COVID-11-19

Today, November 19, COVID is raging across the country. Meanwhile, the Senate won't consider a pandemic relief bill while Trump keeps trying (successfully? hope not!) to overturn the results of the presidential election.   The COVID situation in New Jersey isn't as bad as it is elsewhere, but it's bad enough.  It's getting harder and harder to avoid the virus, just as it's become impossible to do something about Donald Trump in the last nine weeks of his presidential term. More about that later.

I'm getting hypochondrial now, and that may be the only thing that saves me.  Just when we in my household thought our refrigerator was fixed, we found the freezer compartment periodically spiking to several degrees above zero (Fahrenheit) and had a repairman look at it for the ninth time.  Yet another house call is needed, because the dude who came over couldn't do anything about it for reasons too random and complicated to explain.   The same day we have a tenth house call,  I have to bring my car into my dealership - for a different repair than the stalling problem, which has long since been fixed  . . . this time it's the rear door latch.  Any of these appliance repairmen and service advisors I have to deal with could have COVID.  We could follow all of the CDC guidelines as we have been doing, and we could still catch the virus because of one false move on our part.  We can clean our kitchen surfaces and our refrigerator after the repairman leaves, but we only need to miss one spot to get infected.  

Heck, I may have caught COVID from a local auto repair shop I went to earlier this week.  I considered going local for my car because I didn't want to go to the dealership, which is in the next county, and deal with getting a loaner.  That gambit proved to be wrongheaded when I walked in and found no one wearing a face covering or gloves (which could euphemistically be called hand coverings) like I was.  A mechanic looked at my rear door, told me what he could do and  urged me to make an appointment.  Needless to say, I'm not going back.

I expect to have my car repaired some time after Thanksgiving.  I hope I'm still around by then.  It sees that, the more I try not to interact with so many people, the more I have to.