Facie’s Ramblings

 A few days ago, I decided to do gratitude posts on FB. I was good the first two days. Day 3 I got a little snarky as I posted about "doing the right thing" in regards to Covid. The Covid cases in Allegheny County have been on the rise. For a while, we had daily counts between 50 and 100. After July 4, we saw a spike for a few weeks, and then cases were back below 100. Unfortunately, other than one "low" day this week, where "only" 288 cases were reported, we have had between 500 and 620 daily cases. Fortunately, only a few people have died this week. But of course, any death is too many. I started to keep track of cases, deaths, and hospitalizations on 6/12/20. On that day, since 3/12, Allegheny County had had 2,034 cases, 352 people had been hospitalized, and 172 people had died. On 11/19/20, the county has seen a total of 22,042 cases, 1,724 people have been hospitalized, and 465 people have died from Covid since 3/12. In just over 8 months, we have had

I hate to say that I am still working through my grief. I mean, in some ways I can imagine I will always be grieving. But I feel pretty confident it will get easier, and I will cry less and less. But, yeah, I guess I am still working through it. Yesterday, a thought occurred to me: I had not hugged my dad since the end of February, and that will now be the last time I ever did. I did not see him for almost three months because of COVID, and then at the end of May, he started his series of hospital visits with skilled nursing stints in between. I was always afraid to hug him then. What if I gave him COVID? And yet when my dad had really bad ICU delirium during a few different hospital stays, I fed him. If I could do that, why not hug him? So I cried a bit last night thinking about that. I am not necessarily a big hugger; I used to hate it, and then probably before Jordan was born, I got back to doing it again. Before COVID, I hugged my friends goodbye (and sometimes hello). I always wou

Much like my political leanings have changed over the years (conservative child, liberal college student and young adult, conservative less-young adult, and now more liberal middle-aged adult), my Covid feelings have gone back and forth. Now I am in the take-some-precautions-but-don't-lock-yourself-up boat.  At the beginning of the pandemic, I was all for staying at home, and I looked down on those who were hanging out with friends. I did not see my dad for nearly 3 months because I was both following the stay-at-home order, and I did not want to expose him to anything, even though I left my house about once every two weeks to pick up a prescription or something, and I avoided people as much as I could. (Thankfully he had a girlfriend at the time who took care of him.) We wiped everything down that came into our house. I bleached most surfaces daily, although my kid had a bad cold at the very beginning, so I was trying to avoid getting that as much as anything else. When my dad was

Two weeks ago today, my dad died. At this time (9 a.m.) I was either getting ready to head to the hospital or on my way. The day before, we thought he probably had days left, which was good in that it meant we had more time to spend together and he was in no pain, but bad in that he was just lying there, not reacting. Why keep going on? Plus twice I had gotten a phone call saying he had hours left to live. Those calls are awful. I typically think about my dad when I first wake up. Today, he was not my first thought; it was, which cat is lying next to my feet. But he came to mind soon after.  Most days I have cried; some more than others. I had a run of 2 or 3 days where I did not cry at all, but then on Monday, I got some more sympathy cards in the mail. Even Verizon started their letter about discontinuing my dad's service/phone with "On behalf of Verizon Wireless we would like to extend our deepest sympathies to you concerning your recent loss." Verizon has made me cry

I more or less gave up blogging a few years ago. FB replaced it. But since my dad died on 10/8 (one week ago today), I feel that I might need to start back up again. I have things to say. A lot. So here goes. I will start with how we got to where we are now, which is my dad no longer being of this Earth.  My dad did not always make the best decisions. But during the last year of his life, I was there for him a lot. He needed me. He could not keep track of his many, many ailments, so I was the one who talked to doctors, nurses, etc. Frustratingly, he had two (main) competing health issues: congestive heart failure/blocked arteries for which he was told in November 2019 he needed open-heart surgery within a few months, and hematuria. For months, urology was afraid to put him under to figure out why he had blood in his urine, and cardiology did not want to operate on a man who was losing blood. I spent a lot of time going back and forth with those people. Then stupid COVID came. My husban

I have so many disjointed thoughts about guns in America right now. I am sad, sick, and angry about what happened at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida last week. I hate that I have to talk to my high schooler about what to do if someone starts shooting in her school. I hate that when the hubs and I dropped her off at the movies last week, I was feeling uneasy as we told her to be aware of her surroundings and pay attention to where the exits are. I hate that my daughter has many unanswerable questions about how what happened actually happened. I hate that my 11-year-old nephew in TX is afraid to go to school because he is afraid of a shooting. I hate that nearly every day since that awful shooting, I have had to read about threats at various schools, instilling more fear in children. Over 5 years ago after the shooting in Newtown, I said that I still consider schools one of the safest places. Despite the fact that we seem to read about more and more school shootings,