Remember yesterday when I mentioned I had tried to walk in place for a measurable amount of time in order to trick my back into letting me exercise a little tiny bit?
I did it again today. Five minutes of walking in place. Also… I did it twice.
My watch says I have fake walked for about half a mile. For normal people, a half mile walk isn’t anything. For someone as dangerously, dare I say criminally, as out of shape as I am… half a mile is insane.
There is a little part of me that thinks I am actually dead but just haven’t fallen down yet. Like that scene in that movie that I was just about to spoil but won’t because that would be mean of me. She hits him, he talks to her for a while, then he walks away and after a specific number of steps just dies? That movie that I’m not going to mention the name of because it will spoil it for the three people left on Earth who haven’t seen it yet? You all know what I’m talking about, right?
I’ll tell you what, if I do in fact keel over I will immediately post about it from the after life. I promise.
Seriously though… I wonder if I could get myself into the habit of doing this three times a day. I might do it again after work. Assuming I’m alive, of course.
The car dealership that sold us one of our cars (the Kia) has been spamming the shit out of me lately. Mostly email, but today there was a robo call. It was one of those super insulting robo calls that is a recording of an actual person who is trying to trick you into thinking it’s really a person talking.
The gist of the call was, we have been missing our recommended maintenance appointments. Well no shit. We haven’t used the car at all, so why do we need maintenance? Also, There Is A Fucking Global Pandemic. No, I am not going to get my windshield wipers replaced and risk catching the plague. What the hell, assholes?
That’s not what I’m bitching about today though. When the recording ended (why did I stay on the line? I don’t know) a computer voice came on and said that if I wanted to be removed from the call list I could press 9 at any time.
Well, you can bet your sweet ass I pressed that little 9 button on my iPhone as fast as humanly possible. When I did, the computer voice responded with, “we are sorry. There was an application error and your request was not completed.”
>insert sound of a fat red head screaming his head off here<
The Bruins are out, the Red Sox are historically awful, we lost our entire Spring to the Covid shut down, and now that it’s September 1st we have also lost our Summer.
I listened to a little bit of the second period. I heard the Bruins score their first goal. That was nice. I watched some of the third period. I shut it off because I just couldn’t bear it (pun kind of intended). I have to say that after the game three slaughter my heart wasn’t in it anymore. I was keeping an eye on the score. I saw it go to overtime. I saw it go to double overtime. I was asleep when it ended.
Summer is about to end. Lock down is not about to end. That math sucks. I feel like Covid-19 may have cost the Bruins a Cup this year. It definitely cost Pastrnak a 50 goal season. I know a lot of fans will pin this on Tuukka. Not me. He did the right thing.
Everything sucks. My epic binge watch of Agents of Shield just reached the episode where Bobby and Hunter leave. Those two actors got shafted. They left the show to get a spin off of their own, only to have the spin off cancelled before it went into production. That story fits in nicely with the general vibe of 2020, doesn’t it.
I want my summer back. I want my hockey season back too.
I thought about making a stir crazy thing out of this, but it’s not funny or anything.
I have to do something I don’t want to do today, and that means I have to do something that I really don’t want to do.
The lawn is long and shaggy and needs to be cut. Crud. I don’t wanna. Unfortunately, the last time I cut the grass I emptied out my gas can. So if’n I want to cut the grass today, I have to go to the gas station and fill ‘er up.
Did he just say, if’n?*
One of the cars is kinda low on gas so I guess I’ll kill two quarantine breaking birds with one quarantine breaking stone.
Gloves… mask… gasoline. What could go wrong?
*That sentence is a joke lifted from an episode of the old Greg the Bunny show on Fox. Pretty sure the whole series (one season only) is on youtube. You should watch it all.
ADDENDUM: I managed to shake enough gas out of the can to fill the lawn mower tank one last time. So save the above until next time.
It’s Sunday. My thumb hurts, and the rash on my arm is bigger than it was yesterday. I’m falling apart completely. Quarantine is finally breaking me, it seems. So what’s a red head to do? How about some reflection on the state of his world? Also known as a post full of random stuff? Sounds good to me!
