GG's 90th

About a month ago Jack's grandma had a big 90th birthday celebration.   Now that a few weeks have passed, I can say that it wasn't a super-spreader event, so that's nice too :)   We got some good pictures I want to share here.

GG and her kids

GG and most of her grandkids and great-grandkids

2022 road trip with bikes

On the 4th of July we returned from our longest road trip yet.   Jack and I both took some family road trips as kids but we've never done any long drives together, even without the kids in tow.      This trip was a ten night, counter-clockwise loop from Seattle to Idaho to Alberta to British Columbia.   

Quantitative Overview

• driving distance from lodging to lodging: 1476 miles  -   daily activities added more miles.
• gas bill: 1196 - yikes
• miles biked: 85  - pretty good for a family trip :)
• longest ride: 36.8  - a one-way, mostly downhill ride!
• trips between Banff and Canmore: 8   We should have stayed in Banff itself.  Once I forgot the cabin keys at a restaurant and we had to turn around at 11 pm and drive back to Banff again to get them.
• bike rides: 6  - one was just Jack and D, while I drove the car down the road
• bears observed: 5  -   2 Grizzlies and 3 black bears, one of which we saw on the side of the road as we biked past it...
• swims: 4  -  Radium Hot Springs, the hotel pool, Okanagan Lake (Kelowna)  and Hillcrest aquatic center in Vancouver
• national holidays: 2  - Canada day on July 1 and the 4th of July on our way home
• rainy days: 2   - drizzles when we were in Banff one day, but not actually on our long ride followed by a downpour on our last day in Vancouver.
• museums: 1 -  Museum of Anthropology at UBC on a rainy day
• number of tantrums: 0  -   Awesome!
• unpatriotic thoughts:  ? ...... quite a few with the combination of national holidays, incredibly low covid rates in BC vs. WA, rolling back of American women's rights and even public investment in swimming pools.   

This was the longest trip we've taken since we went to the Azores in early 2019.  Thank goodness we took that trip when we did, pre-Covid.   It felt awesome to get away from it all - work, home and mostly covid.

Generally, this trip boosted my confidence a lot for future travel.   Dd, at 3.75 years, is at the point where naps aren't essential.   He took a couple, but mostly did fine without them and we didn't spend any time battling him to fall asleep in an unfamiliar and exciting environment.    We also pushed the kids by staying out pretty late several times.  There was lots of daylight and the drives were long.   They handled it like champs, and if you put it in perspective relative to jet lag, staying out until 10 pm isn't so bad.   One surprise success was on the hydration front.   I brought my osprey pack (thank you, Jack) with the hose and soft water bottle and the kids just could not get enough of drinking from it, so we all stayed hydrated.   

Keeping track of our stuff was a challenge.   We lost misplaced Jack's kindle a couple of times and it camoflauges extremely well against bedroom furniture.  Then D inexplicably put it in a drawer at an AirBnB.   Never put things away on vacation!   In the end, I think the only things we lost were a water bottle and two pairs of pyjamas Dd would have outgrown soon anyway.      

Also, our credit card had some fraud on it right when we got home, so that might be a souvenir of the trip as well.    All in all, it was a great trip.

covid update - day *5 million

*5 million is a reflection of how things feel, not real time

It's several months since my last covid update (https://aglie.blogspot.com/2022/01/omicron-update-and-two-years-of-new.html) so here's a snapshot of what life like these days.

Covid continues to be a menace, but we have plentiful rapid home tests now and Dd momentously got his first Moderna shot about two weeks ago.  Also this spring, D got a first booster shot.

Cases are way closer to home now.   At least four or five kids in Dd's class and a similar number of Jack's baseball teammates caught it in May or June.   My mom had a mild case in two weeks ago, presumably thanks to the combination of a flight from virus-riddled Hawaii and a relatively recent booster shot.   Only older people are eligible for a second booster.   Cases among my once-boosted peers are sometimes pretty mild but also pretty gnarly (though so far not requiring hospitalization of anyone I know who was vaccinated).

Seattle Public Schools remained more or less open for all of D's second grade year.   Public health, and thus our daycare, have reduced the duration of isolation and quarantines, so a case in Dd' classroom translates to 2-3 days of missed school for the affected class rather than over a week of shutdown for the whole school, as happened with the first case in November 2021.

The constant string of variants keeps changing the science subtly.   Recently I came across this blog, which is super helpful and informative.  https://yourlocalepidemiologist.substack.com/  . I credit it with helping me choose Moderna over Pfizer for Dd.

We've all (ok, maybe not everyone) become statisticians too now.   I'm still regularly watching the case counts in King County, but like in the early part of 2020, we all know that the official counts are massive undercounts of the real case load.   Therefore, anecdotal impressions of how many people around us are catching us are not a crazy thing to pay attention to.  More and more, studies of covid remnants in sewage provide the most meaningful metrics.  

I'm still afraid of long covid and most things I've read are pessimistic and still based on unvaccinated subjects.   

Some more food for thought on the subject comes from our recent trip to British Columbia and Alberta, Canada.   King County has a "fully vaccinated" rate of 82% while Canada has a rate of 84%.   While the definition of fully vaccinated is a moving target, these numbers come from the New York Times today and I trust they have made a solid effort to report comparable numbers.    In short, our county has taken a civilized approach to vaccination and masking, yet our numbers are shocking compared to our neighbor to the north.     As noted, all of these stats are imperfect, but still there is such a difference it must be significant.     Our trip was the first time I have felt like we were in a post-covid world where we ate indoors at restaurants and went to the grocery store without a mask on.

Could we have similar numbers if King County had been able to close its borders?