Last few months, while waiting for the post covid travel crush to end; it’s been amusing to watch it from my couch; hundreds of cancellation, over sold planes, Athens and Venice packed so that they look like Disney during a school vacation period, etc. It’s what happens when the travel industry takes government dollars intended to keep them from laying off workers during a pandemic and instead they pocket the cash and do it anyway… and then find once the pandemic ends they find they’re understaffed when a populous of millions of customers that spent 2 years on house arrest, doing little but dreaming about where they’ll go once it’s over, suddenly all up and decide to travel? Yah that…

So I spent all that time playing the game Cozy Grove (while simultaneously watching TV): here’s what I learned

1. Early on you’ll get a quest for fishing and a very cheap rod to do the task. From that point, prioritize fishing, collecting stuff off the ground, AND (once you’ve gotten enough cash to buy the tool which costs 7,500) collecting bugs in order to make the money you’ll need to buy the other things that are more profitable; at the start, save ONE of each (fish or bug) in storage until the guy standing on the beach near the sand castle (on about day 3 of play) opens up the ability to to give him ONE of each for which you are richly rewarded with money and gems, DO NOT sells gems, or the stuff you pick up off the ground or dug for… hoard those as you’ll need them  … otherwise, (for all but the first one) burn the fish for their bones, and sell the bones for more cash than the fish themselves sell for (hold on to about 50 bones in storage as they are necessary for certain tasks, like repairing tools, but sell the rest — your rod and bug catcher NEVER break, you’re digging and hacking tools will… there’s even achievements for breaking them).
2. Mushrooms and veggies of various types can also be burnt to create other ingredients for cooking, but make sure to keep about 10 of each (so like there are 4 kinds of mushrooms, etc.) in storage as you’ll need them to feed imps — who are very specific about what they want to be fed and you might not find any of it that day if you didn’t already have it hoarded…  or to fulfill quests which will sometimes want 20 mushrooms. The rarer the ingredient the more of the product it produces, so like mushrooms create grilled mushroom sticks… brown mushrooms only make one, Shiitake mushrooms make like 6…. but quests that want mushrooms will be happy with either so save up 20 brown mushrooms which are really easy to find for the quests… but keep like 3 shiitake for the imps in storage.
3. Once you start getting money, you need to prioritize buying animals to then feed with with whichever food they’re in the mood for; keep buying some every day at until you’ve maxed the achievements for each type … pay attention to their likes and dislikes (some like birds don’t like being near other birds for instance, but have no issue with deer) and strategically create environments that ensure they are 3 hearts full. If you can’t make the animal happy, right away, stick it in storage for later, and to fulfill some upcoming quests that will want fresh animals to complete it (3 of each type should be enough). It usually requires 5 common items of the type they like to make them happy, unless they don’t like common items in which case either don’t buy them or keep them in your storage to use for quests.
4. Every day you get about 3 new recipes in the game, some as quest rewards some found by digging or what have you… but it’s only about 3 recipes per day. At some point the chef ghost kitchen will open up and you’ll start collecting recipes to make different kinds of food. Until such time as you have collected ALL the food recipes, to your frustration most of the recipes that drop in quests or collecting will be for food, NOT for making items like lamps and chairs. If you produce a new food item and turn it in to the guy on the beach who hands out rewards, he’ll give you between 2 and 4 more recipes, along with money and gems. If you do NOT prioritize doing maxing out his collection (even above feeding animals), you’ll find yourself playing the game for 3 weeks sold and never picking up a recipe to build items to put in the rooms to make the animals happy enough to drop 3 tokens rather than none when fed. So you HAVE to prioritize getting new recipes to the guy on the beach
5. Fence posts are the CHEAPEST items to make… you get 20 of them for very little in the way of collected resources, and 5 of them placed together will make an outdoor animal happy. You’ll always get rustic posts as a first recipe, and the first animals for sale on the first day will always include ones that like common rustic things. If you’re lucky you’ll get recipes for other types of posts early on, but you’ll always start out with rustic.
6. you wouldn’t think it, but fence posts can also be used INSIDE the house to make cats happy. Only cats will want like 30 of them to be happy. When making cats happy prioritize items that take up very little floor space. Some indoor items take up FOUR squares of space, block your ability to see the cats making them hard to click on, and you won’t be able to put in enough of them (common) to make the cats happy because there’s insufficient floor space. Happily fence posts only take one square of space.
