January 26, 27

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I guess it is official--the COVID pandemic is over and we are now simply living with it. The New York Times "Virus Briefing" is suspending its reporting barring a new surge. Yesterday's article was a retrospective and a "good bye." We still have COVID and we have "long COVID" but there really isn't a flood of new information that the media needs to urgently cover. This fails to note that COVID was the 3rd greatest killer of children between 5 and 14 and the 2nd greatest cause of death of adults 25 to 34 for the last three years.

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Good morning again. It is almost the end of January--damn how the time goes by. We have had snow over the last. couple of days. Normally we wouldn't have gone out at all but on Wednesday Mom suddenly realized that we hadn't paid rent yet. The streets were far slicker than they looked and we had a bit of a fender bender. Thankfully, no other car was involved. Coming to a stop sign we hit a very slick patch. A car was stopped in front of us, another was coming behind us and a third was in the oncoming lane. All Mom could do was go to the right side, jump the curb and hit the stop sign and bump the telephone pole. We weren't going fast and only bent the stop sign a bit. The bumper is cracked and scuffed.

We had to go out again this morning because our check for the rent had a mistake we had to correct. We always spend a bit of time talking to the office manager and other people there and this morning the manager commented that at least we knew how to write a check. She had several young people coming in to rent who had no idea. She had to actually teach them how to do it. I asked if they knew how to write cursive and she said they didn't--they hand printed the information on the check. Almost the first thing I read this morning was this piece on Word Genius detailing the rise and fall of cursive writing. For a time educators saw no reason to teach cursive and focused on keyboarding and computer skills. Some states are now rethinking that and mandating the teaching of handwriting skills. I learned handwriting in grade school and then learned keyboarding in high school where it was called "typing".