Another effort to get rid of my extra stuff – and this time a more successful one
During the COVID lockdown time, some people engaged in self-improvement projects. They went on a diet and got fit. They decluttered their homes. They learned a foreign language.
Not me. I languished. Even though I was home practically all the time, it seemed to sap my energy. One of the things I knew I needed to do was to get rid of extra stuff and streamline and order my belongings. But with no one coming to visit, I lost some of the motivation I’d always had for cleaning up and clearing out: guests.
I’m not a hoarder, thank goodness, so the situation’s not utterly out of control. But instead of getting better, it got somewhat worse. Papers piled up. I’d start a cleaning task and run out of steam. Tomorrow I’ll do it, I thought. But tomorrow came and since there was no time pressure, I postponed things. Again. And again.
But now that we’re free to move about the country, and people are visiting once more, I’ve found a burst of energy. Suddenly I was able to do more decluttering in a day than I’d been able to do for months. I’m not finished, by any means. But at least I’m on the way to tackling a great deal of it.
At last.
And for quite a while, no masks either. In the market I would say only about 10-20% of the customers are wearing masks. I even was in a store the other day and not all the employees were wearing masks; that’s a first for me.
It’s a big relief, isn’t it, to see faces again?
“It’s a big relief, isn’t it, to see faces again?”
Yes!
At a shop I often frequent, I saw the full face of a particular clerk for the first time in over a year—and almost didn’t recognize him with his fully grown mustache and chin beard.
I only occasionally see a mask now, though I occasionally spot a die-hard on the street or in a store. I think one of the under-appreciated consequences of the mask mandates was the degrading of personal interactions when we couldn’t see the expressions on people’s faces.
As we ready to sell our house, hopefully closing in late August, we’ve spent 4 months making 2 trips a week to the town dump and to Goodwill hauling out 20 years worth of stuff. About 98% done, still some more to do…gad!
Been seeing a bit of an increase in mask wearing this week as opposed to last week. The sheeple seem to be getting the message about the DELTA!!!! variant and are being appropriately scared.
I consider myself lucky to live in a part of the country where people have been less likely to be panicky about Covid. Even the dreaded Delta Variant hasn’t scared people into moving backwards.
Lots of mask wearing here in central coast CA still. Though a minority thankfully. I saw my first neighborhood yard sign today that said “Proud to be Vaccinated” mixed in with the usual virtual signaling signs “In this house we believe: Black Lives Matter; Science is real, blah, blah.”
At my local supermarket in Prince George’s County, Maryland almost everyone is still wearing a mask, which is one of the reasons I’m in the process of moving to West Virginia. My wife and I are slowly going through 28 years of accumulated stuff. Although we have given much away, I still feel we’re taking too much with us. Do I need 8 cognac snifters when I’ve never used even one? No, but they were my grandfathers and they look nice so I kept them.
I’d say the mask/unmask mix here in western WA is about 60/40 in favor of the unmasked which is a big improvement but still ridiculous but whatever.
Of course the mask mandates and probably restrictions on all kinds of businesses will be back by about October in the blue states.
Starting of the school year will be bananas too I imagine.
The interesting thing is how are they going to do it. Seahawks are planning to go full capacity how are they going to allow that but then make restaurants be half full. Of course when you don’t have to worry about consistency you can do all kinds of stuff.
Rare to see masked people here in Eastern WA, although my eye care facility required them today. We’ve been officially unmasked at church for two weeks so I’m no longer the nonconformist bare faced unfortunate.
Good news though, emailed neo’s Legal Insurrection article about CRT to the senior pastor and he replied in a positive manner.
om,
Yes, the only time I wear a mask is in a medical setting or at my mom’s facility because they require it. and even then the staff know it’s BS at this point.
It’ll be back though. Hope I’m wrong but these people have not given up they are out there getting all hysterical about the Delta variant and there are a lot of letters left in alphabet.
