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Thursday/ it’s Day 15 for me

I have been counting the days after Wednesday, April 14 when I got my first Covid-19 vaccine shot.

The graph below has been doing the rounds on Twitter, and has been featured in articles about the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine.
It was compiled in 2020 by Pfizer with data from the vaccine trials.
New coronavirus cases quickly tapered off in the vaccinated group of volunteers about 10 days after the first dose*. In the placebo group, cases kept steadily increasing.
The second dose boosts and extends the protection (for at least 6 months, possibly for much longer).

*If someone in the vaccinated group did get infected, the symptoms were milder, and there were no fatalities, either.

Comparison of Covid-19 incidences in placebo group, and a vaccinated group, from Pfizer’s clinical trials in 2020.
I’m in the vaccinated group and at the ‘2’ on the graph’s timeline, and heading for the ‘3’ next Wednesday when I will get my second shot.
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Wednesday/ President Biden addresses Congress

Tomorrow marks President Joe Biden’s first 100 days in office.
Tonight, he addressed a joint session of Congress, with two women on the dais behind him for the first time in the country’s history (Madam VP Kamala Harris and Madam Speaker Nancy Pelosi).
The president noted that 220 million vaccine shots had been given since he had taken office, and talked about his $2 trillion infrastructure plan.

Biden’s plans are big and bold. All told, there is a total of $6 trillion in the spending plans he has rolled out.
He says he will move ahead with these plans, even if he does not receive a single Republican vote of support in Congress:
The American Rescue Plan (the coronavirus relief bill), passed by Congress in March, $1.9 trillion.
The American Jobs Plan (infrastructure plan), unveiled Mar. 31, $2.3 trillion (paid for in part by raising the corporate tax rate).
The American Families Plan, unveiled this week, $1.8 trillion (paid for by increases in tax collection and high-earner income & capital gains taxes).

Illustration by Ben Kirchner for The New Yorker magazine, for an article titled ‘Biden’s Pandemic Plan Might Just Work’, by Dhruv Khullar, Jan 27, 2021.
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Tuesday/ closed and blacked out

Here’s the QFC grocery store on 15th Ave, that had closed its doors for the last time on Saturday.
The store’s owners, the Kroger Co. based in Cincinnati, Ohio, says it was not profitable enough. The $4-per-hour hazard pay to grocery workers, mandated by the City of Seattle, ‘had forced their hand to close it’.

I like that little solar panel for the surveillance system in the parking lot. I should put four or five of those on my garage roof — to charge the battery of my up-and-coming electric car with.
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Monday/ walking up along Pine Street

I took my rental car back this morning. The plan is to go carless for a week or so, and then get another one. There is still a good number of weeks to go before I get my new car.

It was a pleasant day, and I could walk up, up along Pine Street to get to the other side of Interstate 5, and to Capitol Hill where my house is.
It’s about 30 mins of walking with no stopping, but I took my time, and took some pictures as I went.

