cny rider

7.5 miles. We live up on a hill. The first 1.5 miles drops 400 feet vertical. So it's a quick ride to work but a slog to get home.

I rode my bicycle to work (not unusual, that's how I go to work most days). It was spectacular. The combination of heavy frost and ice fog had coated the fields and trees in glimmering crystals.

Good riddance. What a loser.

We just scored first flakes here as a vigorous but brief snow shower rolled through. Now on to bigger things!

We really lucked out here, with the rain going to our west. We are still saturated from earlier in the week. It wouldn't have taken much to have us flooding again.

1. Are you peeing blood? 2. If you can, filter your urine for the next couple of days and see if you catch little stones.

You have to have wings at Duffs!

After being so bad they were unwatchable the last few years, this looks like a different team. Let's hope they can keep it up.

We have avoided being that high during storms. Tug just feels so exposed to me during high intensity LE events.

I've been in the Adirondacks during snowstorms, and I've been on the Tug during storms. The Dacks don't really scare me. But I have felt a real visceral fear during heavy lake effect on the tug, especially crossing open areas with the wind howling.

I just woke up and took the dog out. Its 65F and humid at 0630. Feels just like Christmas!

We had the furnace on for a few hours a couple of weeks ago when we had a chilly morning. Nothing since. We have not touched our wood pellets yet but I think that changes on Monday for sure.

My argument is based on public health. In this post and the one below I think you make a compelling economic argument in favor of vaccination. I don't come to this knowing much about supply chains, but have read a bit lately as they have been in the news. Do your products originate in Asia? Wouldn't the best thing for your business be for as many people to get vaccinated as possible, all over the world? You wouldn't have mines shutting down for Covid, factories shutting down because of Covid, shipping understaffed because of Covid and so on and so on. Your products could be produced, and get to you on time, with the least inflationary pressure versus what is happening now. That doesn't mean it has to be mandatory for everyone. But it means it should be promoted and presented in a positive light as a way of resuming healthy economic activity.

Death en masse wasn't a comment on red versus blue states. It's a comment on Florida having 400 Covid deaths a day last month, many of which would not have happened had vaccination and public health measures been followed. 400 dead people is a lot of dead people. You've probably flown on a 737 at some point? Two or three of those crashing a day, every day, killing everyone on board. You would think there would be some attempt to stop the carnage after just a few of those planes crashed in Florida, but there was an almost reflexive refusal by the governor to do anything constructive.

It was, shall we say, a little titillating. There are worse ways to spend a summer say.

I wasn't going to mention it but these were two extremely attractive women dressed in skin tight material, and there wasn't even much of it. They were really good at the yoga though and nobody plunged off the side!

We did that hike last summer. It is spectacular. While we were there two women showed up in skin tight outfits and started posing for pictures in yoga poses right on the edge of the rocks where you are sitting. They were in all kinds of weird balanced positions, literally right at the edge of the cliff face. They said it was for the website for their studio. Nobody died.

We’ve broken out into the sun here. Another 10/10 fall day.

I don't watch CNN and I don't consume a lot of media. Your stats are misleading about what has actually happened over the last 18 months. New York was ground zero for the arrival of Covid in early 2020. The city was overwhelmed with it. There were no vaccines, no effective treatments and a completely overwhelmed hospital system. Bad decisions were made regarding nursing home residents. Deaths from Covid were measured in the thousands per week, peaking at over 2300 in April 2020. Since that time we have developed vaccines, effective therapies, and learned much about the effectiveness of masks and environmental control of virus spread. New York's death toll is generally 100-200 per week now. Florida did not have the early disease surge that NY had. Their first week with deaths greater than 1000 was in July 2020. The sad, senseless part is that through poor vaccination efforts, and refusal to implement risk reduction practices, the death toll in Florida soared to over 2000 per week in August and September. That should not have happened with a highly effective, widely available vaccine. Thousands of people suffered and died senseless, unnecessary deaths as a result of bad governance and management.

Yes, awesome use of stats to obscure the reality of what is taking place. You know that if Warren Buffett joined this discussion we are having, statistically speaking on average we would all be billionaires ?

I admire your dedication to cancer screening. Perhaps you could impart that to unvaccinated friends and colleagues. One of the most impactful screening procedures we do for people is colonoscopy. When you have a colonoscopy there will be 3 people in the room with you: A gastroenterologist, a GI nurse, and an anesthesiologist or CRNA. When a hospital gets hit with a Covid surge the anesthesia people get pulled and reassigned to airway management and critical care teams, taking care of the critically ill who are almost all unvaccinated. Guess how many screening colonoscopies happen during that time? Zero. What's the best way to keep the GI Lab humming along doing those essential screenings? Get vaccinated!

We can look to the great states of Florida, Texas and Idaho for the outcomes in places that didn’t accept vaccination in high numbers and also didn’t “force” people to follow good public health pandemic mitigation strategies. Their governors in particular made the pandemic a political issue, not a public health issue. The results really have been impressive. Death en masse.

It's not all about you. You chose to get vaccinated and I'm happy for you. People aren't being punished for not being vaccinated, they are making a choice. In this case they can choose to get vaccinated and have a kidney transplant. Or they can choose not to get vaccinated and stay on dialysis. Seems simple enough, I know which option I would choose.

This seems paranoid.

Force fed by whom? The public health officials whose job it is to fight pandemic illness? The doctors and nurses who have seen enough death for a lifetime and want people to be protected? Or was it those parents who want their kids to be able to attend school in person, maybe even without masks once the infection rates are down from vaccination? Or was it the small business owners who knew their businesses wouldn't survive unless infection rates went down and people started shopping in person, attending events, going to the hairdresser and the hardware store? And from a logical standpoint: The "hard sell" is irrelevant. You should make decisions that favor your survival, even if you think there's some nefarious "they" who want you to do something.