Cool and damp. Because it’s winter in Houston, but I haven’t looked at an actual forecast.
Yesterday’s travel was uneventful. Walked through security, although one of my boots got selected for additional scrutiny… and that did delay me slightly. The club was mostly empty, the airport was not crazy busy, and the plane was full.
I’ll do a longer post with some other observations that I didn’t want to write about on the phone, with swype doing its best to reduce my trenchant observations to gibberish… but here’s a hot wash…
MIL- starting to feel sorry for her. She drives everyone away with her insistence on forcing reality to match the picture in her head, and ends up with nothing. And she’s a kook. The special all day pie baking (with the grandkids) resulted in a burned pumpkin, a kinda tasteless pecan (she halved the sugar and doubled the pecans- because she thinks pecan pie is too sweet), and a delicious apple. She did the apple first and her fussiness drove the kids out of the kitchen afterwards. So she ended up baking pies no one ate, without the grandkids involved. (And fwiw, she’s normally a good cook, if she avoids all the fake low fat crap).
Travel- mine was ok. I was borrowing trouble apparently by thinking it would be hard. I GUESS the days we traveled made all the difference, although I’ve not seen any of the normal T-giving stories about cancelled flights and stranded passengers, in massively crowded airports. Were the airport numbers down? Several articles that did mention numbers conflated driving with flying, so I didn’t see anything real definitive.
COVID and hospitals- one of my wife’s relatives runs ‘stuff’ at [a big hospital that saw a lot of chinaflu patients] she had lots of interesting stuff to talk about. They’ve had 0 wuflu patient days, although the trend is up. They have only a few corona-chan patients at the moment. Like my client’s hospital, they are seeing sick people for the first time who are MUCH further along in the course of their disease than “normal” because those people delayed seeking treatment due to winnietheflu. This is bad. Their treatment is more invasive, more costly, and more often has a bad outcome.
Economy- looking through the supermarket ads in the local paper, the prices weren’t THAT much higher than here, although they were higher, what was missing was meat on sale. They had only one variety in the one store circular, petite sirloin tips, which I never see around here, and it was as much as top sirloin at my local grocery. The other store circular mentions a few cuts of meat, not on sale, just priced, and zero mention of grade. Could be ‘value’, could be prime, you couldn’t tell from the ad. Based on price I’m gonna say they were all probably ‘value’ grade. Also missing were any special deals, like ‘get a free ham with xxx dollars of groceries’, or ‘buy a turkey get a ham’. I saw both of those promos in previous years here in Houston. Very little seafood in the ads, and nothing premium or “high end”. Considering the area, that is particularly weird.
The cousins (younger than me and my wife ) are all gainfully employed (or in school) and agreed that some stuff was crazy high, like used cars, rental cars, and food. One’s in home health care, one is in mental health in schools, a couple were teachers or worked in a school district. None of them see any shortage of work in the future for their fields, especially when it comes to the special needs industry or diabetes.
One uncle had the coof a month ago, and “thank god I was vaccinated or it might have killed me.” I’m pretty sure everyone there was vaxxed, although some that I KNOW were, were reluctant.
The few places we went all had signs saying masks weren’t required if you were vaxxed. No one was checking anything or even asking though.
Gas was $3.44/gallon +- 10c
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It’s good to be home. I’m sleeping late in my own bed. Maybe I’ll make waffles later.
And I’m definitely going to be stacking more food.
(you should too)
nick