2021 Life Logs, Day 34: Battle of Life Mantras
Date: Wednesday, February 3, 2021
Weather: Overcast; High 34, Low 28 Degrees F
Location: At Home in The Cottage, East Falmouth, MA
I love my dear friend Lynn Kirwin who is currently living in New Zealand. I love her for many reasons, but one of them is her life mantra, “You make plans, then life happens.” When we were sailing with Ed and Lynn in the Indian Ocean, she often reminded me that all of my planning might not work out. I knew that, but the mantra that guides my life comes from educator Harry Wong. “If you don’t have a plan, you’re planning to fail.” What I have learned is that these two mantras are not in opposition. It is fine to plan. In fact, if you don’t, you have nothing to guide you. But you do have to realize that things might not always go as planned and you need to be flexible about that. You also need to make plans that are within the realm of possibility. Unfortunately, hard as I try, I tend to be over zealous and make plans that are just not realistic. That brings me to today. I had planned to write ALL day, but that didn’t happen. First, I overslept. Shadow is on a new schedule where he gets up at 5:30 am. We go out in the dark for that first morning potty break and by the time I get back in bed, it takes a while to get back to sleep. And then I ignore the alarm. By the time I got up this morning, did my exercises, took a shower, got dressed, and took Shadow for his Morning Mile walk, it was almost noon with no writing done. So much for ALL day. In the afternoon I had to do some research on how to get help my 87 year-old sister gain some weight. She weighs only 75 pounds now. I actually found some snacks that are allowed in her current diet to combat IBS that are available on Amazon. So, I was able to order those for her. Then I got part of Chapter Four of The Voyage of Windbird written, but probably have two more days of work to complete that chapter. We’ll see if that is a ‘doable’ plan. And I didn’t get to try out the dictation mode in Word. Much of Chapter Four comes directly from the daily logs I wrote at the time. Therefore, much of the writing is really editing out the parts of the logs that are not needed to tell the story. I will continue on tomorrow and at some point I’ll get to check out the dictation mode.
This evening I joined a call about the coronavirus vaccine roll-out on Cape Cod. It was organized by local politicians and 13,000 joined the call. So far, sign up for getting a vaccine here has to be online, but so many older people don’t have computer access or can’t figure out the sign up procedures even if they do. I loved the technology that allowed anyone on the phone conversation tonight to just press 1 on their phone and their number was entered into a data base of those who have no online access. About 600 people on the call tonight were identified. Another 100 were identified that will need transportation to a vaccination site. I found that impressive. Personally, I found Sean O’Brien, our Barnstable County Department of Health and the Environment Director, the most helpful. He very succinctly outlined how the roll-out has gone so far and how he perceives it will go forward from this point. If I understood him correctly, anyone can log onto the county Department of Health website and sign-up to get a notification when it is time for your designated age group to make an appointment. I’ll try that tomorrow. But even if everything goes perfectly, those of us on the Cape that are in the 65 to 74 year-old age group won’t be able to start making appointments until sometime in March. My sister that ives in Tennessee is in the 85 and over age group. She got her first vaccine today and has a follow-up appointment on March 3rd for the second vaccine. She had to go to a location about 30 minutes from where she lives and wait in a car line for two hours. She was surprised at just how many cars went through during those two hours. She said the people giving the vaccines were actually running most of the time to keep things moving along. People are working hard on this roll out, and slowly, but surely, everyone who wants a vaccine will get one. Let’s just hope that is at least 80 percent of the population.
