Click on link below to see video of a lab test of masks vs. no masks for talking, coughing, sneezing! If you think you don’t need a mask, you just might change your mind. If you are willing to take the risk of going out without a mask, go ahead and risk changing your mind by watching.
What are the Rest of the Rules?
I just made a comment to Bag Lady that I’ve decided I want to ask a wider audience. If you have the answers, please let me know. This is an expanded version of my comment to her. If you want to see her post, click on the link above. Here is my comment:
Aside from the dangers that at any given moment, someone may shoot you because you do or don’t have a mask on, because you’ve asked how tall they are, or spray acid in your face while parked at a stoplight just because you are black, another reason I have less incentive to leave my house is because of how uncomfortable the masks are. My glasses fog up and by the time I’m out for a half hour or so I feel wringing wet all over, with droplets hanging off the tips of my hair, as though I’m holding in all the heat usually released in my breath. I’m not using this as an excuse not to wear one. I always do, even though the tops of my ears aren’t high enough to keep the ones held in place with ear bands in place. The mask is constantly ejecting itself, and the ones that go all the way over your hair make me look even worse that I do with hair I’ve cut for myself for 4 months, no makeup and no earrings because the mask keeps catching on them.
In spite of this, I would never go out without a mask or even have contact with someone in my house without wearing one, but I do have my questions regarding mask protocol. In a restaurant, six feet away from your companion, waiters all masked, the next table twelve feet away, what are the rules for eating and drinking. Do you replace your mask after every sip? Fanangle a straw between you and the mask? Do you lift the mask for each forkful? No one tells us these things.
And the hand washing. Does that twenty seconds include rinsing or is that just the soaping part? What are the precise rules?
A Empirical Truth
I’m writing to our leadership–selfish, short-sighted fools
who are selling off our national parks and making other rules
about protected species, pollution and our health.
Saying it’s for our good while the rich expand their wealth.
If Nero fiddled as Rome burned, it’s also true today
that our most notable leader also likes to play.
As he’s shooting birdies on wild habitats turned tame,
his kids take off for Africa to shoot some wild game.
What we do to others turns back on us in time,
and Mother Nature will find a way of dealing with your crime.
I suggest that you use caution when visiting a zoo
lest the animals you threaten end up hunting you.
Prompt words for today are explain, empirical, zoo, caution and leadership.
(Copied from a friend and shared. Please do the same. Sorry, I don’t know the original source.)
Let’s say you woke up with a terrible cough, a fever, and severe body aches. Immediately, you rush to the doctor and unfortunately, you’re diagnosed with COVID-19. For the last two weeks, you’ve been unaware that you were infected and you’ve ignored “the rules.” You’ve gotten together with some close friends for pizza, had a few people over, even visited a park and a beach. You figured, “I don’t feel sick. I have the right to keep living my normal life. No one can tell me what to do.”
With your diagnosis, you spend the next few days at home on the couch, feeling pretty crappy; but then you’re well again because you’re young, healthy and strong. Lucky you. But your best friend caught it from you during a visit to your house, and because she didn’t know she was contagious, she visited her 82-year-old grandfather, who uses oxygen tanks daily to help him breathe because he has COPD and heart failure. Now, he’s dead.
Your co-worker, who has asthma, caught it too, during your little pizza get-together. Now, he’s in the ICU, and he’s spread it to a few others in his family, too–but they won’t know that for another couple of weeks yet.
The cashier at the restaurant where you picked up the pizza carried the infection home to his wife, who has MS, which makes her immunosuppressed. She’s not as lucky as you, so she’s admitted to the hospital because she’s having trouble breathing. She may need to be placed in a medically-induced coma and intubated; she may not get to say goodbye to her loved ones. She may die surrounded by machines, with no family at her bedside.
All because you couldn’t stand the inconvenience of a mask; of staying home; of changing your familiar routines for just a little while. Because you have the right, above all others rights, to continue living your normal life and no one, I mean no one, has the right to tell you what to do.
#SocialDistancing = It’s not about YOU!
#WearAMask = It’s not about YOU!
#StayHome = It’s not about YOU!
#GetTested = It’s not about YOU!
#MaskItOrCasket = It’s not about YOU!
On Mexican Time
2:59 PM Damn. You would not believe what a day this has been.
Today was Pasiano’s day to come clean and refill the hot tub and pool and to do the regular gardening. On Wednesday he’ll be very busy as they are due to deliver a truckload of plants to put in the recently cleared-out spare lot next door, where they finished putting the fence up two days ago. The first plants we put in were molested by passing cows who stopped by for a light lunch and so planting was delayed until the fence was up. Today was also Yolanda’s day to come clean and Oscar’s day to come walk the dogs and give them both baths.
I woke up very early this morning so was working on my third blog of the day when Alberto the plumber called to say he had the part to fix the pool filter pump and that he’d be coming to do that. He arrived and Pasiano, Oscar and Yolanda left. Got a call at noon, after Pasiano left, that although they were supposed to deliver the plants tomorrow at 5 so Pasiano could plant them on Wednesday, they were instead delivering today at 1!! I tried to call Pasiano as he has the only keys to the padlocks for the gates to the lot and his phones didn’t answer. Called three times and finally got him and he said the padlocks weren’t on the gates. So, about 1:05, the plumber tells me there is someone at the gate. I go out, don’t see anyone and figure they are down in the lot. The street is full of cars but I don’t see a truck! It turns out they are having an open house across the street. So I get down to the lot and no truck. I trudge back up the hill and find it isn’t the plants that have arrived, but rather a truck with my new stove and dishwasher in it–a month early! I desperately try to call Yolanda to see if she’s sure she wants both my old stove, which works fine except for the absence of two dial handles which I’ve been trying to replace for the past year with no luck and the dishwasher, which doesn’t work, but no one answers. Either line. Her son Juan Pablo’s line doesn’t answer either. Then the delivery people tell me they don’t take away the old appliances anyway and having brought the boxed appliances in and depositing them in the kitchen, they depart. I have a kitchen island I had built in the middle of my kitchen which luckily, I had put on wheels. It is scooted over to in front of the cabinets and sink and the rest of the kitchen is filled with appliances!
