Vaccine Time
We got our first Covid Vaccine shots today. We’ll do it again in three weeks, assuming they have enough vaccine then. I saw lines like this on TV, in Kansas City and Los Angeles. I told Becky I’ve gone more than a year without catching the virus, so why do I need a vaccine now? This got me a look that left no doubt we would be getting shots together. It looked like the whole city of Lawrence was there. They didn’t even hand out treats afterward, just a card good for another shot. We got the Pfizer version. The weather dropped a good ten degrees while we were waiting. Was nearly 70 degrees yesterday; I came home from office early and washed Becky’s car. Finished yesterday by watching KU lose another game. Did mine the day before. Now it’s back to winter. Now is also time for supper. Grabbed some yummy barbecue on the way home from shots. Signing off!
UPDATE Thursday, March 11, 2021: It’s been three weeks since Shot #1 and there’s no word about Shot #2. I checked the “system” and was assured our information was duly entered and our names and eligibility are duly registered. I heard on the radio this evening that the 2-shot doses come in pairs from the manufacturer. Officials were upset about people who didn’t show up for their second shot appointment, because their vaccine, having been thawed and made ready for them, had to be trashed, which was a waste. If the report was correct, our second shots have been sitting in a freezer just waiting to be thawed and injected into our arms. I suspect this report was not accurate. Maybe it’s accurate somewhere, or sometime. The supposed “everything there is to know about Covid-19 and vaccines” website doesn’t say anything about it. So, we’ll bide our time. I just don’t want to end up having to get three shots because they didn’t administer the second shot in time; or to end up being told that although everybody said the second shot was supposed to be administered within a certain time after the first shot it doesn’t really matter how much time goes by after the first shot. But I’m hearing about more and more people who’ve had both shots already. I’m becoming less dismissive of the radicals who insist that the whole pandemic thing has been a feint to mask a nefarious agenda, whatever it is. Well, it got Biden elected, got my livelihood trashed, made the border a sieve again, and made big tech companies a lot richer while small businesses went under. Meanwhile, censorship has become not only more and more acceptable, but deemed necessary to our national well being and development of our “wokeness”.
UPDATE Friday, March 12, 2021: That’s how it’s done! Post something critical and stir things up. This afternoon I got an email that I should sign up for a big vaccination #2 event on March 19. I immediately logged on and was advised, “Sorry, this event is full.” This was a mere 10 minutes after the email was sent. Not to be deterred, I kept trying. Since I was at the office I called Becky at home to tell her she should try to get online to make her appointment. Half an hour later they let me in, and I made my appointment, but Becky called to advise she was being rejected for some sort of imponderable technical reason. I tried to fill in a form for her, but at the end was informed she was already processed and I couldn’t submit a duplicate. Becky still couldn’t get in. I started to load up and shut down to go home and assist her there, when she called again to advise she now had an appointment. Well, okay. I decided that the system must have had us connected somehow, so that by logging myself in she was locked out; but one or the other of us had got her appointment made. Turned out they’d sent us both the same ID number; although our appointment QR codes are slightly different. Our appointments are 20 minutes apart. Well, we’re still going together in one car, and they’ll just have to deal with it.
UPDATE Saturday, March 20, 2021: First of all, HAPPY SPRING! We got our second Covid Vaccine shots yesterday. We didn’t have to spend as much time in the car on this occasion. They had things moving along better, and the line didn’t stretch all the way out of the fairgrounds and down Harper to 23rd Street. We got our shots around 10:30. By 5:00 I knew I wasn’t going to weather this shot as well as the previous. Today, I feel like I was recently run over by an 18-wheeler, and Becky has a fever of 101+. I seem to have avoided the fever, at least. Watching the KU game in NCAA tournament. Close one. If the ‘Hawks can pull off a win maybe we’ll feel better.
Wasted Effort
The Chappell Family Website was created circa. 2002. The domain was set up to utilize what was at the time a new Google feature that’s now called Workspaces. Everybody in the family was assigned their own “@chappells.us” account which they could log into for email (on the Gmail platform) and other features, as well as logins to this blog so they could post and share information, stories, pictures, and whatever with the family. I was interested in what the others were doing, for one thing, and also thought it would help to bond familial relationships which were, at the time, strained in certain respects. This was before the advent of Facebook. As time went by, the website’s creator was essentially the only contributor or visitor. When Facebook came along family members hopped onto it with their own pages. The Chappell Family Website creator briefly considered creating a family Facebook page to complement the family website, but the notion was easily dispatched as having no more potential for interest than the website.
One of these days I’ll be gone. Within a year after that happens the website’s hosting account will expire for want of anybody interested in renewing it, the domain registration will likewise expire, and the Chappell Family Website will be history. I suppose it may be preserved to some extent on the Internet Wayback Machine, should anybody ever care to look for it. So, one might ask, has it been a wasted effort? Nah. I’ll save it on a CD or something before I die and give it to the kids, along with the old-fashioned family photo albums. Then I’ll die and it will all be of no further interest to me. Maybe it was never anything more than a personal project of interest only to me. If so, I found the effort, and the product of it, to be personally very satisfying. Especially gratifying have been those occasions when “distant” relatives found the website and contacted me, especially since they nearly all reached out from the United Kingdom, whence my grandfather emigrated to the USA in 1895. He kept virtually all knowledge of his British roots and family to himself and, with the exception of a few letters, photos and clippings that I found more than 50 years after his death, took it to the grave with him.
As I find myself approaching the end of life, I take a kind of comfort in having learned what I could about the family and its history, and in having attempted to preserve and share it on this website, however futile the effort may have been. It occurs to me that the way the internet, technology, and AI (Artificial Intelligence) are developing, anything that has been on the web will, unless humanity destroys itself, remain there and probably become more accessible, rather than less. Descendants of my grandfather’s ancestors who might be curious about such things may well find find this website in the Internet Archives and enjoy, as much as I have, learning about the Chappell Family. I do regret, though, that I never visited England, never hiked about Hillesley, never met any of the U.K. relatives in person, never shared tea with anyone there. Well, who knows? Perhaps the next time ’round.
Suddenly Spring and DST
March 14, 2021
General
Comments Off on Suddenly Spring and DST
John Chappell
Can’t believe spring started a week ago (oh, I know, not officially) and now it’s that damnable Daylight Saving Time. Where did that name come from, anyway? They can’t save daylight. You get the same amount of daylight in a day no matter what time you set on your clock. The crazy thing is the grass has turned green and started growing, the mornings are noisy with chirping birds, and they must be finding bugs to eat so I won’t be surprised if the mosquitoes are swarming any moment now. I suppose there could be a surprise snowstorm in the works and, if it actually happens, I would be quite surprised. This just feels too much like winter is history. Hey! Here’s a selfie from one of our walks last week. Sorry, kinda cut most of Becky out.