NoJoMo – Page 12

Three

Virginia Election reax

Of course, what happened in the Virginia election yesterday has been all over the worldwide media. Results (from AP).

What’s happened here in Virginia over the past, really, twenty years is an example of out-of-state newcomers really changing what the guidance and goals are.

Obviously, my wife, and my entry into the DC area is partially a result of it.

But there’s really few things worthwhile here anymore.

So it’s time to leave soon. Oh well. It’s not like I have any particular affinity for NOVA.

I was really thinking about leaving Virginia, actually. Yesterday’s results might cut down on the urgency on that. The craziness is resolved, somewhat, at the state level. Next year, I expect the Republicans to take back the US Congress.

But will it really matter? What will happen during the lame duck session of Congress between election day next November, and the time the new Congress is sworn in in January 2023? I don’t know.

The Machiavellian instinct I have says that all of the worst things that were in the stalled portions of the “Infrastructure” bills in Congress right now. But I do think some of the senators not in completely off-the-rails states will think twice about ramming things through, even those who’ve lost their reelection bids.

Maybe the blow will be lessened somewhat in Virginia, but that requires more faith than I have.

Another big take-away? Both the Clinton and Trump political machines are completely destroyed now. Youngkin won keeping Trumps at more than an arm’s length (and given Younkin’s college basketball background, that’s pretty far) McAuliffe was Bill Clinton’s DNC point-man, and he ran interference for Hillary. The country’s moved on.

If that means that Trump was the last of four-consecutive Boomer presidents, good riddance. (Biden is “Silent” Generation; Kennedy does a segment on her Fox Business show about which is older X or Joe Biden?)

It appears that the Republicans also took back the House of Delegates, swinging from a five-seat deficit to a fifteen-seat advantage. Yikes.

But I guess we’ll see what more shakes out in the next few days. I was up way too late watching results, so I’m going to slink off to take a nap.

Two

Day two, and I somehow didn’t have a prompt for today.

Today has really been a matter of recovering from yesterday’s ordeal, unfortunately.

Yesterday was an….ordeal.

Late Sunday night, my oldest friend, who’d promised to drive me in to the city to get this procedure done called out sick. Like coughing up blood sick. I don’t think it’s the dreaded COVID, but probably not a good idea to have him in the hospital, regardless.

So mad scramble to figure out getting a ride to and from. My wife can’t drive in the District, so find something else…..

Let me call my brother.

He drove me in and out. Not really a good way to express my gratitude for that. He’d actually never been to our place….which turns out to be about fifteen minutes away from his work.

But get to the hospital at 0800, check in, do perp, they take me back, and I go night-night.

Similar to the one a few years ago. Hopefully there’s nothing weird on the lab results, but I won’t know for about a week, probably.

Home. Sleep off the anesthesia, light dinner, normal twice-weekly work fun, and football.

Today was waking up barely in time to sign-on for work on-time, working a full shift, then going to vote.

Fingers crossed that the candidates against whom I voted lose.

But I’m feeling sort of okay, and, thankfully, don’t have anywhere else to go until I get my teeth cleaned Saturday morning.

But back to the election, kind of where I am with the whole process, now, is voting against the worst people. Considering Virginia has open primaries, I often get two opportunities to do that — once in the controlling party’s “open” primary, and again in the general election.

At the same time, I understand the appeal of just refusing to participate. I can’t remember at this point the last time I felt good about casting a vote for a candidate.

We’ll see what the results are.

One

It’s November. I’m doing what I do, writing, for the month. This is Year Twelve of writing every day. I’m also not shaving my upper lip, which I’ve done for probably about the past five or six years.

Why do I keep doing this? I don’t know. My psychologist has identified it as one of the few compulsions I have in my somewhat-unusual case of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder.

The number of things she’s been able to help me with in the almost three years I’ve been seeing her are nearly impossible to tally.

So, yes, there’s been some dissuasion towards this, but I keep doing it because, the November session, at least, sort of focuses me on the end of the year.

