1. I received my Covid shot on Tuesday. I chose Pfizer and made a point of not taking the Covid and flu shots at the same time. Aside from a little tiredness on Wednesday, I noticed no ill effects from the vaccine.
2. Better safe than sorry. I know the vaccine won't protect me completely, and I may still catch Covid if I'm not careful, but I am doing my best to stay healthy.
3. That includes trying to eat better, which is always a struggle. Why is it that my body seems to crave the very foods I'm not supposed to eat? When I try to eat better, sometimes a salad makes me feel worse than if I'd eaten a candy bar.
4. Taking care of yourself is a full-time job, one that I wasn't taught to do well by my parents. They didn't exercise, or make a point of leisure. They worked. Hard. And I was brought up to do the same.
5. That said, my inability to "work hard" has a tendency to leave me depressed. My body let me down with its endometriosis and gallbladder attacks and now adhesions in my gut that cause pain during 90 percent of my day.
6. However, I am still sticking to the walking on the treadmill. I am stuck at 20 minutes a day for the moment, but that's 20 minutes of walking I wasn't doing but am doing now. Pats on the back to me for sticking with it in spite of the pain.
7. We have voted already. Early voting started in Virginia in September, and last week we went and cast our votes. I was voter number 1,555, according to the counter that a poll worker helpfully pointed out to me to ensure I could see that my vote was cast and counted by the machine. I do wonder if since I know that if my secrecy of my vote is secure. I'm assuming the vote papers land in a nice little pile. Couldn't a poll worker simply count to 1,555 and say, "Aha! I know how she voted now!" ?
8. I was writing about voting security back in the early 2000s, when this county switched to what they called Win voting machines. They were all electronic, no paper to see anywhere, and I did not consider them secure in the least. I wrote a couple of articles about it, though if I am remembering correctly, they were mostly, "Yes, the voting machines are safe" articles because the voter registrar said so. At the time using the Internet for research wasn't so predominate so it was difficult to find an opposing opinion. Without seeing the articles, I don't recall if I found one.
9. It wasn't that I was a voting conspiracy theorist, I just felt like paper ballots allowed for a trail in the event of something happening. What if the power had gone out? No one could vote. I wasn't concerned about "illegal voters" or anything like that. I was just concerned about the security of the machines themselves. So were other people.
10. I used to think some conspiracy theories were harmless. Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster, for example. Now we have conspiracy theories that are detrimental to a lot of people and are causing harm to many. Now I don't think any of them are harmless.
11. Home is where the heart is, and it's where I spend way too much time. It's just easier. And hopefully here I can do no harm.
12. The recent flooding in the mountains from Hurricane Helene have brought back a lot of memories. These old mountains flood terribly when a tropical front stalls over them. I remember the flooding from Hurricane Camille in 1969, Hurricane Agnes in 1972, and the flooding from 1985 (which I don't think was associated with a hurricane, but the remnants of a tropical storm). It doesn't happen often, but when it does happen, it's bad.
Here's a video of the Flood of '85.
13. Mother Nature is vicious sometimes. But what would we do without her? I feel bad for the folks who were flooded out in various communities on the east coast. I also know that help arrives as quickly as it can. Sometimes all you can do is help yourself. Maybe most of the time.
*I really don't like these TTs where my brain just wanders all over the place.*
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I like the stream of consciousness. I wrote about voting machines too. One was called Voting Machine Voodoo and was published in Common Dreams.
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