tracker7 | Entries tagged with covid

Elton John is playing here in Louisville tonight - something like a year after the concert's original date. Yay pandemic. Tickets are available, and for a few minutes I thought about going, but a seat starts at $70 plus fees, so, no.

I do miss live shows. I think the last big arena show I saw was, in fact, Elton John and Billy Joel on some incarnation of their Face to Face tours - I know I saw them twice, and Billy Joel solo a couple of times. Smaller shows and venues got my money in the years after arena show costs went through the roof - Lucinda Williams at the Lexington Opera House and The Midnight (swoon) at Headliners, the last show I saw before Covid-19 did its thing.

I spent a lot of the last week sleeping. More than usual, I mean. 12, sometimes 14 hours a day in bed or on my couch. A lot of ibuprofen, a lot of orange juice - and why do I forget how delicious orange juice is until I'm sick? This stuff is divine.

Rain, then ice and freezing rain Wednesday and Thursday. Roads were treacherous. Not much more than that, thankfully.

Added a fifth player to the CP Red game. Good decision, both because of the slightly deeper player pool, and Mike is very sharp and entertaining.

Spending a couple of days at the farm with Dad. We have a tiny conundrum - he caught a skunk today, and, well, what do we do with it? Try to let it out of the trap and it'll almost certainly spray us. Probably going to have to just shoot it.

It's been a week.

I bought a varmint rifle. A Savage 93 in .17HMR, nice little bolt-action gun. Factory-installed scope, really smooth action. I was looking forward to going down to Mom&Dad's and breaking it in, but ...

I started getting sick late Friday night. Woke up very weak Saturday morning, you-know-what symptoms. Stayed in bed as much as possible. Same thing Sunday, after sleeping for about 15 hours.

The Bengals beat KC and are going to the Super Bowl for the first time in forever, playing against the LA Rams, at the Rams' home field. This has been the best wildest craziest NFL playoff season I've ever seen.

Anyway, still sick Monday. Scheduled a test, positive result this morning. Whee.

The Mariner is still behaving. I'll take it.

Lost one of my characters in this afternoon's MCC session. It had always been a glass cannon - a high-strength low-stamina Plantient, maxing out its hit points at nine at third level. Soidee's demise leaves Stout Evan, the Sentinel, as the last survivor from the four zero-level characters I started with.

COVID-19's Delta variant is the new big thing, very infectious, even among vaccinated folks. CDC is recommending masks again, so of course those kinds of people are losing their shit again.

Norton Hospital has their vaccination clinic process down, y'all. The nearby site I went to is in a former retail space, plenty of parking outside and space inside so we're not tripping over each other. I got there a couple of minutes before my appointment time, and time from getting the forehead temperature scan to injection was about four minutes. Insurance and personal information, allergy and related questionnaire, alcohol swab, shot, bandage, done. Stay on site for about 20 minutes to watch for negative reactions, and that's it. I had some soreness at the point of injection for about 40 hours, but nothing more. Second shot is on April 27.

John Boorman's Excalibur has been in my mind a lot this last week. It's very much my default idea of the Arthur story, and while I couldn't have identified this way back in the early viewings, I'm pretty sure Helen Mirren's Morgana is a big reason I'm often sympathetic to the villianess in a tale. I have a Blu-Ray copy coming soon, and I pulled Osprey's Romance of the Perilous Land off the shelf for a reread. I just love the look of the film and its take on the story.

Still reading a little bit of Conan every day. It's just a damned fun read.

I get my first COVID vaccine dose tomorrow evening. I'm pretty sure it's going to be Pfizer's vaccine, but I'm brand-agnostic. Give me mRNA, give me fetal cell cultures, whatever, just get me vaccinated so I can be part of the solution to this damned thing.

Some more rain today, but we're not going to see any flooding out of this. There's some dangerous weather in the making down around central Mississippi and Alabama, though.

GenCon LLC announced that there will be an in-person con this year, moved to mid-September, and we're at this very moment having a discussion about going. I'm torn - want to see my friends, but I also want to see them for several years to come.

Here we are on the first day of Screw Your Sleep Schedule week. I woke up before sunrise, of course, and could not get back to sleep. Read some Conan stories, watched a SpaceX launch, tried to be still enough to sleep, and eventually gave up. Showered, went to Aldi, started laundry, listened to a few episodes of The Good Friends of Jackson Elias. Napped a while, read a little more. I'm just not a fan of this archaic time shift nonsense.