This is the Hertz rental car center on the 6th floor of a garage on 8th Ave in downtown. There’s the counter in the distance where I had dropped my car’s keys. These are basically all the cars they have; the five floors below are eerily empty. (Hard to know if all the floors had been filled with cars pre-pandemic, though). There’s definitely a shortage of rental cars right now, with people starting to travel again. In places like Hawaii, the fee for a small sedan is $195/ day. That is crazy, and 4 times or 5 times the ‘normal’ rate.
I like the signage in the elevator lobby. I was tempted to stop at every floor to see what 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5 looked like, and what colors, then thought, no! just go all the way down.
The upscale Grand Hyatt hotel on Pine Street is still closed. Many years ago, I had cocktails with friends in the lobby bar. One of them was from Houston, and he could not stop talking about his Continental Airlines frequent flyer miles. (Continental Airlines is no more. It merged with United Airlines in 2010).
Corner of Pine St & 9th Ave, looking northeast. Dough Zone dumpling house Chinese restaurant on the right, Washington State Convention Center expansion construction zone on the left. That’s the No 10 bus from Capitol Hill, coming into downtown.
The Paramount Theater is still shuttered as well, of course. 
‘Justice for Daunte Wright’ says the sign, the 20-yr-old African-American man that was fatally shot on Apr. 11 by police officer Kimberly Potter during a traffic stop & attempted arrest for an outstanding arrest warrant, in Brooklyn Center, Minnesota.
The US Treasury Department was “taking steps to resume efforts” to put the abolitionist Harriet Tubman on the $20 bill (left of the picture), but nothing new has been announced of late.
Ticket booths at the main entrance of the Paramount Theater. The theater has 2,807 seats for the performing arts, and opened in March 1928 as the Seattle Theatre.
Looking back at the Washington State Convention Center expansion, from the Pine Street overpass over Interstate 5. Maybe there is a little money left in the budget to also fix up that rusty lamp post on the far right.
The Baltic Room nightclub & bar with its art deco ironwork is still boarded up, but not permanently closed, as far as I can tell.
This space at 300 East Pine St houses attorney’s offices now, but some 15 years ago it was called The Chapel, a fancy wine & cocktail bar, filled with beautiful people on a Friday night, and a place for which one would dress up a little (in a city that had made grunge bands and grunge wear famous).
The artwork on the alley side of the Sugar Hill eatery & bar at 400 East Pine has been there for a while, but is holding up. Sugar Hill bills itself as a ‘loungey, vinyl-fueled eatery/ bar for craft cocktails, Thai street food & late-night DJs’.
I had left Pine St, and made my way to the new apartment buildings on Broadway by the Capitol Hill light rail station. This is the brand new plaza on the inside. I love the pastel colors of the art installation, with the brighter yellow & orange in there as well. I really hope it stays like this for a while: clean and graffiti-free.
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Sunday/ more rain

There was more rain today, bringing the April total to 0.95 in (24 mm). This is still far below the average for April (2.71 in / 69 mm).

I played a little tennis indoors this morning, mask on. My friend from tennis volunteers at the big vaccination clinic at the Lumen Field football stadium here in the city. He says they give 8,000 people a jab in the arm there every day, but could take it up to 22,000 if they could get more doses of vaccine.

My Japanese maple (Acer palmatum) has sprouted its new leaves for the season. The red leaves contain anthocyanin that gives them their characteristic color. The leaves do contain chlorophyll (green) for photosynthesis, but the anthocyanin levels are much greater.
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Saturday/ the snail mail is here

There was light rain outside and cold weather, all day long (49 °F/ 9 °C).

Mister Snail on my porch step, had evidently escaped the boot of the mailman. I put him back in the soil.
I believe it’s a brown-lipped snail (Cepaea nemoralis). It is one of the most common species of land snail in Europe, and has been introduced to North America. The ‘brown lip’ refers to the lip of the shell opening. There is considerable variety in the color shades and striping of the shells, determined by the dominant and recessive genes in the snail’s DNA.
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Friday/ 21 (or 28) days is best

My text message from University of Washington (UW) Medicine.

My appointment for the second Pfizer shot has been rescheduled, to exactly 21 days out, from my first shot (4 days later than the 17 days out, that I was told at first).

Per a text message from my health care provider, the  CDC guidance for second shots has been updated. (It seems that before today, there was a 4-day grace period, so the second shot could be had as early as 4 days before the 21-day mark, or 4 days after the 21-day mark).

From cdc.gov:
You should get your second shot as close to the recommended 3-week or 4-week interval as possible. However, your second dose may be given up to 6 weeks (42 days) after the first dose, if necessary. You should not get the second dose early … However, if you do receive your second shot of COVID-19 vaccine earlier or later than recommended, you do not have to restart the vaccine series. 

P.S. So Johnson & Johnson’s single-shot vaccine is back in business, in the US, in Europe and in South Africa. Good news.

The pandemic rages in India, with 300,000 new cases per day, and on a steep upward trajectory. People wait to cremate victims who died due to the coronavirus disease (COVID-19), at a crematorium ground in New Delhi, India, April 23, 2021. [REUTERS/Danish Siddiqui]
Am I going insane? asks a Twitter user, as he posts this picture. Only 1% of Japanese citizens have been vaccinated — and the Games is on? I will believe it when the opening ceremony starts.
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I hesitate to say ‘Happy Earth Day’.
Of course we should celebrate Earth, but earthlings— our governments and corporations, that is— have to enact and execute aggressive policies to reduce green house gas emissions, and plastics production.

