Karen C @gamehawk@mastodon.social

Currently playing the game "is this cough just 'welcome back to NJ air quality alerts' or breakthrough covid?"

(98% sure it's the former. Shoulda kept my mask on every minute I was outside yesterday.)

Oh right that's why I stopped using Firefox's bookmarks: while testing out a Pinterest-to-bookmarks thing I accidentally added a contact's Pinterest board. Four times.

She was a journalist, so of course the board was "Drinky."

brb off deleting hundreds of cocktails

Just dug into Firefox's bookmarks, which I never use, and found a folder where I apparently recorded all my open tabs at one point. Including one to Google Reader.

Firefox you are a *hoarder*.

So hopefully we minimized our risks; we have a big fat nothing on our calendar for the next couple weeks so it'll be a sort of informal post-travel quarantine. I've been masking up locally already because of the air quality, so that won't change.

Wichita does not mask up nearly as much as their lower vax numbers mean they should. We masked up to make a grocery run and MIL informed us that the grocery no longer required it; I responded with "but *we* require it." We didn't run into any pushback from strangers, even at the Redneck Walmart.

We didn't leave the airport in either St. Louis or Denver, despite extended layovers. Masking was reasonably well adhered to in the airports. Saw no pax misbehavior either.

So although we didn't make a big fuss about it before/during (house was sitting empty and we haven't gotten the video surveillance thingies set back up), we went back to Kansas for a belated Christmas visit. TBH if Carl's mom wasn't ending every email with "X days left!" I would have postponed because ugh. Family cooked, or we picked up to-go meals for everyone, which was nice because turns out a lot of the stress in visiting is dealing with a large family group in a restaurant.

Carl was correct about the cat forgiveness period; after an hour of nervously pacing around the house, all three cats came to visit me for scritches and Poppi, my personal assistant, will now not stop headbutting me demanding attention (and food).

So it turns out Fort Mifflin still has a Corps of Engineers presence (I thought it was just a museum) and that is the McFarland, a dredger: https://www.dredgingtoday.com/2020/04/24/photo-mcfarland-ready-for-delaware-river-dredging/

River, river, river, blink-and-you'll-miss-Fort-Mifflin and suddenly you're on a runway.

There's a ship docked at Fort Mifflin and I don't know what it is. 🤔

PHL arrivals will never not look like you're about to make a water landing. (It's built on what used to be an island in the Delaware River.)

Someone described the Arch as "a lot going on here" and... yeah. Apparently the museum is less problematic than when I last visited (1981!) but we will not confirm that today.

("Oh, thank you, but I believe I'll just turn it off." At least three people made Silent Thank-You Eye Contact over their masks. I mean I think the guy legit had trouble hearing it, he really did try turning it down and holding it to his ear but we could all still hear it and nobody wanted chipper morning-show hosts pretending to have thoughts about Afghanistan before 7am.)

Being that my name is literally Karen I try to avoid confrontations with strangers but I carry dollar store ear buds in my purse at all times for my kid who has invariably broken hers and today I offered them to a stranger who was playing a news show loudly on transit where other people were trying to sleep or listen on earphones and I'm not at all sorry.

Just once I'd like to empty my purse out and not discover that a packet of honey mustard or whatever has exploded in the bottom of it.

I don't even remember having put a packet of honey mustard in my purse.

(okay weirdly if you *just* change the slider it lets you submit, and if you go back in the phone number and checkbox have been cleared. And then it sends a special little text TO TELL YOU YOU'VE OPTED OUT of texts; just one last little fuck-you)

(Also, not just texts but robocalls. And the CVS recorded voice was like they put out a casting call for "Voice actor who can do the most smarmy, irritating voice possible.")

I really really REALLY hate CVS but Carl's the one with regular prescriptions so I reluctantly accept it as our pharmacy. I signed in to see if my doc had sent the inhaler script I asked for, and:

Can't sign in without giving my cell #.
That automatically signs you up for texts.
Attempting to opt out is... entirely Hotel Californian.

Is it really "consent" if it's not optional?

(The context for that map, BTW, was that channel pointing out this is the worst AQ reading for NYC in fourteen years. We've had smoke from Canadian fires more recently than that, so it's not entirely the smoke; heat/humidity are bad.)