jarrellwoods

So I'm in that span of time that each month I can tough it out before retirement, my monthly Social Security payout will be $13.50 more than the previous month. This place is the most physical job I've ever had, working Wide Format. The print material is often huge and heavy. I work with a good bunch and have an excellent manager. If he ever quits, I'll hasten my departure date. The very longest I'll go is January 2026.

This is so heartbreaking I can't even retweet it.

a thread from Jessica M. MSN, FNP-C

Tonight I helplessly held the hand of and stroked the hair of a beautiful 14 year old girl as she exited this world. She was looking forward to starting high school and eventually becoming a veterinarian. It was so senseless!

I truly believe she could have been saved if her parents had not forbidden us from intubating her. A free vaccination would have prevented it all! This little girl was robbed of her whole life and of fulfilling all of her dreams. She had been with us 9 days and was able to communicate well until taking a turn for the worse yesterday.

About 2 hours later we were unable to save a 25 year old mother of 1 who was 15 weeks pregnant. She had refused the vaccines because of the lies about them causing infertility and harming her baby. Liars killed her, her baby and robbed a 2 year old little boy of his mommy and sibling. Not to mention robbing a husband of his wife and child.

Those were 2 of 4 deaths we had tonight with the oldest being 45 years old! It was the 1st time since late March we have lost more than 3 covid patients in a single shift. Then we find out this morning a coworker had 2 of her tires cut in 1 of our employee parking lots overnight! Fortunately, security caught and was able to detain the asshole until police arrived and took him into custody.

Fuck the big orange buffoon, DeSantis, Facebook, Fox news, antivaxxers, magas, Dr Mercola, Robert Kennedy Jr, all parents who believe these killers over proven science and ALL other killers who spread anti vaccine lies. I can't deal with people right now! I love you guys!

So I've been on furlough for a couple months. My employer's definition of furlough has thankfully been keeping my medical insurance for the two of us, and being able to collect unemployment.

It looks like the host company will be bringing back 10% of their employees this month. There are two of our team of 5 who have been keeping things going in the building up to now. If all goes well the other 3 of us should be back to our positions sometime in January.

I have mixed feelings about this, not knowing at this time where a vaccine will be. It will be good to get back to work, but I'll be back to 111 miles one way to work which means my car's going to hate me again. Lately, it's been happy to snooze days on end in the garage.

I'm hoping that my fur buddy will still be okay with letting me stay overnight at his place a couple days a week like before. Eventually, I really need to find work closer to home, but jobs will be scarce for likely a long time because of the businesses going under due to the pandemic and its massive mismanagement.

It's still too long until retirement. I'm 61, and the very earliest I could possibly shoot for is 66 and ten months. Renee wants me to try for 70 which would be the highest payout from SS, and I'm like sure, if my body will hold out that long. I might go for the former one mainly because I'm just done with how terrible and dismal work conditions have become in my field, and it's really too late to start over with anything else.

Something true that needs to be said and is *really* scary when you stop to think about it:

The President of the United States *doesn't understand* what's going on right now.

And the fact is, he *can't* understand—he's not equipped for it.

And therefore, he *won't* understand.

The number of ways COVID-19 will change how we live, work, study, and relate to one another is *so mind-boggling* that if you think about it for even 10 minutes you come up with a 100 questions we don't have answers to yet. And *all* of it is beyond the president's comprehension.

I was just talking with someone who has a relative who works in a prison. Can you imagine the *hundreds* of unanswered questions we now have about how *that's* going to work going forward? Do *anyone* believe that the President of the United States can comprehend that complexity?

With the flip of a switch, certain sectors of our economy and culture just disappeared for an uncertain period of time, but at a minimum 18 months to a year. How people move, stay healthy, entertain themselves—all transformed overnight, as if we live in an alternate reality, now.

One thing that should be *blindingly* clear to *every* American at this moment in history is that *no nation on Earth* can afford to have a *stupid person* in charge now. In other words, *every nation on Earth* now needs to be run by the *most competent people* in its population.

Yesterday, the President of the United States—with the help of dozens of people he hand-selected—tried to put together a group. That's all he tried to do: *put together a group*. And he ended up just reading out a list of folks whose names he'd heard but who he'd never contacted.

The entire foundation of American society is currently under question and in a state of dramatic transformation and the man ostensibly in charge literally can't even put together a group of people. He can't even stay on task. He can't even express empathy. This is utter insanity.

The conversation we're having about how to open up workplaces is so embarrassingly puerile that it can only be explained by the fact that the man leading the conversation apparently reads and thinks at a second-grade level. Is there *anyone* serious in federal government anymore?

Up to 50% of COVID-19 patients are asymptomatic, and the President of the United States wants to send them into workplaces across the US to touch common surfaces, breathe in/out, and cough in a 16' radius on the assumption a wildly contagious virus won't spread in that situation.

The last person who can be in charge at a moment like this is someone who grew up in a cult that taught him as a child—feel free to look it up—that every situation should be framed as sunny. That's childish thinking that should be a *million miles* from the White House right now.

I don't think many folks realize that there were bipartisan votes in the Senate to *take away from Trump* his power to make foreign policy decisions in Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Syria. Even the members of *his own party* are quietly trying to pry the bauble from his fingers.

At this point more people in media need to be talking and acting like the only way we get through this crisis anything like intact is if all America, en masse, begins ignoring the president and focusing on adults around the country who *actually know how to deal with their shit*.

