Bryce Moore's Blog, page 78
October 21, 2020
Buying a Better Mousetrap
We’re almost to late October, and you know what that means: peak mouse trapping season is upon us. Now that I’ve lived in an old farmhouse for over a decade, this is far from my first rodeo. If there’s a mouse-controlling device out there, I’ve bought it and tried it out. And seeing as how some of you might be newer to the mousing scene, I thought it might be helpful to some of you for me to give a quick run down of the various mouse traps out there, and which one gets the official Bryce Seal of Approval.
Ye Olde Classic–You know the one I’m talking about. Wooden trap. Metal coil. Something Bugs Bunny might try to trick Elmer Fudd with. These traps are fine and all. They’re certainly cheap, and when they work, they work. (Sometimes a little too well. I’ve had mice that pretty much got cut in half by one of these. Speaking from experience, that’s not a situation you want. Cleaning up two halves of a mouse is not a fun prospect.) Messiness aside, I don’t like this style for three other reasons. First is reusability. Once you’ve caught a mouse, you have to get fairly handsy with that corpse to get the mouse out and reset the trap. Second, actually setting the trap is a trick and a half. There’s a fair chance you’re going to snap it on yourself once or twice before you actually get it done right. Third, there tends to be a lot of false alarms with this style. Mice seem to be able to navigate the trap well enough without actually getting caught.
Glue Traps–This style fails on many different levels. First of all, it just seems cruel to me. I don’t like mice, but I don’t quite like them to the level of “glue them to the floor and let them starve to death or die of thirst.” Also, sometimes the critter doesn’t fully get on the trap, and instead it takes the glue trap on a trip around the house. This is less than ideal. Finally, the glue just picks up all sorts of nastiness over time. Yuck. Pass.
Poison–Again, it’s pretty cruel, but there are times when poison’s the only thing I’ve figured out that’ll work. (Less so now that I have a dog. Poison’s pretty much out for me at this point . . . ) But even if you don’t have a pooch to look out for, poison just generally means the mouse dies in the floor or the wall, and then you’ve got to smell if for a long time afterward. Not fun. Pass.
Noise Deterrents–These are plug in things that supposedly make it so mice don’t want to go anywhere near where they can hear the noise. They can work . . . fine. But they only work for where the noise can get, and I haven’t had a huge success rate. They’re fine as a first defense, but I wouldn’t rely on them for all my mouse warfare needs.
Dryer sheets–I swear. People seem to think dryer sheets work for everything. Like mice will smell them and then go running for the hills. I have had no success with dryer sheets for anything other than keeping clothes fluffy in the dryer.
Electronic Traps–The concept seems sound at first blush. Mice go in and get zapped by a battery powered zapper. And these do indeed kill mice. But they also get really gunky over time. The batteries need to be changed. Getting rid of the mice can be a pain, as well. They brag about how they’re enclosed, so you don’t have to see the dead mouse, but . . . that kind of goes with the territory of mouse trapping. Sooner or later, you have to see the beady eyes. These are expensive, and I don’t see the point. Pass.
Have-a-Heart Traps–These take the “trap” part too literally. I want to kill the mouse, not take it on a trip in my car. What is this? A mouse game show? The rodent has infested my house, and instead of making an example of it, I end up giving it a free meal and a trip to an exotic location, where it can proceed to do what mice do best: make more mice. No thanks. If mice didn’t want to die, they shouldn’t have come into my house.
Guillotine Style Traps–They don’t actually cut the critter’s head off, but they come close. They also don’t work for beans. I have yet to catch a mouse with one of these, probably because mice see them and are scared to death.
Board Games–Is that what this is to you? A joke? We’re here to kill mice, son. Not build complex Rube Golberg machines.
Amazon’s Recommended Style–These work okay, over all. I’ve successfully used them to kill multiple mice with the same trap over time, but they don’t have the staying power to last season after season. Once you’ve caught and killed five mice with one trap, the trap mechanism seems to wear out, and you have to get a new trap. They’re fine, and they do the job without being too messy. They’re also easy to reset. They’re easily my second favorite trap, but they’re not my pick for number one.
