Kevin Standlee: Fandom Is My Way of Life

Today is not a blanket holiday for my company. We get a couple of "floating holidays," and most of my teammates are taking today off, but a few of us have to work to support our customers, many of which are working today. (I will use my floating holiday next Wednesday as I fly to Montreal for SMOFCon 38.

While waiting for some reports for which I'm responsible to generate, I did do what I think will be the only Black Friday deal of which I'm going to use: DemeTECH a US-based manufacturer of high-quality masks including the N95 masks that Lisa and I use, is offering 40% off through November 27 at 23:59 (presumably Eastern time, that being the time zone in which they are based) using code BLACK2022. We still have a few masks left — we bought a lot of them months ago, most of which were the supply available during Westercon 74 — but we'll restock now, as the masks are not cheap. OTOH, cheap is not something I want for something I wear to protect myself from the people who mistakenly think that COVID isn't a thing anymore.

We still have some masks in stock, and I pulled six of them yesterday and packaged them in plastic bags for the SMOFCon trip. I probably won't need all of them, but it's better to have spares for when an elastic band breaks than to be caught short.

We once again did a grocery trip to Reno in the wee hours of Saturday morning. I got up two hours before my usual alarm time, and we managed to get to WinCo (the large 24-hour grocery store in Reno) about 3:30 AM. It was less busy than it had been last weekend when we did this two hours later or so. We were pleased to see that most of the staff were still wearing masks, despite Nevada lifting statewide mask mandates. The handful of other customers were mostly maskless, though.

With fewer people in the store, we were able to get our groceries pretty quickly and get out, and were back home before 5 AM. We put the groceries away, Lisa got ready for bed (she's been mostly sleeping days), I got breakfast from the Wigwam, then went to work on a project. I had a CanSMOF board of directors meeting scheduled later in the morning as well. A long nap in the afternoon was not a surprise.

The main drawback to these trips to skip the crowds is that there's only the one 24-hour grocery store (two locations in Reno). There are several other stores that sell things that we can't get at WinCo — Raley's and Scolari's — and they aren't open around the clock. So eventually we'll have to make a trip at a somewhat more "normal" hour.

We don't really need to go shopping weekly. Lisa says it's comforting to know that we have weeks worth of canned and non-perishable food if necessary. Most perishables we can get in Fernley, and we could go without them if we really had to do so. But as conditions permit, we do try to keep the pantry fully stocked.

The pandemic isn't over. We still don't trust most people, particularly given how close to half the population is unvaccinated and denies that there's a problem, and many of them still think that only Weak People ever get sick, and since they can't see so-called "viruses," they don't really exist, because they were real, you could see them, and then you could shoot them with your guns. So for now, we still have to consider any unmasked person a potential threat to our health, keep wearing our N95 masks, and watch out to see if another booster shot is indicated. I've been not-sick for more than two years now, which is longer than I can remember in my entire life, and I think I like being not-sick.

[Backdated because I forgot to post this on Saturday on account of falling into bed much earlier than usual, for reasons that should be obvious.]

With a cooler day and less smoke in the air, Lisa and I ran into Reno to get groceries from WinCo Foods that we missed on our previous trip on account of us balking due to long lines and several things we wanted not being in stock. We, of course, wore our face masks as we've never stopped doing. There may have been a few more people masking up than there were a week ago, but I reckon a lot of people simply haven't heard the latest declaration from the governor's office, and probably a bunch who have are ignoring it because they are Freedumb Fighters.

While driving into town, we passed through a brief but intense downpour. It helped clear the air a little bit, but more would have been better.

Today it will have been two weeks since Lisa and I received our second Pfizer vaccine shots. In theory, that means we're free of needing masks in most situations. In practice, because there's no way I can trust that any other maskless person is immunized, I anticipate that we'll be still wearing our masks for a while now. Indeed, given the ideological makeup of the people around here, I rather expect that the Covidiots who weren't wearing masks anyway will be delighted and I hear them crowing already on Facebook. I do fear another big outbreak as the anti-vaxxers and Covidiots pour gasoline on the embers of the pandemic. As I've said before, I really don't care if they all kill themselves, but I don't see why they think they have the right to take me with them.

And in the meantime, as I look around and see a whole lot of cottonwood seeds blowing in the wind, I think a face mask to reduce seasonal hay fever is a good idea anyway. Also, I haven't had a cold in 18 months, and I rather like that.

I wish we could get the vaccinated population up to the 80%-plus we need to have a chance of getting and keeping herd immunity, but I'm pessimistic when such a large part of the population are science-deniers who think public health is just politics and that that Strong people never get sick anyway, so it's only the Weak who get sick and they should die anyway, and quickly, too.

Yesterday was the first day I used the new DemeTECH N95 mask from the supply we recently bought, because we had to go out on a short trip.

( Mask and Mask Again )

Our big trip: taking the last several months' worth of plastic and aluminum recycling to the transfer station in Fallon, because the station here in Fernley is hopeless and because there's no provision for pickup of recycling around here. (We get one bin, and it all goes into the same tip.) Yes, our big day out was to drive to the dump. This shows you what little it takes to amuse us in a pandemic.

Actually dumping the recycling was uneventful, although we'd left it accumulate for so long that we nearly filled up their aluminum, plastic #1, and plastic #2 bins. Lisa had never been over here before, so we also drove over some alternative routes. This led to me discovering what was on the big hill near the transfer station (a raceway, as it turns out) before we headed for home.

Among the various bits of merchandise available from Westercon 74 through our Zazzle store are 2-layer washable cotton face masks. Zazzle runs lot of sales, but they had one particularly good one a few days ago that led us to buy four more of the white Westercon masks, which arrived a couple of days ago. The instructions said to wash them before first use, and the one I did have was overdue for a run through the washing machine anyway. (I've been hand-washing it, though.)

( Hanging Out the Washing )

Having multiple masks makes it easier for me to put one in to wash while not going without one myself. I wish we could buy one for every member of Westercon 74, but the volume discounts just aren't high enough to make that viable. Although we do hope that the COVID-19 vaccine is broadly distributed and used, so we can safely hold Westercon 74 in person in Tonopah in 2022, we will never criticize people for wearing a face covering in the future, and we hope you will not do so, either.