2020 JOURNAL JAN 1st: We celebrated in our now-traditional fashion last night: a decent champagne accompanied by a small bowl of blackeyed peas for luck; the annual firing up of our dust magnet TV so we can watch "Dinner for One" together via ChromeCast; a St. John's, Newfoundland clock displayed on said TV so we can celebrate New Years 2.5 hours early (hey, we're old). New Years is one of the few social rituals we celebrate anymore but several decades in the bar business does tend to leave an imprint... JAN 7th: In reference to the previous post: "Dinner for One, also known as The 90th Birthday (German: Der 90. Geburtstag), is a two-hander comedy sketch written by British author Lauri Wylie for the theatre. The German TV station Norddeutscher Rundfunk (NDR) recorded it in 1963, in the original English, with a short introduction in German. It is an 18-minute black-and-white videotape recording, performed by British comedians Freddie Frinton and May Warden. It has become a tradition to watch it on New Year's Eve in Germany, and is the most frequently repeated television programme ever." -- via Wikipedia JAN 16th: Just as some people are color blind, I'm social blind. One of those spectrum things that tend to be awkward. A well-honed sense of self-depricating humor can be most useful in this regard. Glosses over many a faux pas. Worthless however with someone who is humorless... FEB 4th: I am now of the opinion that the optimal condition in life is lying in bed, covers over your head and drifting between dreams and wakefulness. All other possibilities are, to some degree, inferior. It's a good thing I never lived close to an opium den... FEB 6th: Ok, I'm a father-in-law now. Still haven't read the manual but will do my best. Just wing it I suppose, like always... FEB 15th: I've been deep in all things gopher for the past week, much to the neglect of other things including this journal. Finding real joy in using the simplest of tools to produce the results I want. For instance, I have always detested to-do lists but have discovered a "done list" is much more to my liking and definitely more informative. Just a simple running text file of things I have actually finished with forever... FEB 21st: Had my clerk training on the 19th for the upcoming Super Tuesday primaries. I was hand-picked as a volunteer by my wife, the precinct judge. The hardware was interesting, the software unremarkable and the legal entanglements daunting. Also scheduled a flu shot at the prospect of being in a small enclosed space packed with masses of people and having to handle documents and id's all day. Essentially like being lowered into a seething vat of Typhoid Marys. Oh joy... FEB 23rd: In reference to the previous post, there are several simple measures that significanly reduce the possibilty of transmission. For aerosol, cover your mouth when you sneeze or cough and wash your hands afterwards. Ask others to do the same if necessary. Do not touch your face, especially eyes, nose or mouth, without washing first. This also applies to anything your hands or other hands have touched as well. Hands are the primary source of transmission and washing is your primary defense. Anti-baterial soaps have no effect on viruses other than to aid flushing them from your hands like other soaps. These practices should remain valid if the COVID-19 stuff goes pandemic, which it probably will... FEB 29th: Leap Day! Hopefully not into the void... MAR 4th: Worked Super Tuesday yesterday for the Democratic Party. Up at 4:30 AM and on site by 6:00 AM. Polls opened at 7:00 AM and closed at 7:00 PM. After tearing everything down and hauling all the important bits back to Georgetown (a 60 mile (100 km) round trip) we finally got back home slightly before 10:00 PM. Most of my time on site was spent explaining how the voting machines worked or helping voters deposit their ballots in an electronic ballot box. Essentially 12 hours constantly on the move, talking, helping and explaining with very few breaks. We and the Republicans ran well over 1000 people through the site in 12 hours and in some fashion I interacted with almost all of them. Essentially a Bataan Death March for an old guy like me. I had things hurting that I didn't even know could hurt. Never again... MAR 18th: COVID-19 seems to be really picking up steam in the US. It got everyone's attention when the stock market went down the tubes almost overnight. Frantic efforts afoot to shore up the economy with essentially band-aids that won't last even into the summer. Someone hit upon the brilliant idea of getting Trump to actually do something by convincing him that firing up the 1950's Defense Production Act would magically convert him into a "Wartime President". Donnie likes that sort of thing... MAR 31st: Settling into seclusion. No great change for me but a bit harder on Karen. Beginning to see every human and surfaces they may have touched or sprayed with their aerosol as a potential disease vector. Difficult since I've never been much of a paranoid. Pretty sure this is going to be a slow motion train wreck with lots of screams, handflapping, loud noises and casualties littered about for the next few months. And all you can do is watch in horror and try not to get any on you... APR 12th: Ah, Easter Sunday celebrated with nothing, as usual. The increased mass of humans at home fending and cooking for themselves has put a real strain on the supply chain. That, combined with the frantic hoarders, has made our usual grocery shopping online with Walmart a real adventure. To their credit, Wally has become much more current and accurate about those things in or out of stock. And this has driven us into previously unexplored venues. For instance, this evening we had a microwave packet of Coconut Jasmine Rice (Thai Hom Mali) from the Super Lucky Elephant brand in Thailand. Not nearly as garish as it sounds. Subtle and quite nice. It was a pleasant discovery. Thanks