I’m taking April off to participate in Camp NaNoWriMo. Have a blessed Easter and I’ll see all y’all on May 1st!
Author Archives: Jen
7 Quick Takes: Got My Fauci Ouchie Edition
How all of this works. For those who don’t know, this is how the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines work:
Monday. I had made my vaccine appointment for Monday at my local grocery store pharmacy. Well, I got an email on Monday morning saying that my vaccine appointment was canceled. I called the pharmacy in case this was a computer glitch, and they told me that my appointment had indeed been canceled because the website overbooked them.
Grrrrr…
Plan B. The person at the pharmacy told me call back in a few hours to see if I could get another appointment with them, but I opted to go see what I could find on Vaccine Locator instead. The local vaccination clinic at the fairgrounds had spots, so I made an appointment with them for a drive-thru vaccine on Tuesday afternoon.
Wait… a DRIVE-THRU VACCINE CLINIC?!?!?!? Yep, you drive thru the building, they give you a shot in the shoulder next to the window, and then you drive to an area to do your 15-minute wait. The people giving the shot are *ACTUAL MEDICAL PROFESSIONALS* and they are completely prepared with Epi-pens in case someone has an anaphylactic reaction.
Tuesday afternoon. I drove down to the county fairgrounds for my appointment, and there were people directing traffic so that people went to the right line. When I got there, the volunteer checked to make sure I didn’t have a habit of fainting during injections (which would mean I would need to go somewhere else) and handed me a clipboard with paperwork to fill out. I was directed to other people and then ended up in a line of cars to wait for my turn to drive through the sheep barn at the fair. I filled out my paperwork, chatted with the volunteer assigning people to lines going through the sheep barn, and read the e-book on my phone while I waited.
When it was my turn, I drove into the line on the right and pulled up until I was told to stop. A very nice LPN was assigned to do the last bit of screening and give me the shot. She folded my left arm in front of me, told me to put my shoulder down, and put one hand on my shoulder to steady it while giving me the injection with her other hand. I felt the needle go in, but it wasn’t painful. She almost forgot to give me my card before I drove off, but I have the card stating when I got my vaccine (Moderna) and the lot number in case there were problems.
After the injection and they made sure I wasn’t going to react in the first minute or so, they directed me to drive to a series of lines similar to what you see while waiting for a ferry boat. Each line was a group of people who had just gotten the shot, and a volunteer came up to me and told me what to do if I felt myself starting to have a reaction (wave my arm outside the window if I could or honk my horn). I also heard another volunteer telling another group to call 911 if they started having a reaction at home instead of calling the vaccine clinic. (It’s similar to the message you hear on the phone line at your doctor’s office about hanging up and dialing 911 if you are having a medical emergency.) I sent my lovely vaccine selfie to a few people and put it up on Facebook before reading until they told me I could go home.
Side effects. Other than a sense of hope and renewed optimism, the side effects I had from the vaccine were a sore arm (normal for me after a shot) and a bad headache. I was talking to Daniel’s pediatrician on Wednesday when he had his ADHD appointment, and she told me to take the day off after my next shot in April because she ended up with a really bad migraine after hers. I work from home, so I’ll probably be OK as I can be in a dark room and work while lying down if needed. I also had some minor chills Tuesday night and then this morning.
What’s next? Once all of us in the family are vaccinated that can be vaccinated, we’re talking about having family gatherings outside in the backyard. It is probably not going to be happening by my birthday in May, but we are hoping that people might be able to get together for my nephew Braden’s birthday in June.
For more Quick Takes, visit Kelly at This Ain’t The Lyceum.
7 Quick Takes: Prayer Requests and Stuff Edition
Prayer request #1. Thomas, the 5 year old son of Katherine of Gloria in Excelsis Deo has a bowel stricture, and they’ll be doing bowel resection surgery tomorrow afternoon Eastern time. Please pray hard. This is the 13th surgery in FOUR MONTHS and doesn’t include things done through interventional radiology. (Don’t believe me? Details are here.)
Prayer request #2. I was working with one of my students on Tuesday when I learned that my friend Ellen’s sister Jenny had been killed in a car accident on Sunday. Ellen and I met through our blogs 19 years ago, and Jenny eventually started blogging as well. I remember when she got her Ph.D at Cornell, hearing about her job hunt for a professor position, and hearing about what she was doing with her students on her blog and on Facebook. (Her pastor wrote a beautiful piece about her here.) Please pray for her sisters Ellen and Karen, her parents Charles and Barbara, her colleagues and students at Hope College (where she was chair of the Physics Department), and all those who knew and loved her as they mourn her passing.
