I don't claim to know how Trump having Covid will play out politically, but it has done wonders for my general mood about the world. It's still a dumpsterfire, but at least the major news story isn't something that I have to compartmentalize lest I descend into despair.
So my two good friends who got COVID have gotten out of quarantine. Apparently one of them went to throw out the garbage and wasn't wearing a mask, he ran into the landlord who was outside and they chatted for a few minutes. A couple of days later the landlord was hospitalized. A few days after that my friend's got sick. His mother also got it and is recovered but still doesn't have her sense of smell back.
The past two weeks have sucked personally for reasons that have nothing to do with the pandemic, but they seem to be getting better. Agreed with 1, the news has been entertaining. "Hilarious" would be callow, and "good" would be overly optimistic, but "entertaining" seems perfectly accurate.
We're safely back from Scotland. The place we were planning on staying on the drive down ended up being on local lockdown, so we white-knuckled it and drove all the way from Skye to London is one day. I do not recommend doing this. It may have been a better idea than we thought going into it: it turns out in most areas the reported numbers were a severe undercount, because the UK government was using an Excel spreadsheet to store covid data and they ran out of rows or something. Northwest England is in bad shape.
The news never fails to be interesting these days. Captivating, even.
I have totally fallen out of my exercise routine, and am stunned at how quickly I have gone from terrific shape (for me) to really bad shape (again, for me). Two months of relative inactivity, and I'm looking like Donald Trump from back when he could breath.
Turns out that scheduling a colonoscopy for 7 am -- you'll be home by 10! -- means you have to be drinking the second half of the prep liquid, and then finishing emptying the system, from 1 to 4 am.
New covid report: 504 new cases on 2,700 tests. Yikes! Apparently, new cases are heavily concentrated among people under 30.
We had almost 200 new cases yesterday, a record, and things are looking discouraging in general.
Locally, we've finally out of "widespread" and into "substantial", but who knows how long it'll last. After two weeks in substantial, schools can open in person, and there are districts in the county that plan on doing so. So I suspect that sometime between Halloween and Thanksgiving we'll be back to "widespread" and the extra closures that correspond.
my doctor was impressed that I didn't gain weight in the last six months. it's because I had no access to free office snacks. and I exercised more than usual to stay sane. and signed up for stand-up paddleboarding classes to force myself to get out of the house (though those will soon pause due to cold weather).
I did socialish things for the first time today. Ordered and picked up some books from an Indie store I like, dropped some of them off and mask-distanced-talked with some friends, got Boba. Talked about how I have absolutely no fucking clue how to be strategic in my job hunt given the times and my mess of a resume and aptitudes. Zero idea what I might want to do that's actually possibly.
Found out a friend died from cancer three weeks after diagnosis. Fuck cancer.
Has anyone heard from Natilo?
8,9, 10. Ugh. Uniromic thoughts and prayers.
11: I have lost weight! My partner does most of the shopping and he's a stickler. I eat a lot of pickled Lupini. (Brami). sometimes I crave doughnuts, but they aren't to be had.
5: did you go to your namesake region? I had hoped to do a UK trip this year.
The TV commercials in 2016 were more Trump than Clinton. The TV has been on in the other room all night and I've heard like 3 Biden ads and no Trump ones. I recall similar things in other nights.
If the polling is right, it looks like Trump's attempt to attack Biden by saying Biden is against fracking have hurt support for fracking and not Biden.
Maybe it will convince Biden to be against fracking.
My daughter's friend's dad has Covid: tests positive, is really sick. She spent the night at her friend's house last night, and now we know about the dad's illness.
We went her to the local mall to get a Covid check, and the Urgent Care center told her to download an app that makes you promise that you are over 18. She didn't feel comfortable doing that in these circumstances, so she came home. We called her doctor and the doctor said it doesn't matter, because the app would just say that if you don't have symptoms you can't get a test.
I said to Molly "If we lived in a civilized country, a public health person would have contacted us by now to explain what you should do." She said, "yup."
I'm still here. Serious gun battle a few blocks away tonight, but luckily no repeats of last week's excitement any nearer than that. I am trying to calm down and not be quite so paranoid, but it is difficult. I had a really excessively unpleasant nightmare a couple nights ago about post-apocalyptic cannibal cults that I surely do hope was not prophetic.
I should probably try to tune out more and read books, but here I am at half past midnight still on the net. Oh well.
Strength and solidarity to you, Natilo.
Thanks for checking in, Natilo. I was getting worried.