7. the same rule for animals applies to trees, you want to make them fully happy BEFORE you harvest them, or they won’t drop much of anything… and wild fruit trees like 5 common rustic things, and you can use fence posts. But here’s a trick, do NOT leave the posts there, pick them up after harvesting. As you put them down one at a time you’ll notice the tree starts spitting out stuff … if you go through the effort of placing 5 common items every time, you’ll double the fruit they drop, and turning fruit into Fruit Tincture is one of the most profitable ways to make money…
8. Berries from bushes are far less profitable than fruit from trees… so while you’ll need some to make animals happy (some animals like being placed next to them, and it usually requires around 5 or 6 bushes to make them happy) … don’t waste your money on buying a lot of bushes. Fruit from trees produce TWICE what fruit from berries do, although both can be burned to create roasted fruit. Quests that want raw food will be as happy with berries as they are with fruit from trees, so save your berries for that purpose till you have a stack of 50 in storage and then burn the rest for roasted fruit.
9. Once you’ve gotten your house to level 2 or 3 you’ll be able to go in, and there’s a Japanese lucky cat (like in Japanese restaurants) in the corner. Every day make sure to save 3 brown mushrooms or 3 berries from berry bushes to “Lure” a cat another into the house for the next day… cats, like other animals MUST be happy … Rustic ones are the easiest to make happy from the start with the fence posts. If you don’t have any items in the room to make them happy don’t bother feeding them because there’s no return on investment, they don’t starve to death (I guess they hunt mice or something). Once they start dropping tokens you can then in the lucky cat exchange those tokens for other sorts of tokens you’ll need… wait till you need something you don’t have and exchange them strategically for that.
10. ALL cats other than the low maintenance one given as rewards for quests hate other cats. As such, to maximize what they drop once you have more than 1 in a room, you have to pick them all up and only put one down at a time, feed it (making sure it’s fully happy first to maximize output), then pick it up and feed the next one.
11. For people who care, there are recipes on line for luring different sorts of cats, but their differences are entirely aesthetic. NONE of the ones you can lure are the sort that are low maintenance (don’t dislike other cats) or produce any other sort of benefit other than appearance, if you’re into that sort of thing.
12. Keep an eye on the recipes you collect for making stuff, at some point you’ll get one that requires 4 fishbones to make an item or other (doesn’t matter which it is). The 4 fishbone items all sell for 2,000 gold each … so once you get that (it’s a question of luck how early it is in the game) use your fishbones to first make those items and sell them and generate a lot of cash which you then use to create an orchard of trees, and those trees will then make you a lot of easy cash
13. Previously I mentioned you’ll get gems. Gem stones should NEVER be sold… hold on to them till you open up the guy that “recycles” things… in the start, hold on to about 100 of the most basic gems (you’ll need them for basic repairs or purchasing basic items) but recycle the rest for a bunch of cash.
14. Priorities for that cash…
    A) upgrading your tent at least until you have 3 rooms inside the structure — this provides room for all the types of cats (so like you can put ones that like cozy in the same room as ones that like rustic, but NOT with cats that like spooky), extends your storage space enough to have room for what you start out needing to store, and
    B) at the end of the day — once you do this the store will not sell you anything until the following day — there’s an exorbitant fee that upgrades the store so that he sells a greater variety of goods the next day… you do this twice to get him to fullest range.
    C) Once his stock is fully extended, he’ll start selling you bag upgrades that extend the size of your backpack by 4 storage places each. There are about 6 of these for sale. They cost about 200K each but if you have enough cash you can buy them ALL on the same day if you want. Buy one which will be at the top of the list of items for sale, close the store, reopen the store and it will seem gone, but if you scroll down, you’ll find it has reappeared at the very end of what he has for sale.
15. Once you’ve maxed out the size of your backpack, continue extending your home till it maxes at (level 11) which results in 5 rooms and about as much storage space as you need.
16. If you’re the sort who REALLY likes holding stuff, storage trunks are for sale in the store at the price of 35K each.  (You WILL want to hoard some rare/legendary/epic shells, fish and bugs as they will be needed for quests, and can be a bitch if not impossible to find when you need them if you don’t hoard them in preparation)
17. Shells in particularly are a bitch, you ONLY pick up 20 shells a day. Fish and bugs regenerate non stop, but shells are limited to about 20 a day and MOST are going to be common. For this same reason, it’s almost impossible to collect every single type of shell unless you’re obsessive about doing nothing with your life other than playing the game… so don’t even try… and even if you play every day 5 times a day doing nothing but beach combing because you’ve essentially maxed out the game you could play it for a full year and STILL not manage it unless you extremely lucky

