The View from the Hermitage, Day 188

On the news front, someone who for now is unknown mailed HWSNBN a package containing ricin. If you watched Breaking Bad, you know as much about ricin as you need to. It is nasty stuff. As CNN puts it, "If ingested, it causes nausea, vomiting and internal bleeding of the stomach and intestines, followed by failure of the liver, spleen and kidneys, and death by collapse of the circulatory system." As much as I dislike HWSNBN, I would not wish that death on anyone.

And in the how can 2020 suck even more category, Ruth Bader Ginsburg died last night, and HWSNBN and the Republicans in the Senate are already moving to name a replacement. It appears that a conservative female federal judge is at the top of the list. These are the same Republican senators who refused to even consider Obama's nomination of a replacement justice and held up the process for a year or more. Remind them of all their high-falutin' language then about how a justice should not be chosen until after an election so that the will of the people can be represented, and, well, things are different now. I am sure that it has occurred to HWSNBN's advisors that Senate Judiciary Committee hearings have the potential to pull Kamala Harris off the campaign trail. 

Covid-19 cases continue to increase at the local university. They have now found them in four of the first-year dorms, meaning that 19 percent of the quarantine rooms are occupied. So far there has been no discussion of putting in-person classes on hold or sending students home. I'm starting to think that they would not send students home but instead might try the Notre Dame solution of confining kids to dorms for virtual learning only for a couple of weeks. It does keep the local news feed interesting.

On the home front, we put down the rug tiles in the dining area. It's not a great photo, but here it is.

It's on the neutral side which  I hope will make choosing curtains or drapes a bit easier. First, though, I have to read up on how to measure for them. We have not yet adhered the kitchen rug tiles to the floor but so far this arrangement is the one we like the best. I had thought about two up against the under-cabinet wall in front of the sink and another two in front of the stove, places where I might stand for some minutes, but that looked too disjointed. I'm voting for this arrangement instead.

The nights are getting cooler, and there's actually an overnight low in the 30s Fahrenheit forecast for later in the week. As a result, we moved the plants in from the deck today. We cut a couple back and re-potted two others in the process. I hope the Christmas cacti were out there long enough to stimulate blooming. I have never managed to get them to bloom at Christmas, so I've given up and take them when I can get them.

I've been moving things around as I move us back into the master bedroom. Cleaning out a couple of drawers in my dresser was a priority. We have two many sweaters, many made by yours truly, for the chest in which I was keeping them. Last year, I kept the extras on shelves in the closet, but they kept getting hit and unfolding, and it just got to be a pain. I hope I cleared enough drawers to hold the surplus. I also have two not-large boxes of clothes to donate. I think my t-shirts have been engaged in hanky-panky and given birth to more t-shirts. There are a couple that I just could not bring myself to donate ... yet.

And now to go see if today's mail has arrived. I think it's going to contain, yes, two t-shirts. I ordered one for younger son's spouse equivalent and decided as I did so to get one for myself. I am my own worst enemy.

The View from the Hermitage, Day 187

Early voting started today here in Virginia. There were long lines at some of the offices in Northern Virginia; I expect the local news tonight will have a report on how things went here. Our absentee ballots should arrive tomorrow or Monday. Then, the husband, older son, and I will sit around a table and vote, with one person acting as witness for another. Rather than putting them in the mail, older son will use the drop box at the city registrar's office, and the husband and I will use the one at the county registrar's office. Then we sit back to wait. I may be able to tell how things went when the husband comes home from working his shift as an official. Was it close, or a landslide in one direction or the other? His face will tell me. At least Virginia doesn't wait until Election Day or later to begin to count absentee ballots.

Another White House ex-staffer, a former aide to the Vice President, has come out as planning to vote for Joe Biden. Her tales of HWSNBN's words and deeds throughout the pandemic are damning indeed. I can understand his concern for the economy; that's definitely seen better days. But his reelection should never have entered the picture of how to handle a global pandemic. Yet there were days when the coronavirus task force had to sit and listen to his diatribes on anything but the pandemic itself. Now, whether HWSNBN's base is going to believe any of that I do not know. When it comes right down to it, though, I just hope people turn out to vote. Another official and I used to thank people for coming in to vote and telling them they had earned the right to complain about the results.

 A Stephen Colbert tweet has much food for thought: The news can be depressing these days, so take a mental wellness break from reading about how the president sexually assaulted someone to read about how he tried to use a heat ray against his own citizens. This is appalling. Dispersing the protesters with no warning, before the posted curfew time, was bad enough, but if he'd used a heat ray to do so? I like to think that that would have crossed some line and made more people question his fitness to serve. I know. If wishes were horses, then beggars would ride.

On the more immediate home front, unpacking the household continues. This has its ups and downs. For example, I had no idea how many effing t-shirts I have. I have put a few in the donation box, but it's hard to get rid of a shirt from one of the bigger things in my life such as GORUCK, SEAL Team Physical Training, or Myo Sim karate and kendo. Then there are the race t-shirts. I have very few compared to some people, but it's still hard. It's easier if they're too small or large for frequent wearing. I got rid of two shirts from the same race (the Montalto Challenge) because a third one fit more comfortably. I have more to go through tomorrow, so I hope there will be more than a few more headed for the donation box. And re-reading this paragraph reminds me that there were some shirts I did not try on and which might be tighter than I like. That would make getting rid of them easier. And since I just thought of it, I should go up and do it before the thought flits its way out of mind.

The View from the Hermitage, Day 118

And the number of cases in Virginia continues to creep up. Apparently, a large part of the increase has been from the coastal area around Virginia Beach. The public health people there say things will get worse starting in the middle of the coming week. That's when cases arising from exposure during the July 4 weekend will start to appear. Most of the new cases are younger people, in their 20s. The maddening thing is that a lot of them are not cooperating with the contact tracers. They refuse to say who they were with and when. And it's not as if they say that they will contact those people themselves. They also decline to provide regular updates on how their condition might change in the coming days.

The governor told me (and thousands of his other friends) on Facebook that he is monitoring the situation and is ready to impose (reimpose?) mitigation measures if needed. I do not expect that that would end well. The people who won't help with contact tracing are certainly not going to seriously self-quarantine, especially if they are asymptomatic. I console myself by thinking that they can't all be asymptomatic because otherwise why would they have gotten themselves tested?

The husband gave me a belated birthday gift that arrived in today's mail. It's a t-shirt that I shall wear tomorrow and often.

If I planned on heading to the nation's capital any time in the near future, I would definitely wear it, not that HWSNBN would see it or care. It would just help me feel a wee bit better.

Emptying the house continues. I was amazed at how much stuff could be tetrissed into younger son's room thanks to the agility and strength of older son. The family dog provided some comedy relief.

This shot was taken partway through the process. There is more in it now, and there will be more in it after tomorrow's packing party. All of the master bedroom furniture save the mattress, box springs, and bed-frame are in this room. We will slide the bed stuff into the master bathroom so we can easily remove it when we get home. I, for one, am tired of the bed in the guestroom. Note to self: Look into a new guestroom mattress.

I shall now get back to packing all sorts of things. The food from the pantry that we will not be taking with us to younger son's cabin, for one, since they the pantry floor is on the list to be refinished. I am trying not to feel overwhelmed, but I expect to get there sometime later in the week.