November 19

The wind is howling though the weather reports said we should have a nice day today. But I haven't trusted weather reports for sometime. The weather has been too unpredictable. I am awake much too early partly because I haven't yet adjusted to the time change almost three weeks ago and the furry alarm clocks most definitely haven't.

In my last post I mentioned the number of overflowing carts at the grocery store. Well, evidently my perceptions were not wrong as this piece on the CBS site shows. We plan to go out later to get a few things for our Thanksgiving dinner and will see what is happening at a different grocery store. We didn't get the items last time because we hadn't decided what we were going to fix yet. Thanksgiving will definitely be different even for us. Usually we would have planned on having dinner with my brother and sister-in-law. But COVID and SIL's death (not from COVID) a couple of months ago scotched any such thoughts. On the other side of the family my sister made it plain she wasn't hosting any dinner this year. It has become too taxing and both she and her partner have medical conditions that make such gatherings especially dangerous. Things do change whether we like it or not.

Found this on Al Jazeera. I rather suspected the COVID depressed economy would affect Social Security and Medicare but I hadn't expected it would do it so soon.

An interesting Tomdispatch post this morning. I have seen a few comments in articles and blogs indicating an unhappiness with Biden's economics team which largely recycles old faces and, probably, old ideas. Not really much of a surprise since the more "progressive" voices were shunted off the stage during the primaries. But the Tomdispatch article indicates the same for the foreign policy and military teams--the old familiar faces and the old familiar ideas. What is especially interesting is the amount of foreign money and influence involved.