Pandemic, Week 87 (Ordinary Time)

This week both prosecutors and the defense rested their cases in the trial of Kyle Rittenhouse, the 17-year old who traveled from his home in Illinois to Wisconsin with an illegal AR-15 rifle in order to protect the private property of people in another state from Black-Lives Matter protestors, including the two he shot and killed. Meanwhile the defense attorney in the Ahmaud Arbery case, where a black man was chased and killed by three white men in Georgia who believed the jogger was trespassing in a vacant lot, drew criticism after he informed the court that, "[w]e don't want any more Black pastors coming in here... sitting with the victim's family." Republican House members that voted for the bipartisan infrastructure deal have received death threats after fellow republican Marjorie Tylor Greene, posted their office phone numbers on her social media accounts and are now facing calls from fellow republicans for the loss of their committee assignments. After two weeks of intense negotiations COP26 came to a close as nearly 200 countries signed the Glasgow Climate Pact agreeing to phase down unabated coal power, finalizing the Paris Rulebook, and raising ambition under the Paris Agreement to keep 1.5C alive. Britney Spears's conservatorship has ended.

The world reached 253.8 million COVID cases and 5.1 million deaths this week, of which the US accounted for 47.9 million cases and 783,000 deaths. 226 million (68 percent) of Americans have received at least one vaccine dose and 195 million (59 percent) are fully vaccinated. Over 1.1 million children under 12 years of age have received at least one does of the vaccine, 924,000 in the past two weeks, including Big Bird, who after tweeting that his wing was a little sore from the shot, drew the ire of Senator Ted Cruz who argued Big Bird's vaccination was government propaganda directed at five-year olds.

Things returned to some level of normalcy for us this week. Sunday we attended Meeting and its Open House where the kids volunteered to serve refreshments (in the hopes that Owen could make a dent in his graduation requirement of logging 100 volunteer hours). Allen's article in Science was published and his Spanish-language interview even made the rounds in our friend circle (based on Google translate we think he didn't say anything wrong). We had our holiday photoshoot on Thursday – this year at the Botanic Garden, where the annual holiday train display is being displayed outdoors. Nora learned how to make candles. Allen was the big winner at poker. Owen made significant progress on projecting his latest bouldering goal.

But probably the most significant sign that things are returning to some semblance of normal is that Nora went to their first sleepover in two years, to celebrate Harper turning 13. We're still a little anxious, given the mixing of households and whatnot, but as the kids are all vaccinated we decided that it was finally time to relax a bit. Hopefully, this all ends well...

(To see all of this week's pictures, click here.)