Notices by katharine (thatkatharine@ohai.social), page 3

I was 8–9 years old and with my mother in a doctor’s waiting room. There was an area with toys, including a set of wooden building blocks. Also in the waiting room was a boy of about 4–6 and his mother. He was an absolute noisy terror, running and screaming and clanging the blocks. At the height of his tantrum, his mother simply said in the most syrupy sweet chirpy voice, “I’m sorry you’re not happy” and continued on reading her magazine.

RE: https://aus.social/@DenisCOVIDinfoguy/116016535090798959

A fun* game you can play is to just put “highly transmissible” into your preferred search engine and see that pretty much every variant of concern/interest has been described as “highly transmissible.”

If you adjust the date range to pre-2018, you’ll get some speculating about how highly transmissible viruses might trigger pandemics. If you search by year from 2020 to present day, you can be reminded that some years have had a couple or even several “highly transmissible” Covid variants.

Covid is a highly transmissible virus.
Because it passes from human to human (and other creatures, yes).
Because humans keep breathing on each other, regardless of the physical experience of symptoms.
So, it keeps circulating.
And mutating.
And evading vaccine coverage.
So, every three months or so, we gotta go through this “guess what, there’s a new highly transmissible strain of Covid and that’s why you and everyone you know are sick right now” thing.

“No, we mean it, this one is the most highly transmissible of all the variants. But don’t worry—you’re probably not going to die of it immediately! Just wash your hands and get vaccinated and that will surely be enough”

Cut to four months later:

“Whoa—there’s a *new* variant and it is way deffo highly transmissible, more than the other variants. Keep washing your hands tho and it’ll be fiiiiiiiiiiine”

…

“Hey…are you guys even trying to wash your hands because you’ll never guess what…”

Rain barrel but for snow (would need some safe way to warm the barrel to melt snow to hold more of the sky water)?

I had a whim and a notion. This is really all I’ve got so far.

I think I'm looking at using this as a template to do a one-piece overlay for the facepiece, but I don't know what materials to use because anything like fabric or vinyl is bound to have visible seams. Also, I don't really want patterns on my face. But if I'm not making something to affix quasi-permanently, maybe I could have some kind of cool pattern as a whimsical treat.

I'm open to ideas.

Looking at millinery tutorials to determine if there are materials/techniques suitable for my vision.

An experiment — took a pleated, 2-ply cloth Old Navy mask that I had from the earliest days of this pandemic, draped it over the Dentec Nx facepiece, and applied a fabric stiffener mixture of Mod Podge and water. I wanted to see what cuts and shaping would need to be done without wasting good fabric. I let it sit on the facepiece for a few hours to see if it would take the shape, then carefully moved it to let it air dry for ~10 hours.

Trimming and fiddling with the bias tape around the sides will the next step. 😬

This could turn into a terrible mess.

Cut the holes for the harness and filters, but haven’t dealt with the trim.

I have two more of the Old Navy cotton masks to play with. Definitely need to deal with the bulky bunching of fabric at the back and I’ll probably remove the inner layer of cotton. It was tricky getting the filters on for a fit check.

This is surprisingly not terrible for a whim.

I tried it on and the cover holds its shape well, thanks to the fabric stiffener. Might add another coat for durability.

Decided that light blue shell was a fun first experiment to see what was possible and have now started from scratch with a different Old Navy cotton mask. Did seam ripping and separated the three cotton layers (all the same colour!), now waiting (im)patiently between stiffener applications. The single ply was much easier to manipulate, though smoothing the fabric over the facepiece to achieve symmetrical smoothness is lightly infuriating.

I am never more impatient than when waiting for glue or paint to dry.

Check it. Single ply of cotton fabric with six or seven layers of fabric stiffener. Reused the bias tape from the original three-layer cloth mask and used fabric fuse glue instead of sewing it. Custom lightweight shell for the Dentec to coordinate with outfits and accessories.

When they say AI is optional, but your option is to turn it off because they decided AI is default.

Always be exporting your Fedi data and saving it to your own devices. You never know if your instance might go down AND there might be treasures that you want to reference later.

I don’t know who needs to know this, but washing your hands is supposed to be a routine function you perform throughout the day, especially when doing bathroom and kitchen stuff. You don’t earn a virus mitigation badge by saying you wash your hands as a way to prevent getting sick with respiratory symptoms.

Another thing about perimenopause is random swelling and tenderness.

Well… that’s different.

We eliminated a strain of flu in 2020–21 due to widespread imperfect mask use, so… people could just decide to do that again but… somehow… no

https://zeroes.ca/@ndrwy/115809719426643010

I’m still theorizing that Covid levels are lower because fewer Ontarians are crossing the US border.