The View from the Hermitage, Day 200

Day 200 sounds like a good reason to open the second bottle of champagne tonight. I didn't do anything special to mark Day 100, but I might have if I had had an extra bottle of champagne then. Maybe I'll get party horns for Day 300 and add streamers for the one-year mark. On an interesting side note, I have been copying all the posts and comments into a stand-alone Word file. Through Tuesday, Day 198, the length of that document stood at 199 pages.

Facebook offers me memories the first time I log on in a day. The last couple have been from 10 years ago. The first one mentioned that my dad was improving and I was looking forward to the Fall Fiber Festival coming on the weekend. The other one mentioned that I would be at the festival for two days then heading to Florida to visit my father. He had been admitted to the hospital following a routine visit with his primary care physician. Dad was a survivor of prostate cancer and was battling multiple myeloma. He had been improving, but on the night before festival setup, I got an email from my stepmother saying that I should come sooner. After coordinating with my brother in Maine, I did festival setup on Friday, worked on Saturday when the booth owner could not be there, then took the o-dark-thirty flight to Orlando Sunday morning. 

Midweek, Dad's condition was not improving, and he moved from the ICU into a hospice facility. Given the flexible nature of my job, I was able to just skip the flight home I had booked and stay on as long as I wanted. Dad passed the middle of the following week. Those last days were very special. I had taken with me my Macbook which held pretty much my entire music library. Fortunately, my library included a number of Frank Sinatra CDs, and Frank was one of Dad's all-time favorite artists. We would sit, saying nothing, but listening to Sinatra. I will admit that I still have trouble listening to Sinatra because of the memories certain songs bring up.

I think I may have said it before here, but I am actually glad that my dad passed before the days of HWSNBN began. He had always voted Republican but in 2008 seemed to veer even more to the right. He sent me a photo of himself (they weren't called selfies then, were they?), smiling, with the yard sign he had re-done to list Palin at the top of the ticket and McCain as her running mate. I don't know how much communication he and I would have had in the last five years, starting with HWSNBN's 2015 announcement that he was running. And somewhere along the way, Dad re-invented his life story to include a PhD in organic chemistry as opposed to the EdD in science or biology education he really had. I'm sure he had his reasons; I just can't imagine what they were.

The debate fallout continues. Will there even be more presidential debates? I have not heard any chatter about canceling next week's vice presidential debate. I certainly hope that Pence and Harris stick to whatever rules are announced for their debate. I actually just read that HWSNBN does not want the rules of the debates changed since he so handily won the first one. I so do not like the direction in which we are headed.

Something like 28 states are seeing covid-19 rates increase. We will not be out of the woods for some time. New case numbers in Virginia seem to vary a lot from day to day. We were down to 450 new cases yesterday, the lowest since early July. University numbers also fluctuate quite a bit. One never knows at what point they insert the athlete cases into the overall ones. It does not seem to be the same time at which they announce them.

The husband, older son, and I all had flu shots this morning. It was my first time out around general other people in about 200 days. I wore two masks and gloves and touched nothing anyway, so here's hoping I dodged any viral particles floating in the air at CVS. I am not that optimistic about what the intersection of covid-19 and influenza might hold. And if someone tests positive for flu, will they also test them for covid-19? Or will there have to be a specific covid-19 symptom since as loss of smell and/or taste? I think it's been about 34 years since I last had influenza, but I remember it well. I do not think I have ever felt so generally miserable. I do not want to go through it again, even with no complications. 

Time to start thinking about when to pop the cork. I will raise a glass in honor of all who happen to read any of this. I do enjoy the comments, finding them thought-provoking and enlightening. There is a lot that differs between places and people, and also a lot that is the same. I'm learning a lot from this whole daily blogging process.