Rft got me a Vado ultralight sweater (made of Polartech Alpha Direct fleece, just by itself for super lightness and breathability), after I was asking some more hiking-oriented friends about layering recommendations. It's great!
I hadn't heard of that brand. It looks nice. I was looking at what I think is a similar hoodie from Timmermade, but decided I'd bought too many layers already.
Ume, who had found me convulsed with laughter in front of the screen one day at a commercial for this thing, secretly bought me one. The little eyes! The pointy nose! The Australian crawl action! Well, OK, I haven't actually tested it in the bathtub. It may turn out to be no fun at all in reality. But I don't care. Best present ever, really.
The only thing I refuse to believe of it is that it could ever catch a fish.
OMG! What fish do you have in your local water?
My Myles Garrett jersey is arriving today, a little bit late for Christmas. I am very excited about this. Its an upgrade to my Johnny Manziel jersey.
6: A Cleveland Browns fan???? Poor football!
My kids' high school and college are doing terrific jobs of Covid-control, and we are all vaccinated and boosted. We just finished our four-person family Christmas, and the wider family Christmas, which had been set for two weeks from now, has been appropriately canceled (or postponed).
My wife is semi-convinced she had Covid last week, but testing around here has been a mess, so we never got it checked. In any event, she's fine now after a mild illness. None of us took any real precautions, and nobody else got sick.
I know that civilization is crumbling around me, and I sympathize with those of who are poorly positioned to weather this nightmare, but I haven't felt this generally optimistic about the pandemic since July (when, of course, my optimism proved rather ill-founded).
8: Preposterous optimism is a common trait in Cleveland Browns fans.
I hope this isn't off topic, (though with the OP what is on topic?)
My brother and his kids came up to NY at my folks' place for Christmas but my brother is catching a trip (he's a pilot) and one nephew is going back to Florida (for the best really, he caught COVID last year, is unvaxxed, and has been going to the gym the past two days). The other nephew is staying and he loves NYC, I'd like to take him in but what should we/can we do? Last summer I took him to the Met and out to dinner. It would be great to have some safe options (this one is fully vaxxed btw).
9: They can totally still make the playoffs.
I'm mulling over whether I'm comfortable going to a New Year's party. 100% vaccinated, not necessarily 100% boosted, 10 people, indoor, all rapid-tested.
I know it's not a reason to act like I'm invulnerable, long COVID &c&c, but the number going around Twitter of death rates per 100k being 6.1 for unvaccinated, 0.5 for vaccinated, 0.1 for boosted, is pretty cheering. One in a million!
Plus, if you've never been stabbed, you can't be sure you aren't a highlander-style immortal.
The river here holds (yellow) perch, (northern) pike and Zander (walleye, more or less). I cannot believe any of them would go for that bat. But it's a product of a Chinese company marketing to American bass fishermen in the first place, and to Europeans who want to emulate them after that. Ask me about the difference between a Carolina- and a Texas-rigged plastic worm, go on.
The unique thing about working class fishing in England is the absolute taboo against eating or killing your catch. Perch are really good to eat, and so are Zander; zander, as an invasive species, are even legal to kill. But it was a major source of xenophobic friction when eastern European immigrants started to kill and eat their catches here.
I believe this is a result of early and intense industrialisation, when fishing was about the only way the working class could get out into the countryside en masse and enjoy themselves legally. If they had killed and eaten what they caught, the rivers would have been emptied in no time; and since the fishing rights were hired collectively, by clubs, a collective conservationist solution emerged and was imposed.
(previous comment to Charley's question)
Per minivet, I worked out in November that if my heart thing gets symptomatic, I have a one in 2,000 chance, more or less, of dying on any particular day in the next three years. Which is amazingly comforting when you ask yourself if this is going to be the day.
12 You're probably safe from the corona virus, but there's no escape from the fact that unless the Grateful Dead are playing, NYE is basically bullshit, and the Grateful Dead ain't playing.
Hey NW, whats the difference between a Carolina- and a Texas-rigged plastic worm?