COVID-19... APR 18th: And now the whole thing is back on the web (again). Gopher is simple, perhaps too simple, and I'm not the least bit nostalgic over the dialup BBS look and feel. Once was enough for that. I have also put aside the pretense of creating a website for others. This one is for me but others are invited to poke around if they wish. And I really enjoy being able to invoke a single command to build the entire site in a second. Yep, I'm lazy... APR 23rd: Having done with gopher, I moved all my activity to the meta-arpa array on sdf.org where my website resides. Spent the morning updating all the instances here and on the web with the new email of every@ma.sdf.org. The old every@sdf.org is simply being redirected with a .forward file. And anything sent to either address pops up on my gmail as well... APR 27th: Well, almost done with gopher. Figured out a relatively painless method for using my gophersite as a mirror. All editing and changes are done on the website files and directories with only certain items transferred to gopher. Basically this is taking my periodically zipped backup stored on Google Drive and moving a copy to gopher and then doing a selective extraction. An extra minute or three at the most... MAY 9th: Yet another birthday so I've been at this journal for exactly one year. Much has changed in that year and practically none of it foreseen or particularly desirable (with a few notable exceptions). And the immediate future isn't looking terribly inviting either (again, with exceptions). But to quote the Immortal Fats Waller, "One never knows, do one?" And now time to scurry back into the hidey-hole... JUN 30th: I see I've been remiss and neglectful of this journal. Did some extensive reworking of my website, none of which was compatible with gopher, so back to the single platform again. Life has been a repetitive exercise around here, externally at least, but we both continue to pursue our interests and discover new things. The internet (not just the web) is a marvelous toy. Also a fairly safe vantage point to witness the disaster movie apparently being filmed around us. Much shaking of heads and muted sounds of exasperation in the household when one of us warily cracks open the news. I sense some sort of horrific crescendo in the offing, possibly with a rapid denouement... JUL 11th: There was never much doubt that Trump would eventually lose control and drive off into the tall grass. The only questions were how soon, how fast and would he make it all the way to the cliff. This might be a cause for some schadenfreude if we all weren't sitting in the back seat... JUL 25th: What a surprise. This website is mentioned and linked from: https://sjmulder.nl/en/textonly.html AUG 1st: Rather an unusual anniversary. We had our traditional Chinese but within the secluded bowels of our bunker. We gave a generous tip for the delivery. It was to be our 40th, the ruby, but neither of us was inclined to venture forth into the plague for jewelry. So we decided to follow Ringo's lead on delaying his 80th birthday until it could be properly celebrated in style. The champagne is still in the fridge... AUG 14th: A rather startling number: According to an NPR poll, a full 35% of my fellow citizens will refuse to be vaccinated even if there is a safe and efficacious one available for COVID-19. It's not every day that you get to watch natural selection in real time... AUG 16th: We ordered nectarines but got 3 pounds of mandarin oranges from Peru. Small, oblate, heavy and a brilliant orange. Peeled and seperated easily with a flick of the thumb. Seedless, laden with juice (hence the heaviness), sweet and sharp. A nice mistake... SEP 24th: Been wrapped up in Mastodon recently. An open-sourced, federated, geek-laden version of Twitter, but with way fewer twits. Yet another rabbit hole to explore. And every day is Groundhog Day while waiting for November 3rd to arrive. Ballots will start mailing the first week of October. Oh, and we just passed 200K dead. Gee, what a great year... OCT 8th: Did my civic duty for the next two years. Dropped my ballot in the mail. Now we get to wait. And abandoned Mastodon. While better than Twitter, that's an extremely low bar. Also actually enjoyed the VP debate last night because I didn't have to watch or hear it. Instead, I followed a thread on MetaFilter tracking the debate in realtime. It reached almost 300 posts. Far more informative and entertaining. Also far less infuriating... NOV 1st: Dutifully observed "fall back". Waiting dutifully for the Nov 3 electoral results. High hopes. High fears. Fully expect a Dem victory will result in a nightmarish 2.5 months to inauguration. Scorched earth. Destroy everything. Make them pay. One does not reject a malignant narcissist lightly. Just my current happy thoughts... NOV 7th: "The End of an Error" -- New York Magazine NOV 28th: One thing that seems to be slowly dawning on Trump is that just because he can say anything he wants, this does not transform into an ability to conjure anything he wants. And yet life and death go on in spite of his best (worst) efforts. Especially death it would seem, at least for the near term. A mere 54 days and counting 'til the inauguration. Still much mischief and damage to be done in the interim... DEC 12th: I'm rather looking forward to being bored for the next four years. Unremarkable displays of competence. The yawn-inducing functioning of a 'by the book' administrative organization. The dull business of sensible policies and reasonable proposals. Reporters nodding off during pressers. No longer cringing at the thought of checking the news. Not having to check the news in any case. Droning monotones explaining in far too much detail and precision things of little general interest. Sheer bliss... DEC 31st: Man, am I ever glad to put a final, demonstrative, stake-in-the-heart period on this smouldering turd of a year: . every@ma.sdf.org