My 2-week period after my second shot is up tomorrow.
Really looking forward to doing some stuff that I couldn’t do before, or at least didn’t feel comfortable doing. Going to a couple of restaurants we haven’t been to in over a year and a half, going to a movie for the first time in a long time too.
On the other hand, we lost our cat after a long illness one week into our month-long July vacation, so it’s been a pretty stressful and tearful month so far.
Weird side-effect of corona-times that I’ve only noticed this week, is that the fist-bump seems to be established as the new handshake, beating the elbow-bump and foot-tap. Of course, that might only be amongst my Swiss/Austrian/German/British/Greek/Spanish colleagues. I kind of like it anyway.
Also that there’s a particular etiquette developing around mask-wearing in f2f meetings, including asking about vaccinations, opening windows and putting masks back on when needed. I’m sure there are theses that will be written on the sociology and mores of the pandemic.
I’m off to a beer festival tomorrow and have been covid testing myself all week in paranoia after two friends tested positive. You can see the beer list here: https://manchestercraftbeerfestival.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/MCBF-Beer-list-2021.xlsx-Main-Sheet-4.pdf
I’m taking this as an early indication that, despite my best efforts, I am going to get extremely cunted on one too many 7.2% sours, and overhear someone brag about faking their negative test and not being vaccinated, but no way were they missing out, and it all ending in an armed standoff with many dead hostages.
Well, that’s a pretty magnificent-sounding beer menu. Do try to avoid the whole justifiable-homicide thing, it’s just the Fenrir Breaks Free talking.
Also I look forward to some questionable TfM moves. It’ll be fine!
TANK FLY BOSS WALK JAM NITTY GRITTY which at 8% is the weakest beer I’ve had today.
Parental advisory:
Content slightly inappropriate for children follows…also content may be slightly unhealthy for adults as well…we do not take any responsibility for any ruptured diaphragms or head injuries due too much laughing or facepalming/facedesking…
…I lost it when I reached the G.H. reference…
Dear me, I may have found a new fetish of mine…researching official governmental advice for reproductive activities during a global pandemic…
Looks like it might be delta o’clock for New Zealand, and a chance for the country to put its money where it’s mouth is.
2 weeks ago a ship docked at the port of Tauranga. 70 stevedores worked on the ship for 4 days, going home at the end of the day. Unfortunately a ships pilot had boarded the ship in Australia and infected the ship with the delta strain. All 110 dock workers later tested negative.
But here we are, with a community case popping up 2 weeks later in New Zealand most densely populated city. The government warned us after the port incident that any sign of the delta strain would result in a hard and early response, with the highest level of lockdown. No takeaways, delivered or otherwise, no liquor stores, no hardware shops open, no work. After the debacle of the Australian states approach to the delta strain, I can only hope we can do better.
Kiwis can normally be relied to do what they’re told, but a significant minority have been infected by memes from other countries telling them to resist everything for any reason. Combine that selfishness with a slow vaccine rollout and we could be looking down the barrel of an absolute balls up.
Of course, maybe they’ll shut down the cluster before it starts. We can hope.
So there we go. Within 8 hours of one single unvaccinated case, the entire country is strictly locked down for 3 days. The region and city the case is in is strictly locked down for 7 days. The PM was asked if she was confident people would comply, she pointed to the mess Australia was in and hoped kiwis would do what they needed to do.
If we can’t make this work here right now with every advantage we’ve got, then it was never going to work anywhere else, ever.
Fingers crossed for you lot. As long as most people are sensible, it should work out.
Hey hey hey… slow down buddy, don’t lump us West Australians in with that east East Rabble!!!
Yeah, just heard about this from a Canadian expat I know who has essentially moved to New Zealand after getting trapped there for months last year while on vacation. Anyone who has ever played Plague Inc. can say that it’s always the island countries that are tough nuts to crack. Hopefully natural defense and a government that would rather be too stern than too lax will win the day as has been the case up to this point.
I apologise unreservedly for tarnishing the reputation of the good people of Western Australia, and implying they’re involved in the same kind of shithousery we’ve seen in New South Wales.
I’ve got to report this because it’s indicitive and hilarious at the same time. Police broke up a anti lockdown protest today in New Zealand’s 2nd largest city (about half a million people in the metro area)
10 (ten) people showed up to protest. 3 were arrested. That’s 0.002% of the population that felt aggrieved enough to cry about it in public.
I appreciate lockdowns are old news to most of you, but it’s been a year since the last lockdown, and I’ve got bugger all else to do than laugh at the muppets that want to extend it
Good news everyone!
I hope they keep taking it.
It’s been 20 years. More specifically, 19 years, 364 days, as tomorrow I would step on a boat from Jersey City, NJ and make my way to what was left of the World Trade Center. It’s funny, I’ve never related this story to many people but I consider all of you some of my closest friends, despite the fact that we’ve never met. Weird how the internet world works.
I was a 24 year old and had been working as a paramedic at St. Joseph’s Hospital in Paterson, NJ since I turned 19 and graduated medic school. I went to medic school at St. Vincent’s, on 7th Avenue and 11th Street in NYC when I was 18 and kind of aimless, but enjoyed emergency medical services enough to think that dropping 5k on school for a job that paid 16 an hour was a good choice.
Paterson was / is no joke and I’d seen my share of the shit. Shootings, stabbings, burnings, hangings, babies being born, you pick the way someone could live or die and I’d seen it. I knew I knew my shit as a medic and coupled with the idiocy that only a mid twenties year old could have… well.
