News and Updates

1. I have to admit that while I don’t want the coronavirus epidemic to get worse – the human cost of that would be prohibitive – the thought of being quarantined for a week or two in my house does hold a certain appeal to me right now.  I could use a bit of down time.

2. I’ve been keeping an eye on the primaries as they slowly work their way toward a place where I can vote, and I have to say I’m slightly taken aback by the fact that here in 2020 we’ve somehow ended up with a presidential contest between three white men in their 70s.  Speaking as a single-issue voter (“Get that corrupt Fascist out of the White House and have his minions, cronies, lackeys, and enablers removed from civilized society”) I will vote for whomever opposes der Sturmtrumper in the general election, but still.  You’d think we would recognize the talents of, well, the majority of the population by now.

3. Speaking of the primaries, watching the vitriolic trolling by the Bernie Bros on social media this week in the wake of his serious losses has been a disheartening experience.  Have those shortsighted fools learned nothing from 2016?  Folks, if your attitude is “My candidate or fuck you” then you are part of the problem.

4. Please note that I am distinguishing between Bernie supporters – people who like his ideas and want him to be president – and Bernie Bros, who would rather see the country burn to ashes than accept that someone else might be the Democratic nominee.  The former group counts many of my friends among them, and while he wasn’t my first choice I can’t say I’d be unhappy if Bernie won in November myself.  The latter group needs to grow up.

5. Having the equivalent of a job and a half is a great way to discover just how much free time you don’t have.  Sigh.  Spring Break is a’comin’ in, though, assuming we’re not all quarantined by then (vide supra).

6. Ollie is now home for his spring break, which is nice – I’m always happy when my kids are home.  I picked him up on Wednesday and we stopped on the way back at a burger place I’d never been to before, because he said they had “superior fries.”  And they did.  They also had not only “fry sauce,” which I’d never seen outside of Utah, but also (be still my beating heart) jalapeno fry sauce.  I can see myself visiting this establishment again sometime in the very near future, really.

7. While we were winding our way up to this place (why do the GPS systems insist on taking you on the most circuitous route possible if it is thirty feet shorter than the more straightforward route?  I swear at one point I was driving through someone’s living room) we saw a Tulsi Gabbard sign on somebody’s lawn.  Did you know she was still running?  I admit it was news to me.

8. We’re experimenting with cutting the cable cord this month.  Kim mostly watches things on Netflix or Roku and I don’t really watch anything at all other than soccer or hockey so it’s long past time we stopped paying that particular bill.  Kim is an optimizer, however, and we are experimenting with replacing cable with an array of alien technology that might as well be an atomic death cannon for all I can make of it, though I did get it to show me a soccer game last weekend.  That smoking crater where Troy, NY used to be is surely a coincidence. 

9. One of the joys of genealogical research is finding new people you are related to.  I recently made contact with a distant cousin on my grandmother’s side, and it has been fun trading stories and photographs of people we have in common but didn’t know much about.  We have filled in a number of each other’s gaps in family lore and information.

10. It’s been fairly spring-like here in Baja Canada this week, with temperatures in the 40s and 50s Fahrenheit (5-15 Celsius), except for about an hour and a half on Wednesday morning when we had a white-out blizzard.  Hard to know what to think, really.