Friday evening – wooooo, vacation at last! Can’t really believe it’s finally here. I’ll finally get to catch up on sleep and explore a new little part of the world… The plan is to hop into a rental car at noon (I’m not putting all that extra mileage on mine; besides, the rental is a 4WD), load it up with supplies, then drive north and north and west… Thunder Bay is 15 hours away from here, so I’ll spend the night at a rest stop.

I won’t lie – I gave some thought to packing up my entire desktop rather than saying goodbye to ESO for two whole weeks, but fortunately I’ve decided against that. It’ll be strange to abandon that little virtual world in favour of the bigger and more real one. How much will our world change by the time I return? How much will I have changed?

As I’m doing my one-man celebration, my old country is going to hell in a handbasket even faster than before. The nameless camouflaged thugs I wrote about last night have shocked the rest of the country too. There’s noise. There’s table-pounding. There are congresscritters from Oregon demanding to know who the hell those thugs were. (The best bad guess right now is that they were with customs enforcement.) This is a direct continuation of the nameless thugs with guns in Washington. That got away with it that time. If there’s insufficient action and outrage this time, they’ll escalate again in a few weeks. This is scary totalitarian stuff, not the sort of thing you’d see in an alleged democracy. (I am so very, very glad I moved.)

That mess has overshadowed covid, at least for today. The South is still overburdened. Miami is still the epicenter, with its mayor waffling and not taking any action. The White House press secretary said something truly remarkable: “Science should not stand in the way” of reopening schools. If someone, somewhere, someday makes a documentary about the history of this pandemic, I hope that soundbite gets used: it embodies so much of the current weaponized stupidity.

At work, we have been tentatively allowed to remain home if we feel like it. Theoretically, this means we’ll be able to work from home through early January. In reality… We’ll see. I’m really curious what the world will look like by then. Hell, I’m curious what I will look like by then: my last haircut was about two months ago. (It’s not like I actually go out and meet people these days.) I haven’t shaved in 54 days. When talking on Skype yesterday, xgf said I look like a werewolf – I’m curious to see if I can get all the way to yeti six months from now.

I hope y’all have a nice safe weekend free of any jackbooted thug interference. Stay safe out there, folks.