Griffin:
Only twenty left, unless they go upper and lower case, or …. infinite symbol
In Slovakia the mandates continue to change, but generally no masks needed outside, masks still required in most stores and in church.
In restaurants, while entering and leaving, they want customers to use masks; the waiters mask. While eating, no mask.
Maybe a couple months behind most US states. Being outside without a mask is good.
om,
Epsilon is currently warming up in the bullpen.
Gregory Harper, where in West Virginia are you headed?
Here in northern Nevada the governor decided in late June that people who have had two Covid shots do not need to mask. Except in health facilities, like this morning in the dentist’s office, and last week in the orthopedist’s office. I don’t carry a mask, so if an establishment wants me to wear a mask, they have to give me one. Interestingly, in the orthopedist’s office, everyone was wearing masks except a few patients (including me) and the doctors themseves. They were bare-faced.
I should add that no one asks for “vaccine passports,” so you don’t have to prove you’ve been vaccinated if you go maskless.
Kate: On the panhandle between Charles Town and Martinsburg. We’ve already bought a place and are making a slow-motion move. There is a lot less mask wearing in the supermarket I’ve gone to but it’s still probably about 20 to 30 masked which is a bit higher than I thought.
I see it all over the internet: people rebelling over masks. I don’t get it. Wearing a mask is in most cases trivially easy to do and has a significant beneficial effect if you encounter an infected person. Yet something so ridiculously easy is fought against with so much vigor.
Hospitals in the western half of this state are already overrun. They’re bringing in health care workers from four other states to try to keep up. We’re losing a couple hundred people a week to Covid, yet people still refuse to wear a mask, socially distance, or get vaccinated. It boggles the mind.
Aren’t 600,000 dead Americans enough?
Thanks, Gregory Harper. So, not so far, but not Maryland or Virginia. Probably a good move.
Masks have been mandatory for a year here. Not for outdoor exercise — so it’s easy to spot the total retards because they’re the ones jogging the middle of tropical summertime wearing face masks.
Somewhat ironic because in second half of 2019 it was illegal to wear a mask outdoors in Hong Kong.
I’ve nothing against making them mandatory in confined public spaces — their efficacy in preventing inhalation of virus particles is pretty much zero, but they may well reduce magnitude of viral assault whether inhaled / eyes contacts in a crowded confined space because catching exhaled droplets from a subway trainload of faces is likely going to help out here.
For sure it is unnatural to go about with faces covered. Absolutely not good for the human psyche.
mkent,
In which State do you reside?
My understanding is that masks have a small beneficial impact in close quarters if the infected person is wearing it. That’s called “source control.”
Healthy people wearing masks has no effect. SARS-CoV-2 is a 100 nm (nanometer) particle. n95 masks, which are approx. 100 times better than cloth masks at filtering inhaled air, have been shown to to have no protective effect against viral infections.
mkent, with around a 99.97 recovery rate IF one gets COVID (per CDC, and with some variation around age, and of course personal condition), why would most people even consider ‘caring’ about a reported beneficial effect (mask or vaccine).
Might as well carry a lightning rod around with you to have its beneficial effect handy in case of a thunderstorm.
I now know three acquaintances who have died from the vaccine, and none that have died from COVID.
In OKC area, the only place that I’ve seen masks are at health care offices. I don’t mind wearing one for the short time I am in there.
I’ll have one in my pocket for a while, but to protect myself during high pollen/mold alert days. Oh, I’ll stash the flannel one in the car to wear on the cold & windy days of winter since it is easier than wearing a scarf.
And, I am not vaccinated since my doctor has recommended against it for medical history reasons (allergic reactions, clotting issues, etc)
I said from the beginning that masks are dehumanizing and make the personal impersonal. It is so great to expose my and see full faces again. One example: I moved to Maine about a year ago and found a barber to cut my hair. It wasn’t until last week’s haircut that I actually saw the guys face, and he mine. Pretty great. Masks were no longer required about 8-10 weeks ago, but I went a very long time between haircuts this last time.
mkent is flat wrong when writing ” Wearing a mask is in most cases trivially easy to do and has a significant beneficial effect if you encounter an infected person”.