My Number One–Now we’re talking. These traps win on so many different levels. First off, they’re very reusable. I’ve got one trap that’s caught four mice over six days right now. (It’s a bad year for mice, it seems? At least in my house at the moment.) Better yet, you can just stick a raisin in the bait spot, and the mice almost never successfully get the raisin, so you never have to put new bait in. You can set it and unset it with just one hand, leaving your other clean hand free to open doors and maneuver in and out of the house. You can reset it with your foot, so if it goes off and misses the mouse, you don’t have to worry about getting your hands dirty again. They’re just very, very good traps. And they’re cheap.
So there you have it. My recommendation for the best mouse killing machine, speaking from years of practice. If you have more questions, I’m happy to answer them. Good luck in your mouse hunting endeavors, and may the odds be ever in your favor.
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Like what you’ve read? Please consider supporting me on Patreon. Thanks to all my Patrons who support me! It only takes a minute or two, and then it’s automatic from there on out. I’ve posted the entirety of my book ICHABOD in installments, and I’m now putting up chapters from PAWN OF THE DEAD, another of my unreleased books. Where else are you going to get the undead and muppets all in the same YA package? Check it out.
If you’d rather not sign up for Patreon, you can also support the site by clicking the MEMORY THIEF Amazon link on the right of the page. That will take you to Amazon, where you can buy my books or anything else. During that visit, a portion of your purchase will go to me. It won’t cost you anything extra.
October 20, 2020
Stop Eating Poop
Ferris is a great dog. He’s definitely making things more interesting around the household in more ways than one. One way I wish were a little less interesting was the way he keeps making us take trips to the vet. We’ve had three vet visits (of the non-scheduled variety) in the two months he’s been with us, and he’s been on two rounds of drugs to solve various issues he’s had. Issues that really, when you get down to it, stem from one basic habit of his:
He likes to eat poop.
I know this isn’t unique to Ferris. That in fact, most dogs think poop is the bee’s knees and would eat it much more often if they could. That still doesn’t make me less frustrated when we have to shell out another hundred on pills that could have been avoided if he’d just lay off the brown stuff. It seems so clear to me. Why can’t he just follow that one obvious rule?
Of course, then I was eating some of Denisa’s apple cobbler she made last night, and a bit of it fell on the floor. Without thinking twice about it, I picked it up and ate it. After I was already chewing, it occurred to me that my floor is far from a sanitary surface. That Ferris literally walks through poop all the time, and that he walks all over that kitchen. That there’s no telling what germs I’d just popped into my mouth.
As soon as I’d made that connection, many other connections snapped together in my mind. Things I do and say (and eat) that I really shouldn’t, even though I know better.
Why is it so hard for us to stop doing the things that hurt ourselves, even when we know those things are hurtful? Over my staycation, I took a break from my diet. Because of that, I felt sick to my stomach most of the staycation. Yes, I got to eat a whole bunch of delicious food, but I ate too much of that delicious food. Denisa told me not to do it. I did it anyway.
I’m getting better in some areas. I don’t stay up as late. I get regular amounts of sleep. I exercise. But there are still definitely areas where I keep eating poop, no matter how many times everyone reminds me that poop is bad for me and will lead to long term problems.
I know this is just a variation on a theme I’ve written about many many times before, but that’s probably because it’s a lesson I (clearly) need to keep learning to master. What is the poop you’re currently eating? The first step to stopping is acknowledging that it’s poop, and not really anything of value. Once you can recognize that, you’ll be much closer to giving that particular type of poop up . . .
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Like what you’ve read? Please consider supporting me on Patreon. Thanks to all my Patrons who support me! It only takes a minute or two, and then it’s automatic from there on out. I’ve posted the entirety of my book ICHABOD in installments, and I’m now putting up chapters from PAWN OF THE DEAD, another of my unreleased books. Where else are you going to get the undead and muppets all in the same YA package? Check it out.
If you’d rather not sign up for Patreon, you can also support the site by clicking the MEMORY THIEF Amazon link on the right of the page. That will take you to Amazon, where you can buy my books or anything else. During that visit, a portion of your purchase will go to me. It won’t cost you anything extra.
October 19, 2020
History in Perspective
I remember reading in my CS Lewis class about the concept of chronological snobbery. In essence, it’s the tendency to think that people who lived in earlier times weren’t as bright and well informed as we are today. Following this line of thought, it’s easy to believe the mistakes they made people in the past would never be made by people in the present, simply because we’ve come so much further, intellectually speaking.