16. Strength to you all. If you manage to get a test make sure they don't lose it because Excel crashes.
On the upside, Steve Miller.
20.last: yes. Also on the upside, Stephen Miller.
5: I thought Skye was considered a non-central part of it, but it seems like that time period there isn't well documented (I guess no surprise, in general our knowledge of the Scottish Iron Age is a bit of a mess) and it might have even been Pictish, to my surprise. Anyway, we did drive back through Argyll and Bute, in particular taking the A82 around Loch Lomond. An awful road to drive in the rain, constant low speed hairpin turns and lots of traffic. I have sadly never been to the place whose Gaelic name is similar to yours; that's to be saved for a time when we can actually meet other people and imbibe publicly.
16: Ugh. Good luck.
Glad you're unscathed, even if you're shaken, Natilo.
Yes, best wishes Natilo and all of Minneapolis. There's so much news of disaster and I'm so close to burned out that I'm trying not to check things obsessively. I'm now missing big things.
I've replaced evening doomscrolling with replaying video games (Currently on _Breath of the Wild_). On the positive side, it's less stressful. On the negative side, it turns out that I'm even worse at stopping at a reasonable point and going to bed, so my sleep has been worse.
Have you tried walking 35 miles over two days in a place where there's usually not cell service?
best luck natilo. I have returned from the grave, which is to say, reading reddit. do you know how many funny, clever people there are on reddit? none, is how. I get to yell at sexist morons? it palls. but the animal crossing new horizons trade/inspo boards are really good. and those 800 or whatever hours I've put in this game? worth it even though I am sort of having a crisis about my museum layout right now, as well as a cottagecore area I may have paradoxically made too large.
I hate narnia, hate my apartment, particularly hate spending christmas here and am...miserable maybe? but have only myself to blame for never talking to anyone ever, known cause of misery. "oh, I'm depressed" I complain. "my psychologist is worried about me," I blither. sure, just text someone though bitch. are your hands broken from eating hot chips? on the plus side, my 50+ song youtube playlist based on r.o.a.r.'s 'comfort of a laugh track' is mostly r.o.a.r. but additionally fabulous songs I did not listen to until earlier today, such as crushed out on soda beach by the scary jokes. the "stay with me" part at the end gives me horripilation much like one of my favorites, duck or ape which gives me shiveries but cruelly for only two lines in a 1:38 song. 2:59 is canonical, 2:18 ok, but 1:38? god, fuck you, r.o.a.r. (I am always interested in whether people have this goose-flesh experience with music or not, as it seems an inborn trait, and so can't correlate with your ability to enjoy music, but part of me says, what do you do during the last verse of "and your bird can sing"? does nothing happen?) the scary jokes sound like an adventure time soundtrack, which is a good thing.
on the plus plus side, stephen miller! on the plus size side, the president, although who knows what's even happening anymore. I have taken dexamethasone while hospitalized for pneumonia, and it's like a normal steroid...on steroids. 80mg of good old prednisone will have me cleaning the grooves of the stove knobs with toothpicks topped with shreds of paper towel soaked in formula 409 at 2am; dexamethasone is like that but much more so, and the hospital won't let you clean anything, or even pace around, so you have to just freak all the way out for a while. it's probably just as well that no one has ever given me the nuclear launch codes, not because I would misuse them, but because it would indicate such a grave lapse in judgment on the part of whoever had done so. but if they had, then I would want to give them away while I lay in furious inaction pumped full of steroids.
Alameida!
I agree about the prednisone. When I took it (for really bad poison ivy), I really perked up.
It's kind of funny to imagine Trump for the first time in his life cleaning something.
I am about to teach face-to-face for the first time since March!
moby: deployed properly it could have helped you clear out the poison ivy, probably, were it infesting your yard as well as your arm. I'll say this about trump: I comprehend wanting to go around on a nice golf course more than I ever have gwb's endless days and hours in the texas heat clearing brush.
I think clearing brush is just homage to Reagan. Anyway, my yard is basically a patio and a couple of shrubs.
Back when this area was built, the property taxes were based on the land value only, so yards were a luxury.
34: The kids are really into Georgism these days.
Elderly people in the 80s were not, so the taxation rules changed.
If there wasn't continual induced crisis from above pushing out everything else, I'd start a protest to get it restored just so I could call it a Georgian chant (and save money).
Over 700 new cases statewide today. Previous record was about 500. More than 200 in this county, taking our active case count over 400.
