Did I Overpack? Retrospective.

At the outset of our recent 11-day trip (which turned into a 12 day trip) to New York and Maine I lamented that our packing spread to 4 suitcases (plus 2 small messenger bags). That's more than we've taken on any flying trip in at least 15 years and was dangerously close to violating the "Miss Piggy" Rule of Packing: never pack more than you can lift. But did we overpack or did we need everything we brought?

A simple way to gauge whether you overpacked for a trip is to count what you didn't use when you return. In that respect I overpacked by a small amount. Clothes I packed but didn't wear consisted of one shirt, one pair of socks, and a sweater. Considering I was packing for 11 days of travel across varying weather forecasts and spanning activities from hiking mountains to attending a formal wedding, that's excellent! And if the weather had been a bit cooler I would've used all those items. So, no, I didn't overpack.

Lockdown Day 456: When It Ended (We Hope!)

It's been a while since I posted to my "Lockdown Day XXX" series. It's been so long that the lockdown is now over! 😳

When people in the future ask, "When did the pandemic end?" it'll be hard to provide a precise answer. Such things tend to end "Not with a bang but a whimper," as T.S. Eliot wrote in 1925. Even the lockdown is that way. It's been lifted gradually and in piecemeal fashion, with different countries, states, and cities having different policies, and those policies driven (sadly) as much by politics as evidence or science. But at least for California there's a day to mark as the end of the lockdown that's as good as any: June 15. That's when the state lifted its restrictions, more or less.

That was Lockdown Day 456.

Today is Lockdown Day 471— or would be, if the lockdown were still going. But here's the worrisome thing: The lockdown may return.

Why We Only Hope This is the End 😳

Vaccine hesitancy is a problem in the US. Although the vaccine has been freely available in plentiful supply for months, less than half the total US population is fully vaccinated today. Most of the remainder are vaccine objectors, people who've been fooled by politically motivated deniers into thinking the vaccine is ineffective, unnecessary, or even dangerous; or that Coronavirus isn't even real.

This significant population of unvaccinated people creates a huge safe harbor for Coronavirus to live and grow in. We're not going to be able to eradicate Covid-19 the same way we developed countries did in the 20th century with diseases such as polio, smallpox, and measles, when we reached 95%+ vaccination. That means there will continue to be Covid infections and outbreaks— plus also more places for worse variants, such as the Delta and now Gamma strains, to develop. Already some places in the world that lifted lockdown measures because they thought Coronavirus was licked are seeing it boomerang and having to go back into lockdown.