Let us have some proof of that absurd statement.
Your fabric mask is useless in excluding the tiny virus-bearing particles. Useless. And therefore stupid.
You are probably not in health care so you are unaware of, and unable to understand, the many genuine medical papers published on this subject.
Operating room personnel do not wear masks to prevent dissemination of viruses, but of bacteria, which are huge compared to viruses.
Social distancing always helps, whether virus or bacterium.
But do wear your mask. It serves as a kind of identity badge saying “I am uninformed but happily obey”.
I am old, over my mid 70’s and I don’t wear a mask and I had been shot a couple of times by the VA and then decided either it works or we are gonna die and so what. I stopped wearing a mask here in my part of Texas in January and going into stores where most were masked up I smiled at those who were not. Now it is unusual to see masked people.
I was doing a six month check up with my great young doctor this week, did blood work last week without a mask and a few in the waiting room and a couple of staff were wearing masks, most were not.
When my doc came in to tell me I was doing a real good job with all of my number he had a mask around his neck. He told me he dose mask up for older fragile people and Democrats who still want to signal with wearing masks but he has not had a COVID case for over three months. He told me back in January that with my decent health conditions, three times out of cancer and one kidney I would be sick but I would get over it fairly easy and then he said this was a totally political election year really bad flu.
All the mask stuff sent me into a mild semi-depression last year because I love to go out and make eye contact and smile at people and visit with people, waiting in check-out lines and anywhere I am standing next to them. I wear hearing aids and had a hell of a hard time figuring out what folks wearing masks were saying to me and often times early on last year in stores and in the county courthouse they wold pull their mask down so I could hear them and I wanted to scream, ‘if this real real stuff you just killed me, or something.’
What a huge big don’t let Trump get re-elected scheme 2020 turned out to be.
A co-worker expressed surprise that my hair is exactly as long as it was before the epidemic.
Which is, incidentally, the length it was for all the years I worked there before, and a quarter century in total. I grew it out to its terminal length and there it has stayed.
Cicero wrote: …absurd…stupid…unable to understand…But do wear your mask. It serves as a kind of identity badge saying “I am uninformed but happily obey”.
This is exactly the kind of thing I was talking about: the condescending anger. Others have called for — and performed — violence against people wearing masks in public. Anger and violence directed at people merely wishing to protect themselves against what will likely become the most deadly pandemic ever to strike the United States.
TommyJay wrote: SARS-CoV-2 is a 100 nm (nanometer) particle.
Which is irrelevant as to whether masks protect you from it. SARS-CoV-2 is not aerosolized. It isn’t exhaled in significant numbers except in respiratory droplets, and most masks protect against respiratory droplets fairly well. This has been known since February or March 2020, which is why the mask mandates came about to begin with.
Many studies have shown this. Probably the best one was published last summer. Effectiveness varied by mask type and proper usage, but the common double-layer cloth mask reduced transmission of the virus by 60% if worn by the infected person and 30% if worn by the possible recipient. If both people are masked, it means a reduction of probability of transmission of 70%.
That’s not perfect, and if you have many encounters with an infected person the odds will eventually catch up with you, but it’s significant. Significant enough that if you only have a few chance encounters with an infected person, say in a grocery store, it can save your life.
OriginalFrank wrote: mkent, with around a 99.97 recovery rate IF one gets COVID (per CDC, and with some variation around age, and of course personal condition), why would most people even consider ‘caring’ about a reported beneficial effect (mask or vaccine).
This number is flat-out false and always was. It should be obvious. A 99.97% recovery rate if you catch the virus means that the fatality rate if you catch the virus is 0.03%. But 0.2% — a number seven times larger — of the entire American population has already died from it.
The falsity of the 0.03% number is much worse than that, because only 10% of the American population has even contracted Covid-19, meaning the fatality rate is 70 times higher, not seven. The fact of the matter is that you have a 2.1% chance of dying if you are diagnosed with the disease.