And the dog has leaking diarrhea, and in the wee hours went all over the house looking for a place to get comfortable.
We have shag carpeting in most of the house.
Definitely a first world kind of thing, and I'll get her to the vet this afternoon.
I've been doing some election stuff like writing postcards and sticking labels on things at the county Dem Party office, plan to do some lit drops this weekend. It's helped a little with my mood, though I am still incredibly unmotivated in general. Still losing at depression med roulette and I can't get anything done unless it's a pressing commitment that I made to someone else.
Topically, I got a mega dose of prednisone a few weeks ago because I have adhesive capsilitis (a.k.a. frozen shoulder) from a fall in the spring. It did wonders for my shoulder but didn't have any effect on my mood or energy. I truly seem to be immune to stimulants. Maybe I should try cocaine, for science.
I didn't feel like it was a stimulant. I felt like I was ten years younger. No pain in joints or needing to hobble the first 200 steps.
I think it's that pain that stops me from hurting myself permanently, so it's necessary. But a few days break was nice.
It's super weird to teach synchronously over zoom and F2F! Very disorienting!
These happen to be Cal II students, and I had almost all of them in Cal I, and a lot of them in Precal last fall. So I could not have picked a happier, more easy-going group to try it out with. Thank god.
Sometimes I was projecting a worksheet onto the front screen for the in person class, and then zooming with the rest of the class. Then I would see myself in my own tiny zoom square, from a different angle, and it was very disorienting. I felt like I was in a dressing room with too many mirrors showing me all the angles of my body that I don't really want to be seeing.
The camera that they'd added to the room was a little add-on to the class computer, not mounted in the center of the room, and so it couldn't travel very far from where the computer was parked. I assumed I'd just use a very small part of the board. But then students explained that what their other teachers do is just set up a laptop and zoom in from different angles, which was an obvious thing to try, except I didn't have my laptop with me. So a student used theirs, and it worked well.
Every time I went to ask the zoom-group a question, I couldn't resist cooing at them in a baby voice for being so tiny and little. I thought I was very funny.
Also the audio - the first time I projected onto the main screen, it switched the audio from the teacher-computer to the classroom speakers, and a zoom-student asked a question and I could not figure out for the life of me who was talking. The students had to explain what happened. Plus, all the different devices and ways to create feedback.
All in all, it was a hilarious class and I think everyone had a great time and learned almost nothing. But holy moly, so exhausting. I feel like I need twelve naps now.
41.2:. No expert, but I don't think topical steroids typically affect mood or energy.
45:. That sounds great! Comedy is so much better than calculus.
It was great! Wanna buy a toothbrush?
That was an inside joke with myself. When I was a kid, this was my all-time favorite joke:
A man walks down the road and sees a salesman trying to sell toothbrushes on the side of the road. The man comes up and says, "How's business?"
The salesman says, "Terrible!"
The customer says, "You need a gimmick."
The salesman says, "What's a gimmick?"
The customer says, "A gimmick is something you do to make people want to buy a toothbrush."
The next day, the customer comes back. The salesman has placed out a bowl of chips and some dip. The customer asks him how business is going.
"It's been great!" the salesman says, "I have a gimmick! Would you like to try some chips and dip?"
"Sure," says the customer. He takes one and eats it and immediately spits it out, and says "This stuff tastes like shit!"
The salesman says, "It is shit! Wanna buy a toothbrush?"
||
Something new to stress about: among other obvious things, suggests to me that various figures in the government recall the significance of the Comey announcement four years ago. This is really, really not at all over yet.
|>
I stayed mostly offline for 72 hours and it was AMAZING. Don't click that link! Close the browser!
Is the chips shit or the dip shit?
50: Want me to explain it to you? It's subtle.
I don't even eat guacamole that went brown if I made it myself from scratch.
51: Meh. I'm not impressed. We already knew the feds would be screwing around, but some of these folks are actual professionals, and others will be afraid of getting caught, particularly since it looks like they'd have to move a lot of votes to succeed. Even among the evil fucks, there are a lot of essentially sane careerists.
Silver has Trump's odds down to 1-in-6. Still way too high, but at least somewhat reassuring.
Amadea's dad had a possible exposure over the weekend and has had some mild, non-specific symptoms (cough but no fever), so he got tested yesterday and should get results within a few days. We're quarantining at home until we hear more. Our own risk is probably pretty low, but best to be cautious given the extent of community spread lately.
I just saw my first cat butthole on Zoom.