About two years ago I wrote about how I had seen the stage musical production of Waitress while in London, and you might want to read that review before this one. It was a musical version of one of my favorite movies, so I was excited to see it… but ultimately was more than a bit bit underwhelmed. Ultimately over the course of that same summer I saw FIVE stage musical productions that had begun as popular movies.

According to wikipedia there are 217 musicals that have been made over the years based on movies, and while this is by no means a new phenomena it seems in recent years to be on that is escalating.  The reason generally given is that musicals are so expensive to produce that in order to ensure success producers tend to prefer to fund sure bets. If the movie was a hit — it stands to reason — it already has an embedded fan base who like me, with regards to Waitress, will buy tickets for the stage version simply because they loved the film… and as long as the musical is essentially true to the movie those audiences will be happy and tell their friends. Back in the day, this used to be why books were made into musicals, but now a days not as many people read as in the past (here are the statistics)…  So while for instance Game of Thrones (the books) were a huge hit, I think its safe to say that no where near as many people read the books as saw the TV series, and I’m going to hazard a guess that sales for the books increased a lot after the HBO version was released — but if those purchasers actually took the time to read said books (they all would make good doorstops, and each in their unabridged audible versions take about 30+ hours to complete) I’d be surprised.

All that said, I’m going to write about the Movie to Musical productions I saw in the summer of 2019, partially to give my review of them, but also to discuss the overall trend.

The mother of this recent uptick in the trend is the long running show, The Lion King. This as most of you already know began as a Disney cartoon/musical and was converted to the stage in an incredibly innovative way that utilized puppetry and dance to bring puppets to life in a really magical way — especially considering the newness of the form. (At this point regular theater goers are more used to it and hence less impressed)

The above video shows a modification of the show done for an award ceremony that gives you a good idea of why, if you buy tickets for this show, you REALLY want to be seated on or near one of the center aisles — and not one of the exterior ones as I was

… as The Lion King takes on a sort of 360 degree quality with the performers popping up or travel through various locations around the theater, breaking what is called the 4th wall (the line between the viewers and performers). And yes, if you have not yet seen it this show really SHOULD be on your list of of must see’s, even if you have no kids.

Another show I saw, was School of rock, a musical version of the already music heavy Jack Black movie. In case you’ve been living with your head in the ground, this movie was SO popular that there is now a chain of music schools, with outlets around the WORLD, all called “The School of Rock” in honor of the movie.

In fact a recent participant on the hit TV show American Idol (entering it’s 20th season/year, so that at this point all the contestants grew up watching the show) was a teacher at one of the branches of the chain.

In case you’re still confused, these are places where kids can go for after school music lessons of the strictly NON classical variety (to be fair there has always been a hole in the market in that regard; I myself asked my parents for music lessons thinking it would be modern music and got stuck playing classical piano and violin — SNOOZE. REALLY, kids should start out playing popular music and then if they are any good switch to classical and or jazz).

Once you’ve entered the theater it’s CLEAR that this is a show parents take their kids too, simply based on the concessions stand’s offering which included stuff I’d never seen at the theater before, including cotton candy, neon colored slushes, and a photo booth…

That said, the adults also got THEIR ‘candy’ which included not only the mandatory bar serving hard liquor and wine like in every theater, but also alcoholic ice cream and popsicles — which was a first for me.