I've picked out some games from the Garycon 13 schedule. A couple of Star Wars sessions, DCC and MCC. Didn't get to test out Fantasy Craft/Primeval Thule yesterday; put it off until next weekend.

It's been right at a year since quarantines and lockdowns and everything else. Vaccines are being produced and distributed; we aren't out of the woods by any means, and there are some astonishingly stupid things going on - godsdammit, Texas, really - but we're going to manage this thing. I'm going to keep wearing a mask for a while because not suffering allergy attacks last summer was pretty darn nice. Plus I can be childish and stick my tongue out at fucking everybody. I'm ready to get back into a bookstore every few weeks. Get a drink at the Back Door after game night.

Finished watching CBS's The Stand miniseries last night. I liked it on its own merits. Kept the core of the story intact; blended a few things together. Casting was really good. Amber Heard was a darn good Nadine Cross, and Alexander Skarsgard was about perfect as Randall Flagg. Watching it put me in a mind to reread the doorstopper of a book, and that led me to reading articles on The Dark Tower, and I think it's about time to revisit those books again. Including Wizard and Glass, this time around.

Go slow past the Drawers, Gunslinger.

Woke up this morning to the news that General Chuck Yeager had died. Yeager was, well, a hero of mine. A product of West Virginia, he was a shining example of the right person at the right time. Shortly after he joined the Army Air Corps, to fill the need for pilots, the Corps created a program to get sergeants into cockpits, and Yeager sure qualified. His mechanical aptitude helped him as both a combat and test pilot, and he became the first pilot to crack the sound barrier.

Most people learned about Yeager thanks to Tom Wolfe's The Right Stuff and its film adaptation. I think some of my dissatisfaction with Disney+'s series is its near-exclusive focus on the Mercury 7. Those are compelling stories, but there's time to be more inclusive. And the series just doesn't capture much in the way of a sense of wonder or hope.

The UK started COVID-19 vaccinations today. Emergency approvals all around, and this isn't going to be a magic bullet by any means. Pfizer's vaccine will start distribution here soon, rolling out in stages. The plan is for vaccines to be nationally available by late spring or early summer, and while that seems a long while away, 2020 has lasted approximately 49 months, so June 2021 will be here tomorrow.

The Mandalorian hit hard last week, bringing back Ming-Na Wen's character from the first season, and taking a dive into movie and EU lore. A lot of action and story packed into that 35 minutes.

I'm dropping the D+ subscription at the end of this billing cycle. I'm subscribed to four services, including the free year of AppleTV, and that's just too many. Netflix and Prime have the libraries I really want, and I'm patient for what's not there yet.

The Clone Wars product for Armada started hitting last week. Sat in on a Separatists-Rebels match a few days ago - the new play options are great, but what struck me was the incredible improvement in the models. The Sep cruiser had really great details and paint, but the tiny squadrons were just terrific. I'm not interested in buying into either faction, but playing against them is going to be a blast.

I haven't looked at much of anything baseball-related in this abortion of a season. I'm on-board with one of the new rules - putting a runner on second in extra innings - and not so much with the designated hitter. But I just can't get excited for things this time around.

The NFL started its season tonight - limited attendance in the stadium, precautions for on-field personnel. My interest in football is waning, but I'm interested in how things shake out this year. I expect COVID outbreaks over the course of the season; the responses should prove interesting.

Kentucky's now seen its 1000th death due to COVID-19. It's getting worse. There's so much ignorance and selfishness, and it's costing lives and health.

Days go by. I'm spending time with PSNow, trying to get a handle on Cities: Skylines among other things. It's fun and plenty relaxing, and it keeps me from thinking too much.

Mutant Crawl Classics has been a fun read, unsurprisingly, and it's reinforcing my feeling that I just don't want to play D&D again, at least not without an incredible hook. There's a real energy and infectious sense of fun in the writing.

Some small steps are happening. The cop who killed Breonna Taylor is going to be fired. I hope it leads to prosecution. Louisville's city council has eliminated no-knock warrants. It's too late, and too slow, but it's progress.

Gulfport, Mississippi, took down the state's flag from all municipal buildings, replacing it with the Magnolia flag. One less government flying the traitor's rag.

Kentucky is sitting at 13,197 confirmed COVID-19 cases, 520 deaths, 3,506 recoveries, 2,482 hospitalizations. Nationwide, we're seeing spikes in infection rates following loosening of lockdowns, to the surprise of absolutely no one who paid the least bit of attention. This thing isn't going away, not for a long while, if ever.

