Not that I care or dare to eat there every day, but McDonald's have reopened their dining areas in Virginia, at last. It was jolly high time; nonprofit public-access computer centers have not.
I am sitting in McDonald's. I just saw a little Ruby-Throated Hummingbird (a female, no conspicuous red spot on the throat) flitting around the colorful sign in the window.
Just to annoy those who don't like my flights of animal whimsy, let's postulate that she was buzzing around the store because she'd heard a fellow customer singing the praises of their French Vanilla Iced Coffee...No. Probably not. Probably somebody had spilled something with real sugar in it on the ground, where the hummingbird couldn't drink it, and the bird was hoping that the colorful sign was the source of that lovely sugary smell. Sorry, bird.
I'd like to mention the French Vanilla Iced Coffee because I never heard of such a confection. I like one cup of hot black coffee in the morning. After that, I like to rinse out the cup with water. After that, depending on which is a better bargain, I can drink more coffee, or maybe tea, or maybe soda pop. At my fa-a-a-avorite cafe, where I don't plan to hang out again until they've had a chance to recover from last year, I liked to alternate between black coffee, sweet coffee, and sometimes decaf coffee. At McDonald's my afternoon cold drink of choice is Coca-Cola. If I had to keep buying drinks to use the Internet at some other places I might start with Mountain Dew or Mello Yello and then move on to something without caffeine in it, because the most popular kinds of soda pop in my part of the world contain very high levels of caffeine and were not meant to be sipped all day.
But this gentleman wanted everyone to know that such a thing as French Vanilla Iced Coffee exists. He says it's sweet, but not too sweet, yet also sugar-free. It's cold enough to drink on a hot summer afternoon, and, he says, he finds the flavor and caffeine content satisfying enough to feel like lunch.
McDonald's still does hamburgers, fries, and soda pop (and you can still get at least the cheap version of each of those for 99 cents), but in recent years they've been trying to attract adults with all kinds of trendier, hypothetically healthier food and drinks.
Hummingbirds literally live on sweet drinks--specifically the nectar of tube-shaped flowers, and different species feed primarily on flowers that are the right size for their bills. So there's a reason why this one might be attracted to McDonald's. However, they need real natural sucrose: preferably from flowers, or failing that from natural sugar. They can't live on the sugar-free sweet drinks some humans prefer. They can't live on the ice cream and milkshakes people have been ordering, either. They might be able to drink sugary Coke or Sprite or Hi-C, but it wouldn't be good food for them...so I hope this hummingbird has found some real flowers to feed on by now.
Here's an update some local folks may not have heard. Most of us have had the coronavirus by now, or the vaccine, or both--not necessarily in that order. On hearing that a mutant strain of virus may still be able to affect people who've had the vaccine, I expect a lot of people in Gate City to react the same way I did. "Dang-bang-blast it all, we had that, last year. I'm NOT going to bother about it a-GA-in!" For most of us there was no need to "bother" worrying, or panicking, or probably even having the vaccine unless it was to protect other people, at any time in the whole COVID saga. If we weren't already reacting to something else we didn't know we had it. Some of us still don't know whether we had it or not; we had a cough, or felt tired, or had vivid memories of mononucleosis, when everyone else was having COVID, But It Was Nothing To Miss A Day's Pay Over, Really...
Meh. Mehhh. I've not thrown out any of my masks, and I'm still a huge fan of social distancing, especially from older people and those known to be at special risk. But seriously, we are still talking about a chest cold. Head colds, flu, strep, and other stupid little infections no normal adult even notices having, are still more dangerous to the fragile than any strain of coronavirus ever was. For many of us not only glyphosate reactions, but also "breaking in" new shoes or sipping too-hot coffee, are a lot more painful than coronavirus. The only cause for special concern about coronavirus was to try to prevent whole towns from all going down with it at once, and since natural immunity formed by having the virus is more effective than vaccines, I think few if any of us have any reason to worry.
I'm tempted to speculate that anybody who notices any form of coronavirus symptoms, now, is probably having a glyphosate reaction. Of course that's wrong. Some of these people have AIDS or lupus or cancer--which is why asking which individuals have COVID or what else was going on with them is not nice. If they want us to know, they'll tell us. (The tendency of older people to share Too Much Information about their health is widely documented. Some of us are just making heroic efforts not to be boring about it. Given any encouragement, quite a few baby-boomers for whom it's still "news" that we're not bursting with crazy teenage energy any more will discuss ailments all day long.)
I merely maintain that there was no valid reason for any businesses to shut down altogether, or anyone to lose their job, last year and there's even less of one now. We've all at least had a chance to learn something from the coronavirus. We all should know, about places like McDonald's: If you're not ill and haven't been ill, consider yourself an immune carrier--if not of coronavirus, of a couple dozen things that are probably more dangerous to the fragile. Go ahead and sit at the same table with people you know to be immune carriers of the same kinds of virus, bacteria, and fungi. Do not go into the restroom, even though it still has two toilets, while anyone you don't know well is in there. (Stop, look, listen.) Do not sit down at a table adjacent to one where people you don't know well are sitting. If the place gets crowded (which I've not seen happen, because by now people know the drill), that's what those picnic tables out on the grassy lawn are for.
Actually, for most of the day, a lot more people could come inside McDonald's without violating the official rules for social distance. We have learned the drill. More people could come inside the other restaurants, too. It's no longer true, as it once was, that any of our local restaurants is likely to get crowded enough that writers who come in mostly to use the Internet would feel ethically obligated to go out for a walk and make sure all of the eat-and-run crowd could find tables at a good healthy distance from one another. However, many people still prefer to take food out of restaurants, to their cars or to their jobs, and that's fine with the restaurant owners and nice for those of us who can only reliably connect to the Internet from a public place in town.
One way or another, everybody (except those who are seriously allergic to sugar-free sweet stuff, or caffeine, or maybe vanilla) should have a chance to try French Vanilla Iced Coffee for themselves.
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