I was going to nursing school at the time too, as I’d seen the writing on the wall as a paramedic - good job, shit career. Garbage pay, no advancement, no pension, etc. I liked medicine, figured nursing was a good step. Till those old battlewagons tried to tell me how to wash my hands. Literally, there is a test in nursing school on how to wash your hands. I think I knew then and there that it wasn’t for me, but there wasn’t much else going on and the semester was paid, so suck it up, buttercup.
September 11, 2001. It was a beautiful Indian summer day - I can still remember how clear the sky was and how beautiful out it was. I was sitting in nursing school and someone came in and said a plane had crashed into the Trade Center. I remember thinking that some moron in a Cessna had smacked into the building, no big deal. Fifteen minutes later they were dismissing us all and sending us home. I tried calling my then girlfriend from my flip phone but there was no service - all the cell calls were routed through the antennas on top of the WTC, which obviously no longer existed… so I called her from… get this… a pay phone. I still laugh thinking about that - when the hell did anyone last use a pay phone?
Left school, drove the fifteen minutes home, changed into my uniform and went to work since I had a shift that night. We didn’t turn the wheel once - not a single call, which was unheard of. Called my best friend’s wife - he was a FDNY fireman and was ok, thankfully; checked on my dad who had worked in 7 WTC and who had made it out and home too.
Next morning, the 12th, my boss told my partner Mike D. and I that we were going in. Mike was the same age, born the day after me, and we were two of a kind. Same angry outlook on life that only working inner city EMS can give you, same hubris, same fuck the world, we got this attitude. And so we went.
Packed a medic truck - back then a Chevy Suburban - full of all kinds of extra shit that we thought we’d need. Drove to Jersey City as part of a loosely organized Task Force; this was before the days when they realized that maybe pre-planning for shit was a smart thing to do. Once we got to JC, everything was a threat; we chased random abandoned packages around on standby, sat near the PATH train cause there was someone suspicious, and generally sat in a state of hyper vigilance for two or three hours.
Around 1000 they sent us over to the Trade Center on a boat. Don’t ask me what kind, I don’t even remember. But I do remember the motion of the waves and the boat rocking, since those are my flashbacks and nightmares.
We got to the site and it was the greyest grey you’d ever seen. It’s funny - I finally joined the WTC Health Program, mostly so that if I get a weird cancer it doesn’t kill my insurance for my kids - and they always ask what protective gear we were given. Protective gear? lmao? They gave us surgical masks and our uniforms and sent us in to breathe ash and paper and people and chemicals and jet fuel and god knows what else. The whole landscape was grey. Grey ground, grey air, grey ash raining from the sky. The only color you’d see was a fire burning somewhere or maybe the red of a destroyed fire truck or ambulance somewhere. The destruction was like nothing I’d seen before or seen since and there honestly aren’t words to describe it.
The worst part of the whole damn thing? There wasn’t anyone to help. Here we were, the highest trained prehospital medical providers you could ask for, certifications a mile long, acronyms for what we knew that would make you blind, skills that even ER nurses and doctors couldn’t do… and not a patient in sight. We walked around for a while, looked for something to do or someone to help… not a bean.
At some point the commander made the call to wrap it up. I don’t remember how we got back to NJ. The only thing I remember was driving back to our base on Route 21, which is a nightmare of a curvy highway, at over 100 mph and Mike telling me to slow down. Got back to base, drove home, bawled my eyes out, drank a scotch the size of your head, had a shower, banged the then girlfriend just to feel something, and passed out.
The boss asked us to go back the next day and I said no, I didn’t have it in me. I still live with and regret that decision, although my therapist thinks it was a good choice and self protective. Spent that next day scrubbing my boots - they were caked in that grey ash, although I never wore them again. Still have them sitting on a shelf in my office to this day.
I’ve lived with nightly nightmares and daily flashbacks for twenty years, not believing that I was deserving of help for only being there 14 hours or so. I’m glad I finally registered with the WTC health program and have gotten medical and psychological help, but fuck me if PTSD isn’t the worst fucker you’ve met. Survivor guilt, mood swings, hyper vigilance, rage for no reason, tuning out at unpredictable times (always great when the wife or kids are telling you something important)… and the best part is that the moods are like wheel of fortune. Spin that shit, who know what you’ll land on. And the wheel spins constantly. Worst game show ever. I still hate the sound of waves, won’t get on a boat, and haven’t been back to lower NYC since. I’ve also got acid reflux from breathing in all that weird shit - can’t eat a cracker without getting heartburn - constant sinus infections from it too, and who knows what else will rear it’s ugly weird asbestos head in the coming years… Spent a lot of years afterwards in self destructive behavior - financially irresponsible, hypersexual, a lot of relationships with married women that wouldn’t go anywhere. Basically living life like there wasn’t a future…
Not sure after this lengthy post where I was intending to go with it, or that I even had an intention. I guess the moral of the story is that if you’re suffering with something don’t be a schmuck and wait twenty years to address it?
Eta: this is the most realistic video I’ve been able to find to what it was like
The boss asked us to go back the next day and I said no, I didn’t have it in me.
There’s no shame in not fucking yourself up further. Life does quite enough of that as it is. The world will quite happily chew you up. Keeping yourself alive and functional is the main way you get to keep helping people.
I guess the moral of the story is that if you’re suffering with something don’t be a schmuck and wait twenty years to address it?
Sesame Street should have a 9/11 episode, and I’m only half-joking. We need ways to deal with trauma that aren’t self-destructive on a large scale. Awful lot of people out there carrying a lot of shit and getting crushed by it. Thank you for dumping some of it.
I can’t even imagine the shit you saw that day and what it must be like to deal with it. Thanks for feeling like you could tell the story here—anything you gotta do to get by, do it.
Thank you for sharing. Means a lot and you have my deepest support!!!
