The Texas Department of State Health Services has received and distributed 14,780 doses of the monkey pox vaccine to local health departments and DSHS regional offices. Another 27,000 doses could be made available by the Strategic National Stockpile.
My babies have moved on, taken to wing, flown the coop… or maybe they have been eaten by the cat next door, but this afternoon when I went out to check on the bird nest in my fern on the front porch, the nest was empty. Talk about “empty nest syndrome.” I’ve been watching that little nest for about a month.
They say that age is just a number, so I suppose churning out my thousandth column with this writing might be comparable to a yawn, wry smile or the lame joke about the needle’s question to the thread in a nudist colony-”Sew what?”
If you happen to visit a high-traffic area in one of the state’s larger cities, you might come across some folks wearing sandwich boards, such as one sees during tax season or mattress sales. The Texas Department of Transportation has adopted this marketing device to promote its “Be Safe. Drive Smart” pedestrian safety campaign this month.
Today, the temperature outside was one hundred and seventy-five degrees. Maybe they said one hundred seventeen, but that’s about the same thing. Potatoes… “Patatas”, Purgatory… Hell. Bottom line, it was too hot. I like to consider myself a nice person, but today I found that I’m not very nice when I’m hot.
The late Dr. Robert L. Smith and Ethelyn Hughes Smith, his bride, fell short in precious few areas of life, but when they did, it was never by intent. By a few weeks in each case, they missed a 70th wedding anniversary, he failed to attain age 90 and she was just short of her 97th birthday when she died recently.
As we cross the halfway point of July, wildfire danger continues to increase across the state. On Friday, Texas A&M Forest Service firefighters responded to 15 new wildfires that burned 651 acres. As of Sunday, there were eight active wildfires; the largest was the Nethery Road Fire in Kimble County, involving an estimated 3,500 acres. It has been 70% contained.
I take some medicines for an auto-immune condition. I’m not sure what the medicines do, but when I quit taking them a few years ago, the lovely skin and muscle related condition reared its ugly head. I broke out in a rash, my cuticles got crusty, and I could hardly get up out of the bathtub without help. Those pills must be some kind of magic.
Thomas Wolf, the author who insisted that we can’t go home again, got it wrong. One can indeed do so, but “home” may hardly be recognizable, and/or--truth to tell--noticeably improved.
The Texas Education Agency has released the 2022 State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness
