The boat was pulled from the lake this past week and I am still cleaning and stowing gear we removed from the boat. We strip all of the gear, including cushions, from the boat before it is winterized and shrink-wrapped for winter storage. This lets us clean and repair or replace the gear over the winter. Mold and mildew can be a problem throughout the year, more so when the boat is in the water, but it can also be a problem when the boat is stored.
All of the clean gear has been put in Sterilite containers and stored here at The Gulch. There are still cushions to scrub to remove the aforementioned mold and mildew before they are also stored away. All in all I have at least another few days of work before everything is cleaned and stowed away.
But it’s worth every minute as long as we can continue to spend time out on the lake.
==+==
When the whole Covid kerfuffle started and lockdowns were declared– basically quarantining otherwise healthy people – a number of physicians and public health experts warned that doing so would actually cause more problems than this and other measures would prevent. Those problems?
Increased issues with both mental health and chronic diseases.
Those warnings were ignored.
Sadly, there may be more than one issue going on here. Dozens of public health experts, including Dr. Scott Atlas and Dr. Jay Bhattacharya from Stanford University, predicted the impact of lockdowns on mental health and chronic disease. They were censored and ignored. As Bhattacharya and his colleague Dr. Martin Kulldorff, an epidemiologist from Harvard, have noted, public health is about more than one viral illness:Could the death toll caused by delaying diagnosing and treating these diseases far exceed the actual death toll from Covid-19? (By ‘actual death toll’ I mean deaths caused by Covid, not deaths of people with Covid, something the Italians have recently divulged, dropping their Covid death toll by 97% to approximately 4,000.)
A fundamental public health principle is that health is multidimensional; the control of a single infectious disease is not synonymous with health. As an immunologist, Dr. Fauci failed to properly consider and weigh the disastrous effects lockdowns would have on cancer detection and treatment, cardiovascular disease outcomes, diabetes care, childhood vaccination rates, mental health and opioid overdoses, to name a few. Americans will live with—and die from—this collateral damage for many years to come.Two California doctors, Dr. Dan Erickson and Dr. Artin Massihi, who own seven urgent care facilities, warned of the potential for lockdown-related illnesses in April of 2020. At the time, their press conference got censored for correctly explaining the impact on the immune system and pleading for lockdowns to end...
I am making guess that we’ll find more people will end up dying from the delayed diagnoses and treatments due to lockdowns and the resulting shuttered hospitals, clinics, and doctor’s offices than even our inflated Covid death totals.
==+==
Knowing more than a few people from San Francisco and having friends and relatives who have recently visited, I have to agree with them that it is rapidly decaying into the West Coast version of Detroit.
That may be a harsh thing to say because it seems Detroit isn’t nearly as bad as San Francisco. Yes, Detroit has only a third of the population it did at its peak, has over 80,000 abandoned and decaying buildings, and mile after mile after mile of empty streets and the crumbling infrastructure that goes along with them, yet I would rather spend time in Detroit than San Francisco. Detroit has rightfully received all kinds of abuse seeing as how those running it destroyed it step by step. Now San Francisco is going down that same road and the devastation will be worse.
...This is a city that needs CVS, Walgreens, and Target.At it’s worst Detroit was nothing like that. This indicates to me that when San Francisco falls it will fall a lot harder than Detroit.
And those stores are under siege, falling one by one, closing up shop.
The ORCs are here.
First it was the razor blades and the cologne. Those were the first things in the all-night pharmacies and convenience stores to go behind locked cabinet doors. But at this CVS in San Francisco’s financial district, it’s damned near everything: booze, of course, though not all the booze, pistachios, mixed nuts, dental floss, toothpaste, lotion, deodorant, hair-care products, pain medicine, multivitamins — mostly not things that the vagrant and semi-vagrant members of the sandwich-philanthropy-receiving population are looking to scoop up for their own use, though a few hours before I got there one free spirit did apparently walk out with a bottle of white wine, the weather being fine and life being one long picnic.
==+==
It is only now that the disastrous Infrastructure Bill has passed that we are finding out what’s in it, a Pelosi specialty. One thing included in that gawdawful bill that I think is both incredibly stupid and incredibly intrusive: mandatory breathalyzers in all new cars.
This isn’t going to end well.
==+==
And that’s the news from Lake Winnipesaukee, where it’s been a might frosty, the leaves are falling in increasing numbers, and where preparations for winter have started.