It was in gallery view, so not a close up.
58: Congratulations! There's nothing like your first time!
Josh Marshall's site has dubbed tonight's barrier between Harris and the vice president the "Pence Fence."
Hey, anyone want to revisit October 7, 2016? No?
49: Heebie I just belly laughed. 45: the coo-ing thing also made me belly laugh. That does sound super disorienting. And like you need 12 naps. Or maybe some dexamethasone.
41: Sir Kraab eek, I'm glad it worked. That shit sucks. Stay/get better!
26: Alameida!! I have been thinking of you. I'm sorry you're depressed 31 also made me belly laugh.
18: Natilo! I'm really glad you're okay. Sending good vibes.
Agh, Charley. Take care.
We have in our first world problems reached the stage of threatening to sue the firm which told us that the flooring in the front of the house was "serviceable" when it turn out there is so much rot and woodworm that all the floorboards are up and the joists beneath them must be entirely replaced. I have been walking through the prospective sitting room on earth that has not been open to the air since about 1750. The whole lot will have to be changed and rebuilt. The builder is inexhaustibly cheerful and has just bought himself a Peloton.
It's good to hear from Alameida, though.
Also, can anyone explain the point of a bluetooth-controlled cock-blocker? I can see why a suspicious partner might want something controlled by wifi, globally; but if it's close enough for bluetooth to work, why not unlock it manually?
In any case, it turns out that this model could in fact be controlled remotely, with potentially disastrous effects. Why are there so many users in Xinjiang?
In work e-mail, I just jokingly proposed a White House death pool, and everybody took me seriously.
67. Is President Pence telling us something we weren't meant to know?
If Trump is really asymptomatic, he must have had it since the weekend before last. Or he never had it. Or the doctors are lying. You guess.
I am now up to 100 postcards sent to Alaska and 40 letters written to send to Colorado in ten days, more letters to come.
Both postcarding and phonebanking feel pretty ineffectual -- out of the ten million calls I've made in the past couple of months, I've spoken to about two real people, and I'm sure 99.99% of my painstakingly handwritten postcards will go immediately into the trash. But postcarding doesn't make me want to kill myself, so of the two it's definitely the better outreach option.
OTOH, M bullied his extended family in Arizona to register to vote and sent them a voter guide for all the downballot races, and it took him like fifteen minutes. So if I really want to make a difference, I should remarry to someone from Wisconsin or Florida.
By the way, Minivet, thank you for the California propositions recommendations on your blog. Very helpful.
71: Yeah, it's so hard to tell which things will make a difference but there's research that personalized GOTV messages help turnout, so I figure it's worth it. I know someone who's been phonebanking older Dem voters in PA and she said she's actually been having good conversations just helping people figure out how to handle their mail ballots. I need to get in on something like that.
M/tch and I have decided that we're going to work the polls on Election Day. Our county clerk is doing a good job with safety precautions, so we feel okay about it. Plus it'll give me something to do other than obsessively check the news all day.
I feel like postcards and letters are sort of an "expensive signal" - the handwriting makes people at least look twice compared to some printed flyer, and then they see that someone cared enough to put in the effort for longhand, even if they don't ultimately care about that person directly.
But I can't get into the head of an infrequent voter, so I do what SwingLeft tells me.
I'm going to hang literature on doors.
Interesting GOTV fact I just overheard on a campaign call: Data shows that emphasizing low turnout and the increased power of an individual vote actually makes people less likely to vote because it feels like less of a social norm. It's more effective to emphasize high turnout and make people feel like there's social pressure to vote.
Woke up yesterday to the news that a colleague once removed won the Nobel Prize, and Stephen Miller has covid, so I'm feeling pretty good this week. But good God could we please get this election behind us?
Is the Biden campaign still lagging with Latino voters? I'm not sure how well I'm doing playing the "in a month, what will I most wish I had done right now?" game.
78 cont'd: In 2016 the answer was "go to Wisconsin, help register voters, help the Feingold campaign." In 2020 there's no Feingold campaign, the whole country seems focused on Wisconsin and are presumably neglecting some other state (Florida? Florida seems likely to be a 5-alarm dumpster fire this year, frankly), and travel isn't easy.
Florida seems like a stressful place to go regardless.
I hadn't thought about the phenomenon in 76, but it makes perfect sense to me. It's like recycling or anything else. They don't want to change the world or be activists, they just want to do the thing that causes the least cognitive dissonance if it comes up in conversation.
That reminds me that I should call my sociologist.