At least the Biden-Harris Administration is a force for good.
President Biden recently announced a new US goal to cut greenhouse gas emissions to 52 percent of 2005 levels, by the year 2035. In a virtual summit with more than three dozen countries, he urged other nations to do the same.
Every little bit will help.

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Wednesday/ July weather, in April

From the National Weather Service Seattle @NWSSeattle on Twitter:
Average high temp. in Seattle, April 15-21, 2021: 75.7 °F (24.3 °C)
Normal average high temp in Seattle, July 11-17: 75.7 °F (24.3 °C)

Our little Indian summer has come to a close today (temperatures will drop back to the 60s tomorrow), which is a good thing.
It’s way too early on the calendar to have mid-70s highs.
Firefighters from the Washington State Dept. of Natural Resources have responded to 91 wildfires this last week.

These red tulips seem to like the warm weather. Red tulips are given when love or romance is involved, much like red roses are. I found them on 17th Ave. here on Capitol Hill.
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Tuesday/ guilty on all charges

Today’s verdict isn’t ‘justice’ .. but accountability is a first step to justice.
– Keith Ellison, Minnesota Attorney General

That a family had to lose a son, brother and father; that a teenage girl had to film and post a murder, that millions across the country had to organize and march just for George Floyd to be seen and valued is not justice. And this verdict is not a substitute for policy change’.
– Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Representative for New York’s 14th congressional district

I was watching the announcement of the verdict on live television today.
Man! Don’t mess this up for all of us! I thought of the jury.

The guilty verdict of former police officer Chauvin is a relief, but a very rare outcome. In many other egregious cases over the last 20 years, the law enforcement officer had come off scot free.

Sentencing is in 8 weeks, and the remaining officers (Lane, Thao, and Kueng) charged in the death of George Floyd, will be tried together on August 23.

All of this made me think back to the verdict in the OJ Simpson trial, in October of 1995. I had arrived on the shores of the United States that February. My coworkers and I, at Anheuser-Busch in downtown St Louis, MO, rushed down to the lobby to see the announcement on television. That jury handed down a verdict that dismayed many people, but the majority of African Americans supported it. They saw Simpson’s acquittal as a victory in a legal system that systematically discriminates against them.

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Monday/ go and get ‘My Vaccine’

Everyone in the USA over age 16 now qualifies for the vaccine.
Now if only everyone (alright, 70% of everyone) will go and get it.
It’s not going to be easy.
Too many Americans subject themselves/ are influenced by, information bubbles that stoke their fears, or lie to them.

Micheal Kosta with a big fake moustache*, guest-starring in a skit on Trevor Noah’s The Daily Show. He is promoting ‘My Vaccine’ to conservative people that are still vacillating. Get one shot, the second one is FREE, and  ‘You stormed the Capitol, let My Vaccine storm YOUR CAPILLARIES .. ‘.
*Kosta is impersonating My Pillow guy and Trump supporter, Mike Lindell.
Israel is held up as the gold standard for vaccine roll-out. At first I thought they had only gotten to 60%, and are now ‘flat-lining’ (source: Our World in Data). 
… but Reuters reported today that 81% of citizens & residents over 16 in Israel are now fully vaccinated, and that the national mask mandate has been rescinded. So maybe that’s as good as it gets, in any country.
And here’s Washington State’s numbers (from the Washington Post). I hope that WA state can match Israel’s numbers in a month or two. In the US, Michigan is still in a very bad place, as are many other countries in the world: India, Brazil, several European countries. This is YEAR 2 of the pandemic. There will be a year 3, 4 and .. a year 5?
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Sunday/ a Model 3 test drive

Patience is a virtue.
– Origin unknown, possibly Cato the Elder in the 3rd or 4th century, or from the The Canterbury Tales, written during the 14th century.

Back from my test drive around Lake Union, at the Tesla dealership on Westlake Avenue.

Here’s a sneak preview of the electric car that I took for a test drive today.

I actually put an order in for one as well.