It’s a hard bias to overcome, but the pandemic is certainly helping me see some of my own shortcomings with it. I remember at the beginning of this whole fiasco, reading all about how terrible Philadelphia did with the Spanish Influenza back in the day. How they ignored the advice of scientists and held a big parade, thereby infecting many more people than they would have otherwise.
What a bunch of boneheads, right? Good thing we got over that tendency in 100 years of progress, I thought.
Fast forward to today, and you read plenty of stories about just that happening now. If you want to play tee ball about it, you don’t have to look any further than Trump actually using “Biden will listen to the scientists” as a reason for people not to vote for Biden. But I’d rather this post not devolve into another litmus test on Trump, so I’ll turn my attention overseas instead. The Czech Republic was a model of a good response to COVID back in March. They instituted a nationwide mask mandate, and they really came together to fight it. Successfully.
But in the intervening months, it appears that national sentiment of unity against the virus disappeared. The desire to keep wearing masks diminished to the point that they’re now mired in the same mask debate that America is in. This despite the fact that they saw firsthand just what masks did for them in March. What’s the result? Their rates are skyrocketing, hospitals are filling up, and they look like they’re right back in the thick of the mess.
People are people. People made mistakes about the pandemic in 1918 for the same reason they’re making mistakes about it now. You deal with anything for a long period of time, and you get tired. Worn out. You just want it over. So it’s no wonder to me now that the second wave of the 1918 influenza was so much worse than the first. Like with COVID, they had their first wave in the spring. They had a respite over the summer, and then when the fall hit, the death rate dwarfed what they’d experienced in the spring. (There was a third wave a few months later, as well. Not as bad as the second, but still much worse than the first.)
People have a tendency to listen to things they want to be true. I want the pandemic to be over as much as anyone, but wanting it to be done doesn’t mean it’s done. This worldwide reluctance to wear a mask properly baffles me, but I suppose it’s due to the fact people don’t want to be uncomfortable, and masks are uncomfortable. So it’s easier to not wear one, or wear one but leave your nose uncovered, or wear a face shield instead of a mask (despite the evidence showing this isn’t nearly as effective). I see all the pictures in my social media feed. I see far fewer masked pictures than unmasked ones. Slews of family get togethers or parties. I would love to go back to that life, but I don’t think we’re anywhere near the place we need to be to do it. For now, I realize that makes me “one of those crazy COVID pessimists” with some. Such is life.
My personal opinion (and I am no scientist) is that back in February and March, there was much, much more COVID out in the places that were doing so badly than we really recognized. So when we look at COVID case rates now (which are much higher than spring) and compare them to the death rates (which are much lower), it’s easy to think “we’ve got this disease conquered. We know how to deal with it.” It’s true that we have a better idea what we can do to diminish the effects, but I think if we saw what the real COVID rates were then and compared them to now, we’d feel much less secure.
I tend to think we’re at halftime. (At least, that’s what I optimistically think at this point.) Some countries had a really good first half, but we’re beginning to see what changes COVID made to its offense and defense (and how our teams have responded). Just because you’re up 35-0 at the half doesn’t mean you’re not going to lose the game. That wasn’t true in 1918, and it’s not true today.
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Like what you’ve read? Please consider supporting me on Patreon. Thanks to all my Patrons who support me! It only takes a minute or two, and then it’s automatic from there on out. I’ve posted the entirety of my book ICHABOD in installments, and I’m now putting up chapters from PAWN OF THE DEAD, another of my unreleased books. Where else are you going to get the undead and muppets all in the same YA package? Check it out.
If you’d rather not sign up for Patreon, you can also support the site by clicking the MEMORY THIEF Amazon link on the right of the page. That will take you to Amazon, where you can buy my books or anything else. During that visit, a portion of your purchase will go to me. It won’t cost you anything extra.
October 16, 2020
Ferris Update: October 2020
Ferris took another trip to the vet today, this time for a scheduled visit. He’s 16 weeks old and 24 pounds. Overall, things are going so much more smoothly with him than they were even a month ago, it’s night and day.