OMGOMGOMG!!!!! Kelly (our Quick Takes hostess with the mostest) has announced that her book will be released on October 8th!!!!! (It’s also the saint’s day of one of my favorite saints, St. Pelagia the Harlot. Her conversion story was mentioned in my Medieval Europe class 20 years ago and has stuck with me.) I must make sure I clear Mount TBR (a.k.a. my e-reader) so that I can be ready to read it the second it appears!
COVID vaccine update. Shortly after I published my Quick Takes, I got an email from Debby, one of my readers, telling me that I was ALREADY ELIGIBLE(!!!!!) because of Daniel and his health issues. Once I was done with the quarter (a.k.a. TODAY!!!!), I looked into it… and she was right! I went to this site to see if I could find somewhere local that had appointments next week, and I was able to get one for Monday afternoon at my local grocery store pharmacy!!! They’ve done my flu shot for the last three years now. They have always kept an eye on me for 15-20 minutes after to make sure I don’t have an anaphylactic reaction due to my weird egg allergy, so I trust them as much as I trust my local health system’s vaccine clinic. (One of their pharmacists is actually a Blessed is She member!)
My deepest thanks go to Debby for giving me step-by-step instructions for how to do all of this.
Really?!?!?!? Cpt. Jay Baker made a completely stupid comment about the Atlanta massage parlor shooter “having a bad day” and is thankfully being removed from the case over it. (He also may lose his job, which I’m hoping happens because that was an inexcusable gaffe, coupled with some racist posts on his Facebook page.) I also don’t believe for one second that the shootings were not racially-motivated. There are plenty of massage places in Atlanta, and not all of them are Asian-owned.
Please also know that I am judging the daylights out of you if you make asinine comments about how coronavirus is the “China flu” or the “kung flu”. Hate crimes against Asian-Americans have skyrocketed since last year because of hateful comments like those made by Donald Trump and his despicable followers, and there is no excuse for that behavior. NONE.
Getting all Samuel L. Jackson up in here. One of my current relaxation things is the web game Taonga: the Island Farm, and it’s kind of like Farmtown or Farmville from the 2010’s. One big difference is that you have quests you can go on, and one of mine has me searching for items and battling these possessed plants called “malignant sundews” which are guarding the items I need to get. After battling 2 (!!!) of them while trying to get to an item, I started having thoughts about being “tired of these mofo sundews in this mofo game!”
Biden’s COVID vaccine goal. He is meeting his goal of 100 million people vaccinated 42 days ahead of schedule despite the previous administration leaving him no vaccine rollout plan. Everyone making stupid comments about “Sleepy Joe” can shut their stupid mouths because he is actually *DOING* something about the pandemic instead of ignoring it, ignoring scientists, and throwing press conferences to prop up his ego like Trump did.
For more Quick Takes, visit Kelly at This Ain’t The Lyceum.
7 Quick Takes: Thursday Night Musings Edition
Some levity. I was reading The Alpine Pursuit (the book before the one I’m currently reading in Mary Daheim’s books about Emma Lord, a publisher in rural Washington) and I came upon a funny quote where Emma is talking to her brother Ben, a priest in Arizona.
Ben: “Can’t those people find something better to do than murder each other?”
Emma: “It’s winter. They’re bored.”
COVID vaccine update. Of the now 200+ people I know who have had at least one dose, one person has gone into anaphylaxis. She was at a vaccine clinic for our local health system, so they just took her across the street to the ER. It was a scary few hours for her but she’s OK now.
Does this make me afraid to get the vaccine? Not at all. You have people who are medical professionals (nurses and pharmacists) administering them, and they all know how to handle someone going anaphylactic. My pharmacist has done my flu shot for the last three years… and I have an egg allergy. The deal is that I get to occupy a chair by the pharmacy door for 20 minutes post-shot, and they know that I have absolutely no problem getting their attention if something starts happening. The current shot location at my local grocery store pharmacy is across from Starbucks, so I can get my coffee and my shot at the same time (if I get my shot at the local pharmacy).
6 weeks until I’m eligible…
Anniversaries. This week has brought a lot of one-year anniversaries from the day the college went to remote learning to the day I was sitting in Daniel’s IEP meeting when Governor Inslee announced that schools were shutting down for 6 weeks… and then eventually kids went on remote learning for the rest of the year. My church also shut down all in-person things, and it felt like everything life-giving was taken away from me.
A year later, I feel like I’ve gotten some of those things back, but there are still things like attending church in-person that I really miss.
