So, uh, I forgot to blog.  For days.  I got distracted.  I had a really good reason for getting distracted.

But I’m doing it right now!

I’ve been binging the news a little less than normal because a) everything has fallen into a sort of horrible stasis and b) it’s getting repetitive. Summed up it’s:

  • Trump is pulling this horrible election-time stunt by sending DHS alphabet soup into Portland to provoke violence and they’re (quite) successfully provoking violence in a giant show of anti-Constitutional authoritarianism.  He somehow believes that if everyone will get good and scared, they’ll all vote for the Great White Savoir.  It’s not working.  From all the polls, it is simply not working. All us here in Baltimore are worried he’s going to send troops here, even though Baltimore has been quieter than usual.
  • The Federal Government continues to refuse to do its job in the pandemic in any way, shape or form.
  • The Republicans are horrible and love the idea of kicking off a Great Depression under Trump because somehow they think crashing the economy into the ground is a sound electoral strategy and…
  • People are dying in droves from COVID-19 and people won’t wear masks because they’re idiots.

There’s this constant drumbeat of stupid coming out of the White House and the GOP where they have the economy and the pandemic in two different buckets when they are, in fact, the same exact thing.  And since they have decided to disbelieve in the pandemic — until they themselves get the bug – they won’t invest in testing, and people will die, and people will get scared, and people will not leave their homes, and the economy will die.  I mean, this isn’t hard.  This is like Freshmen-level econ stuff.  There’s no fancy calculus involved.

Wash.

Rinse.

Repeat.

Maybe Trump can entertain the country with more bragging about his dementia test.

I’ve been up to pretty much nothing other than watching Star Trek: Discovery, knitting a sock, reading my way through Venice’s Secret Spies (incredibly academic and insanely entertaining), baking, and gaming too much.  I beat Rune Factory 4 and now I need a new game where I fiddle to the conclusion.  The more intellectual things I was working toward — trying to master Rust, more machine learning, Russian — all seem to be on hold with my brain tapioca and gaming filling in all my “time to read” time.

Granted, I had a bunch of hours yesterday to read but instead, I baked two sets of cookies and now the house has enough carbs to last a lifetime.  (That said, the lemon poppy-seed cookies I baked from the Better Homes and Gardens Cookie Classics book are amazeballs.  Amazeballs!)

On the exercise front, we’re spending more time with the bikes.  We need lighter bikes — our bikes are old heavy ones.  We’re also spending more time greeting our neighbors!  That’s been the one cool thing about the pandemic — we’ve seen tons of our neighbors.

So anyway.  There’s not tons to blog about.  I feel like we’re all trapped in a really horrible Trump-induced flat circle.

I read yesterday that the worst year ever in history was not 2020, but 1562.  It was the year both Diego de Landa burned all the books of the Maya, and John Hawkins initiated the Triangle Trade.  I’ll buy it.

Stats:

  • 50,635,683 tests completed.
  • 4,186,193 cases found.
  • 148,638 dead
  • 83,617 cases in MD with 3,535 dead
  • 1 out of 97 people in Howard County have it or had it

We don’t know how many cases are actually out there because the testing sites are overrun and its taking up to 12 days to get results back from a test.  So figure another 500K positives running around at least.

Although people have said the number of infected is likely closed to 40M than 4M…