Pruning at the Last Minute

The cherry plum trees have already opened blossoms around here.

I thought, “Oh shit, I better prune my Santa Rosa plum.”

I didn’t prune the tree in early winter because there was a chance of rain, then there was a period of a few weeks with a ton of rain, then after the rain ended I put it off for days… yeah.

Ideally, I would’ve pruned the tree as soon as the rain stopped.

I only got around to pruning it one week later, when the buds are already forming. The wood is green too at the cuts. Yikes.

Well, at least I did it before any flowers opened.

A Test of Sincerity

Over the past year, I figured out a test for sincerity in words: does it sound original?

Let me explain.

It’s easy to repeat things I’ve read or heard many times. It requires less effort, and it’s also safer. If someone else said something, and nothing bad happened, then the risk is low if I say it too.

This is copy and pasting other people’s thoughts. It’s so easy it doesn’t require me to think through things as thoroughly. I might end up copying someone else’s thoughts, which don’t reflect my most sincere sentiments.

About That 36-Year-Old Woman Who Was Healthy Until Covid Gave Her Heart Failure

I have so much to say about this news story that it became this blog post.

For those who don’t want to read the entire article, the tl;dr is: Jamie Waddell, a healthy vaccinated-and-boosted 36-year-old woman, got covid-19, recovered, then got heart failure so severe they put her on a heart transplant list, then recovered from that too.

Why Didn’t The Urgent Care Clinic Test Her for Troponins?

From the article:

Two days later, she was coughing and achy and asked her doctor for a chest X-ray, which came back normal. She called off work two days and went to her local urgent care clinic. She did not test positive for COVID-19 or flu.

“My vital signs at that visit were a little off. My heart rate was a little high. I had a fever,” she recalls. “I came home and basically went to sleep.”

*facepalm*

Given that she had myocarditis, a troponin test at this point would’ve come back positive. Then the doctors would’ve known that she had a heart injury, and she needed treatment. Good treatment at this point in time would’ve slowed or perhaps stopped the progression of her heart failure, and she wouldn’t have needed such intense life support.

11th Anniversary Post

Years before I started this blog, I fantasized about blogging.

I read various blogs voraciously starting in 2008. (Though my choice of blogs changes over time, I still read a ton, it wouldn’t surprise me if I spent on average over an hour a day reading blogs over the past decade).

How could I not imagine becoming a blogger?

In my daydreams, I could be as successful as I wanted. Oddly, my daydreams didn’t involve me making money as a blogger. They didn’t even involve me becoming famous, exactly. No, I daydreamed about writing mindblowing blog posts. Sure, I fantasized about receiving praise, but the focus of my fantasy was not the reactions of others, but the quality of the posts themselves.

In late 2011 and the first days of 2012, I thought a lot about becoming a blogger. So, I took the plunge.