Man, August is already gone ─ and the nights are markedly chilly outdoors. There won't be much more opportunity here for sunning. I could have taken advantage this afternoon (the morning was overcast), but I have been borderlining a headache due to inadequate sleep, and I just have too much to do.
My wife was home all day yesterday, so I had no opportunity to blog. The day was primarily cloudy, so I did not sun either.
She had arrived home early Sunday evening just as I was wrapping up that day's post here with the intention of having some exercise afterwards ─ so that did not happen.
I warned her a little later that evening that even though I was watching the fourth game in the playoffs between the Canucks and the Golden Knights, if my younger brother was not home by 8:30 p.m., then I was going to get to bed as soon as I noticed him arriving here.
As it was to happen, he didn't show up until something like 8:40 p.m. during the break following the first period; so even though my wife had joined me at that point and was eating a snack at the coffee table, I took my leave as warned and came upstairs to get myself to bed.
I am sure I was in bed before 8:50 p.m., feeling a little guilty for abandoning my wife as I had done. But I did not want to have to sit up late, or risk that my brother was too sloshed to be capable of watching any shows that I might have tuned in via our Android TV Box after the game was done.
The score was tied when that first period was over, and the Knights had a series lead of two games to our single win.
I never did learn the outcome until early last evening. We lost 5 - 3, if I remember right. If we lose the game scheduled for this evening, then the season is over for us, and we will go into the history books as still never having won the Stanley Cup despite 50 years of trying.
I was prepared to go to bed early last evening too, but my brother showed up ahead of 8 p.m. from wherever he had gone that afternoon to drink. And so I sat up late operating our Android TV Box, and was not to bed until something like 12:28 a.m. By that time, my wife had already gone to bed some while earlier, for she was to have to go to work late this morning at her friend's Thai restaurant.
It is too hard on me to rise during the night if I do not get to bed at a sensible hour in the evening, so I remained in bed until just after 6 a.m. this morning before rising to put work into the post I have in development at one of my six hosted websites.
My brother emerged from his bedroom soon after 8 a.m. and was smartly thereafter watching T.V. My wife rose well ahead of 10 a.m., the hour when I usually join my brother during the workweek to watch episodes of some of the T.V. series we follow in common.
Before that time, however, my inadequate sleep began manifesting itself with a threatened migraine aura. I was able to fight it off with some desperate eye exercises, but the vague eyestrain-type headache that ensues has remained with me.
I feel in rather bad shape, but I tackled some exercises ahead of 5 p.m. that I hoped would have the added benefit of forcing a thorough cleansing of my eyes and brain with the additional flow of blood and related fluids that the activity could not fail to produce.
I cannot say that it did anything much to erase the vague headache, but I have felt considerably better for the forced activity.
To wit, with only a 30-count between sets, I engaged four each of Hindu-style squats (101 - 51 - 51 - 51 repetitions), then went directly to four sets of calf raises (51 - 31 - 31- 31 repetitions), and then finished up with one more set of squats (51 repetitions).
It most definitely got me breathing heavily, and my blood coursing.
I still have some other exercises to get out of the way very soon, and I also want to have a bath, so I won't be working on this post for too much longer. I need to be set this evening to get to bed inf my brother fails to show up by 8:30 p.m.
I will watch the hockey game until his advent.
Right now, though, I want to reproduce an E-mail that I sent out at 2:40 a.m. early on Sunday to well over 50 people ─ I headed the E-mail "As COVID-1984 Accelerates, Bill Gates Blames ‘Freedom’ for the Spread of the Virus":
Just how far will our governments go with this SARS-CoV-2 pandemic hysteria that they’re promoting?I received this reply at 6:58 a.m. from a woman:
I’m unfamiliar with this young fellow (Spiro Skouras), but he sure does present a convincing case that, thanks to people in power who don’t believe that the general populations are intellectually equipped to made sound and balanced decisions for themselves, we all need to be controlled by ─ and made to obey ─ the dictates of those who do know what is best for us.
What a treat to enjoy some more of Bill Gates’ condescending smug expression and his floundering arm-waving.
For a long time now some people have proposed that bar codes might be the vehicle by which the Biblical ‘Mark of the Beast’ would ultimately be made into reality; but wouldn’t it be fitting if it is born of some system of digital biometric identification that everybody will have to submit to, all because of the excuse that this virus is providing to those in power?