These days, he gets very tired by around 8pm, but we do our best to keep him up, because we’d rather be able to sleep a bit more in the morning. (And when I say “we,” I really mean Tomas and Daniela, who have proven themselves to be very capable dog whisperers. More on that in a minute.) He wakes up around 6:30-7:00, with no accidents at night, and none during the day. (It’s been weeks since he had an accident, and that was because he was sick.)
Walking him has become much less of a sled dog situation as well. He does a fair job walking by us and not pulling us along, and he’ll come when we want him to. (More or less. There are still times when he’s just too interested in whatever it is he’s smelling. Probably poop.) We’ve found that as long as we take him on a couple of walks a day (a mile or more), then he’s generally well behaved and not too exuberant. He’s got a lot of energy, but that’s okay. It gets us out of the house more, and I count that as a good thing.
He still can get a bit carried away with wanting to show his love through his teeth, especially with MC. But he generally knows not to nip now, and those situations are limited to times when he’s feeling particularly excited. He likes to jump more than he used to, which is a new problem, but we’re working on that as well.
Really, however, I’m nothing but happy that we got him. He feels like a real addition to the family, and he loves to be doing whatever the rest of us are doing. It’s fun watching how excited he gets at even the smallest of things. It’s also great to see what he’s done for the kids. I think having a dog has really helped Daniela and Tomas up their responsibility game. My girls have both learned how to say “no” forcefully, which I’m very pleased with. MC has a friend who always has time for her. I’ve watched her and Ferris playing with a ball outside for long stretches of time. She’ll get the ball, throw the ball, and then run with him (he’s on a leash) to go get the ball and repeat the process. They think it’s a blast.
If I were to do this again, I would see if I couldn’t get a puppy that’s a bit older than Ferris was when we got him. Even a few weeks makes a big difference. 10 weeks might be perfect. You still have some training to do, but a lot of it is already done. Those first few weeks were definitely rough, but things have improved so much that it makes you forget the rough parts. (In that way, much like having a baby. Though I do feel this is very much the “baby lite” experience. Yes, babies don’t have teeth and aren’t mobile, but they require so much more attention . . .)
Anyway, just wanted to give an update on the little bounder. If you see us around town, he would love love love to say hello. He pretty much loves anything that moves. (Or smells like poop.)
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Like what you’ve read? Please consider supporting me on Patreon. Thanks to all my Patrons who support me! It only takes a minute or two, and then it’s automatic from there on out. I’ve posted the entirety of my book ICHABOD in installments, and I’m now putting up chapters from PAWN OF THE DEAD, another of my unreleased books. Where else are you going to get the undead and muppets all in the same YA package? Check it out.
If you’d rather not sign up for Patreon, you can also support the site by clicking the MEMORY THIEF Amazon link on the right of the page. That will take you to Amazon, where you can buy my books or anything else. During that visit, a portion of your purchase will go to me. It won’t cost you anything extra.
October 15, 2020
Book Review: The Testaments
I read The Handmaid’s Tale last year for the first time, and I was blown away by how well done it was. One of the most realistic dystopias I’ve read, which is depressing I suppose, since it was written decades ago and has only seemed to get more likely as a possible predictor for the future. (1984, of course, is another clear leader in the genre, and also depressing for the same reasons. But 1984 wasn’t quite as accessible to me as Handmaid’s Tale was. There’s a bigger learning curve involved, figuring out exactly what’s going on in 1984, though that might also just be that I read it so long ago. I probably need to give it another go . . . )
In any case, when I heard Atwood had written a sequel, decades later, I was suspicious at first, worried that it was just a money grab to tie in with the Hulu adaptation of the original. But it went on sale, and I was curious, and I’d loved the first one so much . . . how could I resist? I really wanted to know how she’d approach the sequel, since I felt the first one stood so well on its own. (Something she must have agreed with, since it went sequel-free for so many years.)
I shouldn’t have been suspicious at all. Atwood hit this book out of the park as well. If anything, it was more of a thriller than the first, and I found myself ripping through the last third, just wanting to know what happened next and how it all turned out.
