---

June, well you certainly were an interesting month. This post is certainly arriving later than I would have liked, and in fact, I don’t have a lot of steam to power through it, but thought I’d give it a try. It is arriving late due to being hospitalized for 9 days at the very end of June. Much of it was finished, at least in my head.

Some friends will know from some Facebook updates that were posted so I won’t go into specifics here. I am a very private person in general, so even those updates made me a bit uncomfortable. Despite what I was going through, there are a lot of people who have much worse to deal with, and I don’t like to complain – but I was in the hospital. With so many friends asking my wife via text, and otherwise, it ended up just being easier to keep them up to date with a restricted distribution. I begrudgingly approved the updates, but I told my wife I claimed the power of the final edit. 🙂 Plus I was going a bit stir crazy after a while in the hospital and my restlessness and boredom took over in posting silly updates.

I am doing some better…ups and downs…and have some possible long-term issues to contend with. Nonetheless, I deeply appreciate the thoughts and well-wishes.

In the time of COVID-19

Of course, being hospitalized during the time of COVID-19 is a bit scary in itself. Visitors were highly scrutinized and restricted. Masks were mandatory in all public spaces. Hourly announcements reminded everyone of this. Anyone arriving without a mask was given one and told to wear it. At times, the halls were like a ghost-town despite the hospital being at capacity as far as bed space. To add to the craziness, the hospital was also laying off ER staff, lab staff, and others.

The reality of COVID already hit our family with the loss of a family friend, and it showed its face again while I was in the hospital. My first roommate was recuperating from COVID-19. He had since tested negative twice and was no longer considered contagious. However, he was struggling with severe, lingering breathing issues, needing a tracheotomy, and hadn’t been home in 57 days. Instead, he was in a cycle of hospital to rehabilitation back to the hospital and so on. His struggle was obvious in the labor just to finish a sentence.

And with that, I think there is an extremely vital message. With all the statistical concentration on cases and deaths, there is a component that is difficult to get a feeling for – those that survive, yet end up potentially contracting life-long, debilitating illnesses. My roommate is just one anecdotal case of many as a symbol of just how serious this disease can be for survivors.

And now, there is this ideological political fight over masks. I get it (partly) – it triggers some hot-buttons with those who distrust government, media and simply don’t like being told what to do. We have people claiming how “informed” they are by “reading all sides” and deciding for themselves. They propagate ridiculous figures like “It’s 99% survivable!” and in the same sentence state “All the numbers are made up.” So which is it? The stat that makes you feel better, or the stats that don’t and are fake? It is freaking INSANE, yet completely predictable to social psychologists. Cognitive dissonance remains alive and well in America. Human behavior, while a curiosity, is rarely mysterious.

It may be a while before we learn how the lingering health issues of “survivors” play out. Maybe it takes 3 months, 6 months, a year for someone to fully recover. Maybe they never fully recover. That is a very hard statistic to track once people have drifted off the current focus of deaths and positive cases. Many also seem to forget the financial burden of repeated treatment, medications, ongoing therapy, and possible repeat hospitalizations. Social scientists, epidemiologists, and medical anthropologists have job security for years to come.

The virus doesn’t care about which safety measures we choose or how we mix them. It doesn’t care about economic factors or how we slice the statistics.

retreating to comfort zones…

During stressful and uncertain times, people rely more than ever, on their safe places. It is a coping mechanism, so in that regard, some of this is to be expected as normal human behavior. There is no fighting it. If rallying with their “tribe” offers a sense of comfort, that is going to overrule any critical or rational thought processes… every. single. time.

The simple fact is there just aren’t a lot of options for us right now. There are no good choices. It is a constant balancing act between some inconveniences with masks and social distancing to more severe lockdowns. The virus doesn’t care about which safety measures we choose or how we mix them. It doesn’t care about economic factors or how we slice the statistics. It will do what it does, and some of that is still unknown. Sadly the people having “COVID parties” end up finding out the hard way the consequences of their choices, sometimes paying with their lives. Worse, with the lives of others.

