Catchy Name Needed

I apparently haven't posted here since that week I stayed home sick back in March. Man, that seems like eons ago. Usually I think time goes whooshing by incredibly fast, but pandemic time seems to have changed that. The first couple of months, especially, seemed to crawl by. I've heard other people say that too, but I wasn't even cooped up at home all the time, so I found it a bit surprising. (I'm sure I said some of this way back when, but I'll repeat it since I'm sure not everybody remembers what I said months ago!)

Our workplace closed for two months. Our immediate workplace, that is - but since we work for an academic medical center we are automatically "essential" employees. I ended up working something similar to my normal part time hours, in the mostly-empty building with maybe three to six other people, doing spreadsheets and later working on setting our software up to do what we needed to do for the way we are running now that we're open again. Rob ended up working in the hospital on the mainland, screening people coming in and out of the building. He did it for, like seven weeks. He kind of enjoyed it for a while, as a change of pace, but I think by the end he was totally ready to come back.

So for those of you who don't know this already, where we work is a gym. We had to shut down because it was in the orders the governor gave for the initial shut-down, in the middle of March. In May Texas started opening up again, and we got the go-ahead to open in mid-May. Normally we are open 7 days a week, about 360 days a year, from very early in the morning until late at night. (In the old world I think we were only closed about 6 hours in the middle of the night, at least on weeknights.) In the new world, we still open very early in the morning, but we close earlier at night, and we're not open at all on weekends. The first couple of weeks we were at 25% capacity and then we went up to 50%. We doubled up on housekeepers and so far so good. We work on a reservation system, which was the thing that I mentioned that I worked on setting up. People complain about it a lot - I complain about it a lot - but it does work. And there's no Covid running rampant here like there's supposed to be in Houston. There are cases, but they're pretty scattered.

Life is kind of gradually seeming more normal. Normal, except with masks, I guess? We go out to eat once in a while - cautiously. We go in stores occasionally - but I've always bought a lot of stuff online anyway. (My Amazon profile says I've been buying stuff there since 1999.)

Rob is buying a new car. And my sister came down here last week and bought a house, no less! In our old home-town, which is pretty close to me, and that's what seemed to have been her motivation. (She bullied her husband into it somehow.)

I put the UT icon on this post because I heard this week that both UT and A&M are going to try to play football. I don't see how you can do socially distant football, but I guess we'll find out.

I'm not saying you're actually going to get 7 kinds of random here, but I'm pretty sure that the only way I'm going to get an entry out tonight is to loose the random.

Well, ok, let's start with some updates on things I've talked about previously: first of all, the Texans lost rather ignominiously on Monday Night Football. But hell, they had those injury problems that we had talked about, and it was New England in Foxboro in December and if you read between the lines when I was talking about it before, I wasn't really holding my breath for a victory there. But hey, we're still 11-2. Most teams would give their eyeteeth to be in the Texans' size 14 shoes. We'll see what happens with Indianapolis this weekend.

Also, regarding the cruise ships, this was big news in Galveston this past week: Disney has decided to leave earlier than anticipated. (It looks like the rest of that article is behind a pay wall now, darnit.) Anyway, they're still staying through 2013, they're just not going into 2014 as they had previously hinted they might. And apparently the other suitor for those berths was going to be Princess Cruises, but they have decided to go further inshore and go out of LaPorte. (It's always possible that that will not work out, anyway; LaPorte has had a couple of flings in the past at being a cruise ship departure city and it never seems to work out too well. We'll see.)

I stayed home from work today because I had a sore throat. (I say I stayed home; I didn't drive to Galveston, is what I mean, but I ended up doing several hours of work anyway.) What I really was leading to here, though, was that I have been sick for pretty much the last month now. I'm pretty sure I caught a cold on top of my normal fall allergies, and I was sick for the 10 days or so immediately before Thanksgiving, and since then I've had trouble shaking it. I've been through bags and bags of cough drops. I am getting better, but really slowly. And every few days I get these sore throats, which are usually bad in the morning but then go away again. It's very annoying. I'm pretty sure it's just allergies, but with the way it keeps dragging on, you gotta wonder. (But then what is it? Strep throat? I dunno. I suppose I might should go to the doctor and see what they say. But I hate to.)

I started sending out Christmas cards, finally - I had 5 people on the TUS list who were out of the country, so I did them first, and they're all mailed, and today I started working on the rest of the list. TUS people (until I run out, anyway) are getting some of my precious hoarded cards that I made myself. I've been footling around with more homemade cards this year but haven't gotten far. Anyway, I'm going to use up last year's stash first, some of which are very cute. (I also have Grinch cards and... something else that was on the morbid side... that I'm really tempted to give to my elderly neighbors just to wake them up a bit. But I probably won't.)

We went to see The King's Speech this afternoon - I liked it more than I expected to. I liked it quite a lot, actually, and the rest of the audience seemed to too. The theater was almost full, too. I have been looking up various members of the royal family on Wikipedia ever since I got home.

I didn't come straight home, though, I dropped Rob off and went and got a sandwich at Schlotzsky's and then went to Starbucks, where I read about OB/Gyn codes for a couple of hours, in preparation for my interview on Tuesday. (Today I read about procedure codes, and tomorrow I need to do diagnosis codes; then I'll be as prepared as I reasonably can be, I think.)

