I am one of the people in the USA that have had little impact or inconvenience from the Covid Panic. Still this cartoon provides a good summary of my feelings. 
The cartoonist is Stephan Pastis and the comic strip is Pearls Before Swine.
This appears in our local paper in gray-scale form. I went to the web to get the color version.
https://www.arcamax.com/thefunnies/pearlsbeforeswine/s-2625459
On the left is a scroll list of other comics. I always look at Breaking Cat News, by Georgia Dunn. The cats are often involved in a story line that may go on for a week. Also, some other characters come and go. To appreciate the strip, one has to be a regular visitor, and learn the cats and there personalities.
Local stores have “wear a mask” signs but the patrons seem half-hearted about it. Many just don’t bother. I carry a mask and put it on when and if I have to talk to or be near others. Otherwise keeping a physical distance {social distancing} is quite easy in the community. I’ve been told the big cities and more formal settings in Puget Sound towns are more masked-up than the EBRG area.
On a similar vein, I read of a candy shortage with Valentine’s Day approaching.
This is not apparent in the EBRG stores. Shelves are over flowing with everything imaginal. About this difference my hypotheses are (a) candy is priced too high for our local folks, and (b) we are higher-order procrastinators than others.
Maybe heart shaped boxes are very costly to produce, but $20 for a 20 ounce indulgence seems excessive. That’s in an inexpensive general merchandise store. Some are much more expensive but most EBRG stores never stalk those. The one shown here is $21.95 for 5.8 ounces. I’ll never know if the pieces taste good. That’s over $60 per pound, before an 8% tax. Wow!
This week I was expecting a call from the CPA office that has been working on taxes. Thus, all week I stayed close to the house telephone – I carry a handset when outside – it works for about 200 feet. The call did not come. On Saturday I went to town for a multi-purpose trip. (Note below for Friday.)
I made 6 stops and got home about 1:00 o’clock. At 3 I got the call from Scott, the CPA. I went back in (gas costs me about $6 per trip), signed my name 3 times and came home again. Next is working on last year’s taxes. The filing date in 2022 is April 18th. The 15th is “Good Friday”, so “Tax Day” is delayed to Monday. I found the following on the web:
“A rampant virus, skeleton staff, ongoing legislative changes, and flailing funding all make for a decidedly bumpy tax season ahead. The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) is battling backlogs with a grossly understaffed team (20,000 fewer employees than in 2010) and the delays and complexities engendered by stimulus check deliveries and advances in Child Tax Credits.”
I’m not betting on an early response, although I think the back-year submittals may go to a different office than current year stuff – and it is all electronic. Will that help?
Friday:
Phyllis and Cameron scheduled a trip over for Friday – work and lunch.
They brought metal shelving and an outside weather station. I figured we could work outside for an hour with a temperature of near 40° only if we were quite active. Well, last Oct/Nov we sorted and filled boxes with papers, books, and old magazines (+more) and stacked the stuff at the front of the Big Brown Shed. Thursday I shoveled the snow from the area in front of the swinging doors.
I backed the truck as close as I could get to there (~10 feet) and I got in under the canopy and Cameron carted boxes. I stacked things to the roof. Leer claims this canopy has 40% more volume than a standard “cab-height” model. I can’t find a number for that, but it holds a lot and we filled it top-to-bottom and side-to-side. I ran out of space before Caameron ran out of boxes. I think one more (smaller) load will mostly clear out the accumulation of 50 years of books & papers & magazines & personal documents.
Saturday I went to the transfer station (aka “dump”) and unloading, without help, took nearly a half hour. OK, 20 minutes. I weighed out at 1,920 pounds lighter than when I went in. The dump fee was $121. With the prior trips either with or without a smaller canopy I was only carrying half that weight and the fee was closer to $50. Without a canopy the load has to be secured. That was a pain and limited the bulk. 
The two images above show the under-roof part of a solid waste transfer station. Once things are on the floor the machines place it into a large concrete trench. Then it is compressed and baled and loaded on to trucks to be “transferred” to a far off burial site. Most of the area’s solid waste goes to East Wenatchee, about 80 road miles away.
My spring project will be dismantling the Pace Arrow motor home.
About senior moments and my iPhone:
I got my i-12 via Consumer Cellular and, perhaps this is normal, it had almost no documentation. I got started but easily lost the information about codes, passwords, Apple ID Code, and Verification Code. Later I bought a $12 book “for Seniors” that hasn’t been a lot of help.
Well, my desktop computer doesn’t have a camera and I wanted to get a ZOOM ability. The iPhone seemed doable. I tried but needed the various codes that I didn’t have. I had to request a recovery appointment.
I did that on January 26th. The return message was that in a few days I would get a message telling me when I would be able to do a recovery. That message came 4 days later; it said:
“You will receive a text or a phone call at this number when your account is ready to recover on February 5, 2022 at 9:04:48 PM PST.”
Last night at 9 PM I got ready with an open text document and the phone turned on at 9:04:30 PM PST. Apple-recovery was a few seconds late. I really didn’t know the difference between an Apple ID Code and a Verification Code – – and I was getting responses via the internet and via the phone. What great fun. Apple Support (digital) and I finally got all this straightened out. Monday, I think I’ll call my computer guru and find out what it will take to get a camera & whatever on the desktop to do video, like ZOOM. Also, my friendly Adult Activity Center director, Katelyn, is knowledgeable about iPhones and answers questions for us old farts every Monday at 1 PM. We were stymied last week ‘cause I didn’t know the codes.
From the Naneum Fan
John