The musical, as the following video shows, is essentially a mirror reflection of the movie only with narrative songs (songs that add to the story) thrown in to supplement all the music that was already there.

In fact my major complaint was that while the show was highly enjoyable it stuck TOO closely to movie in one crucial point. The guy they hired for the role was hired in large part (I’m guessing) because he looked a lot Jack Black, a big chubby guy… RATHER than finding a guy who could channel Jack Black‘s energy, which in large part is what made the movie a hit. That said, it was enjoyable and the audience loved it.

Sort of a cool thing, which allowed for the video above (shot it myself) was that unlike every other theater in London which has multiple signs saying DON’T video or even take photos, in this theater they held up signs saying, ‘go ahead and video!’ understanding I suppose that kids would upload it to their accounts making their friends pressure their parents to bring them.

The 3rd, movie to musical production I saw that summer was 9-5 the musical based on the iconic hit movie from the 1980’s that at the time was staring Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin with Dolly Parton as an also ran…

Ironically, while Jane Fonda was actually the one who had the idea for and spear-headed the movie, and was the one who reached out to Dolly to bring her into the production…  (at the time Dolly who’d never made a movie before), the transformation of it into a musical is ALL Dolly Parton — notice how in the picture of me in front of the theater the marquee has her name at the top?

Also part of the production included a huge projected image of Dolly — look at the “o” in the 9 to 5 in the image above — who was not only talking to the audience but was then singing her hit song with the cast at the curtain call— it was kind of surreal.

According to Dolly, see minute 10:04 in the linked video about her life, she’d rejected all previous offers, but figured this was Jane Fonda & Lily Tomlin movie and if it failed it would be on them and wouldn’t blemish her career. Also, she was at that time trying to expand and cross over out of just being a country singer, so her one demand was that she got to write the movie’s theme song, which is still a song you hear today.

All that said, as a musical 9 to 5 was far more successful ‘as its own thing’ than the School of Rock had been, in my opinion. It was essentially the same story but the songs — all written by Dolly (who no one will argue is a very talented song writer) brought their own things to the show, allowing it to stand alone as it’s own thing.

The musical was playing at the theater of the iconic Savoy Hotel in London — which opened in 1889. The hotel, and it’s theater, were built by the theatrical producer Richard D’Oyly Carte with the profits he derived from his Gilbert and Sullivan “opera” productions as a permanent location for them to stage even more of their works (of which there were many). The English language “operas” of G&S (if you aren’t familiar with them) sort of opened the door for the musical theater art form in England and the United States, and continues to be influential even today.

That said, the Savoy theater is a disabled person’s nightmare. The theater’s best seating, the stalls, is located deepest underground and the building was built in 1889, and there are no elevators for the patrons.

At the time I found this sign absolutely comical, as there were to elderly people who were even more disabled than I was (I had major issues with my knees and hips at the time that have since gotten better with supplements to help regrow the cartilage and physical therapy). How helpful… only TWENTY-TWO steps to have to negotiate… think about that for a second… the only seats that were marginally accessible to the seriously disabled was the nosebleeds, which are only maybe five or more steps down from ground level
(Someone, I know not whom, uploaded a video of the broadway production to youtube… no idea how long it’ll be up there but it’s have almost 50K views, so if you want to see it you can — till it’s taken down)

Well we live in “interesting times,” don’t we?

My last post was June 18, when my doctor said that the post lockdown damage was that I was now diabetic and my liver had grown (WAY much) during that time because of fatty liver disease. On that day my frame, which should be a size 4, weighed in at 202 lbs. Since then, about 7 weeks, I’ve successfully lost 17.5 lbs (like 2.5 lbs a week)… a few more and I’ll have lost the 10% body weight the doctor wanted to see before I have all my blood tests and such redone.

