Thursday, April 15th, 2021
The sun is back, albeit accompanied by a chilly wind.
Life today was pretty much the same as yesterday and the day before and the day before that. At times I lose count of the day of the week as there is little change in our daily lives, which sometimes makes me feel as if time is wasted, which of course is a perception driven by what could be rather than by what is.
We are fortunate to spend time in our lovely home - who knows for how much longer. I am fortunate to have this time with EM before she leaves home forever. And despite some ups and downs, we are close. We just miss being travel buddies. Though there is no reason why we might and should not travel once she is at Uni.
Likewise, the thought of having lost a year in my Aikido journey is inaccurate, I have simply not spend time on the mat, but hopefully learned a lot related to Aikido – at no other time would I have spend the amount of time I have on weapons. So, there is always a bright side to see even when things may seem a little bleak.
Beyond work, cook, eat, swim the main event was my lovely contractor coming by to fix my kitchen faucet. Turns out it did not need replacing, but just a screw tightened. N. also fixed my lop-sided cabinet door and mounted a blind which had been chilling on a windowsill for a few months and he gave me tips on dealing with the old silicon sealing of my bathtub. I felt a little bad about asking him to fix various odds and ends but am grateful he did. N. also had a suggestion for a shop which may be able to repair my antique desk chair, which has sadly broken so one can no longer swivel. Were it not for this being a memory of my dad, I would probably not bother having the chair repaired as the repair will presumably cost more than it is worth.
I have given up all hope of Jennifer returning so have begun to reduce my household. Someone was asking on the Listserv about household and storage items. So, today a storage stool and the plates and cutlery we had bought to tie us over upon arrival and had passed on to Jennifer for use, went.
I am also going through cupboards extracting clothing items I have tired off as they have seen too much use during the pandemic. EM and her friend A. have a high school club to support homeless shelters for women and that is where they will all go. There are some clothing items EM had discarded, which Jennifer had retained for her use and I think these also will find their way to the shelter. The decluttering goes. I am adamant to get rid of stuff before the next move rather than upon arrival, especially if I end up arriving back home with mum where I would have half the space I have now.
The next victims of my cleaning up spree will be items in the garage, mainly balls and other sports equipment. The major purge will come when EM gets ready to head to Uni and we need to decide which childhood items are keepers to be stored somewhere and what can go. Winding up an aera is a little sad, so as not to say heart breaking. It is what it is, I guess.
One could say the same applies to Corona. While cases in Montgomery County are not going down, they are also not going up, which is not what can be said for the nation as a whole. The past twenty-four hours saw an increase in reported cases of 78k to bring the US total to 32.2 million. Surprisingly (not), there is a significant uptick in new infections in Miami after thousands flooded the city over spring break.
At least vaccinations continue to be on track despite the pause of JNJ. Admittedly I was highly skeptical of the mRNA vaccines but ended up with one myself. Research seems to indicate that they are effective and safe and outperform more traditional ways of manufacturing vaccines. That does not mean the other vaccines are not effective or safe. “The blood-clot events with the AstraZeneca and J&J vaccines are so rare—appearing in one in 100,000 to one in 1 million vaccine recipients—that they would not have shown up in clinical trials, even ones conducted within more leisurely, non-pandemic timelines. The patients with clots also had low numbers of platelets, which are tiny blood cells that help with clotting. Normally, someone with a low platelet count cannot form clots and bleeds as a result. But in these people, who had all recently gotten an AstraZeneca shot, an immune reaction may have set off uncontrolled clotting that bound up all their platelets. Some scientists now hypothesize that the immune reaction is triggered by some part of the adenovirus-vector technology. If that’s true, these blood clots might show up as a rare side effect with other adenovirus-vector vaccines. But they clearly are very infrequent. The AstraZeneca and J&J coronavirus vaccines are the first adenovirus-vector shots to even be deployed widely enough in the U.S. and Europe for such rare events to emerge, but vaccines including Russia’s Sputnik V, China’s CanSino, and J&J’s Ebola vaccine also use the technology.”
Research finds the risk of getting blood clots with COVID, read as a side effect of COVID, is ten times higher than getting a blood clotting caused by any of the available vaccines. At the same time 16.5% of people contracting COVID are likely to suffer bllod clots and die. Now that is an interesting data point and should hopefully end the debate about blood clots and vaccine safety. To me more than enough damage has already been done through his public debate of only partial facts.
The UK is experimenting with mixing vaccines. I for one am interested in the results of this study, especially in lighter of booster shots.
Now that mRNA has proven to be a safe and effective biotech companies are moving on to develop other vaccines for diseases such as Flu and Malaria. The article also states this technology is to be used to develop a cancer vaccine. Now that is factually incorrect as mRNA technology has been applied for years to develop cancer treatments and this research was used to quickly churn out the COVID vaccines.
I am curious to see how else mRNA technology can be applied. I am also making amends as far as my reservations are concerned.