New week, first week of May

I blogged this i early May and didn't get it published.  Now that it's early June, I've started another so will publish this one first!

MONDAY the 4th

As of yesterday at 5:45 p.m., there were 5659 cases of coronavirus in Nebraska and 78 deaths so far. There are now two counties that have more cases than Douglas... All county is up to 1256, and Dakota County has 918. Apparently, that's because the virus is running through one of the huge meat packing plants up there. Dakota county is up close to South Dakota oh, right on the river. It's a very small County like Douglas, and certainly not very populated except for the packing plant. I believe Dakota City is on the other side of the river from Sioux City. The internet says they're only 1900 residents of Dakota City! That means that if all of those people live in Dakota City it's over half the population. But I'm sure a lot of them live in Sioux City and surrounding small towns... anyway, Douglas is close behind Dakota County with 878 cases. Cass County, where Mom and Mary live, has increased by 1 up to 6 cases. The side is showing that nearly 33,000 people have been tested, and 27000 people have tested negative. I think that is the real set of numbers to look at... Let's think about this... They're only testing people who either are exhibiting symptoms or have been exposed to someone who has the virus. Yet 81% of those tested are negative.

Today is the day that they are opening salons and restaurants. They're requiring restaurants to serve not more than 50% of their fire code. And as for salons, they're requiring everyone, I'm assuming meaning appliances well, to wear face masks. I'm going to try to get in to get a pedicure in the next day or so. My toes are desperate!


TUESDAY, the 5th

As of yesterday at 5:45 p.m., there are 6083 cases of coronavirus in Nebraska.  That's a 7.5% increase over the day before, which seems pretty significant to be encouraging more contact with each other.  They updated the national site yesterday, but they took the projected peak date data off!  As far as I'm concerned, the rest of the data is fairly useless unless I'm looking for stats from other states...

TUESDAY the 12th

A week has gone by and I left this unfinished. Obviously the numbers are starting to not be very important to me but they have really gone up. I will go into that later... Right now, I'm getting ready to go to Plattsmouth to meet with Nom, Merry and Rick for lunch. It's Merry's turn at A Mother's Day lunch. I met mom on Friday for Mother's Day, but Merry couldn't join us that she had a lot going on at work.

Anyway, I decided that I'm going to play a pretty simple ticket today at Keno and I was trying to decide what numbers I would play. I wanted to play something different. So I decided to play Tim Ohm's birthday again, and I was trying to decide on someone else's... Someone who's passed as well. So I thought of Dorothy who I haven't thought about in a long long time! I looked up her birthday and decided I would be playing that but it got me thinking about her. Dorothy lived next door to us for probably at least a dozen years. Before she bought the house it was a rental, and within the first year or two of us living here she bought the house with her then husband. Her first husband had died some months before that. They had lived in Glenwood, Iowa, and it sounded like he was Professor if I remember correctly. He got meningitis and was in a coma for 14 months as a result of that and eventually passed away. Apparently there was this guy, Ron, who was a good family friend and was there for her throughout the whole ordeal. After her husband died, I have a feeling she was so devastated that she essentially collapsed into this guy's arms and they married quickly. In the end, however, it was all about the insurance money. I don't know how much she got, but apparently it was fairly substantial for that time. She bought the house outright, and once they blew through the rest of that money, he booked, leaving her with the house she really couldn't afford, a house with a lot of issues, and with no real means of income.

Dorothy and I became pretty good friends over the years. She had bouts of depression and she was a serious alcoholic. But we had some things in common... Like the love of animals. She had cats and dogs, we had cats and a dog. Super smart and well read and easy to talk to. At one point, she apparently fell into a very deep depression and suddenly... And I can't remember how I came to know this... She was in a hospital, I have a feeling perhaps a psych ward somewhere. I was asked to take care of her pets while she was in the hospital, and what I found when I went in was pretty awful. The cat litter boxes look like they hadn't been scooped or emptied in months and the smell of cat urine was overwhelming. At that time, she only had one dog and my instructions were to go over to the house each day and cook Snowball, her Samoyed dog, a steak! That's right, a steak every day for the dog. The woman could hardly afford to feed herself and she was buying steakes from Schwan's to feed her dog! God bless her! Only an animal lover would truly understand that and not give her shit about it.

Anyway, I considered her a good friend and I was really sad when she finally had to sell the house. She moved to Silver City, New Mexico, where her sister lived. And it sounds like your sister's children proceeded to take advantage of her out there. Dorothy lived a very difficult life, and I hope she chooses an easier one next time around. She may have been a tortured soul, but she had a good heart and I thought a lot of her.