scientists – Sillyfrog's Blog

Today’s word is “dogged.”

Karen had a big heart and heightened sense of safety having a history of working as a paramedic but her persistence on everyone in her family getting the vaccine became a problem.
Uncle Harry just said, “No way! I’m not putting that experimental crap in my body.”.
Karen thought, what did Uncle Harry know? He drank too much and had dropped out of high school. He had no medical training!
But he wasn’t the only one who refused.
Her little sister, who had had a bad bout with Covid-19 was also refusing. She had also vowed not to vaccinate her kids.
How could her family be SO blind?! They were “anti-vaxxers”! The new second class, reckless, deplorable citizens.
Karen’s sister had voted for Biden. She had to have some good sense. And, she had a college degree too. Karen was livid! Her family wasn’t reflecting well on her, and her inner circle of friends were raising their eyebrows.
Karen’s dogged evangelizing was driving a wedge between family members but, she knew best!
Soon, all she did was send them CNN articles and NPR statements of FACT.
It was ‘fact’ in her circles, anyway. She had no time for alternative views. Gosh! She was the trained paramedic, and this was an emergency.
Then, cases of the vaccinated (and boosted) started intermittently rolling through the emergency room. More adverse reactions, to the vaccine, started ‘leaking out’ and showing up. When she looked further, she realized that the scientific data available was sporadic and incomplete.
Karen suddenly reexamined her position.
Her family had, thankfully, not lost anyone. They had all (at least initially) been frightened. Covid-19 had been a tragic, and evil, imposition on them all by a foreign country, not each other. The vaccines were a calculated personal risk, just like the virus. There was a non-transparent authoritarian attitude among the most visible scientists, for some reason. And the measures taken to combat the virus had been extreme while the interest in finding treatments was almost non-existent.
Happily, her family held no grudge when she relaxed her judgement of them … because they knew Karen, after all, had a big heart and a heightened sense of safety.

https://fivedotoh.com/2022/01/23/fowc-with-fandango-dogged/

Random words generated by randomwordgenerator.net

wordplay…scrubland…kinswoman…pill…irratatingly

Here’s my story:

It’s a common occurrence in families. Doctors come from a long line of doctors…teachers seem to be generated within blood lines too. So when Jillian decided to become a water witch she suspected that she was the “fly in the ointment” of her scientific family.

Jillian spent her Thanksgiving reunion in a silent fuddle. Her Dad, the physicist, tipped his head toward her with a raised eyebrow and asked, “So how are those studies going?” He emphasized studies in a way that she was familiar. He could irritatingly infer that she was a kook even when his interest seemed genuine. No one else had been informed of her career choice so the introduction of the subject stung a bit.

She’d spent 6 months in a desert scrubland with no positive results and was beginning to question her skills and whether or not she just might fit the kook label after all. Failure was a hard pill to swallow in her family, especially hard for a deviant from science like herself. She had a dozen successes under her belt. That certainly wasn’t a shabby record. Jillian had stepped in when “scientists” had failed more than once.

Dowsers use divining rods attempting to find water. The practice was ancient and had saved many a farm from dust and despair. Not knowing every reason for a practice certainly cannot preclude it from being scientific. Jillian stiffened her posture.

Dad continued to poke fun, “Jillian, dear, it would be divine if you’d pass the gravy.”

With that, Jillian decided to “come out of her mystic closet”. Dad’s wordplay was getting to her, big time. Suddenly her shame was from hiding her beloved profession.

“So, has everyone heard about my studies? I’m a water witch. A darn good one too!”

Heads lifted. Aunt Barbara condescendingly snickered into her napkin while cousin Frank, the legally blind entomologist, squinted at her through “coke-bottle” glasses. Jillian had always wondered why he didn’t study BIG creatures. What a joke!

Great-grandmother was the only accepting face at the table. She was also the only one who spoke.

“It appears you have a tough crowd to please, Jilly. I’ll bet they don’t know about a fine kinswoman who made her life as a dowser. My great-grandmother worked for Abraham Lincoln himself don’t ya know. She’d be so very proud.”

Every face fell.

Jillian felt redeemed and raised an eyebrow directly at her father.

“Hey Dad, want some humble pie with that gravy?”