While I’ve gotten better, personally, many, many things have gotten a lot worse this year.

In the first entry last year, I wrote, “I’ve been trying to stay a bit optimistic about what’s going to happen, but I am worried.”

I think that was justified.

My wife and I are trying to figure out how to begin extracting ourselves from the DC swamp. I think we’ve got the start of a plan, but there’s still many lower-case Js to dot, Fs to cross.

I have about two-thirds of the month’s writing planned. Let’s go. Yes, that includes you, too, Brandon. O.o

What are Saturdays for?

Kind of my question of the day, though this is the last somewhat-normal one I’m probably goi8ng to have for the rest of the year.

My wife told me yesterday that she doesn’t want to go anywhere for the holidays. I’m good with that, but I would like to really do holiday food stuff. I might get some pushback on that, but…..we’ll see.

I want comforting food as the weather gets cold.

Something to enjoy as things wind down here on the edge of the DC swamp. I think both of us want out. Enough, already.

I’m listening to this after gulping down copious amounts of Lorenzotti Coffee.

What else…

I need to finalize my writing prompts for next month. So far, I have only a few.

Obviously, I’ll write a long entry to start, probably written early because I expect to be undersedation for a medical procedure at the end of the day.

Day after election day.
Veterans’ Day.
Birthdays.
Thanksgiving.
Christmas Shopping, plans.
What is the most out there movie or book that you can’t get enough?
Do you have goals that you want to accomplish? What are they? What is your plan to achieve them?
What I have accomplished in the last 10 years?

I’ll probably also combine a few shorter queeries I have in to one larger entry.

So if you have ideas, I’m open.

I’m excited to do this.

Thirty

No prompt today, just a recap of what I’ve done, and what I hope to see for the rest of the year.

Since I’ve been up today, I ordered my new computer. It’s not exactly what I wanted, but it looks like it’ll do for the next few years.

This thing isn’t whining yet this morning, which is nice. I think the new one will be quiet, too.

So. On writing. I don’t know. Obviously a lot of what I’ve ended up writing about is the 600-pound gorilla in the room, COVID-19.

I’m worried about Lockeian fundamental human rights. I’m convinced there’s a large portion of the population in the US who don’t believe in those rights anymore.

I don’t know what to do about that, and I’m much more limited in my options to combat it.

The other day, Friday, maybe? I ended up watching a bit of MTV Classic. Bust A Move was on. “Everything you have is yours, and not stolen.”

But if you get a government agent to steal it, it’s okay, right? No.

For “Cyber Monday,” I did order my new desktop. I hope it will be better than this wheezing thing. While it’s not exactly what I thought I wanted, but can it be worse than what I’m dealing with now?

And, not long after I finished writing that, I ended up buying something else. So much for fiscal responsibility.

But, yeah, I’m finished. Eleventh year in the books.

I hope everyone has a nice Christmas.

I will try not to be so sporadic, but I do need to get rid of the daily writing spells.

Maybe I won’t write this summer. We’ll see.

I think there’s something useful, perhaps, in my underreported news items. Walt Hickey sort of does a version of this over at numlock.news, but I think I could do something different.

Could I do a very short podcast on a single story….? Hmmm…..

Twenty-nine

Sputtering towards the end of the month, both me and my writing.

I think I’ve slept more in the past two days than I have in the past decade.

It’s different.

Listening to Robbie and Gene Epstein as a Sunday Morning wake-up.

I watched some of Rob’s stand-up Friday night, and enjoyed it. I might have been a little more gentle, but this is his set, not mine.

Would I pay money to consume it? Probably. It’s largely enjoyable to me, and I want to see him succeed.

My only real point of emphasis? High-droxy-chlor-o-quin

My body seems to be responding positively, and I should email one of my doctors about that.’

This is another somewhat-truncated week. I get my infusion on Friday, finally, thankfully. With the extra rest, however, I’m not nearly as fatigued as I’d normally be.

Hair growth is happening. The beard isn’t going badly. The hair up top is a bit of a pain to deal with, but I’m going to deal with it.