It’s a 2021 Tesla Model 3.
I picked the the long-range model (average of 353 mi on a full charge), with all-wheel drive, deep blue metallic color, standard 18’’ aerodynamic wheels, all-black interior — and steered clear of the ‘Full Self-Driving Capability’ option (that’s an extra $10,000).

I am going to have to be patient, though.
The delivery date is 7 to 11 weeks out.

Hey, three years ago the wait was 12 months.

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Saturday/ electric car, circa 1973

It’s official: my Toyota Camry is going to be written off, and not be repaired.
I’ve told everyone I know for four years that my next car is an electric car, or no car at all*.

*Use Uber and the train or bus here in the city.

Since we’re still in a pandemic, and it would be so much more convenient to have a car, I am about to pull the trigger and put in my order for an electric car. (It’s from a company that is named after the last name of Serbian-American inventor, electrical engineer, mechanical engineer, and futurist Nikola Tesla).

Seattle City Light Superintendent Gordon Vickery with prototype electric car, 1973.
The vehicle was a modified Gremlin powered by 24 rechargeable six-volt batteries. It could run for approximately 50 miles at highway speeds before needing to be recharged. [Item 181150, City Light Photographic Negatives (Record Series 1204-01), Seattle Municipal Archives].
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Friday/ the jays, dropping by

Here’s Mr & Mrs Jay*, dropping by for a bit on my front lawn.
It looks like one of them indulged in a little sunning (bottom picture below, lying on the ground, wings spread out, to catch more of the warming rays of the sun).  It was morning and still not very warm, when I took the picture.

Meanwhile, the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife has announced that backyard bird feeders can be put back up (the number of reports of sick or dead birds across Washington due to the outbreak of salmonellosis, has dropped).

*Steller’s jay (Cyanocitta stelleri); Cyanocitta from the Greek words kuanos (‘dark blue’) and kitta (‘jay’).

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Thursday/ a sunset stroll

We had 75 °F (24 °C) in the city today, a record high for the day on the calendar. I made it out of the house just as the sun was setting at 8 pm for a walk around the block.

Here’s the view from 14th Ave & Thomas St, looking west towards the Space Needle with the sun below the peaks of the Olympic Mountains.
We’re losing one of the neighborhood’s grocery stores on April 24: the QFC on 15th Ave. It is owned by Kroger Company in Cincinnati, Ohio. Kroger is the United States’ largest supermarket by revenue, and they cited the $4-per-hour hazard pay surcharge for grocery store workers (that the King County Council had enacted), as the reason to close the store. Capitalism at its finest?
Nice to see that the outdoors space at the Rione XIII restaurant on 15th Ave has a number of customers. Here in King County indoor dining is now allowed at 50%. Three counties in Washington State were moved back to Phase 2 (25% for restaurants) just this week, due to their increase in Covid-19 case counts.
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Wednesday/ at Harborview Medical Center

At 7.45 am, I joined the social-distanced line of a dozen of so, outside the nondescript little building at the back of Harborview Medical Center— thankful that I was wearing my padded jacket (47 °F/ 8 °C).

By 8.00 am I was in the door. Hey, you and I have the same birthday, said the young woman that checked me in. I filled out a form with a few questions, and then went to one of the 5 stations with a nurse, for my shot. (I got Pfizer-BioNTech’s vaccine, not Moderna’s).

Three weeks to tick by, and then I can get the second shot. It feels good to have the first one.

The Facilities & Engineering building on Terrace Ave (on the right) is where the Harborview hospital’s vaccination clinic is run out of. I had just exited down the stairs.
One of the hospital’s delivery gates. I’m making my way back to the big parking garage overlooking I-% and downtown Seattle.
I love the Art Deco detail on the buildings. The construction was completed around 1931.
The entrance off Eighth Avenue. Harborview Medical Center is the only level 1 trauma center* for Washington State. *Capable of providing complete, life-saving care for the most seriously ill or injured patients, through rehabilitation.
The roof of the parking garage off Eighth Avenue, across from the entrance to the hospital. Last year in November I thought the PEACE letters was for the holidays, but looks like it has became a permanent installation (and why not). That’s Columbia Center (cpl. 1985) and Seattle Municipal Tower (1990) in the back.
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Tuesday/ the J&J pause

My personal D-Day in the war against the vaccine is here: I will get my first shot at 8 am on Wednesday morning.