"I've got a worrisome lump on my socioeconomic class, doc."
I guess serviceable means it needs to be serviced by replacement.
My mother once told the joke in 49 at the dinner table and its the only time in my life I've ever heard her use the word "shit."
Honestly, it's not a very good joke for dinner.
That's one of the rules I push hardest in the house. Not jokes involving shit at dinner.
51: my links are ok.
91: re: constipated-looking people, I always thought tucker carlson was the most constipated-looking person in the world, and then I heard him described as looking like he just walked in on his prom date blowing his best friend and I think that's better.
zoom-wise, my poor husband has on and off weeks, but monday he had TEN CONSECUTIVE hours of zooming. he like to died.
Amadea's dad tested positive. He's doing fine so well and isolating at home. We are too, and will probably get tested Friday unless we develop symptoms sooner.
94: Hope everyone gets better/stays well.
10 hours on zoom is just too much.
91: I am convinced that Pence has not shit since the late 80s. There's nothing inside that shell but impacted stool.
So our major conference of the year, where we usually have a ~40 x 60 vendor booth, is at the end of November and this year is completely virtual this year. My colleague signed us up for $100k in pre-recorded sessions with live Q&As at the end without reading the fine print, to wit, the pre-recorded videos have to be uploaded in a week and a half--six weeks before the actual conference. I am a bit pissed at my colleague, and insane with rage at the conference. Like, track down all of my colleagues at the competition who also paid for these sessions and get them to join us in telling the conference to pound sand and next year we're all doing 10 x 10 booths if they don't get their shit together. Fuck them and their fucking incompetent intransigence right in the ear.
On the plus side, I picked up all the stuff I need for a powerlifting setup at home today after spotting them in an auction for a cabinet shop going out of business--the current market for weights is *nuts*--running 3-5x what they cost pre-pandemic. I got them for about 2x, so a definite win. I'm hoping regular exercise of a sort I like will help with stress management, even if I'll miss the camaraderie of lifting with others at the gym while never talking to them.
We got a punching bag. It's kind of useful for that.
I don't think that sounds quite fair to your fellow gym-goers.
100: the iron panic is incredible, it just keeps going. everything vanished in days back in March and for months even kettlebells were selling for hundreds of...pounds, if you could find them. I remember one of the very first people to be prosecuted for violating quarantine here was a guy who drove from Manchester to somewhere in Dorset to fetch weights he'd bought on EBay.
Checking, prices are still silly and a lot of product is on back-order until November.
100: Chopper, are you at the old company or did you make a move?
Yeah, I tried to get some dumbbells a while back, and failed. I do have a kettlebell and some bands and a TRX trainer for home, but I couldn't find anything else for love nor money. Bikes are also like gold dust.
I bought a second hand bike recently, which is a nice bike, but, if I'm honest, really better suited to someone about 2 or 3 inches taller than me. But, I figured it would do until retailers actually have any stock. I know that several of my work colleagues signed up for the cycle to work scheme, and then returned their "vouchers" without buying a bike because they couldn't find anything.
So, I'm riding around feeling like a kid on my Dad's bike. Slight exaggeration, but still. In terms of overall body height, I'm somewhere between medium and large on most bike manufacturers scale. But, in terms of torso length, I'm solidly at the upper end of large, and in terms of leg length, more like borderline between small and medium, because I have a long upper body. But, there's shit all chance of actually visiting a bike shop and trying a load of models to find one that works for me, when what would probably work is a medium bike with a longer stem. Right now I'm riding an XL bike (!) with a short stem, which is actually not that bad, the seat height is about right for me, in terms of standard bike fit, but the seatpost is all the way into the frame and I have no scope for adjustment, and I'm faintly worried I'm storing up hip or knee problems for myself.
ttaM: this might be overkill, but a couple of London bike shops do a fitting service: Condor and Sigma. Budget around £100-200 though, and more if they end up saying you need different components, or even a different frame. That said, it really works, you feel great afterwards, and it should iron out or pre-empt injuries.
re: 106
Yeah, I really do think I need a different bike/frame. Luckily, I only paid 200 quid for this one and put about 70 quid into it in terms of parts* and will easily get that back if I flog it. So the issues are -- what size do I need? Which would be aided by a bike fit, and I've considered it. And where can I buy a bike that is the right geometry? Which is mostly really hard at the moment, as the choices are limited, and most bike shops seem to only have their more expensive bikes in a range of sizes.
