Fully Vaccinated, Again!

The COVID-19 pandemic rages on here locally despite everyone's best or worst efforts to slow it down. We were both fully vaccinated this spring. It turns out that after 6 months or so the Pfizer vaccine that we both got 2 doses of wanes in effectiveness. So, now we have both received a 3rd booster shot. So, we're fully vaccinated again, for now, for however long it lasts again. The pandemic continues to keep us both pretty close to home with no travel plans at all except to Mom's for Christmas. No photos!

Clay's Big Night on his 73rd Birthday

 

Clay's Timpano

Clay reenacted a favorite movie cooking scene from Big Night. He worked for 2 days on this timpano!

We'll be eating it 4 days for dinner!

Timpano Cross-section

Clay baked his cake and ate it! Happy Birthday!

Sunflowers!

For the last several years, excluding 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic, downtown Raleigh has had an 8-acre field of sunflowers every summer. It is part of a city park on the former grounds of Dorothea Dix Hospital. The parks and recreation department harvests the sunflower seeds at the end of the season to produce biofuel for their fleet. We've known about it, but today we finally visited the sunflowers ourselves. It was worth the wait even with the haze in the air!

No Synchronous Fireflies for Us this Year

We got an email notification that we did not receive a lottery pass for viewing the synchronous fireflies. Maybe next year. Maybe not.

That brings me to an update about my Parkinsonism. The tremors, resting and intention, have spread to all 4 limbs and my jaw. I have lost proprioception with the tremor spread. We bought a cycling machine for me and I use it for 30 minutes a day but so far it has had no noticeable positive effect. As to travel, I am struggling enough now with daily self-maintenance that we allowed our $500 deposit credit from last year's canceled American Cruise Line fall foliage Hudson River Cruise to lapse. I think we both thought between COVID-19 insecurity yet and my continued decline that it was a bad idea to try again this fall. We are talking about a long road trip to New England this fall instead, but only thinking and talking. It has the advantage of being flexible and avoiding close quarters. We'll see. 

Fully Vaccinated!

We are both fully vaccinated for COVID-19. There is talk now that later this year or early next year, we'll need booster shots to cover the variant mutation strains of the pandemic virus. We'll see. I think we both have a bit of travel bug even though things haven't returned to normal yet. That being said, we saw this on the news last night! Synchronous Fireflies! They appear every year around the same time, in the same places in the Appalachian Mountains. How did we not know about this? It is like when we didn't know about wintering tundra swans in NC! So, this morning we entered the lottery and we'll find out on May 7th if we won a spot for the first 8 days of June near Gatlinburg, TN. We already missed the window of opportunity for Congaree in SC. Fingers crossed for our 1st trip since the pandemic lockdown in March of 2020.

It's a New Year

 And yet, it isn't. A year ago COVID-19 hadn't even been given its moniker as I recall. It was a bizarre health event happening elsewhere. Now here at home, we are in day 308 of NC's state of emergency. We are well. We haven't suffered as millions of others have but being this careful of avoiding infection still takes a toll. I don't want to complain, we are in good shape. We went to Florida for 2 weeks over the recent holidays and had a nice isolated stay. 

It has just been awhile since I posted so here is my update. Fingers crossed that we'll both have received vaccinations by mid-year and that things will start to improve. We have no plans for the future other than to remain carefully hunkered down and isolated. Best wishes.