Update

There are four doors opening onto this hall. Greg is taking off the old casings and installing new ones that match the ones we did in the living room several years ago when we put in a new front door. It's a puzzle in some places to get everything to fit and Greg has set up his saw in the driveway and made dozens of trips up and down the front steps as he measures and cuts each piece. They mystery of the grinding sound emanating from the endless construction house above us has been partially solved as the same grinding sound is now emanating from this hallway. Greg tells me it is an oscillating saw for cutting the baseboard.

The current news from Afghanistan is heartbreaking. Although I agree that we should no longer be fighting an unwinnable war there, our initial objective was to defeat the Taliban, not establish a Democratic government. I would have hoped that the Biden administration would have learned something from the Vietnam War. The scenes at the Kabul airport and the one in Saigon almost fifty years ago are dishearteningly infuriatingly similar. The U.S. personnel and the Afghans who assisted the U.S. should have been evacuated from the country long before the troops were withdrawn. If the stated goal of troops in Afghanistan was 'to assist the Afghans', the precipitous withdrawl without an exit plan has left us, and the country of Afghanistan in exactly the same place where we were 20 years ago with the Taliban in control.

The number of Covid 'breakthrough' cases continues to grow and what was initially portrayed as 'a pandemic of the unvaccinated' has now proven what apparently was known all along....that in an effort to front load the efficacy of the vaccine by opting to give the second shot just three weeks or a month after the first one, the immunity provided is now dropping from 85% to only 40 to 50% . The recommendation for a booster after eight months has come as the number of breakthrough cases being hospitalized is growing. So much for transparency....