Have the reprobates accepted or rejected wordle?
https://www.powerlanguage.co.uk/wordle/
I got in 4 today.
Currently halfway home from spending the last several days in VT with my family. Some kind of illness was going around, but multiple covid tests came back negative and it seems more like a stomach bug anyway. Other than that it was fun. Atossa got to play out in the snow a lot. Or I should say, is getting to, because she's still up there for another week. The coming week will be our longest childfree period since 2019.
We were talking about how we've basically gotten sick every year at Christmas. Partly that's that we usually spent a few days in NYC and sometimes caught something there. One year we got two different illnesses.
Christmas is such a terrible time for family gatherings when people are spread around the country. The weather messes up your travel, and everyone gets sick.
My son and I went to see Spider-Man and now I know secrets that I can't tell people. We were probably safe, wearing masks and sitting like 10 feet from all but one random guy.
I am middlin' relaxed about Covid, and I really want to see Spider-Man. But even I won't sit in a theater with strangers for a couple of hours.
I also haven't had a professional haircut since early 2020. But my daughter is getting better at it, and I never get fancy haircuts in any event. (In truth, there's really not enough hair involved to get stressed about it.)
I tried to get to an empty theater for Spider-Man by going early afternoon on a weekday. Unsuccessful. Good movie though.
The nudity was very tasteful and essential to advance the plot.
We saw Dune and West Side Story in the theater, but that was pre-Omicron. No one is in town because of break so I probably couldn't get Omicron by going to the theater. I really want to get it now instead of after classes start, but it's difficult to do so with all the students out of town and most businesses closed for a week.
We've seen naked spiders before, Moby.
There's "naked" and there's "nude."
24: I'm not relaxed about Covid and am basically in self imposed lockdown this month, but I a couple of haircut even before I got vaccinated. I got nervous the first time I went post vaxx with everybody unmasked, but then I went back and the mask mandate had been reinstated. I'll make an appt with the new stylist is February.
Maybe I can find one in the suburbs instead of going into the city.
London curves. Cases may have peaked super-quick. If hospitalizations do the same it may be at least better than last winter.
Is it clear that this is a real decline and not an artifact of the holidays? You often see incorrect numbers around holidays showing a false decline because people can't get tested.
Or because they are avoiding testing so they don't miss out on the figgy pudding.
Sleepless in Cornelia.
I may have just found peak NYT Covid know-nothingism.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/12/28/us/covid-deaths.html
Article on shifting demographics of Covid mortality since the availability of vaccines.
For instance: The change in death rates among groups is starker by race and ethnicity, and the death rate has risen particularly sharply for middle-aged white people. Covid-19 now accounts for a much larger share of all deaths for that group than it did before vaccines were widely available. and maps showing counties whose death rates from Covid have gone up or down since then which exhibit a, um, certain pattern*.
Not even mentioned in the article is political leaders and partisanship. It is kind of breathtaking.
*To be the fair there some nuances in the patterns that run counter to partisanship but cone the fuck on.
Oh. Wrong thrad I guess.
I am not a crank.
33: There's definitely pre-holidays evidence that omicron peaks fast (from eg South Africa, but also from smaller, localized outbreaks). I don't think there's consensus on that yet.
12: Obv depends on your personal definition of comfort, but ISTM that that's a lot of belts & suspenders.
Sentimentally, the best gift was that my sister decided fairly late in the game to come visit, and we had a lovely 4 days with her.
Objectively, the best gift was the seat bag she got me for my road bike. It's an expandable one (kind of like a drybag, you can roll it up if it's empty) that enables me to more easily use that bike for longer rides for which I don't want my heavy touring bike with its rack & panniers. It's something I very much wanted but couldn't really justify the price, and which I didn't expect her to get for me. Which is one of the 2 best kinds of gifts IMO (the other being the perfect item you didn't even know you wanted).
Financially, the best gift was the $9k the SBA deposited in my account last night, no strings attached, which I wasn't really expecting to get and if I did, I thought would be a much smaller number. We just put a $26k roof on the house (after years of leaks and temporary solutions), and this means that we won't have to take out a loan to do so.