I know I don’t find articles like this one from July 30 at a website called BiometricUpdate.com to be anything like comforting: Biometrics and digital ID providers launch health credential, detection and temperature screening for COVID-19 recovery.
Developments like this will only escalate ─ there will never be any turning back once they become implemented. They will only become more pervasive and all-encompassing.
G*****, it is frightening. My anxiety levels are at an all-time high over Covid, the negativity plastered everywhere about the upcoming election, the "vaccine" they have rushed into, and want to push on us, as well as the intrusive and invasive things you cite in your letter. I am presently trying very hard to adopt the ostrich approach. I don't watch the news, I scroll past the crap online, I refuse to engage in a debate regarding opinions about any of it, and I try not to spend a lot of time thinking about it because it upsets me to the point of not being able to sleep, stuffing food in my mouth to avoid my feelings, and feeling frightened and overwhelmed. I have prayed about it. I try very hard to concentrate on counting my Blessings. I am deliberately trying to block out the bullshit going on in this world because I feel absolutely powerless to do anything about it. I feel as though we are speeding into a George Orwell novel. I am frightened that the America I grew up in is turning into something so ugly that I can't recognize it. I don't have the ability to stop the bullet I can see racing toward our collective forehead. When I think about this stuff I simply become so overwhelmed that I can't function properly. I hate being frightened and anxious. Avoiding the overload of information: false news, "scientific" information, opinions, hatred, accusations, and threats is more difficult than I could have ever imagined. Send me heart-warming stuff, Garnet. Distract me from this horrible reality. Make me feel good. Give me hope. Help me get through this nightmare. Please.So I responded back at 10 a.m.:
G***** D*****
Ouch!!!And her final reply to that at 10:13 a.m.:
Welcome to the ugly future, I guess.
But I sure do understand how you feel. My older half-sister P****** keeps forwarding me links to videos and articles that at least one of her borderline conspiracy-theorist friends buries her with.
However, I hardly ever watch or read any of it ─ there's just too much of it. Sometimes, I'll get one message with a half-dozen or more links to videos and articles ─ I don't have that kind of free time on my hands, even if I was interested. Besides, so much of it is political, and I can't be bothered with politics ─ it bores the blazes out of me.
The thing about P****** is that she doesn't read or watch the stuff either ─ she just forwards it to people just in case it's interesting to them. Can you believe that? She can't be bothered weeding out whether it's worthwhile or not ─ she just forwards everything wholesale without taking a look at it.
Back when I was a teen in the second half of the 1960s, I had a semi-real arrangement with a couple of my friends that ─ if ever one of us got snatched up by friendly aliens ─ we'd get them to grab each other too, and take us all away from the awful world we thought we were living in back then.
I've been more or less waiting for 'the End' at least as far back as the age of 12. I think that it was around 1962 that I discovered on my tiny transistor radio The World Tomorrow programme hosted by Herbert W. Armstrong and often his son Garner Ted Armstrong, who were the voices behind what was then the Radio Church of God. I became obsessed with it, and would listen to my little transistor each night, tuning the dial to find the programme on whatever distant radio stations it was on, even if I had already heard the show.
I ordered all of the free literature, and subscribed to the magazines, although back then there was probably only The Plain Truth.
The main theme was that we were approaching the Great Tribulation that would precede the Second Coming of Christ when the world would be in its death throes from disease, famine, natural catastrophes, and so much war that a final confrontation would be about to take place that would lead to our extinction ─ and that would be when Christ would come, crushing the two warring armies.
By that time, the English-speaking nations of the world were to have been devastated and conquered by one of the two major forces that were about to clash and bring on worldwide extinction ─ an Armageddon event set in the Middle East.
One of the horrifying pieces of literature was a booklet titled 1975 in Prophecy ─ dreadful reading for a kid just entering puberty.
"1975" was just an estimate ─ not the prediction of the actual year this would all start to unfold. I understood that, but I was just entering my teens and it was still fairly early in the 1960s. To me, that became a target date when I would be around 25 years old. That was when the world as I knew it was going to come crashing down.
This complete belief ─ and remember, I never attended a church service ─ I only listened to the radio programmes and read the literature ─ completely coloured my life outlook. Everything was going to come to an end ─ why bother pursuing a lengthy education, or invest one's self in laying any sort of foundation towards an eventual old age retirement?
Maybe I was fortunate that I lasted until Grade 12 before dropping out ─ I never completed it and graduated.
