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captainsblogObscure Genesis song, meet Billy Joel. Bill, Phil.
I’m starting by dictating this into my phone while walking the dog. Siri does a pretty good job, but there are the occasional weird autocorrects or suggestions: 
(Gozer? Why I hardly....)
Eleanor has headed off for her quarterly Cortisone injection to keep her knee from putting her into traction, so it’s probably as good a time as any to knock off the post about the effect that the pandemic has had on our health. Fortunately, nothing directly. Because we are taking the precautions, and accepting the limitations, we haven’t been put in the position of stupid Republicans who've said it was a hoax and had people die as proof it is not. Yes, Herman Cain, I’m looking at you. And you can now add a Louisiana Republican who got elected to the House, and died of it before he could even be sworn in next week. He was 41. Not a good number this year.
We really haven’t had any issues with anything that doesn’t come from just getting older, which of course beats the alternative of not getting any older. For me, the only exception to that came right as COVID was starting to make its mark. For two scary weeks in mid-March, I was in and out of doctors' offices, and urgent care, and even an emergency room, and everybody tried to figure out why I was experiencing pain on the right side of my lower back. It had been a problem for at least a few weeks before that, when I had trouble sleeping on that side without feeling a twinge, but by the time I really got worried about it, it was constant, in all positions, and I was having trouble getting into a comfortable position to sleep at all.
In the end, nobody ever did figure it out, and it went away and never came back. As with other things in these reviews, I hesitate to say that, because 2020 still has a couple of days to work its magic on me, but I am eternally glad I have not had to see the inside of a hospital, a clinic or any other medical establishment except the Wegmans pharmacy for prescriptions and a flu shot.
Come Friday, my deductible resets, which usually brings on new and improved trouble, but I’m hopeful that as long as we stick to the rules, I’ll again keep that down to a dull roar. I am now due for my 10-year colonoscopy, so that will be a fun experience- but the worst of it is at home, and as long as the kitten doesn’t try to drink the prep, I think I’ll be fine.
In the wonderful world of bad teeth, I had a crown fall out over the summer. Fortunately, I did not swallow it, and my dentist was able to get it back in with minimal fuss, and it’s been fine ever since. See above disclaimer about there still being time.
I miss the results, or at least the preservation of the status quo, that came from hitting the gym a few times a week. The resulting flab is there, but not horrible, and as long as I can still fit into a suit for a zoom call a couple of times a month, I’m not going to complain. They all closed, then re-opened at 33% capacity and I went for about a month before they closed again, only to reopen again at 25 percent allowed. I was OK with the risk the last time, because our studio was fastidious about separation and cleaning and mask wearing, but even though it’s lower capacity now, I just don’t have it in me to take the risk. The UK variant of the virus, unaffected by the vaccine, has reached our shores, and there are just too many stupid people out there in the world. Some of the local gyms have openly defied the limitation rules; the really stupid one in OP got a court order, and others, including a local chain previously fined for breaking the rules, have tried to ride along on that authority even though they were not included in the court order. That one has a location near the store where I had my Tax Software Kerfuffle over the weekend, and its parking lot was full at 1:00 on Sunday. Probably because no Bills game was on for them to grunt and toss heavy objects in front of.
We also signed up for the senior-couple YMCA membership, mainly to get Eleanor access to a pool, which my insurance pays for the first $250 of during the year. They, too, have blinked on and off like a beer sign, and I think she's gone once all year. They also sponsor the Turkey Trot, which did go on with a small restricted and distanced field of Real Serious Runners to maintain their standing as the oldest continuous Thanksgiving run. The rest of us were offered the opportunity to run it virtually for a t-shirt and medal, but without the crowd and camaraderie of 13,000 other crazy people around us, neither I nor any of my prior-year companions chose to do it. I have traditionally driven home from that to the annual noon Thanksgiving replay of "Alice's Restaurant" that Dave Kane on WCMF in Rochester has been playing on that day for 40 years and I listening along with it there for over 30 of them. I caught it from home instead; Kane-O hinted it may be his last set of "servings" before retiring. Since he's already a Rochester Music Hall of Famer and one of the few local legends in the media to have survived the purges, he, too, is entitled to go whenever he wants and on his own terms.
Just the other day, I caught another glimpse that reminded me of the Masacree:
Apparently this is a new home security app. If someone breaks into your house, it takes twenty-seven 8x10 color glossy pictures, fines them $50, makes them pick up the garbage and puts them on the Group W bench!
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Well, this seems to have transitioned into a generic Day in the Life post, so I'll finish it that way.
I mentioned the Three Jeffs the other day: both deliverers got their gift cards; despite Paper Jeff beating me to the stoop on Christmas morning, I beat him to it on Sunday and he got through the drifts to claim it. Other Jeff continues to ask me legal questions and I to answer them; I ended a particularly persnickety summary of some filing rules with the rhetorical question, Now would you like to learn about the blue lines in hockey?
This references a series of "primers" that MAD put out in the 1960s and 70s, which I still remember with greater accuracy than what the law actually is.
The original Hockey Primer was from 1965 and included a mind-numbing explanation of the actual rules then in effect.
Would you like to read them?
Remember that they have been revised and amended in the 55 years since then.
To make them worse.
See the coach stop play after a goal is scored to initiate an offside challenge because somebody's skate was one one-gagillionth of a micron over the blue line. See the players turn the game into a curling match complete with brooms and beer on the ice until the hosers in Toronto confirm it one way or the other half an hour later.
THAT primer was published before my MAD reading time- I probably read it in one of their best-of paperbacks- but it resurfaced at least once after that, when they did a bowling primer in the 70s. That one gave an equally mind-numbing explanation of how to score a bowling match, and homaged the earlier one.
Would you like to see that, too?
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Finally, something you should like to see.
We added another streaming app to the TV- PBS has one, and thanks to renewing our membership to the stations in Rochester where friends work and programming is much better than here, we get "Passport" access to otherwise unavailable things. Including this documentary, which a friend had recommended:
Robbie Robertson of The Band, the guitar soloist on Jackson Browne's "Doctor My Eyes," and Link Wray of the title song, perhaps the only instrumental to ever be banned from the airwaves for being too provocative. All have Native American roots, which were largely suppressed from the stories of rock, blues and jazz by the same forces who took the land and tried to cancel the culture back before conservatives suddenly stopped liking that.
One who tried was Johnny Cash. After the blockbuster success of "Ring of Fire," he recorded a Nativecentric song called "The Ballad of Ira Hayes," which his record company and radio stations refused to promote. He would bring the record to studios to try to get DJs to play it, and circulated an open letter, displayed in the film, which calls them out for their cowardice and notes places in the early 60s where prejudice was in need of calling out. Look who made the top of the charts!
I assume he didn't mean Minnesota.
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Speaking of top of the charts, come back tomorrow for some more Dementia!