Beautiful tests
A beach urchin stopped by for a bit today to do some laundry and drop off some compost and garbage. Why garbage? Because her garbage cart blew away a couple weeks ago and various entreaties to the landlord to replace it have fallen on deaf ears. It’s okay. I rarely have more than one kitchen-sized bag of garbage per week so there’s plenty of room in my cart.
First thing out of her mouth upon arrival? How about that coronavirus? How about it indeed. We talked viruses and preparedness and face-touching and the incompetence of the Orange Baboon et al. I saw a news clip in which the CDC director fell all over himself to praise the OB for his leadership and decisiveness and I fergit what all. Are we really living in North Korea now? My beach urchin’s day job involves interaction with the general public so…
But then we lightened it up a bit. One of the things going into the laundry was some fabric pieces long stashed in a drawer that became rodent-infested. This can’t totally be blamed on a crappy apartment because I have intermittent problems with rodents here at the Landfill. Anyway, she stated the opinion that the fabric was probably virus free at this point. Virus? Oh yeah, *hantavirus*! Right.
So way back when we first heard about hantavirus it was pretty scary. All of the usual questions swirled in my head, particularly how was it transmitted. As it turned out it *is* a scary disease but it is not transmitted from person to person, only from infected rodent droppings so it’s pretty easy to avoid.
When hantavirus was still scary, I returned to my “childhood” job at the EPA after a vacation. I happened to be feeling just a wee bit rocky from a mild gastrointestinal virus. I wasn’t feeling too sick to work so I went in and the first thing my Chilean friend/colleague said to me (in his Spanish accent) was, “Have you heard about thees theeng? Eet ees coming from thee west!” Jeebus! Yes, I had.
Last I knew we had no coronavirus cases in the Great Lake State (that could change any moment if it hasn’t already) but people are *still* making runs on toilet paper and Clorox wipes and things. I stopped at the Saline Road Meijer on my way home from work Thursday and I wasn’t even looking for Clorox wipes although I do use them to clean Eco Terlet. I was heading back to where the orange juice was and happened to pass the household cleaning aisle and though you can see it isn’t totally empty, people *have* been buying this stuff.
I’m going shopping tomorrow morning and I *do* have toilet paper on my list. I hope I can find some! If not, I guess there’s always Amazon Prime…