It’s been hard to blog.

I feel bad about letting this blog just wither, but honestly, it’s hard to know where to begin with all the truly godawful shit that is 2020. So, I’ll try to focus on the good things – there are a few.

We are (mostly) all still healthy. We had one case of COVID-19 in the NC branch of the family – my daughter-in-law’s younger sister had it. She’s recovering.

The Trumper Dimwit Governor of Florida reopened the bars last week, so, yeah, we’ll see where our new cases are in two weeks. We are still at around 3K+ new cases a day, so hey, great plan! Asshole.

I’m still getting a paycheck, so that’s good. The job sucks, but it pays the bills. The company remains cautious in its “return to the office” plan, which keeps moving from September to November and as of two weeks ago, I’ll be working from home until January. Yeah.

We are finally experiencing what passes for fall here in FL – tomorrow’s high will be a brisk 83 degrees! No, seriously, that’s going to feel AMAZING after months in the 90s, with heat index temps well into triple digits every day. I haven’t walked in a couple of weeks because the humidity was just more than even I could stand. Tomorrow morning, I walk again.

I’m still writing Postcards to Voters. I have about 30-40 stamps left, and then I think I’ll declare it a wrap for this election. I will have written 200 postcards and used 2 rolls of postage, spending about $110 of my own money, and early voting is starting in some states in a couple of weeks, so it seems like a good stopping point.

The animals are all doing well, NOW. We had to change vets last week. I think I’ve mentioned that my long-time (25+ years) veterinarians sold their practice to VCA as they are winding up their careers and preparing for retirement. Things have gone downhill there, but I was going to stick around until the wife in the husband-and-wife original practice decided she was ready to pack it in. I was going to stick around until last week.

Gidget suddenly stopped eating and drinking, didn’t want to climb the stairs, and was clearly hurting from something. I had no idea what had happened. She wasn’t any better the next morning, so I called the vet’s office. The receptionist heard my description of Gidget’s woes and put me on hold. She came back to tell me that they didn’t have any openings but they could prescribe a medication, or I could drop her off and a vet would look at her at some point during the day.

I asked what kind of medication, and she said it was for nausea. There was no evidence that Gidget was nauseous. She’s a healthy little dog, and she hasn’t seen the vet since she was adopted last November. (At that visit we saw a new doctor I’d never met and didn’t particularly like.)

So, let’s see: we have a dog in pain, a dog y’all saw only once for 5 minutes and haven’t seen in nearly a year, and sight unseen you’ll prescribe a medication? Or I can let her sit in a cage, scared and hurting, until someone “gets around to” looking at her?

I told the receptionist to get my animals’ records together; I’ll tell her where to send them. I called another office that comes highly recommended, they were able to see Gidget at 3.

The new vet seems great; of course with COVID protocols I didn’t actually get to meet her. She said she thinks Gidget hurt her back somehow, and prescribed a pain med. She did not try to upsell me on x-rays or $250 blood tests. We were home in less than an hour, and the entire experience cost $70.

Gidget feels much better, and we have a new doctor.