Muh muh muh my Flurona

It’s amazing to me how much our collective vocabulary has expanded in the last couple of infectious years. Suddenly we’re tossing around words like “viral load” and “antigen” and “herd immunity.”

And, as Rich Siegel would be the first to tell you, while all of those would make awesome band names, we probably could’ve done without them and just gone on with our average eighth-grade vocabularies the rest of our lives.

But, as I wrote about here, in the not so illustrious advertising tradition of combining two words to make an astonishingly bad third one nobody would ever use even if they had a gun to their head, it seems medical science has jumped on the bandwagon.

We now have a name for the virus you have when you have the bad luck to come down with the seasonal flu and covid-19 at the same time: Flurona.

Two mints in one.

I suppose it’s a catchy (no pun intended) way of identifying what’s ailing ya. It’s also a way to broadcast your monumental bad luck to the world.

And while the odds of contracting both respiratory illnesses simultaneously are small, the risk of hospitalization is considerably greater. Fortunately, you can now get a flurona vaccine, which is exactly what it sounds like. Two vaccines in one shot.

So if you haven’t had your flu shot, and you’re due for a covid booster, just sidle up to the CVS pharmacist/bartender and order yourself a Flurona straight up.

Be careful not to ask for a Shingmonia, Hepatolio or Measbies. Those shots aren’t ready yet.

byePhoto

Space. It really is the final frontier, especially when it comes to my computer's hard drive.

I'll be the first to admit it: I've had "drive envy" almost since I bought my laptop. That's because my 17" MacBook Pro, which I bought in February of 2009, came with a 320GB hard drive. Which I thought was plenty of space at the time, right up until Apple did what Apple always does. Three weeks later, they introduced a 500GB drive for my model laptop.

Thank you Apple, may I have another?

Fast forward to August 2012, and come to find out I only have 5GB of available space left. Not enough to load new or update old applications.

So I only have two choices: make more space, or replace the drive for one with more space. I decided to start with the first one.

Since I shoot mostly high-res pictures, I started my clean up in iPhoto. What I found was the curse of the digital age - that because I can just keep shooting and shooting, I had many, many duplicates of the same photo.

You no longer have to wait for the perfect moment. You just have to keep shooting then see if you can find it.

At any rate, I started deleting tons of duplicates I'd taken. Not to mention the bazillions of shots my kids had taken with my camera at ten frames per second.

I'm not nearly done taking out the trash on over 17,000 photos, but so far I've picked up almost 5GB in space.

I'm going to have to upgrade to a 750GB drive soon (it's the biggest the specs on my laptop will allow for), but until then it's nice to know there's actually an easy and somewhat productive way to gain a little more space.

Of course, the laptop we just bought my son for his birthday has a 1TB drive.

Thanks Apple.