In the meantime, the plants arrive and I go back down the hill to show them where to put them. They start downloading and I run up to the house to call the store where I bought the appliances, if, since the appliances have been delivered a month early, they have, as promised, arranged for someone to come install them, and they say no!! Luckily, Alberto the plumber comes up from having installed the pump and I ask if he knows how to install the stove and dishwasher. By then the appliance delivery guys have left and he says yes, but he’ll need help lifting the stove out. I help him do that but wonder how we are going to get it up the steps to the garage.
The doorbell rings. It is the plant guys who have put all the plants into the spare lot and are ready to be paid. I ask the guy they’ve hired to help if he will help Alberto carry the dishwasher up the steps to the garage, which he does. I tip him and they leave. Alberto installs the new stove and gets it going, then learns they haven’t delivered a hose with the dishwasher. We also discover ten years of cockroach poop behind the dishwasher. He puts the dishwasher out on the terraza and I try calling Yolanda for the sixth time and she answers! Yes, they want both appliances and will come to get them tonight. Alberto departs to drive to Jocotepec to get a new hose.
I go to sit in front of the fan and take my mask off as I’m now soaking wet and my glasses are totally fogged over from all that running up and down the hill and breathing hot air that leaked out around the top of the mask right up to inside my glasses. What a day!! All mistimed appearances that somehow meshed. If Alberto hadn’t been here I would have had no one to install the appliances. If the plant guys hadn’t come a day early, there would have been no one to help him carry the stove up the stairs to the garage, but as things turned out, everything jelled. And that, my dears, is a perfect description of Mexico for you. Things that seem pandemonium just seem to work out. Not in the time you’d planned for them to work out and certainly not in the way you’d planned for them to turn out, but nonetheless, they turn out!
P.S. Yolanda just called to say they will come for the appliances tomorrow. “But the dishwasher is standing out on the terrace. What if it rains?” I ask. “It will be fine. The dishwasher will be fine,” she answers. And she is probably right.
Home for the Duration?
I simply must go shopping. I’ve a plethora of needs.
My soup has gone unsalted and my garden’s full of weeds.
I need whips for my whacker and I need a box of salt.
So if my meals aren’t tasty, you can see it’s not my fault.
The bane of my existence is the branches that have grown
to obscure my lake view and upset my garden’s tone.
When I’m in the hammock, I’m thereby deprived my vista
because I loaned my hedge clippers to my older sista.
It’s easier to buy new ones if I could just go shopping,
but nobody knows when our immurement will be stopping.
Lately what might happen in the future’s arcane knowledge.
I hope that school resumes before my 3-year-old needs college!
Prompt words for today are salty, arcane, vista, plethora and shop.
I took this photo of a hibiscus held captive outside a local paint store. I let my hibiscus go free!!!
For Cee’s FOTD
Image by Fusion Medical on Unsplash, used with permission.
A-roving
Just because we can doesn’t always mean we should.
Nature says to stay in place. It wants us to be good.
In searching for experience, we’ve spread ourselves too thin
and left a little bit of us in everyplace we’ve been.
As good as some parts might have been, others cut a path
that proves to be a cruel one, tragic in its wrath.
Smallpox infected blankets, Ebola, Plague and SARS
are gifts we brought along with us in ships and planes and cars.
So now we hunker down alone to choose “I” over “we.”
It’s hard to fight an enemy that we cannot see.
As it reaches out to hold us in each tiny arm,
this minuscule lovely one has such potential harm.
We’ve seen its regal portrait, heard its misleading name,
but the victory crown it offers proves to be a lethal game.
So if you yearn to go roving to relieve the daily grind,
Please, friend, for the present, just go traveling in your mind.
Today’s post is dedicated to all of you who labor every day to post your prompts and to read our responses. You and your predecessors have been my motivation for seven years now, every day, and I have probably rarely thanked you, so for Ragtag Daily Prompt, Fandango, Your Daily Word, Word of the day and The Daily Spur, this one is for you. And Ragtag, your prompt today wasn’t meant to be taken personally, right?
Prompt words today are windbag, (Hope this one isn’t personal,) begrudge, futile, inspire and ease.
Five Little Words
Lest you think I’m a windbag and lest you begrudge
my words meant for chuckles, to inspire or nudge
for social reform and for giving the boot
to public servants who pillage and loot
our public coffers and fill up their pockets
with money or spend it on guns, walls and rockets.
Better the money be spent on our own
in stead of a POTUS who sits on his throne
dreaming of golf games and bragging of pussies,
berating mask-wearers as alarmists and wussies.
OK see how I’m off on a whim or a breeze,
raving again with remarkable ease?
I can’t seem to stop, even though I’m retired.
I simply can’t shut off the words when inspired.
So long as the world is so stupid and brutal,
efforts to stifle my words would be futile.
Just five daily words will inspire the rest.
I write all the others at their behest.
lifelessons - a blog by Judy Dykstra-Brown 