Instead of traveling I’ve been working out three times a week. I started out at a “prestige” gym, where you can ONLY work out with a trainer, on specialized equipment designed so that you couldn’t work on them independently even if you wanted to…and the main requirement for staff members seemed to be some experience with the equipment and being attractive and a size 4. That said, I went from being unable to get out of the sofa without flopping around like a fish out of water — because my core muscles were THAT weak — to feeling better than I had in months…

Since then the local university (which I live walking distance from) has opened their gym memberships back up to community members (during lock down they limited attendance to staff and students only, and extended other memberships for the period of the lock down). I signed up… it was $500/year and personal trainers were the same price for TWICE the time!! Where the prestige place charged no membership fee but $55/half hour, this University gym (which has AMAZING facilities, 80% of which I’ll never use) was $500 year, but you can always come in on your free time and work independently for as long as you wish, where you couldn’t at the other place, and here personal training is $50 for full hour.

Probably more importantly, my personal trainer here (while also being cute and a size 4) is a TRAINED trainer; as in she is a few credits short of being a physical therapist, and specializes in sport rehabilitation for the school’s athletes. So SIGNIFICANTLY more skilled than the other woman. While she still has me doing machines (this time, on my own time — after showing me how to set them up and telling me which weight to start at and being sure my form was right)… She instead spends our together time doing stuff to help with my particular issues, such as the right foot having developed a mind of its own ever since I had that horrible concussion back in australia so sever that it dislocated my jaw and damaged the speech centers of my brain … , it’s why I kept falling down and going boom over and over again in the months after my concussion… it turns out towards the right and starts dragging, which has caused me to trip on things like uneven pavement and door sills/thresholds.

Beyond that….
A friend and I have decided to do some “staycation”ing, in large part because right now the Chicago area is just SAFER than most of the rest of the country (vaccination rates here are high, in some cases VERY high, and as such we’re not seeing a lot of Covid cases) … so like a few weeks ago we went to the Museum of Science and Industry for the afternoon (after I was done working out) and we’ll go again next week to see a special exhibit we bought tickets for while there, focused on the Marvel Super Heroes franchise (tickets were sold out weeks in advance, so we couldn’t see it then). I’m not going to talk about the Museum of Science and industry much, as it’s sort of a Chicago fixture and world famous… other than to say, while they have updated stuff, they’ve essentially kept most of the classics I remember from my childhood. So they still have the coal mine ride (but I wasn’t interested in being cooped up in a badly ventilated space during Covid), and the the doll house is still there — it used to belong to a former child movie star of the 1920’s and she donated it to the city upon her death. For those unfamiliar, everything in it is real gold and gems, the books are readable under a microscope and the castle’s church has what is described as a sliver of the true cross. So NOT your average dollhouse. The craftsmanship in miniature is mind boggling.

While there I was making a point of telling anyone who happened to be hanging out by the back doors, which lead to stairs that face a little canal, that THAT was in fact the original entrance. The building which houses the museum was built as the “Palace of Fine Arts,” a part of the historic Chicago World’s Fair of 1893, and was designed so that you took a boat via that canal to the now unused landing, and climbed the stairs to what is now a set of unused glass doors… that people unfamiliar with its past think is just a back entrance. Nowadays we all enter via what was originally the back doors… Well, actually we USED to… They have since my last visit (maybe 15 years ago?) turned the parking lot into a huge lawn and instead dug down and created a multi storey parking lot beneath, and you now enter from there into the building via the basement… So for me it was revisiting a childhood favorite and appreciating how the city has tried to beautify itself, and increase practicality, while maintaining its historic value. Not sure what amount of our tax dollars went into this improvement but I think it was well done.

That said, we’re going to try checking out other smaller less famous museums that are in the area, places I’ve never gone to before and that most tourists never see… I WILL do dedicated posts about those.