I was chronically unemployed throughout my 20s and even my 30s. It wasn't until I was maybe 42 that I started to feel considerable desperation to become permanently employed with a pension plan that I would be contributing into ─ just working part-time and collecting unemployment insurance or even welfare wasn't cutting it anymore. I was middle-aged and obviously getting older ─ the world wasn't really any nearer to crashing down on me than it had been.
Sure, I grew away from that church fixation, but I could never shake that doom fixation. It had been with me since the age of 12, and I still today believe that the scenario as had been described back in my early impressionable years may more or less still play out.
So I've been living with the expectation of doom for most of my life.
The worst part of it is feeling like a 'sitting duck'. At least if I had managed to become rich, I could pull up stakes and move off to some remote part of the world where maybe I might be able to avoid the martial madness to come. Or if I was wealthy enough, I could have some hidden, elaborate retreat somewhere in the wilds of northern Canada, stocked with years of supplies.
Instead, I'm a 70-year-old 'duck' just sitting around and pretty much helpless to avoid whatever is to come.
So I feel much as do you. Impotent and helplessly ineffective to do anything much at all.
Again ─ a 'sitting duck' surrounded by happenings and events that I want nothing to do with.
And I sure don't like it.
Anyway, I think my nap time has come! I got to bed last evening around 9:55 p.m., I think. But I was awake before 2 a.m. and got up then, and I am still up. I even took a round trip hike of at least 2½ miles and did some grocery shopping, leaving home shortly before 7 a.m.
Here where I live, our time zone is probably at least as much as two hours behind your own. So right now, it is almost 10 a.m. for me, but it must be approaching noon for you.
By the way ─ quit eating to feel good!
I've recently begun trying a system of intermittent fasting.
For about a week I would only eat during an eight-hour period, and then take in no calories for the other 16 hours. Now I'm trying to reduce even that feeding time period ─ I am looking at bringing it down to seven hours at most.
So I last ate a small supper between 7 - 7:30 p.m. last evening, and I won't be taking in any calories until at least midway through the noon hour. I've only had a cup of black instant coffee just prior to heading off to do that early grocery shopping ─ no calories in plain black coffee!
Believe me, I'm really looking forward to have a big mug of hot coffee with the works come the second half of the noon hour! My day's first meal (I usually only have two meals a day) can wait until some while later.
😁
─G*****
The time stamp on this email was 12:00 noon! So you nailed it! Thanks for understanding, G*****. Don't forget to send me good stuff! And, G*****, thanks for taking the time to talk to me about your own feelings. That means a lot.She and I have never met, but we have grown quite close after corresponding for at least the past decade, if not longer.
G***** D*****
Later that Sunday at 6:28 p.m., a chap I knew back when I was still in late elementary school back around 1961 replied to the original E-mail:
Hi; I do believe in the Freedom thing.My response at 1:25 a.m. early Monday:
If we were all told, its time to go into the nuclear shelter
I think most people would obey that. Not everyone, but
a high number. With Covid-19 if there had been a more
authoritative order with Lock down and what shall be done, we
would not be experiencing the high number of fatalities. The
reason It was not successful is the system of governance and
the freedoms that the citizenry has. The rebellion on this are
the folks saying you cannot tell me what to do. If you try to
make me do it, I will shoot you with a AR15.
It takes a lot of guts to speak up and go against the concept
of freedom in this case without being harshly attacked.
Get out of the building, the fire alarm is ringing, 99.9% of the
people will leave the building.
Yes, I can agree that it's quite likely that coronavirus deaths might well have been far lower if the more liberal countries had imposed what would have amounted to martial law, and took away everyone's freedoms. But that's essentially what would have had to have happened.Then his overreactive reply at 7:20 a.m. that Monday morning:
I would not want to be in any such country.
Of course, we have countries like Sweden where the government was exceptionally lax in imposing restrictions, yet their death rate has turned out to be exceptionally low. An August 11 article gives some insight into Sweden's position: ‘Dangerous’ to think masks will stop virus: Swedish epidemiologist.
I actually wrestled with principle this past week concerning face masks after learning last Sunday that Real Canadian Superstore was going to impose mandatory face mask requirements for customers at all of their store beginning the Saturday that has just passed. I had just been there the morning before.
I began shopping at the Superstore some months back for a few products that are dollars cheaper than they are at other stores such as Save-On-Foods ─ which happens to be less than half the distance away for me. Keep in mind that I walk. The nearest Superstore is a round trip hike of 5.625 miles (yeah, I actually plotted that out), but Save-On-Foods is no more than a round trip hike of 2½ miles.