The book is told through three viewpoints, all female: a Canadian middle-class teen, the daughter of a Gileadean Commander, and Aunt Lydia herself, the leader of all the Aunts in Gilead. By weaving between those three characters, we finally get to see a clearer picture of both what Gilead really looks like, how it came to be what it is, and what its future might be. It’s still not spelled out directly all the time–Atwood enjoys putting the puzzle pieces in front of her audience and letting them make connections on their own–but that’s part of the enjoyment of the series, as well.
I don’t want to spoil anything, so I won’t say more of the plot than that. If you were a fan of the original, I consider this one a must read. If you haven’t read the original, they’re both more than worth your time. If you didn’t care for the original . . . this one, as I said, is more accessible, and so might be worth a shot still. 10/10.
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Like what you’ve read? Please consider supporting me on Patreon. Thanks to all my Patrons who support me! It only takes a minute or two, and then it’s automatic from there on out. I’ve posted the entirety of my book ICHABOD in installments, and I’m now putting up chapters from PAWN OF THE DEAD, another of my unreleased books. Where else are you going to get the undead and muppets all in the same YA package? Check it out.
If you’d rather not sign up for Patreon, you can also support the site by clicking the MEMORY THIEF Amazon link on the right of the page. That will take you to Amazon, where you can buy my books or anything else. During that visit, a portion of your purchase will go to me. It won’t cost you anything extra.
October 14, 2020
Movie Review: That Darn Cat
Sometimes it can be difficult to find a movie everyone in the family is going to like. I’ve been burned a few times by turning to old favorites I loved as a kid, since some of them just don’t stand up to today’s pacing and expectations. So while I’d seen That Darn Cat listed on Disney+ for a while, and I remembered really enjoying it back when I was a kid, I had a hard time convincing myself to try to get the rest of the family to watch it. I mean, come on. A movie about a sting operation set up by the FBI to follow a cat in hopes that it will lead them to a kidnapping victim? And it’s a comedy?
Seemed like a big ask.
But over the staycation I wanted to find a family friendly film, and . . . that’s what I ended up on. The rest of the gang had their doubts. However, I’m pleased to say that the movie more than held up, and we all really enjoyed it. I gave it an 8/10, believe it or not. It’s true, some of that might be nostalgia at work, but I don’t think nostalgia played too big of a role in it.
What worked about the movie? Its light hearted adventure and earned laughs. (Though it started out much, much darker than I expected a G rated Disney movie to start. Basically a bank teller’s told she’s going to be killed in cold blood while she’s a kidnapping victim. No wonder I was scared of being kidnapped as a kid . . . ) The animal acting in the movie’s a lot of fun too. Daniela was amazed they could get the animals to do all the things they did. These days, it likely would have just been done with CGI, and that’s a bug shame.
The film also boasts a very robust Disney pedigree. Hayley Mills and Dean Jones directed by Robert Stevenson (who did Mary Poppins, Bedknobs and Broomsticks, The Love Bug, The Absent Minded Professor, and more). Will it change your life or make you view the world differently? No. But for a fun time that everyone in the family can enjoy, it’s definitely worth your time. I’m glad I gave it another shot.
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Like what you’ve read? Please consider supporting me on Patreon. Thanks to all my Patrons who support me! It only takes a minute or two, and then it’s automatic from there on out. I’ve posted the entirety of my book ICHABOD in installments, and I’m now putting up chapters from PAWN OF THE DEAD, another of my unreleased books. Where else are you going to get the undead and muppets all in the same YA package? Check it out.
If you’d rather not sign up for Patreon, you can also support the site by clicking the MEMORY THIEF Amazon link on the right of the page. That will take you to Amazon, where you can buy my books or anything else. During that visit, a portion of your purchase will go to me. It won’t cost you anything extra.
October 13, 2020
Staycation Report: A Resounding Success (with one foreseeable drawback)
The staycation I wrote about Friday ended yesterday evening at 6pm. As I said then, the main goal of the weekend was to make it feel different than just a normal weekend at home. We weren’t going anywhere, and we didn’t really have anything spectacular planned. How could we make a break feel like a real break? I’ve been through enough three day weekends to know how much they often start off with promise, only to end up as just another weekend, that maybe was slightly longer, but didn’t feel that much different.
Overall, it was mission successful. What did we get done over the weekend? Well, not really anything, from a “things we needed to do” perspective, but from a fun perspective?
