Note to Self

ladder-stepladder-stairs-stepsStepstools and ladders and stairs, oh my.

Last week Sy, Donna’s friend Millie’s husband, took a bad fall. We think he was using a step stool, and of course was home alone when it happened. Saturday, he took a sudden turn for the worse and was hospitalized. He died a couple of hours ago, and Donna’s on her way to Millie’s to lend what support she can. Millie’s five years older than Donna; Sy was in his 90s.

While we were in Las Vegas last week, we visited Sandy, the recently widowed wife of Donna’s cousin Howard. Shortly before Howard was hospitalized and put into hospice care, he’d gotten up on a ladder while home alone and was found hours later on the patio, unable to extricate himself from the collapsed ladder or pull himself up. Howard was just three years older than us.

The guest bedroom at our son and daughter-in-law’s Las Vegas house is on the second floor, and I found myself taking extra care going up and down the stairs. Our elderly dachshund Mister B fell down those same stairs during our visit and is still hobbling around, five days later.

Stepstools and ladders and stairs, oh my … and Covid.

There’s a statement at the bottom of the invitation to Howard’s memorial service. It reads “Please be respectful and leave the Politics and/or Covid conversations for another time.”

No, we didn’t ask, and no, Sandy didn’t talk about it. We understand multiple factors were involved in Howard’s death, Covid being one of them. We don’t know if he was vaccinated but think he was (Sandy and the rest of her family definitely are). Howard and Sandy’s daughter, a woman in her 40s who worked as a nurse, is a Covid long-hauler who contracted the virus before there was a vaccine and will likely be on supplemental oxygen the rest of her life. Her experience would have been a wakeup call for any family.

And Beth, our daughter-in-law, who contracted Covid in her 5th grade classroom in Las Vegas despite being vaccinated and boosted, who told us at the time that her symptoms were mild and lasted only a few days, now tells us she’s experiencing lingering effects — she’s lost most of her sense of taste and so far it isn’t coming back.

So anyway, note to self (and Donna too): stay the hell off stepstools, ladders, and stairs, and keep masking in public.

I mentioned mobbed gas stations in yesterday’s road trip after-action report. I wasn’t exaggerating. We pulled into a Love’s truck stop outside of Kingman, Arizona on our drive home Sunday and encountered a scene like this:

gas station chaos

The pumps were right there as we turned into the lot and everyone was lined up facing them, but then some assholes started pulling around the sides and going in backwards, against the flow, blocking everyone else in. It was chaos, an end-of-civilization moment, and there’s not the slightest doubt in my mind some of those blocked-in drivers were armed and close to drawing their weapons. I think we’ll be staying off the roads for a while.

But hey, here’s a happy thing, seen on a TV show called Billions:

D0D70F99-C622-4749-8019-09E814283278

How about that? Not to quibble, though, but shouldn’t they have mentioned the beer at the end?

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