Week 14 of hiatus

Monday, 6 to Sunday, 12 July 2020

My hiatus will end sooner than I expected
This week, the HOA that rules David and Anna's neighborhood reported to them that someone has made a complaint about me being here.  Even having an RV parked here is a violation, let alone having someone live in said RV, let alone let alone said someone doing it for what's now in the 4th month.  So I have to leave, meaning I have to go to a campground.

All week, Texas has been setting new coronavirus records, including numbers of new cases, numbers of deaths, numbers of hospitalizations.  On the rate of positive results of testing, Texas has now achieved 15% as a statewide average, meaning the high number of new cases isn't a result of more testing, as some figures in authority have claimed.

All of that tells me that if I have to go to a campground, Texas is the wrong place to do it in.  So I've been trying to find a possibly safer state, and I'm having a surprising amount of trouble doing that.  I've tried unsuccessfully to get a straight answer from the CDC website; I much prefer to be told information like positivity rates rather than total numbers that don't allow me to compare one state to another (e.g. North Dakota's population is a lot smaller than Nebraska's so it's bound to have lower total numbers).

Nonetheless, from everything I've seen recently, South Dakota and Nebraska seem to have among the lowest risks in this part of the country.  (Maine is good, too, but (a) it's a state I've already visited and (b) it's on the other side of the continent.  SD isn't exactly next door either, but Google claims it's only a 14 hour drive (for ordinary drivers), and Nebraska is only 10 hours away.  So I'm tentatively planning to head up there when I can get everything wrapped up here.

Actually, I was planning to go to North Dakota until I heard this morning that they're starting to experience a spike in cases.  Well, a spike in ND is a fairly small number of people, but it only takes one to infect others, and I don't want to be one of those others.  I told David to tell the HOA I'd leave by Tuesday the 21st, and that's still 9 days away.  Lots can happen in that amount of time so I'm aiming for flexibility on exact travel plans.

2 Cleanliness Trips
Waste tank cleanliness
I've been intending for ages to clean my waste tanks and been put off by thinking it's complicated.  Well, it is and it isn't and I'm tired of putting it off.  When I bought the RV, the service staff at the dealership gave me a bottle of cleaner and told me to pour a measured amount into the toilet, followed by flushing a bag of ice.  Then I'm supposed to drive around for a day and dump it all out the next day.  So, it's mildly complicated.

I found I had less than one dose left in the bottle, bought a bag of ice, went to the Arlington KOA, dumped my tanks, then hooked up to their water supply so I could flush the bag of ice without running out of water from my tank.  Just driving back to Anna and David's in Dallas's traffic constituted enough of the requisite driving around, I figured.  Then the next day I drove up north past Denton to a Love's Travel Stop up there to dump it out.

Because it wasn't a full dose, and because there wasn't enough to dump down the sinks as well, I want go through this process again before I leave town, including the sink drains this time, which means I have to find an RV supply store.  For some reason, the internet is having trouble with this one, but I'll figure it out.

Virus news
On these trips I continued to find Kroger parking lots full - even ones in remote locations - at odd times of the day.  I finally decided to stop at one anyway, figuring surely they weren't all full all the time.  And maybe they aren't but the one I went to sure was.  Because the governor has finally mandated mask-wearing in public places, they were all wearing masks, but almost nobody seemed to make any attempt at social distancing.  They apparently believed the mask canceled out that part.  So that grocery trip became a nightmare for me and I bought only what I really needed and got out of there as fast as I could.

On the news recently I saw a brief interview with a young woman who wasn't wearing a mask (this was before the mandate) who explained it by saying, "Everybody's going to get the virus anyway."  Well, yeah, if everybody follows her example.  Maybe the governor saw the same news clip I did and that led to the order.

Speaking of bizarre attitudes about the virus, I heard this morning about the existence of something called a Covid Party.  It's thrown by someone who's been diagnosed positive for the virus, and folks come to the party to be exposed to it to see whether it's real or a hoax.  I saw online that it may not be a widespread thing, but at least one happened here in Texas and one 30-year-old died after catching the virus at that party. 

I clearly remember when we were in our early to mid-20s we were often reckless and did moderately dangerous things; we never questioned our immortality and invincibility.  But that attitude had substantially worn off by the time we got to age 30, and I didn't know a soul who was stupid enough to do what this 30-year-old and his friends did.  But what it means to me isn't just that they were stupid, that's obvious, but instead the extent to which they've bought into conspiracy theories and disinformation online.  They're being bombarded by assertions that black is white and up is down and nothing is trustworthy, and it would take stronger personalities than many of them are old enough to have to resist that onslaught.  And if I'm right, our country's got bigger problems than I'd realized as far as our future is concerned.

