jimsjournal
| Mosquito Coast Redux -- 10/03/03 |
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If you read the previous entry (the 7th web-anniversary entry for this site) you may have noticed (or even read) the third entry in the list of my first ten entries, entitled Mosquito Coast, in which I recounted the disruptions caused by mosquitoes carrying EEE (Eastern Equine Encephalitis) -- parks closing in late afternoon, soccer league schedules being changed, soccer practices cancelled -- Nancy and I were coaching the soccer team Jeremy played on -- well, Nancy was the coach, I was her assistant (she had played soccer in an IBM co-ed rec team when we lived in upstate New York; I have never played an actual game of soccer). (Yes, the entry title was an allusion to the novel by Paul Theroux. which was the basis for the 1986 movie of the same title staring Harrison Ford.) Four years later I had another entry (Sept. 9, 2000) on this same topic which I called "Mosquito Coast Redux" -- in which I noted that not only did we have problems with EEE, we also had West Nile Virus. Well, the reason I recycled the "Mosquito Coast Redux" title is because once again we have both EEE and West Nile Virus. Three horses have died from EEE in our county and a number of birds have died from West Nile Virus. The state has identified several places where they have found mosquitoes carrying one or the other -- they have found both EEE and West Nile in our township. (Of course, with bureaucratic stupidity, for a long time the state was refusing to identify where they had found the virus, but finally gave in to public pressure. Their reason was that if they named the locations, people who didn't live in that exact neighborhood would stop taking precautions. Idiots. (We are the government. We are all-wise and all-powerful. You are merely subjects to our royal bureacratic powers.) Nancy's fall tennis league schedlue is in disarray. The town has banned early evening activities in town parks -- and is enforcing that by turning off the lighting for the tennis courts. (Dawn and dusk are the prime mosquito feeding times.) That means matches must be moved to earlier times, but that doesn't work for most people who have jobs. Once again, everyone is waiting for the first hard frost. We did get some cooler weather moving in on Thursday and there was frost on the windshields of our cars when I went out to bring in the newspaper around six this morning, but that's not enough to eliminate the problem. The weather will warm up in another day or so and we'll still have highs in the sixties or even low seventies and the overnight lows will probably not dip below forty. The Friday Five is all about automobiles today, but I happened to write about all of our vehicles in an entry just a few weeks ago, so this is going to be another one of those weeks to skip that. Nancy came down with a bad cold about two weeks ago -- she didn't miss any work, but it did make her feel miserable for a few days. Then Jeremy didn't feel well, bad enough that he went to see a doctor (which is fairly unusual for him) -- mono was considered a possibility, but test results came back negative for that, then he felt worse, very bad cough, went back a second time. He missed two day during the week, mostly sleeping, but fortunately did not miss any classes. (He has no Thursday classes and his Wednesday classes were temporarily moved to different days because the professor had a schedule conflict. However, don't be jealous of him having every Thursday off -- he has Saturday morning classe.) And last night I felt rather beat when I went to bed, but I had had a fairly vigorous workout and thought I was just tired from that. This morning I woke up with a really bad sore throat. Oh, how wonderful -- here comes a weekend and I'm going to be sick with a head cold. grumble grumble |
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