I have failed my blood test BIG TIME … my liver numbers (remember the fatty liver I got under control before covid?) are now so high that they couldn’t even do the test to see if I had cirrhosis because the machine would have given a false positive… AND my blood’s glucose levels doubled… for years they’ve sort of wiggled around type 2 diabetes sometimes edging up to pre-diabetic, sometimes back down in healthy level levels… well since Covid started, they’ve actually DOUBLED and are solidly in diabetic range … between the liver number and the diabetes… guess who’s in diet mode again…

Granted I was fully aware of the fact that I’d pretty much “outgrown” what had been my fat clothes and was now living in sweat pants and X-large Tshirts….AND back to my top weight (same as in 2015 when I discovered my weight by standing on a scale outside a grocery store — 200 lb) … but even considering all that … till I saw the blood numbers I was living in a sort of denial that things hadn’t gotten THAT bad. I hadn’t caught Covid … so I “still had my health”

HA HA HA HA

Well that’s over… I’ve been in diet mode all week, and combining it with the modified fasting I had been doing last time I lost weight without even realizing I was doing it (16 hours a day of no food — last eating anything is 6pm then breakfast at about 10am — every day) … hopefully between that and the working out 3 times a week with a trainer, I’ll have lost enough in the next 3 months that the liver doctor can do the cirrhosis test without having to put in paperwork to my insurance company asking for permission to do an MRI

Was fully vaccinated by the end of April, yay team Pfizer, and May has flown by in a blink. For most of it just going to gym two to three times a week (my physical trainer is very proud of me even though I’ve not lost a single pound) was about as much excitement as I could bare. Got a flat tire fixed, and had my car’s starlink system updated (the satellite system that allows the car to automatically call for help in case the airbags get activated, irrelevant of if there’s cell coverage or if I’m conscious)… which was a major pain in the ass… TWO WHOLE DAYS of sitting in the dealership with them saying, any time now….

Other than that, nothing exciting has happened… life is slowly returning to normal, and mask mandates have been lifted for those of us who have had the jab.

Friends and I are starting to talk about some group travel. Now that they’ve been wholled up a full year, some people have reached out to me asking if they can join me once I decide it’s safe to get back on a plane. Till then I’ve suggested we turn our attention from travel away from home to staycation … My intention is start checking out things around the Chicago area and writing about that… as well as catching up on the about 125 location posts from when I was traveling that I THOUGHT I’d writing about during lock down but couldn’t bring myself to do… preferring instead to watch infinite amounts of television….

Hello from Chicago! It’s been a good 4 months since my last post.

Today I am officially good to go! It’s been exactly two weeks since my 2nd jab and I am now fully vaccinated — according to the experts at the CDC (at least for the next 6 months based on current data). I celebrated this momentous fact by doing what before covid would have been the utterly mundane… I signed up with a personal trainer for a session in a gym to try to get back some of the muscle tone lost over the past year of barely moving…. without hurting myself. It was GLORIOUS! I was smiling uncontrollably for two hours after the half hour session was over… and then topped it off by making an appointment with the dentist to get my teeth cleaned. The prosaic has never been so exciting.

Got my first covid shot (Pfizer) on March 18th at a local walgreens. Signing up for it was a bit of a challenge. I had registered with my city but a few weeks had passed and they had not emailed me back with a when, so I started looking around and discovered the city where I lived was actually WAY behind the local pharmacies in handing the stuff out…. so that even though my obesity and other issues qualified me with my state to be getting a jab, the city was still only trying to finish vaccinating the older than 65 year olds. A friend suggested bypassing the public efforts and to go private instead, and suggested signing up for it online at midnight, and then again at 6am with a pharmacy, saying “if you wait till 12:15 am or 6:15 am they’ll be all gone.”

First thing I did was I compiled a list of all the local pharmacies in my area (ones with outlets within a 1 hour commute) that were offering vaccinations — some of which were via grocery stores, and included the hyperlinks direct to their various sign up pages. This was to not waste time navigating through to those pages during the aforementioned 15 minute window of opportunity. For a few days I tried it repeatedly, but with no wins. Then on about the 3rd day I decided to try again at 8am… after a complete fail at both midnight and six, to discover the Walgreens pharmacy chain was offering a handful of appointments that were scattered around the state … 1 here, 3 there… And as I was refreshing the page trying to find a time and location would work for me including the possibility of having to drive an hour to and from the location (my body clock being pretty screwed up at the point, so that I was falling asleep at noon and waking at 9pm). Then, suddenly at about 8:15am, 22 appointments suddenly appeared at a walgreens not 15 minutes away from my home — I shit you not! I tried to grab the first appointment of the day but between clicks someone beat me to that one, and had to settle for the 2nd appointment — I checked back and by 8:30 almost all of the 22 openings had been filled.

