April 21, 2020
I had a personal insight, yesterday. I have gotten so fascinated with the difficulty the human race is having as a whole in working on problems requiring worldwide creativity, that I have come to overlook many simple opportunities to improve life as an individual. As an example, a couple of days ago, I was happily working on my truck all alone, as is often the case, when I ran into a couple people who had dropped into my yard to see how I was doing. They were both wearing masks, one looking official and the other handmade. I was not wearing a mask, and in fact do not own a surgical one. I have made myself a couple of masks consisting of bandanas and rubber bands, but I keep misplacing them. Obviously, I was letting down the team.
Later, my wife, Marian, dropped by and invited me to take a walk with her. Since I had given her the responsibility to make sure I was getting some minimum amount of exercise, I happily accepted. But once we hit the street, I realized that everyone but me was wearing a mask. Including Marian, who had made herself one that said Stanford University. I did not want to go back to the house and grub for my bandanas—what to do, what to do?
This time of the year I often wear a sweat suit when working outside on my machinery. That day I was wearing an old pair of fatigue pants and what is called a hoodie (hood attached to the top part of the sweat suit). She quickly told me to turn it around so it was backwards,. I laughed, she said "no, do it". I did at which point she stepped behind me, pulled the hood drawstring fairly tight, and said that I now had a mask. And I did, and very wonderful one, two layers of thick dry cloth obviously thick enough to trap evil liquid droplets, porous enough to let me easily breath, , and resulting in a slightly swashbuckling look. The photos below show me in my sweat shirt in backward configuration, with mask up, and from the rear.
Forgive the haggard look, but I had put in a long days work. Another advantage to this system is that the front of my sweatshirts always trap the major amount of grease and other stains, and I never use the large pocket on the back. Reverse the shirt, and it becomes a wonderfully useful feature, as well as making the sweatshirt look much cleaner.
This is a wonderful discovery for me, because I have several sweatshirts with hoods, and hardly use this feature of them. This was an instant piece of creativity on Marian’s part, and I was flabbergasted. We went walking on a street with other people, all wearing masks, and rather than thinking less of me, they smiled approvingly, and I could see several of them taking mental notes. The sad thing to me is that without Marian's quick creativity, I would have spent my walk brooding about national governments and Covid, collecting negative feelings because I was not wearing a mask probably tripped and fallen down, and who knows, perhaps joined the Covid ranks.
We do not intend to patent this wonderful discovery, so if you have sweatshirts with hoods you never use, dig them out and join the club. In order to show it off in a better light the two photos below show me in a clean sweatshirt after a shower with mask down and up. Dashing, what?
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