Musings of Old Man Joe

There and back again!

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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.

Leaving Los Angeles

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Photo by Dillon Shook on Unsplash

I decided with my wife it was time to go back to Ireland where I am from. I have been in Los Angeles for nearly thirty years and the city isn’t the same place it once was.
The Pandemic changed allot of things, I am lucky and I count my blessing that I can get out and head back to a small town for a break from the big city and the problems that are going on here.

Things weren’t that great before the pandemic hit us. I wrote about a pole that was drooping and could hurt people if they were blind and walked into it. After a month or so I took it down, The City never came to fix it and actually just complained about the way I asked them to help with said pole. So obviously there was something not that great even before Pandemic.

Of course then we had Pandemic, and the world changed. I had to take time from my job to look after my wife who wasn’t well. Then after a while we decided I should take an early retirement and we should head back to Ireland. Of course the original plan was to head back sometime next year. But fate would deal a few blows that changed our minds.

The building we live in was sold and the new owner/manager wants to do the LA thing and kick out the existing tenants, paint the place and charge a fortune. It doesn’t matter the people in my building are here on average 15-20 years. The longest has lived here about 45 years. Kicking people out of their homes is not a noble enterprise. Then new guy (I won’t use real names to be politically correct), let us just call him ASSHOLE!

So asshole started the three month retrofit during and pandemic to cut us out or our parking and make it just that bit more uncomfortable living here.
I feel like I am looking at the end of Los Angeles as I knew it, nobody I know can spend $3000 a month in rent. So it’s been harder to get things ready to leave, moving is already a stressful thing.

I left my job but needed health insurance for the last few months here. There is Cobra, which sounds great if you can afford it. But it’s even worse than you think. After you leave your job you are usually insured until the end of the month. The job has a few weeks to send the papers to the cobra people letting them know you have officially left. Then the cobra people have a few weeks to send you the papers to sign up for cobra. Then you sign up and they have another ten business days to let the health insurance company know you are paid up and they can cover you. This means it takes about a month the get the coverage with cobra, during that month you have no coverage, they back date it, but you can’t schedule appointments or get medication because you aren’t covered. So you pay a month for health insurance that doesn’t exist! Fucked up!!

I bought a car last January because at that time I was still going to be here for a few years. The Title for the car had the wrong address on it so of course I didn’t get it. I found this out about eight weeks ago when you could still actually call the DMV after only a two hour wait. Today I would forget it as I have been on hold with them the last week for about six hours and no joy. Happily I am also a AAA person and boy did it save my life this time. I was able to get my business done with a real person, Go figure!!

On reflection I am glad I gave myself the time to get ready, because if I was in a rush I wouldn’t have had enough time and I wouldn’t be ready when I am supposed to leave. I am looking forward to writing about where I am from and getting to know it again. I hope you will enjoy my getting to know Ireland again posts from November on.