There has been alot of debate over the best way to announce that one has been vaccinated. There is talk of vaccine passports. My solution is that our state health departments issue little v stickers to affix to our driver's licenses. For international travel the State department could send us little v stickers that we could affix to our passports. Presumably there is a data base that could be accessed before the v stickers could be issued.
The nice part of inflation is that interest rates are high enough that you don't have to gamble on the stock market to make any money. I remember when I had a savings account at Silverado in Denver and the interest rates were 16 per cent. Of course Silverado eventually went bankrupt but that is a story for another day. It also means that if you buy anything, you can be assured it will go up in value. That is not always true, condos can be fickle about gaining value, but can be true for other things.
Driving around yesterday I noticed the gasoline had crept up to over three dollars a gallon. Eggs have also crept up. The thing I have noticed the most is the increase in the tabs at the local taverns. Right now interest rates are still low, however. We'll see how long that lasts.
As a kid I was often around adults who said, "All the kids want everything handed to them, nobody wants to work anymore". Today conservatives are reciting the same mantra. Liberals say it's because the kids are still not in school and too many women have no choice but to stay home. By this logic, Labor Day will be appropriately named because it is then that millions of Americans will be off of unemployment and thronging the hotel and restaurant industries with their skills.
In the mid 70s I graduated into a recession. Some of my friends (I was in the bohemian crowd) went on welfare. The luckier ones got jobs but soon were collecting unemployment. For many of us baby boomers, work was that thing you did with the goal of collecting unemployment.
Many unemployed, admittedly, have side hustles. Jack is helping his brother take wood paneling off of his neighbor's house. Mary is baking birthday cakes for the kids on the block. Fred is putting mufflers on his neighbor's cars. Off the books.
Still in September, I predict we will go back to fairly stable levels of employment. Sadly, wages are unlikely to go up much.
The greatest honor of all honors at Fanny Hillers School (K-6) was to serve as a Junior Leader. This honor only befell to the members of the 6th grade class. On the first day of school in 6th grade, I got a slip of paper welcoming me to the ranks of the Junior Leaders and assigning me the duty of guarding over the bicycle rack. I knew this was a distinct honor.
The bicycle rack was located next to the school and should have been heavily used but the arcane rules of the school forbid the use of this piece of infrastructure for students who lived within a mile of the school. Since a mile was less than the distance most students lived from the school, and those few students who lived more than a mile away could take the school bus, it was, by mandate, an unused facility. Filled with slots for twenty bicycles, it was, sadly an empty encumbrance on the sight of the school grounds. I myself, living on Kaplan Avenue, a block away, was unable to take my own bicycle to school.
As a junior leader, I had to submit a report every week on the status of my station and responsibilities. On Friday afternoons, the weekly meetings of the Junior Leaders necessitated not only the submission of said report but an oral reading of said report to the other Junior Leaders and the school principal.
There was a notation of the report at the end where the student had to evaluate the status of his station with a checkmark besides the comments excellent, fair, good, or poor. Since it was difficult to evaluate a week where nothing happened, no bicycles entered or housed at the facility, I chose to use the neutral determinative "good" to evaluate the week. Certainly "excellent" would be overstating the case and fair or poor might also be inappropriate.
My report was sadly consistent. "There were no bicycles this week. The bicycle rack was good." Around the beginning of October I noticed a few chuckles from the audience at my report.
I had accepted my fate, like any civil servant being ensconced in a cushy job. Then my life changed forever. A Monday morning in early November a girl drove up to the bicycle rack. We chatted and to the surprise of all the Junior Leaders, that Friday I proudly announced, "There was one bicycle this week, the bicycle rack was good."
She was a regular user of the bicycle rack for a while. After that I don't know. In January I was assigned to a street corner and for the rest of the school year, the bicycle rack was an unguarded edifice. I suppose the bicycle rack continued to be good.