Well, all week I've pondered the dilemma. Wear a mask in the damned Superstore and keep saving precious pension dollars on the three specific grocery items I've been going there for, or stand fast and pay the decidedly higher prices at a store that is still willing to let me practice my freedom of choice to not wear a mask?
Yesterday morning I hiked to Save-On-Foods. I'll pay the higher prices. My freedom of choice has value to me.
I had a lovely interaction with the only cashier who was on duty at Save-On-Foods (I try to get there as soon after the store's 7 a.m. opening as I can). She's probably my favourite cashier ─ a fairly young woman named Dolma whose background is Tibetan.
We got onto the subject of whether her store would eventually impose a mandatory face mask rule (she wasn't wearing one), and she felt that it likely would. She said that she has to wear one any day that she is assigned the duty of helping people who use the self-serve stations.
She said if her store did impose masks as being mandatory to its customers, she hoped that it would offer them for free to its customers like COSTCO reportedly does (according to her).
I suggested to her that the virus might never actually leave us ─ that this is how things are going to be forever.
She laughed and countered that the Spanish flu eventually 'went away' ─ so why not this?
Heck, who really knows!
But I definitely do like having my freedom of choice. I just hope that it's always affordable!
😁
─G*****
Martial Law? When a building on fire has been doused,When I responded at 2:44 p.m. that Monday afternoon, he never had anything more to say ─ I expect that he was too incensed to coninue:
even the Fire Commissioner disallows owners from going in.
If the top medical experts say to do everything possible to stop
the virus, the WTF? I think this citizenry needs restraints at
times. Masks if they only help by 30% is still hugely beneficial.
Thats why the fines are being levied because of largely stupid
people saying the rights and freedoms are being taken away.
No common sense.
From my perspective, until I actually see evidence that SARS-CoV-2 even exists around me and is an actual threat after so many months of a supposed pandemic, I'm not buying into the panic about wearing a face mask.Practically everyone I knew when I was a schoolboy went on to graduate and maybe even get some post secondary education, yet few of them seem able to compose much beyond the elementary school level.
If folks were dying in droves all around me, okay. But I still do not know of anyone who has even gotten sick from it. The same goes for anyone I have asked ─ no one as yet has been able to claim that they actually know somebody who has become sick.
The best I can get is that a few people I know say that they know someone who knows of someone else who has gotten sick. So it's still practically hearsay. That hardly makes me tremble and want to grab a face mask.
And so I will do my grocery shopping where I can do so free of a mandated face mask. Masks need to represent more to me than just being a symbol of reactive hysteria by scared people who are tantamount to being terrified of shadows.
Remember, I'm not talking about me mask-free wandering through hospitals or full-time care facilities for the immunologically impaired or the extreme elderly ─ those would essentially be your buildings that are on fire. Of course I can identify the value of visiting such places while having donned a mask in order to protect the vulnerable residents.
I'm simply saying that I refuse to buy into the need to be wearing a mask while I am walking the streets or going into a business to spend my money. Any business that declares that I must wear a mask will be doing without my patronage.
I'm not some 25-year-old who thinks he's invulnerable and can recklessly do practically anything I like ─ I'll be 71 in October, for pete's sake. Until I see first-hand the virus rampaging all about me, I'm just not impressed that there is a realistic deadly pandemic so threatening that I suddenly need to be wearing a face mask in the general public.
I am supposed to be one of those who has entered into the ranks of the most vulnerable age group. I do not deny that ─ COVID-19 infections are deadliest to folks with poor immune systems, and the elderly. I do believe that. I know that there is such a thing as immunological senescence ─ the immune system does indeed age and decline, just as does the rest of the body.
I just don't believe that I will be getting sick and find myself facing that grim reality that my odds of surviving the illness are extremely low. Heck, for all I know I already have the antibodies and am immune. Who can say?
Thus far, I see no fire. When or if I do find it roaring down upon me, then I guess I will do my best to survive it.
😷 🤒
But that's just my position. So far, it's still a free country, and I'm supposed to be allowed to have a position and choice. Public transportation around here is only open to people wearing face masks. That's cool. I'll just stay away from buses and the SkyTrain. I don't mind. There's nowhere I need to be that badly.
And as long as there are supermarkets where I can go and buy something while not wearing a face mask, those are the places I will shop until that may someday change.
─G*****
Okay, it is well past 6 p.m. now, so I must bring this post to a close.
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