America—in the midst of a historic emergency—doesn't have the time, energy, patience, or brain-space to let the President of the United States work out childhood issues and readily diagnosable disorders that he could have tried to address himself anytime in the last five decades.

We should be perfectly clear with ourselves and one another that the presidential response to this crisis has been *so incompetent* and indeed *juvenile* on so many different levels that a president with any integrity who'd acted this way would resign and let an adult take over.

Pick a topic. *Any* topic. Say dentists. Say cars. Or higher ed. Home-buying. Wars. Healthcare. Sports. Home repairs. It doesn't matter—just pick a subject, then spend 20 minutes talking with an intelligent person about how it'll be changed by COVID-19 and you'll see the problem.

MBS is suing for peace in Yemen. Putin is admitting he doesn't have the virus under control. Pollution is dropping. Unemployment may breach 25%. We are in the *earliest imaginable days* of understanding how profoundly our world has changed and *the president isn't up to his job*.

What lies before us is a mountain so high it would be an extraordinary lift for the greatest presidents in American history to lead us even halfway up. And what we have instead is a clearly incompetent, deranged, profoundly antisocial embarrassment who *can't even form a group*.

Playtime is over. We need a real president now. /end

PS/ 2,500 Americans died of COVID-19 today.

2,500.

And the CDC says that's an *under-estimation*.

30,000 new people contracted COVID-19 today.

30,000.

That brings the total to 650,000.

So we'd better start wrestling with what it's actually going to take to get through this.

So my mom died on May 1. It was after a long slow slog through congestive heart failure. My dad was her caretaker even in his advanced years. He suddenly felt like he didn't have a reason left to live. He didn't want to stay in the house with all its memories and yard upkeep. So Renee and I and her mom got him moved to a nice retirement community where my parents put in a deposit years ago as a place they thought they'd like to live together before my mom's health deteriorated. His deposit was still good which shot him to the top of the waiting list. He's all moved in now and has new reasons to live with his newfound friends there, endless activities he enjoys, and the staff there are almost scarily helpful.

My job... My workload didn't bounce back in January after the normal holiday slump. I began to churn up some business with a lot of my established contacts there, and the result was only to marginally keep things bumping along. The client had a new contract to sign in March and we were holding our breath to see if they would. They did. No cuts to equipment or the three of us, so I knew I had a year then to build up business among my regulars and keep the department healthy and needed. The next thing I knew, my employer was giving one of my printers to an account in Georgia, and then the host company proceeded to downsize by reproduction services to fit in the same space in the mail room along with the other two employees. Somehow we got everything to fit, and I continued to grow business and actually had a pretty good month in June.

The next thing I knew, my manager pulled me aside for a meeting, put her cellphone on speaker with HR on the line, and proceeded to tell me the host company had decided to end reproduction services, eliminating my job, only going to mail services. The ~good~ news, she had an account she erroneously thought would be closer for me to drive. It's not. It's 22 miles further (109 miles one way). this new position would be cutting my pay to about $6 less per hour (she always had this thing about me being paid too much) and on top of that, I'd have to pay for parking which was about $25 a week, or nearly $300 per year. It was take it or be terminated, so of course I took it, but from the onset, I knew this wasn't going to work with our mortgage, car payment, and everything else. So the host company essentially ripped up the contract they'd just signed and my employer apparently did nothing about it, except giving almost no effort into finding me a new account, which they had to have known wasn't going to work for me. I'd just gotten a Bronze award last year for exemplary work. Whatever.

So I began working at this completely non-viable account on July 1, my mom's birthday, 2 months to the day after she died. I called Dad while there because I knew he'd be having a rough time also remembering her birthday. Really, it's not a bad place to work. All the coworkers are great, and I was learning what to do on their automated package distribution and tracking. But I had something else brewing I didn't make public until it was clear it was going to happen. When they laid off my coworker last year, she found employment at a different division of our company and she told me of a job posting out where she was. I went for and got it. It's a dollar more per hour than what I'm currently getting, it's ironically the same exact 109 miles, just in a slightly different direction, and the parking is free. And I get my coworker back. Long-term, it probably still isn't going to work, but at least it buys more time to find something that will. I'll look for something maybe in Winchester. Today, they need me back at the account where they told me they no longer need me. Tomorrow is a pre-scheduled vacation day for Renee and I to help my dad with the last few details of his house which sold, for full asking price I might add. Monday, I start at the new account.

my wife got me a magnetic poetry kit.

Here's one I just constructed.


garden doesn't elaborate
as purple petal shines
beneath languid moon
to lick my frantic feet


Here's another.
forest monkey
a spray of chocolate fluff
delirious
urge to scream at sun
worship cool water
whispers
drunk on luscious honey

Kind of boring, and a bit of a letdown too. I was always led to believe I had some Cherokee lineage from a maternal great-great grandmother who was supposedly either half or full Cherokee herself. That is apparently not the case. I have less Native American than Elizabeth Warren. I knew about the English/Welsh part, but just not that it was that great of a percentage. I told Renee yesterday, it's no wonder I burn like a mother out in the sun.

Renee and I were going over to some acquaintance's building project they were showing. They had basically taken an extremely old rickety house and made it into a church. But the sanctuary was kind of an add-on out back and was still under construction.

The rest of the existing house was rooms for lobby/meet & greet, children's church, and office space. They had all the furniture moved to the inner walls in each room to maximize the space for people to enter and congregate.

I was of course an atheist in the dream as I am now in real life, but I remember thinking, 'they did a good job with this. Now all they need is someone who can do some nice stained glass windows,' and I was going to make it my project to find reasonable rates for that.