Day 3935

Every day there seems to be a new reason to take the virus seriously. I've pretty much decided that I'm not going to travel anywhere until this whole thing blows over. Unfortunately, that may be a long time. If the president and NFL football players can get sick while being closely monitored inside their special protective bubbles, what's going to protect me? I still think the best thing I've got going for me is that I have very little desire to interact with other people. They say now that the most common way the virus is transmitted is thru family gatherings. Weddings, funerals, birthday parties, and backyard barbecues are much more dangerous than a trip to the grocery store. This makes sense to me. People tend to be comfortable around their own friends and family and let their guard down. I see huge family picnics almost every day in the park.

Semi isolation does get boring though. Eating and taking long walks have their limits. Today I decided to get productive and mowed the grass in both the front and back yards. I also unclogged the shower drain, which I wasn't planning to do. If the shower backs up while you are taking a shower, you've got no choice though.

Dawn still doesn't feel like taking long walks. She's eager to go outside in the mornings, but tires a lot more easily than she used to. We're not sure if her lack of energy is related to the meds she's currently taking or the underlying condition that caused the high fever and apparent seizure. At least the fever is gone and she's eating normally again. All we can do right now is continue to monitor Dawn carefully and wait.

I watched another Space X launch get scrubbed tonight with two seconds remaining on the clock. This is really weird. Every launch attempt at Kennedy Space Center in recent weeks has been canceled or scrubbed. The Cygnus resupply mission did successfully launch from Wallops Island this evening, but that mission has been delayed recently as well. Maybe this is just the 2020 curse. It does seem like a lot of failures in a row though.

The Moon and Mars look spectacular tonight. I went outside a few minutes ago to look at the conjunction and immediately smelled smoke. Whenever the temperature drops below seventy degrees in Texas, people start lighting fires in their fireplaces. Just about everybody has a fireplace in our neighborhood, so sometimes the smell of smoke gets oppressive. This probably sounds like needless whining to people out West who are dealing with real wildfires, but I still don't understand the fascination with fireplaces. We've never had a fireplace. I don't miss them at all.

When I was taking my solo walk this afternoon I saw several coyotes peeking out of the bushes near one of the trails. It looked like they were just waiting for a little dog to come by. There were lots of little dogs being walked this afternoon. I thought about warning them, but somebody honked their car horn and scared the coyotes away. It's rare to see coyotes in the middle of the day. I see them occasionally around sunrise, but this siting was kind of strange.

It's time to make my grocery list again. Janet did her shopping today and said that a lot of items are still in short supply. It does seem like the whole supply chain is kind of broken now. Really common items have just disappeared from the shelves. What a weird year it's been. You really have to wonder what is going to happen next.

Bailey is today's Dalmatian of the Day

Watch of the Day

Day 3684

Whenever something bad happens these days it almost always reminds me of a movie I've already seen. Reality and fiction have become hopelessly blurred together in ways I never would have thought possible a decade ago. When I first started hearing about the coronavirus scare it seemed so much like the movie Contagion that it would be impossible for me to tell which story was real if I didn't already know that Contagion was a movie. In many ways the idea that there is a city in China that is larger than New York City where people routinely eat bat soup and snakes on a stick seems more like fantasy than any movie I've seen. I guess I'm not as well informed as I thought I was. Until a few weeks ago, I didn't even know that the city of Wuhan existed. Sure, I knew about Beijing, Shanghai, and Hong Kong, but Wuhan? Never heard of it.

A pandemic like ebola, bird flu or the coronavirus has to make you wonder about globalism. When anything becomes too big to fail, what happens when it inevitably does fail? When engineers want a failsafe system, they build in a lot of redundancy. When a single system fails, the machine continues to run. We ought to think of the world this way. A lot of independent, self-sufficient economies is a lot safer than a single global economy. We were a lot more resilient as a country when every city had a factory and we were able to make everything we needed ourselves. I think a world where it is not so easy to travel from one country to another is better as well. What is so bad about applying for a visa and planning ahead? The reason we all know about Wuhan today is that it is super easy to just hop on a plane and be anywhere else in the world in a matter of hours.

A guess you can't have it both ways. I'd like to see flying cars and cities on Mars, but I'm still more comfortable in the simpleminded black and white worlds of Have Gun Will Travel and Perry Mason. Old TV westerns make more sense to me than today's news.

Our world may be falling apart, but I find that my own little world usually gets better as soon as I turn off the TV. There is something to be said for concentrating on your immediate surroundings. There is usually plenty there to keep you busy. I ran my usual Saturday errands in the morning and took my walk in the afternoon. Not a lot happened today, but that was fine. An uneventful afternoon is much better than a roof leak.

As my trip to the Davis Mountains draws closer, I'm starting to realize that my knowledge of astronomy is woefully inadequate for conducting star parties at the observatory. I'm reading a lot online these days and spending time looking at star charts. This is no substitute for actually going outside at night, but we haven't had many clear nights lately. The more I read about contemporary astronomy, the more I remember why I chose advertising as a profession. A clear, dark night fills me with wonder, but I don't think I'd have the patience to spend years studying the rotation of galaxies or exploring stellar mass and luminosity.

I hope tomorrow is uneventful as well. A good breakfast and a trip to the gym are all that is on the agenda. That's enough for me.

Bones is today's Dalmatian of the Day

Watch of the Day