Tonight's picture was taken in July of 2009, during Brandon's 19th birthday party in the clinic. Mattie and Brandon were diagnosed with cancer around the same time in 2008. Mattie and Brandon, despite their age difference of 12 years, got along splendidly. Mattie called Brandon his "best buddy." That day in clinic, Mattie, Brandon, and Jocelyn (another good friend and mentor to Mattie) celebrated! They played at the art table together and also enjoyed ice cream and cake. It is hard to believe that both Mattie and Jocelyn died from osteosarcoma.
Quote of the day: Today's coronavirus update from Johns Hopkins.
- number of people diagnosed with the virus: 4,541,016
- number of people who died from the virus: 152,922
In Washington, DC, and most areas of the country, we have been dealing with the lock downs associated with COVID-19 since March. That is five months, with still no end in sight. Funny when I think back to the 14 days of shut down originally promised to us in March, I thought that was bad. It sounded bad at the time, but thankfully most of us couldn't fathom this extending passed two weeks. I came across an article today entitled, There are no hours or days in Coronatime (https://www.wired.com/story/coronavirus-time-warp-what-day-is-it/). The title alone caught my attention, because it is true! It is hard to keep track of one day from the next! As each day looks just like the day before it.
Time, according to Aristotle, is the measure of change. It depends on what is shifting, reshaping, and what remains the same. The article highlights when you are stuck at home day after day, “the brain likes novelty.” “It squirts dopamine every time there’s something novel that’s happening, and dopamine helps set the initiation of the timing of these events.” In this model, the brain clocks those novel experiences, stashes them away as memories, and then recounts them later to estimate the passage of time. No novelty, no dopamine—and then “perceptual systems don’t bother encoding stuff.”
I agree with the author of this article..... "No one knows when this will be over, or what the world will look like on the other side. Our experience of time isn’t just different because we are fearful or bored, cooped up or overworked. It has changed because we don’t yet know what to measure it against."
As we were coming home, Peter saw something big perched on a window sill. I couldn't believe this was real, but indeed it was a Cooper's Hawk sitting up top having a meal!
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