Category: random

It’s not often I present photographs like these U.S. Naval Aviators doing their magic for a publicity shoot…

Fair winds and following seas…

Last night as I walked my dog, I looked up into the heavens, admired the stars, pondered the creation of the universe and I wondered to myself: what are the lyrics to ‘Blinded By The Light?’

Wow wee! A computer crash and a treasure trove of written material hidden in the folds of the Internet, and that I thought was lost forever.

It’s like having a whole bunch of new stories to post. Some are actually journal-type entries from 2008 while others are poems that I jotted down in 2001 and 2002.

Needless to say, I’m so tickled. Please be ready to read.

Carson City Health and Human Services (CCHHS) is reporting four additional deaths due to COVID-19 in the Quad-County Region. Two of the individuals were Lyon County residents and two were Carson City residents.

Currently there are 751 cases in Lyon County with 62 active cases. Of the 751 cases, 673 people have recovered, however 16 people have died from the disease. As a whole Nevada has seen 137-thousand COVID-19 cases, including 83-percent of the states prison population having become infected, with over two-thousand deaths blamed on the virus.

To this end, Nevada announced that it has entered into a $10 million contract with Quest Diagnostics for COVID-19 testing through December at state prisons and veterans homes. It remains unknown how the money will be divided between the two targeted groups.

On Friday, Nov. 20, Gov, Steve Sisolak issued new restrictions under what he called “Stay at Home 2.0,” Nevadans were urged to not go out in public unless absolutely necessary, not gather with those outside their households, to order groceries for delivery instead of going to the store and to pick up food curbside instead of dining at their favorite restaurant. Employers were also being asked to have their employees work from home as much as possible and to host meetings virtually instead of in conference rooms.

Private gatherings are to be limited to ten and can include people from no more than two households. Public gatherings limits will also be reduced from 250 people to 50, including churches.

Masks are required at any time you are around someone not part of your immediate household, including during private gatherings inside and outside.

Other restrictions include:

• Reservations are required at all restaurants and bars that serve food for in-person dining. Fast food restaurants and food courts are exempt from the reservation requirement. Restaurant and bar capacity was reduced from 50 to 25 percent, and there can be no more than four patrons at a table.
• Capacity at gyms, fitness and dance studios is reduced from 50 to 25 percent. Patrons must wear a mask at all times, unless actively drinking. If the activity is too strenuous to be done while wearing a mask properly, people must seek an alternative.
• Casino capacity has been reduced from 50 to 25 percent.
• Public gatherings are limited to no more than 50 people, or 25 percent of fire code capacity, whichever is less.
• Arcades, art galleries, aquariums, racetracks, bowling alleys, mini golf, libraries, museums and zoos all are reduced to 25 percent capacity.
• Big box stores that have more than 50,000 square feet must now have monitors at public entrances to manage capacity.
• A pause on all adult and youth sports tournaments.

In addition to individual and workplace action, Sisolak asked that colleges and universities communicate with students and faculty that they should avoid any gatherings on campuses and in homes. He did not make any specific requests of K-12 schools, including whether or not schools should discontinue in-person learning if the upward trends continue.

Sisolak’s stay-at-home request, however, did not apply to tourists, who the governor said should continue to travel the state while following all coronavirus health and safety protocols. The state’s tourism-driven economy came to a halt earlier this year when casinos were forced to shut their doors for several months and remains battered as visitors have been slow to return amid the pandemic.

CCHHS is also reporting 34 new cases and 25 additional recoveries of COVID-19 in the Quad-County Region. This brings the total number of cases to 2,869, with 2,119 recoveries and 30 deaths; 720 cases remain active. They continue to work to identify close risk contacts to prevent further spread of the disease.

CCHHS is continuing to offer drive-thru COVID-19 testing and flu vaccination events for Quad-County Residents only. Those from other counties will be turned away. For the flu vaccine, CCHHS is contracted to bill most insurances.

For uninsured we ask for a $20 administration fee; however, no one will be turned away for the inability to pay. CCHHS is not contracted with Tricare or labor unions. Testing is free of charge.

Events are first come, first served, no appointments or reservations.

The Nevada COVID-19 Mitigation and Management Task Force met with nine counties, including Lyon County, flagged for having an elevated risk of transmission of COVID-19. Lyon County’s Assessment/Action Plan remains the same with a main focus on messaging from local County and City leaders to correlate issues and actions that need to be taken from the community.

The task force said that all counties, regardless of risk level, must maintain the statewide baseline mitigation measures, including wearing face coverings, limits on gathering sizes and capacity in businesses. Additionally, all counties must continue to follow the criteria on gatherings and youth/adult sports outlined in Directive 033 and Directive 034, respectively.

They came for me at 3:15 a.m. once again. I don’t know who ‘they’ are but its always about the same time that I wake up in the morning and then can’t get back to sleep.

This time ‘they’ came with a little more mischief in their hearts (if they have one or any.) Precisely at 3:33 a.m. my computer, which was turned off at the time, decided to crash.