Welcome to Plathville. I had seen some clips of the show on YouTube, so I decided to watch it on-demand and see what the actual show was like because all the clips online paint Kim (the mom) as a bad person. I’m on episode 2 and the jury is still out. I’ll let you know my impressions next week.
Why can’t he just go away??? As former presidents and first ladies got together to encourage people to get their COVID vaccine, the previous occupant of the White House issued a statement taking credit for the vaccine, claiming we wouldn’t get it for 5 years at best if not for him.
…
Bless his heart.
1.) Nobody but you and your merry band of bigots and freaks call it the “China virus”. In fact, calling it that is increasing violence toward Asian-Americans. Knock it off.
2.) Any president worth their time would have done *SOMETHING* toward fast-tracking a vaccine. Obama did it with H1N1. A pandemic was declared on April 24, 2009 and the first vaccines were given on October 5, 2009. I know this because Jon, Daniel, and I were among the first in our county to get them that October due to Daniel’s prematurity. If you don’t believe me, click here for the pandemic timeline from the CDC website. If Trump had been doing anything other than sitting on his butt tweeting, playing golf, and holding press conferences to boost his ego, the pandemic wouldn’t have been nearly as severe here in the US.
3.) Dolly Parton put $1 million of her own money toward the research to develop the Moderna vaccine. Trump spouted fake cures and unproven claims based on his minion’s economic interests. (Case in point: hydroxychloroquine.) Dolly did more toward “this beautiful vaccine” than Trump did.
4.) Biden and Kamala got vaccinated on live TV as did the former presidents and former first ladies when their turns came up. (Jimmy Carter even took a selfie with his vaccine card.) Trump and Melania got vaccinated secretly at the White House. Way to boost public confidence, Donnie.
5.) Any president who was following the science would have instituted a mask mandate nationwide, especially as the virus spreads through the air. Joe appeared in public masked-up the whole time except for the debates. Trump refused to mask up and gave COVID to those prepping him for the first debate and those who were working at the venue.
Interesting… Caitlin of Ask a Mortician talks about how they keep Lenin’s corpse perpetually young on display. I remember one of my seminary professor telling us about seeing Lenin’s body in Moscow, so this is fascinating to me.
Stop looking at me that way! I’m not obsessively surfing the Archer & Olive website after seeing Plant Based Bride unbox her A&O subscription box! I’m not! I’m not! I’m not!
For more Quick Takes, visit Kelly at This Ain’t The Lyceum.
7 Quick Takes: COVID-Related Stuff Edition
Illiterate adults deserve respect. I really recommend watching this. I deal with adults who fall below the functional literacy level a lot in my work, and there is a lot of stigma attached to not being able to read or write well.
Dolly Parton’s COVID vaccine. Not only did she help fund research toward a COVID vaccine, but she even got hers on camera and repurposed one of her songs to encourage people to get the COVID vaccine.
Greg Abbott fustercluck. It’s actually kind of amusing when *ALL* the Texans I know (who span the spectrum politically, several of whom have had COVID) agree that Greg Abbott is a special kind of stupid and announce that they are going to keep masking up and socially distancing. Why? Because they understand that there are some things you do to protect OTHERS because the world does not revolve around them.
I’ve also seen this picture more than a few times in my Facebook feed.
Also, the last time I checked, a virus doesn’t give a rat’s butt if it inconveniences you… because having to wear a mask and socially distance is really just an inconvenience to most people.
Yeah, that’s still a “no”. I just got the news that my local school district is bringing middle schoolers back in a hybrid learning model starting April 19th. Given that we’re an immunocompromised family, that’s not going to be a reality for Daniel because I need to have both doses of my COVID vaccine before we even think about letting him out in public because he touches everything and touches his face. (In other words, he’s a COVID vector.) He also likes to cough, sneeze, fake-cough, and fake-sneeze without covering his mouth. And yes, we’ve been trying to impress on him for two years (since he gave me a pissy little children’s cold virus that went from zero to pneumonia with sepsis in three days by fake-sneezing on me) that he needs to COVER HIS DAMN MOUTH. He thinks it’s hysterically funny and doesn’t care. (Parenting an autistic kid sucks at times as they don’t listen to reason or logic… or really anything else.)
Believe me, I hate remote learning and doing school with him at home, and he hates it too. (I can’t think of anyone in my real life or on Facebook who is doing school on Zoom or at home for COVID reasons who wants to continue it after this year. It is not a viable option for most of us, especially for those of us who have to work to support our families.) However, we aren’t among the idiots who believe that COVID is “just a cold” or “just flu”, so we’re doing what we need to do to protect ourselves and our families. It’s a sure thing that if I get COVID, I *WILL* end up on a ventilator because that’s how my body works. (And yes, I don’t leave the house unless absolutely necessary and I have been masking up when I go anywhere since last March.)
