOU SO!
Go inside, buy carwash, tell them pump #10 is busted, move car to new pump, card declined (the 25 cents charged on the first attempt followed by indoor purchase apparently set off some flags…)
FB: SEE, THIS IS ALL TERRIBLE AND WE DON’T HAVE TIME FOR THIS.
Me: *sigh*
Get gas with different card, get carwash, back home before 9AM.
FB: That was really close, you know…

My brain is so ridiculous sometimes.

But I will grudgingly admit that it being light when the alarm went off was pleasant. Standard time still blows chunks, tho.

I realized I’d not reset the time on the thermostat and went to check it and it was off by… 2 hours and 20 minutes? An hour would make sense, but this… does not.

Short week, yay! Sort of off a bit early today, meeting at 9PM tonight, then Thursday and Friday off!

I am going to need way more coffee today, tho, I can can feel it.

Though I would trade it back in a second for sunset to not be at 5:03PM tonight… (And it’s dark even earlier than that here, cause of all the trees around here.) Bleah.

We’ve got some intrigue in the Virginia house races – Delegate Mugler down in Hampton conceded – lost by less than 100 votes, and then the election folks said there had been an error in the count. So, concession has been rescinded and it would seem a recount is in the works. There is one other recount going, so I think at best it would get us to 50/50, so not enough to control the house, but one more person to try and hold the line.

The final numbers for the Durham Foodraiser are in and it was over $38,000!!!!! That is going to help so many families over the holiday break.

And in a fun thing, on Friday, I got my hairstylist to curl my hair and it is awesome! Early on, I had shown her a couple color/cuts with curls and she interpreted it as “cut/color only” and would just blowdry my hair straight, which was fine, it always looked nice, but I gave up on curls, cause I felt like an idiot who didn’t know the code words for “please curl it”…

When I went in Friday, the gal right before me got curls, they looked awesome, I said as much and my stylist said, “Oh, would you like those? We can do that!” YES, PLEASE!

And then I discovered when I booked the next appointment online, if you scroll alllllllllll the way down there is an option for “Style: Curling Iron” – for the last, IDK, 3-4 years, I’d never seen it. I am a fucking moron. But, a moron that now has curls added on to the next appointment, and curls that have held since Friday.

Hell, if our case counts continue to drop and stay in Moderate, I may make an appointment just for a shampoo/blowdry/curl on Friday so I can look fancy for indoor beer. (Someday I am going to be one of those old ladies that is in every week for a shampoo & set, just like Grandma K did every Saturday. I don’t know how much hairspray they put on her, cause it lasted the whole week.)

Enjoy your Sunday, and get out and about while there is still some light.