Enough pandemic stupor. Time to move your butt and go somewhere Lately, Eric Burdon and The Animals' 1985 hit "We Gotta Get Out of this Place" has been echoing in my head. Download and play the video and you might feel the same. It's not that we want to pack up and abandon our very …
Tomorrow evening Stew and I will be going on a thrice-postponed trip abroad, our first since the Covid-19 pandemic began more than two years ago. We've been vaccinated twice and received the booster, in addition to a flu vaccine and the first of two shingles vaccines. And of course, we'll carry our KN-95 masks in …
Continue reading To mask or not to mask? But why? Does anyone know?
Forget the old "April showers bring May flowers" ditty. In San Miguel that seasonal sequence is backward; summer heat comes early in the year, anywhere from March through May, and the springtime showers, and the flip-of-a-switch greening of the landscape and burst of wildflowers, don't arrive until late June. This year the rains started in late …
Continue reading Early spring brings blessings along with caution
Back in March, when the Covid-19 virus had barely begun to infect and kill people in the U.S. and most of the world, the state of California imposed strict preventive measures that, for a while, seemed effective and were embraced by the citizenry. Ten months later the epidemic has returned to California with a vengeance, …
I'm on the mailing list of Fr. Richard Rohr, a Franciscan priest who heads a retreat and meditation center in Albuquerque. He sends out weekly spiritual messages that often, quite frankly, go over my head. This week's message, though, resonated with me deeply. In it, Rohr seems to describe the mental and spiritual exhaustion many of …
Continue reading Keeping together when the world seems to be coming apart
Six months or so ago San Miguel went into lockdown, and since then we've been living in varying degrees of isolation, along with a relentless stream of news reports and opinions from both sides of the border. And yet, the still-unfolding catastrophe had remained one step removed from my experience: I didn't know any COVID-19 …
In the warm-up to the upcoming presidential campaign, President Trump has already fired salvos of his trademark insults and nicknames at his likely opponent, including calling Biden "Sleepy Joe."If I were Biden, I would welcome that as a campaign slogan: I, for one, am ready to take a little political siesta, a respite from the …
Yesterday Stew and I went to Querétaro for a doctor's appointment and a quickie visit to Costco. In the pre-virus era, we might have combined a Costco raid with a movie and dinner at the Antea shopping center, coffee at a Starbucks, or a walk-through one of the department stores. In other words, a somewhat …
Continue reading Is the smoke clearing regarding the Covid-19 lockdown?
Fear is one of the principal threads running through the story of the coronavirus pandemic, and so is the reluctance of many of us to articulate and deal with our fears. Fear induced by the pandemic engulfs the mighty and the lowly, from President Trump down to the working-class John and Jane Does.One suspects that the president's frequently …
Several people had asked me when my next blog post would appear, and I wasn't sure. But after Trump's Thursday night press briefing, in which he suggested people could shoot bleach or disinfectants as a cure for the coronavirus, a blog topic fell on my lap: L'affaire Clorox.Torrents of words have been written by newspaper and …
El Rancho Santa Clara 