Musings of Old Man Joe

There and back again!

Joe

One Year Later in Ireland

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Here I am in Ireland after a year and the world is coming to grips with the new normal, I read that in the 1918 Flu somewhere between 17 and 50 or as many as 100 million people died because they had no vaccine and it just had to take it’s course.
Today 5 million people have died due to covid-19 or as many as 17 million depending on how it was counted.

As bad as that is and as grateful as I am we now live in a world that can make a vaccine that will help us get through this. With booster shots every year and growing immunity as our bodies get used to covid it will in a few years be just like a flu shot.

But for those of us who moved out of everything we knew to a better place the feeling of loss is there. I was forced to move from my home. Under different circumstances we always intended to leave and find a nice place to settle to. But being forced puts you in a state of limbo. I have struggled with this since I moved and waiting for the world to get out of the pandemic just makes it linger. What will my new life look like and when will it begin?

I know how lucky I am in so many ways but that doesn’t mean it’s not frustrating to have your life in a flux. You want to have a feeling of home and happy but there is an unsettled feeling that doesn’t go away. I just keep hoping I will in time as get used to my life here. We didn’t so much move to Ireland as we left Los Angeles and that makes a difference.

It doesn’t mean it’s bad here at all, it’s a much better life an almost every way, but that’s not what gives you the feeling of home. It’s more than just the place you are living at. I have no regrets in what we had to do, I just hope we will figure out how to emotionally move now that the bodies have done it!

Your own personal pandemic

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I met with a family member recently on a visit who I have not seen in many years. He is much younger than me with that youthful enthusiasm that comes with a certain age. During our conversation it became apparent that he has decided that he isn’t going to wear a mask on public transport any more. He explained he just wants to get back to his normal as soon as he can.


My covid and lockdown experience has been mine & can be very different from anyone else’s. My age and experience in my life have moulded the way I react to things. This is of course not news but seeing another person share what they are taking from this makes me think.
I am lucky and I know it and appreciate it every day, I am grateful and count my blessings. I also try to make sure I am making the right decision and not the most convenient one.


When I explained to my family member that I will be doing things in a different way and that I have lost friends due to the pandemic I saw his eyes take on a look. I don’t think he has lost anyone and for him this is all about the change in life style and the lockdowns.
It made me think about how even through a global pandemic our experiences of said pandemic can be so different.

Because I live in Ireland the worst of my pandemic is over, due to such a large vaccination rate in the country. Then of course you have people in the southern United States who are going through the pandemic afresh as they have people who for what every reason would prefer to die than get vaccinated and live. I feel sorry for the people who could be moving on and the medical staff who have to go through this still when it didn’t need to happen, their pandemic is very different from mine.

Opening up early to save the economy has not worked pretty much anywhere it’s been tried. The virus doesn’t care about the economy and when you have to lock down again because you have no choice the lesson should be learned. I know these times will pass but I do hope that people truly learn from their experiences that the choices we make do matter.

First Harvest

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Six tomatoes from the garden
First Harvest

So exciting news is we have our first harvest of tomatoes, we have never grown anything before that lived long enough to actually eat. And with the world still in the grips of a virus that has changed so much it’s cool to have something nice to talk about.
I learned from YouTube that you can pick them while they are still green and they will ripen over a few days. So I have left some to ripen on the plant and picked a couple of green ones to see how they are and which is better, if anything is better or not. I am pretty sure they will be awesome we are so looking forward to salad with lunch.

Update

So it’s been a week since I started this post and we have had a few tomatoes that ripened and they are so yummy. It’s so nice to have something so fresh. As for the ripening thing it’s so true you pop them in a paper bag or just wrap in paper and pop them on a window sill and give them a few days and they turn a beautiful red colour.

Latest Batch

This whole thing has made me (who is not a person who grew up on salads), meat and potatoes were my roots. But I am happy to be eating the fruits (pun intended) of our labour. If we had a veranda or any outside space in the States I am sure we would have tried this years ago, alas we didn’t have the space. It was jarring for Susan & myself to move across the planet during a pandemic with cats and dogs. I am so lucky but it doesn’t mean it wasn’t hard, many people have gone through so much since march 2020. The sad part due to misinformation so many people who could be safe are still at risk because they aren’t vaccinated. Please remember to get news from a news source and medical advice from a doctor, not Facebook!