We got food from three different restaurants (Orange Cat Cafe, Basil’s, and House of Pizza)We played four board games as a family (Kingdomino, Ticket to Ride, Dixit, and Carcassone)We watched four movies (My Octopus Teacher, Knight’s Tale, O Brother Where Art Thou, and That Darn Cat)We played a variety of video games together (Super Smash Bros, Mario Kart, Final Fantasy VI)I finished 1.5 books (Wintersteel and half of The Testaments)We went on two “shopping sprees,” that ended up being . . . mixed. The grocery store spree was much more popular. Kids loved being able to get anything they wanted to eat. The Walmart run? Much less successful, though I found that really encouraging, actually. No one really wanted to get things just to “get things.” So yay for that.We hiked the local ski mountain (Titcomb), with Ferris in tow.We had a BYU football party. (Thank goodness we won!)
Maybe all of that doesn’t sound like too much when I rattle it off like that. I mean, we had three days to do it, but really, I was impressed by the different the lack of devices made for the weekend. We spent a whole lot more time together as a family, with everyone there fully present and involved. And I felt like I had a ton of time as well.
I definitely felt the absence of my phone, as I expected I would. There were many many times that I found myself just sitting there instead of checking the news or Reddit or my email. But instead of those times feeling like empty downtimes, I was spending the time doing other things: talking to my kids, for one thing. Go figure.
Now, there was one bad side effect of all of this. When I plugged back in yesterday evening, I had around 100 emails waiting for me, and that was after I’d already been going through checking emails once at night and in the morning, deleting any fluff, just to make sure no emergencies came up. Yet another reminder that yes, I get a lot of emails. So I went from feeling super relaxed and content with my weekend to feeling fairly stressed by everything I had to do to catch up.
Ideally there’d be some way to reach a middle ground in all of that. Maybe what I need to do is get up in the morning each day and not just check emails and delete the fluff, but answer the ones that need immediate attention. I don’t know. I do know I want to avoid that avalanche feeling I got when I checked back in . . .
But overall, the weekend was a success, and I want to see what I can about replicating it more in my everyday life. Maybe I’ll put my phone away when I get home, or after a certain time. Maybe we’ll talk about it as a family and see what approach would work best for us. In the end, it was just three days, but because of those simple base rules, it felt much, much longer than that.
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Like what you’ve read? Please consider supporting me on Patreon. Thanks to all my Patrons who support me! It only takes a minute or two, and then it’s automatic from there on out. I’ve posted the entirety of my book ICHABOD in installments, and I’m now putting up chapters from PAWN OF THE DEAD, another of my unreleased books. Where else are you going to get the undead and muppets all in the same YA package? Check it out.
If you’d rather not sign up for Patreon, you can also support the site by clicking the MEMORY THIEF Amazon link on the right of the page. That will take you to Amazon, where you can buy my books or anything else. During that visit, a portion of your purchase will go to me. It won’t cost you anything extra.
October 9, 2020
The Great Staycation
It’s a mini fall break this weekend for Indigenous Peoples Day here in Maine, meaning the kids have today off, and all of us have Monday off. We’ve often gone away this weekend, checking out other parts of the state and staying at a VRBO or something. We’d hoped to do the same thing this year, but several things came up to make that more difficult. Obviously there’s the pandemic still, which meant that wherever we ended up, we’d have to tweak what we were doing. There’s also Ferris, who is fairly housebroken by now, but we realize there’s a big gap between “fairly housebroken” and “housebroken.” He also sometimes doesn’t sleep through the night, and the thought of sharing a room with him left me . . . reluctant to pay for the experience.
So I proposed that we just stay home and treat it like a staycation instead. Denisa was less than enthused, pointing out that every time we’ve done that, it turns into just another weekend, instead of feeling like an actual vacation. So I put on my thinking cap and tried to come up with a way to make the weekend feel different. Special. Cool.
My answer? A set of basic rules we’d follow to make the weekend feel different.
No individual electronic devices. Shared movies would be okay, and even video game systems, but iPads, phones, laptops, and the like? Nope nope nope.No work or homework.No chores
What would we do to replace all those things? We’d have a pretty much unlimited budget, for one thing. After all, we’d be saving hundreds of dollars at least by not renting a house for the weekend. Probably more like $800 once all was said and done. That’s a lot of dollars. So we could eat out wherever we wanted. Buy whatever treats at the grocery store we felt like getting. Go on a shopping spree. Whatever. We would also treat the time at home like a vacation. Go on some outings. Explore. Spend time together.
