The View from the Hermitage, Day 246

The Orange Foolius evidently tweeted that Uncle Joe wast the winner of the recent election. He of course quickly corrected himself to note that Uncle Joe won the rigged Fake News election. Maybe he's edging himself to being able not to concede but at least to say that Uncle Joe would be inaugurated as President in January. The longer The Foolius keeps up the facade of his having been cheated out of office, the more stupid he looks. Well, at least to me. To his base he likely looks strong and resolute.

Virginia's covid-19 case numbers reached new heights. I really, REALLY hope that the new case count from yesterday had some extra cases added because it was roughly twice the day before, about 2,600 as opposed to about 1,300. The seven-day moving average, which would be the same no matter whether cases are counted on the correct date, hit a new high coming too close to 1,600. Perhaps more disturbing, the percent positivity rate for tests is up to 7.3, with testing supplies running short. It's not clear whether the local university will have all the tests it needs to test students before they go home next week.  

The Orange Foolius's principal coronavirus person, a Dr. Atlas, has no experience with infectious diseases but has managed to work his way into The Foolius's inner circle. He responded to the tightening of covid-19 mitigation measures in Michigan by urging residents there to rise up and stop those unfair measures. I wonder what state he'll go after next. Clearly, it will not be one with a Republican governor because they will all be toeing the party line. I want to just shake my head and try to leave this incident alone, but it's one of the more frightening things to come recently.

On the novel coronavirus good news front, though, Moderna has announced that its vaccine has a 94.5 percent effectiveness rate. Two possible vaccines are obviously better than one. I don't know if the Moderna one requires the deep, deep freeze temperatures that the Pfizer one does. It would certainly be easier to distribute a vaccine not requiring dry ice or liquid nitrogen storage.

I never got to those drawers yesterday. My current read sucked me back in, so I went ahead and finished it. It was The Kingdom, the latest crime novel from Norwegian author Jo Nesbo. Interestingly, The Washington Post today ran a review of it which you can access here. The reviewer nailed it in my opinion, particularly in noting that the end might be a hair disappointing to some readers. I will admit to being one of those. It just didn't feel right, not in a major way, but enough to make me sit back and ponder what I might have been missing. If you like noir fiction, you can't get much better than Scandinavian or Icelandic literature. 

I spent the morning preparing materials for the upcoming meeting of our Homeowners Association. I volunteered to be the secretary/treasurer as a way of not being asked to be president or vice president. On general principle, I will never again agree to be vice president of anything. When the sons were in a cooperative preschool, I let myself be elected vice president. With less than a month left in the summer, the president resigned. He had not done the summer tasks that he was supposed to do such as updating the parent manual outlining things that needed to be done, who was responsible for what, etc. No more being a veep for me, thank you very much. 

I was going to get to work on those drawers after lunch, but an email came in from my mom's assisted living facility. They want photos of residents and their families to use in decorating a small Christmas tree for each resident's room. I've pulled together what I could from the backups of my last three or four laptops and requested photos from my brother and sister-in-law, Son #2 and his spouse-equivalent, and Son #1for photos of Mom's cat he adopted when it was clear Mom was not going to be able to move back to her condo. I'm not sure what it says that of the original 13 photos I found before requesting the others, five were of people and eight were of animals.

And so has passed the day. There may still be time for a drawer or two since I haven't started a new book to distract me.