Peace!

Truth is important

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Photo by Markus Winkler on Unsplash

The Trump years were a low point for the United states; I could see the damage he was doing to the Republican Party, which had been more radical since Obama was elected, and also the extreme damage to the country. I found myself, every day, asking the question, how this could be happening?

I like many loved President Obama, his intellect and way of dealing with things and the respect he showed even to people who decided he was the enemy. I like many thought that, with him , the United States had moved on toward a more open & less racist society. I was wrong and it was just an image painted over the country during his tenure in office.

It was only when Trump got in and made changes to so many Obama policies, just because he hated Obama and nothing to do with making the country better, you could see the birther racism show through. My surprise is how many people went along for the ride, and how quickly the Republican Party went from small government to a white power party. They were anti immigration anti muslim pretty much anti anything that threatens the white guy in charge.

The last four years have been an education on how much racism there truly is in America, and how fragile the system is, how open to attack from within. The safe guards against the rule of law can be manipulated by those in power very quickly. America can and did lose the moral high ground in world politics, and as many times as Joe Biden will say America is back, the damage is done and will not be forgotten so easily, even though he is trying to clean up after the Trump policies debacle. The world breathed a sigh of relief when Joe Biden was elected; I believe he won four times in Georgia!

The politics in the United States is so full of lies, it’s hard for some to know what the truth is. I personally say to anyone check your news sources, and move away from just American news sources as they can be biased, even local news can be manipulated like the Sinclair media story. It’s time for the American people to start believing the institutions that have been established to provide information to the government since the inception of the United States, namely the intelligence community, who even during the Trump years stated the truth to power. While Trump was saying Russia was great & Putin was a great guy this was happening.

There needs to be open hearings to get the truth out to the people again, all these politicians who are spreading the lie need to speak under oath and see the consequences. Those who manipulated the crowds who stormed the capital due to a lie need to be held accountable for the country to move on, otherwise the elections in the future are rife with peril. If you cannot trust the election what can you trust.

The United States is a super power and with the other ones being china, wannabe Russia, the world needs a super power doing the right thing. Europe needs to grow some balls and get it’s act together, because racism and special interests cannot be allowed to determine our direction.

One Year in Lockdown

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Looking outside window at rain on car.
Rainy Day today

I have found it quite difficult the last few months to focus on anything other than the lockdown. I have friends who have had the virus and some who have been very sick & are lucky to be alive, also coworkers who didn’t make it through. During these times it doesn’t seem right to say how beautiful it is here in Ireland with all this going on. I was so lucky to be able to move here with my wife that any expression of gratitude seems a bit lame compared to what my friends have had to go through and are still going through!

I think like many people I am tired of restrictions, it would have been better to close borders and restrict people entering the country to stop lockdowns going on for so long. Best example New Zealand, worst example continues to be the United States. How much a human life is worth seems to vary from one country to another.

In a few days March 15th it will be a year since the lockdown entered my world. I was living in Los Angeles with a job and a home/apartment I had lived in for 15 years. My wife was starting to feel unwell with what we now know was frozen Shoulder. I was trying desperately to get time off work to care for her, even though I worked in a hospital & had a doctors note a hospital is just another corporation that happens to look after sick people. So I ended up having to deal with corporate ego’s trying to flex their unimportant lives to prove to themselves how important they are. When your partner is sick that means nothing, you will do what you have to do.

Then the apartment we lived in was sold to a developer who wanted to remove the old tenants, do the place up and sell it for profit. During a pandemic when the City was supposed to be protecting tenants, NOT!

One year on myself and my wife are living in Ireland and under a lockdown as Ireland does care for people more than just profit. There is frustration waiting for the vaccines to arrive as every country is scrambling for the jab. I am grateful that in this day and age the science is there that could make it possible for a vaccine in such a short period of time. I say to myself there was a pandemic in 1918 and until now the world got over that one without the science we have today. This will pass and the world will begin again to look like it did before Covid-19.