I presented this to the family, and there were generally positive responses. There were some hangups around that “no personal electronics” area, and Denisa was also worried about the “no work” rule, since she didn’t want to fall behind. I was pretty adamant about the electronics, but I did say to Denisa that of course if she had to do something, she had to do it, but that I thought the weekend would feel more relaxing if we really stuck to those rules as much as possible.
In the end, it was agreed.
Honestly, as I’m facing going home and giving up my phone and laptop, I’m feeling . . . anxious. Like I’m going to miss out on important things that are happening. Which is ridiculous, and makes the stubborn part of me that much more set on following through with this. I don’t like being dependent on things, and the fact that I’m this attached to electronics says to me that I need to do more of this in the future, so that I can kick that habit. Right now, I feel like I’m checking the news constantly, always wondering what other horrid thing is going to happen, as if knowing about it will somehow make me better equipped to deal with it.
I can go for three days without knowing.
In any case, if you’re trying to get hold of us for the next bit, you’re going to have a tough time. I might check my email and phone messages in the morning or evening, just in case there are any true emergencies, but that’s just because I’m a library director, and I don’t want anything to happen to the building and me not be able to help out. When I do use my phone for that, there will be a no social media, no news, no anything else rule. Email and phone messages, and just to scan if there are things that can’t wait until Monday.
Catch you all on Tuesday. Wish us luck.
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Like what you’ve read? Please consider supporting me on Patreon. Thanks to all my Patrons who support me! It only takes a minute or two, and then it’s automatic from there on out. I’ve posted the entirety of my book ICHABOD in installments, and I’m now putting up chapters from PAWN OF THE DEAD, another of my unreleased books. Where else are you going to get the undead and muppets all in the same YA package? Check it out.
If you’d rather not sign up for Patreon, you can also support the site by clicking the MEMORY THIEF Amazon link on the right of the page. That will take you to Amazon, where you can buy my books or anything else. During that visit, a portion of your purchase will go to me. It won’t cost you anything extra.
October 8, 2020
Who Won the Vice-Presidential Debate?
First of all, I’d like to thank each of you for coming to my blog today. I realize there are a lot of different things out there that you could be reading, and it means the world to me that you’d choose to spend some of your busy life to read the thoughts and feelings I have about life, the universe, and everything. And there’s a whole lot of “everything” going on in the world these days, isn’t there? So many topics we could talk about. Wildfires. Taxes. Pandemics.
It can be bewildering, trying to sift through all these myriad different opinions. That’s why I think it’s important to really take a close, analytical look at those issues that are important to the American voter.
It reminds me, actually, of what it was like for me growing up. A young boy in America in the 80s. I remember having to do homework, even though all I really wanted to do was play video games. But eventually I had to realize life wasn’t all about video games. It was about something that’s more important. It was about the direction this country is heading.
Who won the vice-presidential debate? That’s an excellent question. And to really get at the heart of the question, we need to dig deep. Deep into the history and context of our wonderful nation. A nation that will no doubt return to greatness once we’re through with this election. But how, precisely, will we be able to heal the great divide that exists today?
You can look at any number of statistics out there that will back up each and every argument I’m making in this blog post. I’ve got enough numbers to make a math teacher go cross-eyed. Sort of like I felt when I was in school, reading about a train going north at 90 km/h while a truck full of carrots was driving east at 55 mph on a clear day into a headwind of 5 knots. You don’t get to answer tricky questions like that without knowing a whole lot about what makes carrots so important to a daily diet.
And I know how to answer questions. Directly. Succinctly. In a way that leaves no doubt in the mind of the American voter that what I was talking about had many syllables. You see, it isn’t enough to just answer the question that was asked. You need to understand its context to really be able to dig into the meaning behind the question. And that’s where America is right now, isn’t it? Behind?
Behind in so many different areas. All of which can be placed directly at the feet of the loser of the debate, who (if they were allowed to enact their damaging policies) would only drive us further behind the rest of the world. But thankfully, my presidential candidate is ready to ignore all those different policies and problems and instead focus on what Americans really want to know:
Who won the vice-presidential debate?