I now know three acquaintances who have died from the vaccine, and none that have died from COVID.
That would be a statistical oddity, because only about 2,000 Americans — out of 150 million vaccinated — are even suspected of dying from the vaccines. Their cases are still being studied to try to determine whether the vaccine was causitive or merely coincidental to their deaths.
OriginalFrank wrote: mkent, with around a 99.97 recovery rate IF one gets COVID (per CDC, and with some variation around age, and of course personal condition), why would most people even consider ‘caring’ about a reported beneficial effect (mask or vaccine).
“This number is flat-out false and always was. It should be obvious.”
In that case, you should speak with the CDC. The figure I report is roughly theirs, noting that they break it down further given that older age ranges have higher loss rates while younger ones have much, much less. Given that you are well-informed, I suggest you begin assisting them to improve their calculations and reports.
“A 99.97% recovery rate if you catch the virus means that the fatality rate if you catch the virus is 0.03%. But 0.2% — a number seven times larger — of the entire American population has already died from it.”
No. It’s widely-recognized that the panic-creating higher figures include many, many people who have died *with* COVID, not from it. That is why some governments and agencies both here and around the world are slowly (and reluctantly for the most part) reducing their actual counts dead *from* COVID.
Unless one lived in a nursing home or similar in a state that forced the infected into those situations, statistically the threat is and always was minuscule, statistically. Of course, those with serious health issues or the obese have much higher risk
And to make this more on-topic, Neo, yes, it has been a *joy* to see the faces of neighbors, friends, those in retail and restaurants, and my employees again. Living in a deep blue area as I do, the effectively-propagandized long dominated, so it has taken a while. Let us hope that enough people have learned from this experience that the same mass media/government/tech giant (effectively one at this point) stimuli won’t produce similar effects (Delta, anyone?) if run again.
“everyone was wearing masks except a few patients (including me) and the doctors themselves. They were bare-faced.”
Um–because doctors who read have known all along cloth masks do nothing???
How completely credibility damaging to have people cloth masking in medical settings—some policy maker must think it makes people “feel safe” to come in and get care.
The misinformation from Covid Theater will be impossible to eradicate from the sheeple’s belief system.
mkent–once again–cloth masks do NOT A THING to decrease infection rates from Covid, or any other respiratory virus. *
Long known from military studies; repeated military study and one from Denmark during this pandemic reconfirm.
(Your data is NOT IRT single layer cloth masks, BTW.)
That’s why people don’t want to wear them.
Live not by lies.
Take zinc, vit D, and quercetin, HCQ or IVM if you want to do something effective to prevent infection.
Or wear an N-95 and eye protection.
And wash your hands–a lot.
* If they did, I assure you physicians would still be wearing them.
They were antiquated well before I started my time in hospitals forty years ago.
They dropped the mandatory mask thing here in South Texas some months ago, and I only see one in five wearing them now, even indoors, and at the grocery store. Most businesses dropped the mandatory thing last month – even the ones who were particularly insistent about mask-wearing. My daughter and I did a road trip early in June, from San Antonio to Kingsland, near Marble Falls, and the only people we saw with masks were some Army troops on a convoy to Killeen.
The local public radio science reporter is still pushing masks, and the latest promo for her podcast had a guest insisting breathlessly that the Delta variant is d for death. I don’t think anyone outside of a handful of the easily panicked is buying the ‘OMG – we’re all gonna die! Eleventy!’ any more. We’ve had a year and more of hair on fire panic theater, and oddly enough, most of us are still alive. We’re either vaccinated, had a mild case of the Commie Crud, or are naturally immune.
Yep … in Texas about the only place you’ll see a mask now is at a medical facility. That kinda makes sense. Lot sick people there and you never know why they are there.