The data log says so. Only lost four news articles that I had been working on and had not saved to the cloud or elsewhere.

Spent all day from around four in the morning till jus’ after 6 this evening resetting the thing. Could not get rid of that damned Microsoft Edge.

It’s like a cancer that infects everything. Finally, I’m back online.

But not before I forgot to bring my notebook and pens from outside – the ink in all of my pens has turned to sludge. Thank goodness for pencils and manual pencil sharpener.

go smoke a turkey
off behind the old wooden shed
tryptophan stoner

winter time fly
trapped in window sill
final survivor

How many times did Mary Greger run me out of the library? There’s no way to tell.

Mary is one of the many people that made high school, a place I thought of more as torture, a good experience. And I think she knew my dislike for school.

She was the head librarian at Del Norte High and that library was my hiding place. You see, I did a lot of skipping of classes all four years and when it was storming out, who wanted to go hang out in the woods around the parking lot and get soaked.

It was like a cat-and-mouse game. Why?

Because while working for the high school annuals, I could never get a photograph of her for the yearbook. Frustrating at 16 and 17 for sure, but well worth the chuckle at 60 years of age.

(While researching back ground information, I learned that she never had a photo of herself in any of the annuals from my time in high school. Sneaky!)

This morning I went to the online edition of the Del Norte Triplicate’s obituary section and I immediately recognized. I have nothing but warm memories of her catching me perusing the book shelves in the far corner from the main desk and her chastising me for missing whatever class I was skipping.

Oddly, she never tattled on me, not once. Instead, I’d go to the bathroom, then wait for her to go into the back and I’d slip in again, jumping the turnstile.

Oh, the look on her face when she’d catch me in that far corner, leafing through yet another book, once again!

Age doesn’t matter, not even at 94 years, it’s still hard to lose a person who has had any kind of influence on your life. That’s the way I feel about the loss of one of my most important high school English teacher, Doris Whalen.

This was a woman who didn’t pull punches. She said it like she meant it and meant exactly what she said.

“You can do so much better, Mr. Darby,” Mrs. Whalen would say to me. “You’re smarter than this, you simply don’t apply yourself and are lazy.”

And she never said it in anger or with any meanness — jus’ honesty.

Ouch, at first, but I she told me that so often I eventually let it go in one ear and out the other. And Lord knows, she was SOOO right about me and school work.

“I can’t stand the ‘Lord of the Rings, and I won’t read it” I told her one time, being rebellious.

“That’s fine,” Mrs. Whalen stated. “That’s the assignment and whether you read it or not is up to you.”

I didn’t and she promptly gave me the ‘F’ I had earned and deserved.

Her husband, Mike (yes, I was allowed to call him that behind closed doors as a kid, but never in front of other students) was easier to get along with. He was like a secondary counselor, who urged me to get out there and put my nose to the grind stone.

And he could take a joke, too. I talked him into letting me draw around his two pointer fingers using his coffee cup.

First, I did each finger separately, then slightly spaced apart, yet side-by-side, than the two fingers together. Finally, I set the cup on top of them and walked out of his office.

I can still hear him shout, “Tom!, Tom! DARBY!” as I closed his office door and walked down the hall.

Mrs. Whalen, on the other hand, would never cotton to such shenanigans. She was all business about teaching and we students, learning.

Waiting till the last minute to do, to complete, to turn in an assignment was something she could always tell I had done. And the one time I did do the assignment ahead of deadline – the only time – she gigged me for my spelling, my grammar and my inability to type.

D+ was the highest grade I ever mustered from her English class. Argh!

But, because she laid down the law, something I rarely heeded at the time, her words stuck to me like paste. I finally got my act together and stopped my laziness, I applied myself, I busted my ass in other words.

Twenty-years after barely graduating, I saw her for the first time. It was at the 20-year-class reunion and it was areal pleasure to see and talk with her.

Gone was the authority of the classroom. It was replace by a genuine desire to know how I was doing, what I had been doing with myself for all those years and if I had any plans.

She was nothing like the Mrs. Whalen who wouldn’t let me or others, as I found out that evening, get away with crap in class. She was happy to hear that all of us were doing well and were making lives for ourselves.

And though I’ve incarnated myself several times over the years from service member, paramedic, radio jock, cop, news reporter, cowboy, and such, I’ve always had a zest and a yearning to write and that is what I’ve done. And there has rarely been a moment that I haven’t heard Mrs. Whalen’s words echoing like a gentle whisper some where in my head, driving me forward, to do more and better with my words.

She believed in me when I had absolutely no clue what I was about. How did she know?

Simple. She was Mrs. Whalen.

And while I don’t know this for certain – I think she knew back during that 20-year class reunion that I still hadn’t read the book, “Lord of the Rings.” But I’m very certain that she knows now.

My Cousin Elmo says, “Figures rarely lie, but liars always figure.”