It’ll be a bit strange to have an ID that has me with long hair on my face, and head.

Oh well.

My initial hedging on it, is passed.

I do wish I could get a haircut at Georgetown while I was in the is-he-going-to-die-after-his-infusion period.

Prompt…

Have you ever unintentionally poisoned someone against another person because you hated them?

No. Doing that is exactly the opposite to how I live. I play Sir Robin.

Still, there’s a difference. One of the reasons I’m getting counseling, is that I know bad things could happen, and I really don’t care.

All I ask is that if you’re going to harm me, please leave a record of it.

If you’re going to harm me, own it.

That, too, reflects back on how I live my life. Have I ever done anything I regret? Certainly. Have I done anything that causes terrible embarrassment? No. Nothing. Now that doesn’t mean I wouldn’t do some things differently, wouldn’t place confidence in some individuals, but I think nearly everything I’ve done was justifiable.

Okay. News.

Front page of Bing was this, which is a video clip.

The woke crowd will say he’s a set-up. Whatever. I do believe in life, liberty, and property. If that makes me a bad person, so be it. Kill me for it, just do it when the cameras are rolling. You can’t hide everything forever.

But on a somewhat-related note, and in line with what I’ve been barking about the last few days, all of this is killing mom-and-pop shops.

The fruits of someone else’s labor are not yours to give, but they’re also not yours to take.

Even if you know better than me.

Twenty-eight

Saturday morning. Not as much sleeping as the past two days, but I think I’m getting more on schedule.

Going to address the prompt early today because the news section really is what I want to deal with today.

So. Prompt.

Is there someone you were close to at one point in time, that you can no longer stand to be around?

Absolutely. Her. Him. Her. No ill-will towards him. Well, I still talk to her sometimes. Him, too. *shrug*

I don’t have a lot of friends. I never have. Few people get close to me, understand how I work. Some of that is me, but things fall away.

Some of that is a function of my nomadic upbringing. Some of it is a function of how I behave.

The amount of ill-will i bear towards those with whom I really don’t have contact varies.

By and large, I’m civil.

Significantly limiting time spent in the cesspool that is Facebook goes a long way to ensuring that.

I use the mute function liberally. That’s kind of eliminated my original concept of just unfriending them there.

This is related to the news section today.

I’m becoming increasingly convinced of two things:

The solutions proffered for combating the virus don’t work, and;
There’s really not a lot anybody can do about it.

I admit that I’m listening to this right now.

What I’ve been looking for is solid evidence that the sorts of measures recommended by lockdown proponents that the lockdowns actually work.

New Zealand!

Okay. It’s an island with relatively few residents. Let’s look at Australia.

The numbers there are increasing, too, despite it being late spring.

Science doesn’t know how to control this. Government, especially ones “following the science” don’t have answers, either.

So you’re left with a choice of doing something that probably won’t work, or doing nothing.

Politicians are accepting whichever option justifies more authoritarianism.

Twenty-seven

Listening to this in the background. This morning really did require an effort to write, not to just mess around.

Thanksgiving was decent. Seeing both teams serve up fortyburgers was, um, satisfying.

The nighttime AFC game was delayed because of a COVID-19 outbreak on the Ravens.

Dangerous prediction! Probably all of those infected will be okay next week.

I know, I know, that’s not Chuck Todd dangerous, but I clearly don’t believe in the constantly-shifting War On Science^TM.

Casting any aspersions on the blessed is risky.

Oh well.

Christmas gifts, plans

Happy to see that there’s a way you can put together one of the Big Tech merchant’s wish lists, then buy things somewhere else.

So I’ve largely done that.

I don’t know for whom else I should buy gifts.

At this point, I can count on one hand the number of people outside my family who’ve kept up with me since the rolling that started in 2013.

I don’t even have the energy to get upset about it. Maybe I should.

News
Oh, a CIA officer got killed in one of the bright spots of the Obama/Biden foreign wars. Nothing to see here. Move along.

Two more days, and another year finished.