OriginalFrank wrote: In that case, you should speak with the CDC. The figure I report is roughly theirs…
No, it is not. Right now on the CDC Covid Tracker homepage are the figures:
605,140 Americans dead from Covid
33,726,363 American cases of Covid
That alone yields a death rate of 1.8%, a number 60 times higher than yours. The actual number will be even higher than that, because some of the 4 million active cases included in the number at the bottom will die and end up being added to the number at the top.
Those are the CDC’s numbers. I don’t need to speak with them. They already have data far more accurate than yours.
mkent spotted wearing four(?) masks in the western state of Panic while on alert for roving bands of violent viraphiles. “Shoot them if you see faces, only way to be safe!” he said.
mkent,
The left lies. About EVERYTHING. They are lying liars who lie. Their scientists lie, their doctors lie, their “law” enforcement lies, their prosecutors and lawyers lie and their judges lie. Only a fool would pay any attention to any number on any subject from any of the lying criminals in government.
Here on the Texas Gulf Coast, I got a text over the weekend from my dentist’s office reminding me of a Tuesday appointment, and advising me that my appointment would be canceled if I didn’t fill out their questionnaire in advance, in addition to which I would be required to wear a mask to my appointment. I called on Monday morning to suggest that we cancel and reschedule for 6 months from now, to see whether they felt safer by then. They back-pedaled completely and said come on in, no masks required. Maybe they just need a few prompts to get rid of the holdover text message. I rarely see anyone in a mask any more.
Now and I then I encounter someone with Delta panic, but from what I read, it’s not producing an uptick of hospitalizations or deaths, so I call it irrelevant. It can spread as fast as it likes as long as it’s not making people dangerously ill. The Delta variant doesn’t seem to affect the vaccinated at all, with vanishingly rare exceptions, and I figure the unvaccinated can take their own chances with the risk/reward trade-off, at least here in the U.S. where it’s truly a choice. Sad picture in countries where people want vaccine and can’t get it.
Some of my neighbors believe in vaccination for people of all ages and health, others don’t. I don’t see a lot of quarreling about it any more. My view is that my vaccination protects me, your vaccination protects you, and neither of us needs to quiz the other about status. If you’re unvaccinated and feel vulnerable, stay out of public.
I’m glad to be a Texan.
Move! When the youngest went off to university, I sold the suburban house and moved into a NYC apartment. Got rid of over half of my belongings in the process. During the lockdowns, I retreated to my vacation home and let the apartment lease run out. In the process of moving out, I shed half of my NY belongings – in addition to one of my two residences. I was never one to accumulate things, until the kids came along and I seemingly lost that skill. Sure feels good to shed stuff and simplify.
In central New York, I hardly see anybody anymore in a mask. Maybe a young child sometimes, hand in hand with an unmasked mother heading into a Dollar General where there’s a sign on the door asking those who aren’t vaccinated to wear masks. A teenager amidst other unmasked teenagers, maybe somebody with asthma or a heart condition or some other vulnerability. In full adulthood or Boomer-hood, pretty much nobody wears a mask at all. I spent some time today In a wildlife preserve where birdwatchers are gathering in hopes of spotting a rare bird that a few lucky observers have managed to see. There was not one mask anywhere at all. Everybody’s done with those blasted masks unless there’s a good medical reason to have one on.
Later in the day, we hiked through a state park in lovely breezy outdoors air and saw not one person anywhere in a mask. Such a relief to see human faces and human smiles. People spoke to one another and smiled and offered to take pictures, and it seemed that everyone was so relieved to get back to being human beings in the out of doors unafraid. The only place I’ve been recently where masks are still required for everyone, vaccinated or not, is the public library, where there’s a sign saying that they are governed by the same rules as elementary schools and, since very young children still can’t be vaccinated, please wear masks. Well, okay, sure, that makes at least a little sense. The mask goes on for long enough to choose a book or give blood or whatever else goes on in the library and, when that’s over, with great relief, it comes off again.
I have a basket on the dresser near the door in our mudroom, full of masks and sanitizer. Pretty soon, I can put it away forever. I can’t wait.