Today is kind of a big day. Symbolically, if not literally. Today is the last weekend day that the kids are at our house before Bellana goes back to school. We’re going all out. Jen is making her favorite dinner tonight. Harry is making her favorite dessert right now. I’m so worried about the future. I want her to go and have a great second year at college, but I don’t want her to go and be at risk of catching the plague. I want her to stay here and be safe. Basically all the same arguments I made last August, with a few pandemical twists. Mostly I just don’t want to miss her again. Selfish, yes, but it’s still true. At the same time, if they can keep the Covid bubble closed and stop her and the rest of the students from being exposed, then I want her to have a great semester. I want her to have a ball. She doesn’t leave for a little over a week, but her last weekend is a dad weekend so we’re giving her a send off a little early.
I feel a little better about my step son’s school plans now that I know he’s only going in person half of the time instead of all the time. I guess you could say I feel half better than full bad? Get it? I would feel full better if he was going full remote, but that’s probably going to require an outbreak in the high school and I don’t want that either. I want him home and safe.
Sports: The Bruins won their first Tuukka Rask free game. They are up two games to one in their first round series against the Whale. I have confidence in Jaroslav Halak, that’s not the issue. I just had more confidence in Rask. A Cup win seems less likely with Halak carrying them, but really given the way they played in the first few games into the return to play, I had lost most of my Cup confidence anyway. We’ll see how far they can go. I’d like to at least beat the friggin’ Whale.
The Red Sox are utterly atrocious. They are very close to being on pace for the lowest win/loss percentage in franchise history, and the franchise has been around for about 120 years or so…. that means they are really, really bad. We all knew it was coming though. They have one major league starter in their pitching rotation and he’s probably a #4 on a real staff. Maybe a #3. Chris Sale, Eduardo Rodriguez, and Nathan Eovaldi together is a nice start for a rotation, but with Sale out getting Tommy John surgery, and E-Rod out with Covid-19 related heart issues, that just leaves Eovaldi and a bunch of minor leaguers and that is a recipe for complete disaster. Add a few hitters having epically bad seasons so far and you have a team that has a good shot at the #1 overall draft pick next year.
Music… 50/90 is 42% complete. I just added songs #20 and 21. I’ve got seven songs with rhythm guitars down that are waiting for lyrics and vocals. That’s it. 28 songs total so far. I need to get to 34 by the end of the month (50/90 takes place over three months and 50/3=16.67). I also want to have a 10 song (at least) album in a month for August. Five of the completed songs were started and finished this month, and three of the unfinished songs were started this month too. Those three are the top of the priority list right now, and I have to keep the new stuff coming so I don’t fall behind. I feel like I am way behind on things, even though I’m really just at the halfway point.
A bird just flew into the window, about two feet away from me. I hope he’s okay. It looked like it might have been a glancing blow. More like he bounced off than crashed.
We applied for vote by mail ballots recently, and our 9/1 Primary election ballots were delivered a couple of days ago. Will there still be a functioning USPS for us to mail them back? The shit stain of a president admitted publicly that he’s hamstringing the post office to tamper with the November election, and the response from those who stand as a check and balance against him? They went on vacation. Also, there is a global pandemic that is killing a thousand Americans a day so they went on vacation. If you still think your government represents you, then that should show you the truth.
That’s kinda a bummer note to end on. Here, let me make it worse by adding a couple of new songs. That should push us all off the ledge, right?
You can tell we are in a global pandemic and a massive lockdown by the size of the gigantic party going on down the street right now. There are at least a dozen cars lining the road.
Today is August 13th. Five months ago today was the last time I was in the office in Waltham. Five months. At the time the work from home order came, we were expecting it to be two weeks. Five months and counting.
My step daughter was on spring break, expecting to go back to Vermont. Nope. My step son kept saying that they can’t close schools, that would be crazy? Nope. Closed. My wife read a news report that hinted things could be bad enough to keep us home until the Fall and I thought that was ridiculous.
Now we are planning for back to school. University life will require a quarantine and a negative test to be let onto the campus, and from there on it’s a bubble. High school life… who the hell knows. Even the administration doesn’t have a friggin’ clue where they are going, never mind the students and their families. It’s a complete disaster.