There's a bike fit place in, iirc, Richmond, which is not far for me to travel.
* new brake pads, bottom bracket, etc.
104: No recent moves other than since I saw you in Boston last fall I was converted from contract to employee. Medical software marketing.
Afaik there is a bit of wiggle room in frame sizes (needs to be ballpark, obviously) that can be compensated for with seatpost, stem and bar width adjustments. Suspect you're better off with slightly too small a frame rather than slightly too big, but could be mistaken. Sigma is in Kingston, so not far from Richmond. They will default to more expensive bikes, because it's a specialist place, but anywhere that does fitting should _also_ have a good range of the bits (stems etc.) that can make a big difference, and will hopefully know how to deploy them. Very 'pro' to have an absurdly long stem anyway.
103: Yeah, I think if I turned around on Craigslist I could easily double my money (which is sort of tempting)--the only reason this stuff came to me so cheap is it wasn't advertised on it's own--you had to go look at a cabinet shop equipment auction to stumble across them. Since I'm trying to figure out how to get woodworking tools on the cheap, I went looking--I'm not in the market for industrial scale machines bigger than my couch, so the weights were a happy accident. I bought a single poor-quality 35-lb. kettlebell for $85 in July and it it took 6 weeks to arrive.
re: 109
Yeah, all the reading I've done suggests I should be going for a medium sized frame (54/55cm in old school numbers) and a slightly longer than standard stem (but probably nothing extreme).
We've moved back to phase 2 for at least the next 28 days. Not the entire province of Ontario, but the 'hotspots' of Ottawa, Toronto, and the Peel region (= suburbs and exurbs of TO). No indoor dining/drinking at bars/pubs/restaurants; gyms, theatres, arenas, hair salons, and etc. all closed. I'm so sick of this, but it had to be done.
Yes. It's just a pity we've spent the initial surge of public spirit and now all that's left is fatalism and however much enforcement anyone's going to actually do.
I'm not doing any of that stuff anyway regardless of what is allowed.
Just got news a close friend's mother is near death after 10+ years with Parkinson's disease. The pandemic is making it so much harder. I'm hoping none of the family gets sick. They have no good options - limited visitors at the hospital, transferring to a hospice facility, going home with in-home care workers, all as cases are increasing fast where they live. I'm a bit heartbroken they won't even be able to have the solace of a big family funeral.
Her mom was great, too. Funny and silly and kind and radiated love and warmth.
Just got news a close friend's mother is near death after 10+ years with Parkinson's disease. The pandemic is making it so much harder. I'm hoping none of the family gets sick. They have no good options - limited visitors at the hospital, transferring to a hospice facility, going home with in-home care workers, all as cases are increasing fast where they live. I'm a bit heartbroken they won't even be able to have the solace of a big family funeral.
Her mom was great, too. Funny and silly and kind and radiated love and warmth.
Ugh. And now I'll tell you about it twice because I've sent over 2,000 GOTV texts today and my fingers have a stutter.
I'm sorry to hear that. My condolences. It is a very bad time even for events that would be bad regardless.
That sounds awful, ydnew. My condolences, and I am sorry for your friend's trouble.
Sorry to hear that, ydnew.
We had our COVID tests today. Throat swab rather than nasal, which was not ideal for me since I have a very sensitive gag reflex, but I got through it okay. Should know results within 4 business days, probably sooner.
721 new cases on 1900 tests. This is really bad.
Yes. It's going to be a very bad winter for people who like breathing.
Cases are up nationally and hospitalizations rising. Deaths will start rising after the election, mostly.
124: Of course, nothing matters for the election but whether Biden and Harris definitively answer whether they will permanently damage democracy by "packing the court" in the event that the Republicans complete their totally normal process of confirming Amy Barret in tow weeks. Ask any pundit or "old school" journalist. They are tired of the "evasion."
... they can also go pound salt up their rectums with a jackhammer.
If you do it right, Pence will call you "Mother."
119-121: Thank you. JPJ, it's a big Irish Catholic family; I'm sure you can imagine how hard this will be for them.
122-4: I am still betting we're going to have a serious disaster in January after Thanksgiving and Christmas. I can't tell how much of this mess is schools reopening vs people being tired of the restrictions and getting lax vs the same types of socializing moving from outdoors in. I wish we had a competent CDC. We've already let my family know we aren't going to be attending any holiday gatherings since our jobs are plenty of risk. AJ figures it's better to tell his mother later so he won't have to listen to complaints for the next few months.