Covid is not over. Covid cases in America are surging in 46 states. The lower the vaccination rate in the state, the worse the surge. Missouri, a state with one of the lower vaccination rates in the nation has been hit particularly hard by the Delta variant.

In the backdrop of this, some hosts on Fox News are raging against the very thing that can prevent deaths and hospitalizations. Vaccinations.

The sacrifice of lives for ratings and power

It’s not just Fox News hosts cashing in on America’s fear of the vaccine. The Washington Post raised an issue regarding Republicans and their voters. In an opinion article titled…

I have been blaming my inability to focus for long on constant interruptions from my family. Take a husband working from home and a daughter doing virtual learning most of the year; then throw in a couple of dogs, and that probably has something to do with it.

But health experts have found something else is going on with many of us. They call it “pandemic brain,” and it’s caused by living through high levels of uncertainty, stress, and fear for a prolonged time.

And now, the acute feelings of impending doom that I felt back in the early days…

The story begins on a fall morning in 1993 when a Las Vegas armored van pulled up in front of the Circus Circus Casino. It was 8 AM, and the truck was full of cash for the day to fill the casino ATMs across the Vegas strip.

The driver of the van was a fairly new employee, Heather Tallchief. The tall, beautiful woman had only worked for the armored truck company for about two months. Earlier that year, 21-year-old Heather Tallchief had been working as a nursing assistant at a San Francisco AIDS hospice.

But now, she was a driver…

I’m fully vaccinated. The vaccines are so effective that I feel like I could stop worrying about Covid if only my young daughter could get her vaccinations. But, until her age group can get vaccinated, I’m going to worry.

I worry every time I’m out with her and I see unmasked people. I know the CDC says fully vaccinated people don’t need to wear masks. But how am I to trust everyone I see with a bare face is vaccinated?

I wouldn’t be concerned for myself. I have that much faith in the vaccinations. But when I’m with my daughter…

So you’ve found success on Medium. Now you want to write about it. That’s great, and many people will be happy to read your story.

I am not one of those people. I used to be, but I’m currently burnt out on Medium success stories. And still, I see a steady stream of how to improve your income, how to write every day, how to get more followers. The list goes on. And on. And on.

It’s my fault. I clicked on too many of these articles, and Medium thinks it’s all I want to see.

I have to escape from this unending cycle of Medium success stories. Many of which appear to be from writers that had one golden article go viral and now think they’ve cracked the Medium code.

The problem is, even if you crack the Medium code one day, they’ll change it on you next week.

I missed the initial buzz over the incident of the lost followers. I was traveling and hadn’t been on my Medium account for a few days.

It wasn’t until a day or so after the event that I realized my follower account had dropped by a few hundred. And then I started seeing the many articles of writers lamenting the loss of hundreds (and even thousands in some cases) of followers.

Medium explained in their blog, “As part of our ongoing work to provide the best possible user experience, we’ll be removing spam accounts from your follower and following counts…

Historically, American Midwesterners tend to prefer simple drinks, like beer and whiskey, over fancy mixed concoctions. But Chicago does have a few famous cocktails it can claim from its past.

Though Chicago doesn’t have a rich cocktail history like San Francisco, New Orleans, and New York, there are some drinks where we can trace the origins back to the city.

There are limitless places to get a cocktail in the city today. But, before and during Prohibition, bars were mainly focused on pouring a straight whiskey or beer. …

I have a small garden in my backyard where I have successfully grown tomatoes, lettuce, pepper plants, a variety of herbs, and loads of zucchini.

Not everything works out. The green bean plants were decimated by rabbits before they could grow a single bean. Same with the peas. And anything delicate or fussy has never made it for long in my garden.

I’ve also had no luck with watermelon. I once watched a lone watermelon on a vine sit for weeks, never growing. I waited and waited to see something happen, but it didn’t budge in size. One day, I…