Just a head’s up… COVID-19 has killed 518,000 people in the USA as of yesterday. Below is a chart showing the number of people who die from the flu yearly.
You will find more infographics at Statista
Yeah… this isn’t just “the flu”.
Fauci ouchie update. My parents got their second COVID vaccine shots on Sunday. They reported feeling fatigued on Monday, but things were normal for them by Tuesday. Of the 100+ people I know who have had both shots, maybe 5% have reported any negative side effects from dose #2, which is the one where you’re going to have a bad reaction. Nobody has had an anaphylactic reaction, and the people at risk of having one have had to get theirs at a special clinic.
Trump inauguration today. So, how did everyone enjoy the Trump coronation inauguration today?
Wait… it didn’t happen???
Oh… it has been moved to March 20th?
So, is that the day that Donald Trump and President Biden are going to switch their faces back???
For more Quick Takes, visit Kelly at This Ain’t The Lyceum.
7 Quick Takes: Stoned Cats, Murder Mysteries, and Strange YouTube Finds Edition
My current earworm. I was downstairs prepping a bolus for Daniel one evening when this was playing on one of the music channels on TV.
Cats! My parents’ elderly tomcat Jethro had to have his teeth cleaned on Monday, and they decided to remove some lipomas from his sides while he was under anesthesia. Jet did fine, but the incisions on his sides were large enough that he has some decent stitches, so he was the proud recipient of an Elizabethan collar (a.k.a. the cone). Minion had apparently never seen another cat in a cone because he puffed up… which is impressive when you consider that he’s a 15 lb kitty cat. His puffed tail is probably the best part. He also got hissy and started growling, so he was exiled from my parents’ room that night. Meanwhile, Jet was really stoned to the point that he was standing there watching TV. (He then started bumping into walls.)
Alpine, Washington. My literary catnip at the moment is Mary Daheim’s series of murder mysteries involving the fictitious town of Alpine, Washington in the Cascade Mountains. I was first acquainted with them 10 years ago and read them out of order over the last decade. I’m finally buying the e-book versions and putting them on my e-reader, and I am finding that I am enjoying them now that I am reading them in order, especially as I now am acquainted with the location of some of the places. The protagonist is a newspaper editor named Emma Lord, and I find that I can actually picture a lot of the events after living in a bunch of small towns.
Fauci ouchies, round 2. My parents get their second doses of COVID vaccine this weekend. I’m hoping that I hit the top of the list sooner than later. I will also be curious to know if I can get my shot at the local vaccine clinic or if I’ll have to go elsewhere given that I’m at risk for side effects. (I have an egg allergy, so they’ve always made me hang out after getting any vaccines or my flu shot even at my local pharmacy. I’ve also gotten allergy shots, so waiting for 20 minutes afterward is normal for me.)
What’s in a mortician’s purse? Caitlin does a riff on the “what’s in my purse?” thing that people were doing 6-7 years ago. And yes, she’s being sarcastic, especially about the fetal human skull made of white chocolate.
More of “Ask a Mortician”! So what’s the oldest mummy in the world?
Speaking of old things… Benjamin of bald and bankrupt explores an old caravanserai in Armenia.
For more Quick Takes, visit Kelly at This Ain’t The Lyceum.
7 Quick Takes: TED Talk Edition
While I was editing my parish’s devotional book and trying not to play Taonga, I listened to a lot of TEDx talks as I needed some background noise. Here are some of the ones I enjoyed.
Caitlin Doughty. Caitlin is the person behind the “Ask a Mortician” YouTube channel. I decided to check out her channel more thoroughly after watching this talk.
Christian Picciolini. It’s unnerving to me that Christian was recruited to the White Power movement by someone seemingly expressing concern for him. He also admits that some of his music helped to radicalize Dylan Roof, the shooter in the attack on Mother Emmanuel church in South Carolina.
Darryl Davis. How many people would meet with someone who hates them to try and understand the reason behind that hatred?
Eric Hodgdon. He had a really positive message on how to get through after the death of a loved one.
Lucy Hone. This was helpful in seeing behaviors in my life that are beneficial in dealing with adversity. Lucy’s daughter was killed in a car accident, and all of her psych training had to ber sifted through to help her cope.
Greg Boyle, S.J. Because kinship.
Sue Kleibold. How do you heal from your son and a friend killing 13 people before killing themselves. Sue explains.
For more Quick Takes, visit Kelly at This Ain’t The Lyceum.