pause for events

1. Virus cases keep going up, and have reached one million in this state. The highest per capita rates are in the outlying rural counties which long assumed they were immune. But it's serious everywhere. It only increases my determination not to go anywhere or see anybody. I did keep a dental appointment on Tuesday - when I said this was the most adventurous thing I'd done in weeks, the dentist chuckled and said many patients had told him the same thing, which I found an encouraging remark - and I'm picking up our weekly take-out grocery order later today (Friday), but, well-equipped with food, I haven't been out of the house between. I do have a lengthy auto trip planned, possibly as early as this next week, but it's purely expeditionary and I may not even have to get out of the car.

2. Cats are kind of frantic, though. Tybalt keeps coming into my office, climbing behind the venetian blinds into the window, and then coming back out again. This is not good for the blinds, which I have to keep closed to keep back-glare off the computer screen. (I may have to replace the blinds eventually; I was able to mail-order replacement slats for the heavy vertical blinds in the dining room window, a couple of which had lost their grip and crashed to the ground, no thanks to cats.) But it was Maia, the quiet, peaceful cat, who jumped up onto the kitchen counter and knocked the menorah to the floor with a mighty crash. Exit cat, top speed.

3. It's not the petulance of the giant baby hiding out in the White House that worries me, it's the people enabling it. Aren't there any adults in the room? Even the few daring to peep their heads out seem frightened.

4. Latest New Yorker, whose cover shows a line of people waiting to vote, one of whom is a woman holding a book - that would be B. - ironically includes a brief article on a book-summation service, currently wrestling with Ghislaine Maxwell's deposition in the Jeffrey Epstein case. "Context is so important," says the firm's "content producer" (no context is provided to explain what that title means). He adds, "I don't get cultural references sometimes. I'm from Sweden."
And I hear in my mind's ear the ghostly echo of an old Flying Karamazov Brothers line: "I am Norwegian: I do not understand."