A Quiet Sunday

I was having a very pleasant and relaxing weekend and then I made the mistake of trying to see what was happening in the world. Big mistake.

It seems that some in the media have pivoted back to the ‘Rona and are worried about cases rising in certain places. The lack of a simple understanding of the numbers continues to amaze me. I’m not ruling out the possibility that we’ve seen upticks in places but the overall trends are in the right direction.

The problem is that the number of tests has gone up significantly over the period in April when we had our peak. It is true that every week from 4/19 to 5/31, the following two facts were true. One, the number of tests increased. Two, the number of new positive cases went down. So we were testing more and finding less. That’s a good thing.

It is also true that one streak was broken this last week. We did have 3.2 million tests (assuming my source is correct) which was marginally higher than last week. But the number of new positive cases went from 145,598 to 147,209 so we ticked up by less than 2000 cases. And you want to start a new panic over this?

The number of deaths, while still high when compared to other places, is less than half what it was at the peak in mid April. Which means we are (a) doing a better job of keeping it out of high risk populations and/or (b) the cases we are finding are mostly minor or asymptomatic people.

We spent a lot of the weekend trying to keep the wildlife away from one of our bird feeders. I had been using these cylinders laced with hot pepper but that didn’t stop the fox squirrels so I changed it to a normal cylinder. Big mistake. I guess the red pepper kept the raccoons away because last night, I had to take the feeder down because the raccoons were going after it.

Today, my wife applied a little oil to the clamp we use to hang the feeder. That made for some good entertainment watching the squirrels try to climb out to the feeder. Saw a red squirrel later in the afternoon which was the first time they’ve tried to get at this feeder (guess they hate the red pepper as well) and he was sliding all over the place.

There’s a station on the satellite radio that plays music from the 40’s and we’ve kind of made that our go to station in the car. I do love big band music. Its just so happy and uplifting.

I guess part of it is I can live in a little fantasy world while driving. Have you ever just wanted to travel back in time only to live in a particular era for a bit? I think about that all the time. Dancing swing in that actual era to a live band just seems like it would be fun.

I’d also love to go back in time to watch baseball games from different eras. Does that sound strange? Maybe because baseball was the first sport I really started following and the numbers always attracted me. You see photos of these historic players and read descriptions of how the game was played but I just think it would be fun to actually sit in the stands and watch a game. Besides, in a lot of those old eras, the guys all wore hats and that’d be an attraction.

Other people probably want to go back into the past to change history. Me, I just want to watch a ballgame or two.

I don’t know. Living history things have always had a fascination for me. Again, it is just more about understanding how normal people lived back then. And trying to think about what it would be like. Well maybe not the year 536 which sounded pretty horrible.

Guess I’ll just end this now. Its time to get off the computer anyway.