Work? It’s looking more and more like we won’t be back in a building until sometime early next year. Jen’s company is still closed down completely. Mine has been sneaking people back into one of the buildings, and next month they are going to open another. My building is not on the reopening radar yet so it’s unlikely we’ll go back this year. We don’t know for sure though. We had wondered if we might be making working at home permanent, but the company squashed that talk emphatically. We’re going back, we just don’t know when yet.
In the last five months I have bought two tanks of gas. Normally it’s two a week(ish). I’ve been to my parents house a few times and been incredibly nervous about it each time. What if I have it and give it to them? What if they have it and give it to me and I bring it home and give it to everyone else?
I haven’t set foot in a store since a few days after we were sent home. That first weekend (I think) I went in a grocery store a couple of times, and maybe a drug store once. This was before stores put their Covid restrictions into place. I haven’t had to wait outside for the headcount inside to go down. We’ve been using instacart and amazon for pretty much everything we need. I’ve done a couple of curbside pickups, one at Best Buy and one at Home Depot.
Are there signs this is coming to an end? Not really. There are hints of vaccines. Until I and my family have one in my blood I’m not going to stop stressing. So many of our fellow citizens seem to think it’s okay to start reopening, and every time they try there is an outbreak and a new spike and it’s time to stop being stupid and just shut things down again.
I want this to be over, and it won’t be over until we all take it seriously… and there doesn’t seem to be much chance of that happening.
This just popped up in my iPhone’s news widget. We’ve spent a lot of time over the last few days stressing over back to school. The entire discussion is insulting. If the pandemic was bad enough to shut down schools in March, how is it not bad enough to stop a re-open in August? It’s absurd. The situation would need to be better now than it was in March and it is most definitely not better. It is worse. So very much worse. FIVE MILLION infections worse.
To quote the great Will Ferrell in Zoolander, I feel like I’m taking crazy pills.
The question of what to do about school this year is changing from a disturbing hypothetical to an ugly reality.
My sister is a teacher. Her union is pushing for 100% remote school. Her district disagrees. I understand why, but how effective will physical class time be with the entire faculty fearing for their lives and the lives of their families? I can’t read the future, but I’m guessing the answer is “not very.”
My step son’s school district is offering both remote and in person options and letting the students choose. He emphatically wants to go with the in person option. He had a rough time with the at home school last year and he doesn’t want to risk his senior grades on doing it again. No amount of counter arguing has convinced him to change his mind. Clearly remote is the better option for everyone, but he wants to go back.
I don’t get the logic these school systems are using. There is a clear risk to the health of the students, faculty, and staff. It was enough of a risk to shut everything down back in March. Nothing has changed as far as the virus is concerned. Why then is re-opening the buildings even a consideration? My step daughter’s school is sort of a bubble, so her situation is different. She’ll be taking most of her classes remotely, but she’ll be doing it from her dorm. If they can keep the bubbles closed then they might have some luck. Of course, I don’t think the faculty or the staff are bubblin’, so maybe it will blow up in everyone’s face.
Public schools though… no bubbles there. How do we handle it? Ideally we would all go remote because that’s the smart thing to do, but since when are American’s smart? There has to be some way to lessen the chances of spreading infections from home to school and back again. Should we wear masks at home? Probably. Should school kids isolate themselves from their parents? The older the kid the more likely that works, but it seems pretty unlikely regardless of age.
We’ve been in a cosmic sized mess since March, and in a couple of weeks it’s going to get a whole lot messier. Frankly, I’m scared shitless.
I’ve talked a lot about how my back hurts all the time. I’m 49 and overweight, what do you expect?
I’ve talked recently about how there seems to be something wrong with my left thumb. It hurts. It’s not getting better.
I haven’t talked about it in a long time, but my teeth are a mess and every so often I get a little pain, just to remind me that they are there.
Yesterday I bit my tongue. I think. I don’t actually remember doing it. It might be just a scratch or something. Whatever the cause, my tongue has a spot near the tip that just hurts. Every time it touches something, which is pretty much 24/7, it hurts.
In the immortal words of Jimmy from South Park, “I mean, come on!”
Enough already! If The ‘Rona isn’t going to let me leave the house, the least the universe can do is not have me in nagging pain from head to toe while I ride it out. Stupid body. Stupid, stupid body.
Inside the Red Head's Head 