I believe it will be the Moderna vaccine that I’m getting.
The Johnson & Johnson it will not be, with the pause that was announced today by the Food & Drug Administration (FDA) here in the US. Of the 120 million or so shots administered in the States, less than 7 million were J&J, and White House officials expressed confidence that the roll-out here in the States will not be negatively impacted.

The unwillingness of people to get the vaccine, the so-called ‘vaccine hesitancy’, is the bigger challenge.

Cartoon by ‘J&J jab under observation’ by BRANDAN REYNOLDS, published in Business Day (South Africa), Wed. Apr 14, 2021.
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Monday/ an unusual Scrabble ending

This Scrabble game of me against ‘CPU’ (central processing unit) had an unusual ending: the computer had to pass the last 5 turns. It could not find a way to put even one of its 7 remaining tiles on the board.

I figured out which the final letters on CPU’s rack were: A A I I O O V Y. So yes, not a lot to work with. Even so, CPU still managed to beat me by a wide margin, 420-336. Earlier on, it had built two 7-letter words,  GEMLIKE and TERNION, for 50 bonus points each.

Here are the meanings of some of the more unusual words on the board:
GI: a lightweight two-piece white garment worn in judo and other martial arts.
TERNION: the number three; three things together; a ternary or triplet.
JEHADIS: (plural) a person involved in a jihad; an Islamic militant.
TOFT: a site for a dwelling and its outbuildings; an entire holding comprising a homestead and additional land.
QIS: (plural) the circulating life force whose existence and properties are the basis of much Chinese philosophy and medicine.
TREMS: (plural) short form of tremolo (arm) on a guitar, a lever attached to the bridge of an electric guitar and used to vary the pitch of a note.
IGG: (slang) to ignore or snub (someone); a snub or rebuff.
FET: short form (acronym) for field-effect transistor, a transistor in which most current flows in a channel whose effective resistance can be controlled by a transverse electric field.
PERVO: (slang) a sexual pervert.

My final turn: building GI for 3. The machine is stuck with A A I I O O V Y totaling a face value of 13 – so that gets deducted from its score, and added to mine. I still lose by 74 points but hey, there is always a next time.
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Sunday/ a sunny week ahead

My Sunday afternoon started off with a nice game of doubles tennis, but on the way back I was involved a car accident (no injuries, thankfully), that resulted in major damage to my car. Ouch. It might be time to replace my 14-year old Camry, anyway.

The weather people are promising us sun all week, 65 °F (18 °C) by Wednesday, and 75 °F (24 °C) by Saturday.

White Hyacinth flowers (genus Hyacinthus) from my quick walk around the block tonight. These used to come in only pale blue or violet, but nowadays there are lilacs, pinks, white, cobalt blue, cream, apricot and even a blood red.
The name “hyacinth” can be traced back to remote antiquity. The flowers were mentioned by Homer, the great epic poet of Greece, in the Iliad. They are named after Hyacinth, the beautiful youth in Greek mythology. He was the mortal lover of Apollo, Greek god of the sun.
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Saturday

It’s Saturday/ Caturday. I like cats, especially the big wild ones.
(The term ‘Caturday’ started with the tradition of posting LOLcats to the message board 4chan on Saturdays).

A cougar with a tracking collar walks through Griffith Park, Los Angeles. Illustrating the problem of animals’ loss of habitat as cities expand, the photo sparked a movement to protect southern California’s last cougars and other wildlife in two large protected areas bisected by the Highway 101 north of LA. Set to be completed by 2022, it will be the world’s largest wildlife overpass. [Picture by Steve Winter/ Prints for Nature]
An artist’s rendering provided by the Resource Conservation District of the Santa Monica Mountains shows a planned wildlife crossing over U.S. Highway 101 in Agoura Hills, Calif. Hoping to fend off the extinction of mountain lions and other species that require room to roam, transportation officials and conservationists will build a mostly privately funded wildlife crossing over the freeway. [Clark Stevens, Architect/Raymond Garcia, Illustration/RCD of the Santa Monica Mountains via AP]