It is grey and rainy and wet here in Louisville today, and it is glorious. A flood warning goes into effect tonight, and I don't think we'll see anything out of it. Probably see some high levels along the river - just don't submerge River Road at Fourth, okay, mighty Ohio?

After digging into my Delta Green files, looking for useful stuff I can share with my players, I found a whole stack of resources I'd completely forgotten about having. Lots from the Kickstarter from a few years ago - a load of investigations and Agent/Handler resources.

Essen Spiel announced its cancellation for this year. That's the biggest gaming convention in the world, eclipsing even GenCon and the various PAXes by quite a lot. I hope this is one more push for GC to scrub this year's event. Post-GC respiratory crud is bad enough in a normal year; with COVID-19, holding the convention would be wildly irresponsible at best.

Taking the Mariner to the shop in the morning. Due for an oil change, and he's leaking coolant from somewhere. Not entirely sure how the shop is handling a waiting area; if I have to come back to the house, it's a nice walk or a short ride if the weather demands it.

This has been a heck of a pretty day. Sunny and just warm enough. Spent some time reading in the back yard, until the grass and dust from a neighbor's mowing got the best of me. Seasonal allergies are bad enough during normal times here in the Ohio Valley; throw in a respiratory illness pandemic, and an innocent-if-irritating sneezing fit becomes a cause for very mild concern.

As of this afternoon, Kentucky's at 7,080 COVID-19 cases, with 326 deaths and 2,649 recoveries. 137 cases per 100,000 residents, less than half of the national rate of 354 per 100K. There's been one case, a recovery, within my immediate circle, and one death if you extend things out a couple of degrees.

United States: 492,000 confirmed cases, 18,500 deaths, 32,000 recoveries. Kentucky: 1,450 cases, 79 deaths, 339 recoveries. New York City is getting absolutely hammered - one-sixth of the nation's known cases are in the city.

Thanks to CBS offering a free month of All Access, I am burning through Star Trek: Discovery. I'm digging on it. I'm in the latter half of the first season, the Mirror Universe arc, and boy, this Terran Empire is just cartoonishly villainous. Got a few more weeks to finish this and watch the first season of ST: Picard.

I think that today saw the first face-to-face conversation I've had with anyone besides co-workers and clerks in about a month. My playtest group cashed in, so to speak, some of our accumulated credit, and I went over to our team lead's home to pick up my loot. All done properly - the box was at the end of their walkway, and we stayed about ten, twelve feet apart during our chat. It was good to see some friends in this increasingly empty world.

It's a quiet, cool, cloudy Easter Sunday. Peace to you today.

Yay for seasonal allergies during a respiratory disease pandemic. I'm sneezy and have far too much mucus for anything that isn't a hagfish. Hell, I'm sure I've been exposed to the virus, between still working and my needy housemate going over to his needy fucking girlfriend's place like nothing is nothing.

We lost John Prine yesterday to COVID-19. WFPK is playing tons of his music today, as is the way of things. All the adjectives - gifted, prolific songwriter, you name it - he was something special.

I miss my parents and my friends and Friday night gaming. I know this will pass, and thank goodness for phones and carefully-curated social media, but man, I miss these people. I'm sure it's worse for the extroverts and people-persons, but they can just deal with it, the same way the rest of us have to deal with their nonsense in normal times.

Terraforming Mars is pretty great on the iPad. A game takes about an hour to play, and while I haven't won a game yet, I find myself not caring because the thing is so much fun. It does make me want to get the tabletop original, though, since it can be played solo.

Conversely, I picked up Civilization 6 for PS4, and I think I could have gotten just as much entertainment out of setting those three twenties on fire.

As of this morning, there are 368,000 reported COVID-19 cases in the US, with about 11,000 deaths and 20,000 recoveries. Kentucky has about 1,250 cases, 60 deaths, 306 recoveries.

For the most part, people are being smart. There is idiotic behavior, of course, some of it closer to home than I'd like.

Marvel's giving away a nice pile of comic collections through their Unlimited app and Comixology, and now I have a healthy pile of things to read. Plus, there is a heck of a lot of Star Wars comics free on Prime Reading, so there's that, too.

Roadside Picnic

Bright Ideas, Dark Futures

In God's Country

Allegheny

Buckets of Baggage

The Scenic Route

Faith

Dog With Two Bones

Meltdown

Old Cherry Blossom Road

Love Action

The One Thing

Bad Reputation

Resurrection

The Friends of English Magic

Working With Fire and Steel

It's Alright for You

It's a Sin

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January 2026

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