So to conclude, I’d like to reiterate the many ways in which the loser lost and the winner won. The loser lost not just by espousing terrible ideas, but by being such an incredible loser to begin with. Supporting wrong-headed beliefs since the day they were born, whereas the winner won with flying colors, many of them unrelated to anything that actually came up as a topic in last night’s vice-presidential debate.
Thank you, once again, for your time, and God bless America.
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Like what you’ve read? Please consider supporting me on Patreon. Thanks to all my Patrons who support me! It only takes a minute or two, and then it’s automatic from there on out. I’ve posted the entirety of my book ICHABOD in installments, and I’m now putting up chapters from PAWN OF THE DEAD, another of my unreleased books. Where else are you going to get the undead and muppets all in the same YA package? Check it out.
If you’d rather not sign up for Patreon, you can also support the site by clicking the MEMORY THIEF Amazon link on the right of the page. That will take you to Amazon, where you can buy my books or anything else. During that visit, a portion of your purchase will go to me. It won’t cost you anything extra.
October 7, 2020
An Invisible Pandemic?
Look, this post isn’t about denying COVID exists. I’m well aware of that, and my blog posts more than back that up. Rather, it’s about wondering if there’s a national reluctance to admitting when you come down with COVID. I realize this all might be confirmation bias, and that I’m dealing with a very small sample size here, but that’s why I’m writing this post: to try to get a sense beyond my limited daily interactions.
Bluntly put, I personally know 11 people who have come down with COVID. That’s off the top of my head, and I’m probably forgetting some. But of those 11 people, I only know of one whose diagnosis was actually “public,” so that people generally knew he was sick, and he’s over 80. (He has recovered, thankfully.)
If less than 10% of my friends are going public with their COVID bouts, I have to wonder how many more of my friends have had it but not said anything. More importantly, I wonder why. I’m concerned there’s some sort of a perceived COVID stigma, where people are worried they’ll be accused of not following the social distancing rules closely enough, or that they’ll face some sort of blowback in some other way.
I know it’s easy to sort of shrug this effect off. “What does it matter?” Well, I’ve seen the flip side of this: friends who don’t know of anyone who’s had COVID, so it seems like not that big of a deal.
I see a big discrepancy between the way COVID is reported in the news, and the way I see it play out in my actual life, so I can’t really blame others for noting that same discrepancy and even wondering if, as Trump puts it, COVID really isn’t something to be afraid of. “Less deadly than the flu,” and never mind all the experts who have said that’s not the case, and the 210,000 dead Americans who beg to differ. The flu kills around 30,000 or more people each year in the US. I don’t know anyone who’s died of the flu. I don’t know anyone who’s died of COVID, or who’s been affected by it long term, so it’s easy for me to conflate those two illnesses.
True, I live in Maine, and the COVID rates here are very low, so perhaps this is just something unique to my area, and people who live in places with a wider spread are actually talking about it, hearing about it, noticing it, etc. But I have friends and family in areas with higher spread, and I’m certainly not seeing a discussion about it on social media.
Which is part of the problem, I think. I wonder if so many people are just staying silent about it, and that in turn is swaying public opinion of the many who are still going out and about freely in public, unmasked and uncaring.
So I turn to you, my faithful readers. I don’t want to “out” any COVID cases who want to remain anonymous, so please anonymize cases if that’s called for. But how many people do you know who have had COVID? How many have been hospitalized or died? How many are dealing with long term effects? Maybe by talking about actual cases more, we can help convince more people to take it seriously. If we do that, we’ll be through with it all that much more quickly.
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Like what you’ve read? Please consider supporting me on Patreon. Thanks to all my Patrons who support me! It only takes a minute or two, and then it’s automatic from there on out. I’ve posted the entirety of my book ICHABOD in installments, and I’m now putting up chapters from PAWN OF THE DEAD, another of my unreleased books. Where else are you going to get the undead and muppets all in the same YA package? Check it out.
If you’d rather not sign up for Patreon, you can also support the site by clicking the MEMORY THIEF Amazon link on the right of the page. That will take you to Amazon, where you can buy my books or anything else. During that visit, a portion of your purchase will go to me. It won’t cost you anything extra.
