a negative result, a celestial happening, and political and pandemic revelations

The crescent moon Wednesday night with that faint pinpoint of light straight above being the planet Jupiter. Saturn was above and slightly to the left  of Jupiter but too faint for my phone camera to pick up. They're getting closer with the conjunction only 3 days away on the winter solstice when they will be lined up to appear as one big bright star.

I got my test results late Tuesday afternoon...negative.

We went to Costco Wednesday late morning. I figured Tuesday or Wednesday would be the least crowded days. Wrong! It was packed when we got there, long register lines all the way down the aisles but by the time we got our goods and headed that way it had cleared out so only two people ahead of us at the register.

And yesterday was my volunteer day. The guy whose wife was positive was there when I first got there but they must have asked him to leave because not long after he was gone. And then I went over to Pam's all the way across the street! to check out her new Tuff Shed storage building which they delivered and then put together on Tuesday but it got dark before they finished, were supposed to return Wednesday, were supposed to return yesterday, are supposed to be here today to shingle the roof and finish (they were and did). Then off to the grocery store where I spent far too much time for the few items on my list, unorganized going from one side of the store to the other several times, and then walked the dog, did the dishes since they had reached critical mass, shelled nuts for an hour and a half, cleaned up the kitchen again after dinner, went to bed at 9:30 with my book.

Today the big plan is to take the accumulated newspapers to the vet and fill the bird feeder now that I got the giant bag of birdseed from Costco.

Since my days are pretty blah and boring, I guess I'll get political. The nation is continuing to be under attack from the Trump administration. It has now come out that his coronavirus pandemic team's goal was to get as many Americans infected as possible as fast as possible for herd immunity and the 300,000+ and rising death toll was just the price to pay and they have been quite successful as over a million Americans are getting infected every week. Now Governor DeSantis of Florida and a few other republicans have decided that they are smarter and know better than the scientists and doctors who developed the two dose vaccine and are saying that the first shot is sufficient to provide protection and that way twice as many people can be vaccinated, meanwhile millions of doses of the vaccine available to the US sit in a warehouse waiting for the Trump administration to tell Pfizer where to send them and some states have been told they're only getting half the doses promised. Why are they dragging their feet you might ask? Well, Moderna's vaccine is due to be given emergency use by the FDA any day now and guess who has invested in Moderna? So, yeah, it's all about what's best for Trump as always.

As if that's not bad enough, we all know that Trump fired the pandemic response team left behind by Obama and Biden and we are experiencing the result of that, but Trump also decimated the cybersecurity department leaving only the unqualified behind and basically opening the door to Putin's hackers who have been tromping around in our government systems, including the nuclear weapons agency, for 9 months. The few experts left have no idea what all they got into, how far, how deep, how many other back doors they installed, or what national security secrets they got access to. And just like Trump had nothing to say about the revelation of Putin putting bounties on American soldiers in Afghanistan, he has nothing to say about this cyber security attack. It would not surprise me to learn that this was all arranged in one of Trump's secret meetings with Putin. And how did the Defense Department react? They canceled all meetings with Biden's transition team until after the holidays.

Trump himself is quadrupling down, insisting he won because he got more votes than last time, egged on by his advisers who, every time Trump starts to show signs of acceptance, convince him (easily enough as he doesn't seem to grasp the concept that the person who gets the most  votes wins) that he did indeed win, while certain other political hacks are calling for him to declare martial law to remain in office and threatening to object when the EC votes go to Congress for ratification. So this is all he is focused on, fighting to keep a job he hates, doesn't really want, and barely does. In the meantime his neighbors at Mar A Lago have filed suit to prevent him from making it his residence, which legally he can't do.

And the republicans in Georgia have gone bat shit crazy filing more frivolous lawsuits that keep getting thrown out to reverse Biden's win in that state as well as to suppress the vote for the Senate run-off election. They are pissed that the republican in charge of the election there has added more drop boxes and want them removed or at least locked after dark. He's making it too easy for  black people to vote! So while they're fighting to keep control of the Senate, they're busy eating their own.

Later the same day...

Well, I dawdled too long and failed to get the newspapers to the vet which closes at noon on Fridays. I did, however, fill the bird feeder, take the box of books that a neighbor gave us a year ago to the little library across from the post office and they all fit! And as the floors in the lower part of the house had also reached critical mass I swept. Took the staghorn ferns out for a good watering as well as the bird of paradise which has sent up two bloom stalks (it always wants to bloom late fall into winter), watered all the plants inside, walked the dog and that's it for me. I put on my comfy I'm-not-leaving-the-house-again pants, I'm going to grab my book, and occupy the couch for the rest of the night.

I'm behind on reading all your posts and I may or may not try to catch up but I'll be back around tomorrow.

And in case you were wondering, this is what the fire spike looks like after the flowers fall off.