I've apparently gotten over yesterday's relapse. I'm still sucking on cough drops, but that's not so bad. I always manage to be sick sometime between Christmas and New Year's, that's just inevitable.

I hear that the Texans actually won today - I suppose it taped, so I guess I'll have to watch it this time, instead of erasing it like I've been doing most of the year. Usually I've already heard before I get around to watching that they lost, and then it's too depressing to watch it. I'm just not enough of a masochist for that.

( Minor Spoilers for Those Damn Martin Books )

We went to the town Christmas parade tonight. I am very amazed because we never do things like this. But it's not like it was any trouble - we weren't even sure when it was, but we went out for an early dinner and when we came back people were gathering on the side of the road with their lawn chairs, so we knew it must be pretty soon. Actually nobody had "lawn chairs" in the sense that I think of them, the old folding ones with the plastic webbing. Everybody I saw had those newer kind that seem to be made out of fabric and some sticks. (You can tell I've never put one of those together; I have no idea how they actually work.) So we went home and we got our old plastic-webbing lawn chairs, which is all we have, and we walked the half a block over to the main street where the parade would be. We still had to wait for a bit, but it wasn't too terribly long. I don't mind as long as I have somewhere to sit and something to look at - there was plenty of that, what with all the kids running around and stuff.

I suspect that the parade wasn't as well attended as usual because Friendswood High School was in the state semi-finals and was playing at Kyle Field in College Station. (I just found out, via Google and Dave Campbell's Texas Football, that they got beat rather badly.) But it was still a nice little parade. At other times of year, I usually think little dinky local parades are kind of pitiful (I may be a little snobbish about this) but somehow colored lights make everything look different, and boy, everything was covered with them. There weren't any bands - I was wondering if normally the high-school band participates, but naturally they were otherwise occupied today. But there were kids marching and there were antique cars and there were a quite a few fire-trucks (some of them were antique too) and a couple of beauty queens and, well, all kinda stuff. It was such a small parade that people on the floats would look right at you and wave, so that you felt compelled to wave back.

I struck up a conversation with a lady standing nearby with her grandchildren while we were waiting on the parade to start, and she said that the fire-trucks drive around between now and Christmas and give out candy to random kids. Man, this really IS a small town.

I forgot to talk about Texas getting beat by the dreaded Texas A&M, but as you might deduce from the fact that I forgot, it didn't really upset me too much. I had already pretty much formed the opinion that this year's Longhorn team wasn't winning any awards, and frankly, my #1 concern as we were losing was that this would somehow save Coach Fran's job, because somewhere along the line I decided that I don't like that man. Luckily for me, he resigned after the game - which says to me that he was going to get fired no matter what, he just beat them to the punch. I don't know why I care, I pretty much believe, ascolumbina says, that all football coaches are petty megalomaniacs - and I have been around enough of them to know. But anyway, I did care a bit, for whatever reason, and he is gone from A&M, and we will just have to see who the next megalomaniac in line is. (I guess Mack's job is safe for now - at least I haven't heard anything to the contrary. We did win a national championship a couple of years ago, after all. But the heat is sure to be turned up just a little higher next year, just the same.)

I put the new (green) tree up today - I figured if I didn't it wouldn't get put up for two weeks, at least. It's not completely decorated but it has lights and a star and a lot of the older glass balls out of mine and Mom's collection, both - I love the vintage ones. I even have some that I bought on eBay, I like them so much. But the ones that are "family heirlooms" are even better. I'm also looking through my ornaments for stuff that I don't really love or just think I can part with, for whatever reason, and I'll probably take them up to work and see if people want them. I have an enormous collection of ornaments, have you figured that out? And I'm probably going to put up two trees - I still have the little white tree, after all, I'm thinking I will put it on the dining room table. It's smaller than the green one, although not by much. I'm pretty sure the two little trees together won't hold as much as our old big trees did, and I had enough ornaments to decorate a big tree with stuff still left over. So a lot of ornaments are going away. Which will make Rob happy, I think. I really do have too much Christmas stuff, I know that.

(Oh, my mother had an all-pink tree, I don't know if I've ever said that. I mean, the tree itself wasn't pink, but the ornaments were. And I brought some of them home, the ones that I like, and I am going to try doing the pink theme on the white tree, which seems like it ought to work. I may hate it but I thought I would at least try it out. If I don't like all-pink maybe I'll try all-pastel or something.)

Back to football - the Texans lost today (making them 5-6, so by Texans standards they're doing ok). I also watched a good bit of the Chicago-Denver game, which ended up being rather exciting, and just now I watched the end of New England game, which also had more excitement than just about anybody expected, I gather. I don't dislike New England the way a lot of people seem to (inevitably, under the circumstances), and in fact I was sort of happy to see them come back. I'm interested in seeing if they can really go undefeated. I think this was the closest anybody's come this year to beating them, isn't it? (Obviously I have not been following this all that closely.)

This weekend went really fast, even at twice the usual length. I thought maybe staying home so much would make it seem longer, but no. Still flew by. I do have a four-day week this week, because I'm going to Austin early Friday afternoon. Meaning I'll be packing to leave before I know it.