A word to the wise, I now know having discussed it with the pharmacist that they arrive in the morning, find out what shipments they’re due, and then leisurely upload appointments into the system, based on how many staffers they have who can give jabs and work schedules …  According to him this can happen anytime between 6am and about 8:45am… and I just got dead lucky having refreshed by screen at about 8:10, because once they go up they do tend to be snatched up within about 15 minutes to a half hour — to his experience.

Now here’s a thing, Walgreens, the pharmacy chain I used told me the 2nd shot instead of being 3 weeks after the first, would be administered a whole month later. I called them up and asked, as it seemed wrong, and they said it was perfectly ok and that the 2nd shot could be done as late as 6 weeks after the first with no negative affects. So I waited. On my third week the American CDC (Center for Disease Control) bitch slapped the company and told them in no uncertain terms this was NOT ok. According to a New York times article that I read, they were doing it because it made it simpler for THEM to schedule the appointments using pre-existing software, and that it had nothing to do with supply and trying to get as many first shots into as many people as possible as quickly as possible (which was the explanation they gave me when I asked). Once this happened, I called them to see if I could get it rescheduled to the next few days they said NO, because there were no openings. SO my 2nd shot was a whole month after the first making the process from first shot to full immunization last tedious 6 weeks of waiting, for as we all know a watched clock runs slow.

But it’s over now … at least for the next 6 months…  I have marked my calendar for mid September to remind myself just in case a booster is required at that time. Granted we still need to take the same precautions, but here’s the thing. Till now any time I went out to a grocery store or some such (which I did rarely) it was stressful as all hell. Invariably some idiot was either not wearing a mask, or wearing it with their nose hanging out, or worse on their chin. Even among those with masks, a good third were NOT wearing effective ones. There was no shortage of people with bandanas over their faces… or wearing masks made of materials that did nothing, or worse actually broke up the moisture they breathed out into smaller droplets that made them MORE likely to stay suspended in the air, and for longer… which increased the risk of spreading the disease.

Having lived in Asia for a while, there they understand basic science and know you wear a mask because it is not only rude but inhumane to infect the people around you with whatever germs you might be carrying. As a result they will as a matter of course wear masks even if they feel ok, but know they’ve been in direct contact with someone who was sick. Masks in Asia are so common place that I many years ago picked up a few child sized ones while visiting Tokyo Disneyland. Americans however can’t seem to grasp this concept, and think the mask they are wearing will protect them for other people who are not wearing masks. THIS meme which was making the rounds a while ago was probably the BEST explanation of how masks work

But here’s the problem… Americans are not exactly known for their politeness, especially if it means inconveniencing themselves. They’ll wear a mask to protect themselves, but they don’t really care about others… and if they don’t believe the mask will protect them (on top of not believing covid is a real thing) then they won’t wear one, or if forced to will sometimes INTENTIONALLY wear something that obeys the letter of the law but is actually a fuck you to the people forcing them to wear a mask because they know full well its NOT the right kind of mask.

As such, leaving the house would FREAK ME OUT, and I would return from quick trips to the shop completely stressed. Today I was able to go to the gym, and afterwards to pick up food from Macdonalds, with NO stress because I now believe (fingers cross, no evil eye) that even if I should become infected with covid, the statistical likelihood of it killing me has dropped significantly. Where the Spanish flue we know in retrospect had a mortality rate of 2.7% of the population, with the highest mortality rates among children and young adults, we know that Covid kind of flips that… the mortality rate for covid is about healthy young people is only about 0.9% (but that varies with age, health conditions, and how well prepared and or equipped the local hospitals are to deal with being overwhelmed with patients). For someone my age with my health conditions… and my obesity… the death rate is about 10% … TEN PERCENT!!!!

