Tag: covid

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Please, Oh Please!

Pull your mask up over your nose!

I realize that if your mask is not covering your face you are either rebellious, stubborn or immature and on all counts, you are stupid.

The mask is a two way protection. If you are sick, the mask let’s you keep your germs to yourself, thank you very much. You’re not polluting our air with your microbes.

And it prevents you from breathing in others germ riddled spit.

If your nose is exposed, you are breathing in unfiltered air. You could be breathing in Covid, among other things.

And guess what.

Covid is a respiratory disease. It attacks your lungs. This means it is in the air and you breathe it in and you die.

That is the main way to get Covid.

If everyone wears a mask and wears it properly, guess what again. Covid has no where to go.

The mask is doing you ZERO good if your nose is exposed. Because you breathe through your nose. And if you’ve run up the stairs, your mouth too.

And it doesn’t matter how much nose hair you have.

– Not to mention –

You are driving me nuts looking at you.

X WRONG:

Your chin doesn’t breathe. I bet you believe you can breathe through your eyelids too like Nuke LaLoosh (Bull Durham).

X STILL WRONG:

But you’re getting closer. There are really two pathways to your lungs. Your mouth is one of the two. Can you guess the other one that we use more frequently? Take your fingers out of your ears, that’s not it.

CORRECT!

You got it. Cover your MOUTH and your NOSE.

One other thing: Masks are not enough to end this pandemic.

GET FULLY VACCINATED!

And always stay six feet away from me!

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Masks

I have posted many rants about mask wearing, because to me, it is very simple. Covid is spread by your breath. Wear a mask and covid cannot go anywhere, and to some degree, prevents you from breathing in someone else’s covid. It has been proven in other countries to be very effective, and this whole mess could be over if everyone would just comply.

Simple.

But humans, with their big, mostly useless brains, have made it an issue, and so complicated.

However, I have adopted a mask as part of my daily attire. Much like, I usually don’t go out without underware, kind of routine. I don’t think about it much, including the foggy glasses. It just is.

When you need to make a quick trip to the store, the fuss of how you look is eliminated. I don’t have to wear makeup or worry about bad breath. It hides a lot of ills. My friend says he doesn’t have to shave.

It also can make a fashion statement. I have seen some pretty ones, some clever ones, some very comfortable looking ones. And then there are the ugly ones, the ill fitting ones, the ‘I don’t give a F’ ones. My personal pet peeve is the below the nose mask. It aggravates me in the same way those pants worn at the hips do, I want to pull them up!

I watched a doctor on You Tube don one mask after another, up to 6, to prove you do not compromise oxygen transmissibility by wearing a mask. So when I had a biopsy done recently I wore 8 masks! I tell you truthfully, I had no trouble breathing. And since I had 2 surgeons hovering inches from my face, I felt a bit more secure. So a lot of the BS you read about ‘I can’t breathe’, is, well, BS.

So just wear a mask and enjoy the benefits, like, still being alive.

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That Voice

A great deal of my working days consisted of me yapping. Mom was right, I never lack for something to say. There were clients and staff to talk to in person, lots of phone calls, lots of conversations. My gums got a good work out.

Now that I am retired, having left my job because of covid concerns, my mouth has gotten a rest, and alas, many people, their ears.

I still talk, but the audience has changed.

I have great conversations with the cat, myself, the odd inanimate object, plants. They listen very well. They lack a bit for debate, but I think they tend to agree with my points of view anyhow. Cat just walks away or falls asleep in protest, disagreement or boredom. No arguments or shouting matches, just a nice disregard. I kind of like that. It is humbling. So far, the plants haven’t wilted, their leaves turn brown or fall off. My ornaments quietly collect dust as usual. So it is all good.

I read books and my own writing aloud. My apartment has some neat acoustics I hadn’t noticed before. My voice sort of like drums in a ventilator shaft, voluminous and rising to the sky, but not nearly as exciting as a drum solo from Led Zeppelin.

I can almost hear my neighbours groan on occasion. But when they get my flute practice sessions, they concur that perhaps my reading aloud in not so bad, well, not as bad. It just goes on a lot longer than the flute.

Being ones own audience is quite interesting; to laugh at ones own jokes, especially if they are not that funny, or not funny at all. Interesting to debate with oneself and have some pretty convincing arguments, make some nifty observations and get some startling insights. It is all very cool.

And I get to have whole 3 act plays with myself. I get to be the entire play! I write it, direct it, act in it, edit it. I can be very loud if the script calls for it. I end up laughing when I try to be dramatic. Laughter is the best sound my voice makes. Oh yeah, it is very loud too. Think maybe, barking seals. With clapping flippers.

I have to keep that booming voice fine tuned after all. I might need it some day, for a sermon or just to let everyone within 5 blocks know that I am still around. Perhaps I should have been a Sergeant Major like my Dad. Hmmm, maybe that’s where this voice came from. Ya think?

I am not much for making phone calls, the telephone was not my main way of communicating in the past. I tried to keep calls short and sweet.

Now I have marathons.

Before you call me, have your meal, pee break and a nap, because you’re in for a long session. Get comfy.

I’ll never be lonely as I can talk to most anything. Yes even rocks. Now there is a whole other story I will bore you with in a later blog.

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Small Things

In my working, pre-covid days, each morning I would encounter the same people and have a brief chat before I caught the bus. A man waiting in the lobby for his ParaTranspo pick up, the man walking his big dog, the pony tailed young woman returning from her run, the retired bus driver out for his morning walk, the woman playing fetch with her corgi.

All these encounters and more, that I took for granted were a pleasant start to my day. If I didn’t see one of them, I would wonder about their welfare and ask the next time I saw them. Likewise they often enquired about me.

After several months away from this, I do miss it. I don’t go out very much, due to bad legs, a condition and age that ups my covid risk, and of course, I am now unemployed.

How greatly, in small ways, our lives can change in an instant.

Even when they told us to close our office in March, we never foresaw this. We thought, oh, a couple of weeks and all will return to normal. We had no idea.

It isn’t just the big things that changed, like quitting my job of 15 years, but all the little things, like my daily routines and encounters that I didn’t pay much attention to.

I don’t long for the past by any means. I am still processing the shock of huge changes, adjusting to a new way of life I was not prepared for.

In a strange way however, not being ready has made this a grand adventure, where I have no idea of what the future holds. In the past, whenever I have made big changes I spent a long time planning and working them out. I am not a risk taker. This time, I had no plans, only vague ideas of what I might do with lots of time. And I certainly did not envision the changes in the daily small things.

Making this a grand adventure, from my own self inflicted house arrest keeps me from freaking out.