I shouldn’t say I’m excited to relax, should I?

But I am.

Twenty-six

Thanksgiving.

Even with the Steelers’ game cancelled, there’s still games in Detroit and Dallas.

I actually saw an interesting story on this.

The AFC game for tonight was cancelled, so it’s very old-school today. One intra-conference game in Dallas, one cross-conference game in Detroit.

I do like the old-timey NFL franchises still seeking Super Bowl success — Lions, Cardinals, Browns.

So. Thanksgiving. What am I thankful for?

Being married to the right partner. She and I do work well together, even if we sometimes disagree; even on big issues. She’s not going to be at all happy about the SCOTUS ruling that came down while we were in bed.
Financial well-being. I don’t know how much of a bonus I’ll get from my job this year, and I don’t care. I’m not working to scrape by enough to get us through the month, keep us insured, etc.. I cannot describe how relieving that feeling is, even more knowing that we did it together.
Being somewhere where I can get decent medical care. When I moved up here, that, alone, would have been a selling point. One of the few after the government’s response to the pandemic with a 99.something percent survival rate killed off most of them. Not that I partook often, but at least I was in close proximity. Would I liked to have taken my wife out to dinner for our tenth anniversary last month? Absolutely. Even if it meant a cab ride through the shoddily-coordinated Black Lives Matter Plaza? Yep. Whatever. Is that even really possible, now? No. Will the place I was intending to go be there? I’ve got my doubts. Kennedy had a monologue on Monday about removing what she termed “qualified immunity” from politicians whose lockdowns have unintended consequences. She was a big off on the term, there, it should be “sovereign immunity,” but I do like her argument’s general thrust. If politicians were accountable at somewhere other than the ballot box, they might make a lot fewer laws that negatively affect, sometimes kill, people. There’s long been a push to expand personal liability for corporate executives who do bad things; why not add politicians?

News

I mentioned this above. Whether you believe in a higher power or not, it’s pretty clear that this is a basic thing that humans do. Yes, there may be a few who can do it in solitude, but most people want feedback and interaction.

Cutting that off, something that is explicitly protected in the Constitution, isn’t going to work.

There will be violence. As it should be.

But today is going to be football, food, and calling family for Jitsi meets, etc.

Back tomorrow.

Twenty-five

I am off work. I have nothing to do until Monday.

This feels weird.

There’s not a lot to do, really. I could be doing training, but I wonder what’s even the point.

So, catching on the podcast queue. Maybe I’ll get around to watching some TV; I have two nights’-worth of Kennedy, and I’m still trying to get through The Wire.

(Totally random aside — I think after the COVID craziness is over, I could deal with living in Baltimore….)

You can change one significant event in history, and only things directly related to it will change in the future. Do you change it, and if so, what event do you choose?

The more that I think of things, the more I think that it’s time to repeal the Seventeenth Amendment to the Constitution.

The presidents elected straight from the Senate have been largely terrible.

What am I listening to right now? This.

I get information from many different sources. Not just one source. And that’s dangerous.

The discussion is fascinating to me, honestly, as I’ve lived so much of my life in isolation.

I work by myself. That’s largely been the case since I started working. I can’t imagine how it is for other people.

I’m looking forward to tomorrow, even if the folks on the Reason editors’ roundtable were picking on the Lions on Monday.

They started this stuff.

News.

I’ve been trying to follow this, and I’m not sure why. My wife and I would order Pizza Hut while we were out in the middle of suburban sprawl.

Was that because the food was great? No. Did I find something small, local, that was better? Yep. But it hit the spot from time to time…and for not a lot of money.

Would I prefer to do something from a local shop? Yes. Is that really difficult when you can’t walk/take public transit/drive? Absolutely.

My property management company just sent an email reminding me to follow them on Instagram. I guess I could do that, but I don’t want any Facebook spyware on my phone.

I think I’m going to stop for the day, however. Thanksgiving tomorrow. Should I write about what I’m thankful for this year?

Hmm.

Stepping away to ponder….