And even among those who don’t die, another 30% might end up as long haulers with permanent damage to their heart, lungs, etc., and most frighteningly … their BRAINS. The medical community has just started documenting a massive uptick in psychiatric issues among people who had mild cases that they were able to overcome without hospital assistance.

How scary is that!!!

So yes, going out today fully immunized knowing that my risk of any of that has dropped to about the likelihood of being hit by lightning … something I don’t go around worrying about … and being able to actually ENJOY being around other people (even with the precautions of masks and social distancing — which is not unlike taking normal precautions during a thunderstorm) was just WONDERFUL!

I love London. My dad grew up there and my family spent so much time there during summer vacations — not to mention my semester at London’s Royal College of Art — that I feel it’s my second home. So, growing up we did most of the MAIN tourist things… so when I go there I tend not to aim towards those sorts of things any more than I would in home Chicago. For me, London is and always has been about theater! (My mom loved theater so much that she often took us to two shows a day, and occasionally crammed in three).

One of the shows I saw this trip was Education, Education, Education

So… I’ve said this before, but in case you’ve not read that post… first rule of London theater, as taught to me by my parents…  is, unless there’s a specific show for which you’re willing to pay full price, you’ll want to start out by going to the Tkts Booth in Leicester Square…. London has a very competitive theater scene, just like New York, so anything showing in a major theater is most likely very good. On the way there you’ll pass any number of store front ticket booths advertising them as THE half price ticket booth… keep walking. None of them are. Their What’s on Sale screen, behind me in the picture above, will tell you what tickets they have that is on deep discounts (usually 30 to 50% off). You can also buy tickets for two days out… so tonight, tomorrow and the next day… but not farther out than that. You can check their website to see what’s available, but you can only buy the tickets at their booth. Half price tickets for the top shows are ONLY available either at the box office doors of each individual theater, where you stand in line on the day of up to time of seating, but with no assurance of actually getting a seat … or here at the TXTS booth. (How do you want to spend your vacation time?) Personally I haven’t got that much time. This way is easier, and profits from the ticket sales at this venue rather (than ending up in corporate or private pockets) go towards the Society Of London Theatre, which supports the theater community in a myriad of ways. (So you can feel good about your purchase).

The Trafalgar Studios, while while being listed as a Grade II English Heritage building, is still a relative modern space by comparison to the Gielgud where I saw Sweat, a theater that like a lot of London is NOT handicapped accessible. The Trafalgar was built in the 1930’s and (as such) has an actual elevator for people with mobility issues. The space is split into two smaller venues that used to house television productions (hence the name studios), but currently tends to house new productions, which if they become major hits are then then moved into larger venues. If you look the picture above you’re seeing all the seating front to back. You can see how the seating was designed to host audiences viewing live TV productions, with a few more rows of seats now added at the very bottom where the cameras and staff used to be located. And it’s a very small space, so viewing is good for pretty much all seats

The show, which only had the suspiciously short run of only a month, was described as a “whip-smart love letter to education in the 90s” that was “jam-packed” with the musical hits of the day … but that said, the show bored me — a MUSICAL bored me (the mind boggles). As a former educator I hoped it would appeal to me, and the girl who sold me the tickets promised it was a very good show… but I had a feeling in retrospect that its the sort of thing that you really have to be British in order to fully enjoy. I wasn’t and found myself getting irritated by the heavy handed cynical tone. I assumed that had been full of inside jokes (but didn’t hear a lot of other people laughing when I wasn’t) that you had to be very familiar with the state of education during the Tony Blair administration to understand well enough to “get the joke,” (he was the UK’s left leaning Prime Minister from 1997 to 2007, around the same time as Clinton and Bush Jr.,) as the show kept making references to expected increases in school funding. Upon writing this post I learned that even the title was an inside joke, as “Education, Education, Education” was how Blair had described his priorities when he took office, according to this BBC article, and in fact if you read their article pretty much all the points the show made there. Who knows, maybe everyone else in the theater was also a tourist and as such none of us were getting it, so to speak.