I suppose thousands of years of history tell us humans don’t grapple well with the “unknown.” And there are so many unknowns right now, mixed messages, daily onslaught media coverage to drive anyone nuts. Misinformation and disinformation are rampant and exploited. And oh yeah, throw in the volatility and inflammatory rhetoric of a major US election on top. Ugh. There is no better time for vigilance in vetting information we are exposed to and patience.

---

Environment

Clinton River Cleanup

A unique situation developed over the past couple of months on the Clinton River here in Southeast Michigan. There is a dam that has powered the apple presses of a local cider mill since 1876. The river has various tributaries and diversions, but nothing wide or deep enough to take significant flow away from the main river. Water over the dam also has a reputation of being quite dangerous, as some kayakers have lost their lives in attempting to paddle over it and get caught in a hydrodynamic roll at the edge.

The water flow changed dramatically in the past couple months. With the erratic rainfalls we’ve had and a slow build up of sediment along the main body of the river, the river took a “jump” and its flow completely diverted to one of the bypass routes.

The water over the dam stopped and the riverbed started to dry up. While this needs to be fixed long-term, it presented a unique opportunity for a river cleanup. Our local Clinton River Watershed Council organized a cleanup day specifically for the riverbed to haul out tires and other large debris which is difficult if not impossible to do while full of water. Owners of the dam (Yate’s Cider Mill) are also taking the opportunity to inspect and make any necessary repairs.

Restoring the water flow is going to be quite the project, involving heavy equipment to clear out built up soil, rock and clay at the diversion point.

---

Photography

My photography for June 2020 consisted mostly of working on gathering more aerial photographs. With the homogeneous greens of summer, many nature scenes don’t have much character to them from the air. You can only do so much with green treetops. As such I have been exploring some tangents like the great state park we have in Detroit. It is on the island of Belle Isle in the heart of the Detroit River. I also visited some solar installations that I wrote about previously. However, given I wasn’t feeling well the past couple of weeks of June, which ended with me in the hospital – even these tangents were limited. I have a feeling my July activity will follow suit.

Publication News

Anyone involved with a stock agency to sell their work knows that you don’t always know where your work is being used. It is only accompanied by very generic information describing the market and license. Reverse image searches have made it possible to discover some of these uses, but it isn’t a guarantee. Finding an image by chance in a large national magazine is rare.

Such a thing happened to me back in March. We subscribe to National Wildlife Magazine, and my wife was flipping through the April/May 2020 issue and noticed a wildflower picture. She said – “Hey – this looks like one of your pictures!” (not noticing the image credit yet) And to my surprise as well, it indeed was mine. I had no record of making such a sale of that image on my own, or through any agency. Well, how does that happen?! I am used to the normal process of securing a license, then publication, then perhaps payment follows shortly thereafter. At the very minimum, I am aware prior to publication.

While I doubted a publication like NWF would engage in infringement, I at least wondered if something “slipped through the cracks.” My agency educated me on this process and how it is quite common. Large publications often license in bulk since they use so many images. It may be months later before they collectively reconcile all the images they have used. This was the case with this image, and in June, the license and payment showed up in my account, three months after use. It is an interesting insight into large publication operations and actually makes sense in reducing the amount of licensing transactions.

---

Website Bits & Bites

Least favorite Country Award

Norway garnered this prestigious award for the month of June 2020, being blocked 361 times. And as this new tradition begins to form, I must find a curse word in Norwegian. So for all those Drittsekk Norwegians – knock it off!

Comment Spam

I have noticed a marked increase in comment spam since I have turned off the little checkbox I used to have to “solemnly swear you are not a spammer.” I guess spammers didn’t like taking that oath. 🙂 It isn’t making it through to my site, but a maintenance item I need to keep an eye on. I am leaving that checkbox off for now for the sake of eliminating things a visitor needs to do to make a comment, even if it is minimal. I didn’t notice any particular comments worthy of granting a “most creative spammer” award, same ol’ boring stuff.

---

Creativity

Quote of the Month

In forty years of medical practice, I have found only two types of non-pharmaceutical ‘therapy’ to be vitally important for patients with chronic neurological diseases: music and gardens.

~ Oliver Sacks (1933-2015), neurologist and author

Thank you for tagging along for this attempt to rake a leaf pile. Don’t hold your breath for big July update. 🙂