Another aspect of the virus is shown with the current controversy about whether and how schools should reopen in the fall.  I suddenly started wondering about social distancing on school buses.  If they're trying to figure out how to create enough distance in the classrooms, how are they going to do it on the buses, unless they plan to put double the number of buses to work to spread the kids out.

It was big news this week when the Texas State Fair got canceled for the first time since WWII.  The virus cases in North Texas have been increasing at exponential rates recently, and though the fair isn't until September, I suppose authorities figured there was no way the virus would recede far enough to lower the risk substantially.  A shame, though.

Other things sighted
I passed yet another unaffiliated church - Open Heavens Church.  They say they're "a Spirit-filled church, blessed to have an extremely diverse culture that allows the Holy Spirit to flow in many different ways."  I continue to be surprised at the large number of independent churches in this area - numbers I haven't seen anywhere else I've been.

I passed several signs in McKinney relating to 3rd Monday Trade Days.  They claim to be the oldest and largest monthly flea market in North Texas, an outgrowth of their county market dating from the 1870s.  I don't know where they rate in relation to the 1st Monday Trade Days in Canton, but I can say I'd heard of Canton's and not of McKinney's.  Guess they need better publicity.

I passed a large Raytheon facility in McKinney and learned online that it just opened a few years ago and is McKinney's largest employer.  It's an advanced manufacturing plant, they say, that employs about 500 people.

I passed a large building with the name Pin Stack on it.  Having never heard of it, I looked it up and learned it's a chain of bowling alleys located north and northwest of Dallas.  That fancy building looked a lot more like a tech company than like the bowling alleys I went to when I was young.

I can't remember now where it was we stopped, but when I looked up I saw 5 longhorns in a small field across the road.  One of them had so much burnt orange on him he could be Bevo.

In other news
I voted in person this week, something I haven't done in several years.  When I'd registered to receive absentee ballots this year (based on being over age 65), the county voting office told me I hadn't picked a political party so they wouldn't send me a primary ballot.  I'd decided not to worry about that election since it's hard to keep up with fine distinctions at a distance.  But since I'm actually here for a change, I went on over with David and Anna.  Afterwards, I called the elections office to be sure voting in person wasn't going to cancel my request for an absentee ballot for the general election, and they assured me the computer had it set up.  I love voting.  It makes me feel like an American.  I can't even conceive of why someone wouldn't want to vote.

I discovered my awning wouldn't retract again this week, and this time I knew it was the motor and not something I was doing wrong.  My friendly local RV repair place squeezed me in to get the parts numbers so they could order them right away.  Now that I'm up against a deadline to leave town, I'm also running up against the normal times it takes to conduct business that don't always fit into my new schedule.  But the RV place said they'd do their best, probably spurred by my promise that I was leaving town as soon as they could get the work done.

I'm also still working on getting my Eleanor Roosevelt poster turned into a t-shirt.  They found they couldn't get a good enough image for a shirt by using the image they found online and told me they needed a flash drive.  So I found an Office Depot in Garland that has a scanner large enough to take my poster, and I think they charged me $5 plus the cost of the flash drive, which is reasonable from any point of view.

Then I took the flash drive back to the t-shirt place in Mesquite and they said it'd be done sometime this coming week.  And I told them too that I was leaving town as soon as they got my shirt done, so I've got my fingers crossed.

I've also made an appointment for the puppies to get baths this coming week.  I can't even remember the last time they got washed, and I might as well do it now.  And wash their bedding of course.

I heard someone on the radio mention a brown paper bag test in relation to Black history, and I'd never heard of it.  It turns out to be a real thing that, sadly, has been applied mostly by Black people in relation to other Blacks: someone who's skin color is darker than that of a paper bag is less likely to be able to join a sorority, for instance.  According to several authors, the use of this test has persisted into the 2nd half of the 20th century.  I found this interesting article online https://www.ferris.edu/jimcrow-question, written by the director of the Jim Crow Museum, which is in Big Rapids, MI.  I had no idea this museum even existed, so I missed it when I was in Michigan.

A company called Interabang Books sponsors some local NPR program or other, so I hear the name mentioned often.  Such an odd name, I finally got around to looking them up and learned an "interabang" is a punctuation mark that looks like this:  "‽" - a combined question mark and exclamation mark.  I'd never heard of it, but it was a character my computer had in its library, so I guess it's really a thing.  This is a 3-year-old independent bookstore and seems to be one of the very few independents in Dallas.  I wish them well.  I used to patronize BookPeople when I lived in Austin because they seemed more reliable than the chains.

I've now got a long list of things I need to get done before I leave town but, as usual, I'll just have to stay flexible.