Long Time No Blog...

Hello, Gentle Readers, how've you been? I'm sure rumors are flying, so here are the facts about my disappearance from my favorite cafe...

1. How seriously the cafe owners are "going crazy" I have no idea, but I know they were required by law to stop serving as the main WiFi hot spot for the whole town. They couldn't seat people for a long time, then they were allowed to seat people at only half the tables, and then the coronavirus actually reached my town and nobody with any public spirit wants to sit in a public place all day. This has all cost them a lot of money--more than they'd get if half a dozen writers all came in and bought cups of coffee all day, every day, all winter. Not that we would. Because...

2. The whole downtown area is now a WiFi hot spot...if your battery will run long enough, and, during that time, it won't rain. I can't take full advantage of the fact that you can now sit anywhere in downtown Gate City and use the'Net all day free of charge. Some people can, and are doing. 

3. I'd been blogging from a friend's basement. The predictable basement problems had kicked in. The corridor that divides the basement meant the friend's son and I kept bumping each other off the Internet and passing each other on the way to the bathroom. The less he was able to work, the more inconvenient I was for him. The suggestion did come from me: I am an aunt, and as such, if it were my nephew, I'd understand that the last thing a twenty-something guy wants is to have to check the corridor for other people's aunts before dashing to the bathroom. Possibly his mother had hoped that this would motivate the guy to find a better job. Hello? In 2020? Find any kind of job?

4. So when I suddenly had the cash in hand, either to rent a physical store for this winter or to rent a van and go to all the open-air markets, come sun or rain or snow...I thought the store would be easy; half the buildings on Jackson Street are empty. I was wrong; the owners of those empty buildings wanted to sell them for what the owners believe those locations ought to be worth, even though the people who are willing to consider those prices are going to lose their shirts.

5. However, no problem, right? I could still go to all the open-air markets and I had a couple of vans and drivers in mind. While those people were still haggling, however, I went to the Friday Market in my own town and checked out the crowd. Let's just say that most of this crowd are not coronavirus bloggers. They are not heavy Internet users. They are not people who believe what they hear on television, if they watch television, which many don't. And they were not making a connection between the trivial little symptoms they had and the Dreaded Coronavirus That Kills People. It is hard to explain the findings of modern immunology to people whose formal education ended before 1960, although Grandma Bonnie Peters was, and Adayahi and Lisiwayu are, exceptions. These older people grew up hearing things like "You had strep throat, your sister had scarlet fever, and your brother died of rheumatic fever," rather than "You had the mildest reaction, your sister had a more severe reaction, and your brother had a fatal reaction to infection with streptococcus bacteria." So, most of them were wearing masks, veils, or bandanas, at least when they approached other people...but a lot of coughing was still going on. People who were ill and knew it were still swarming up to people who were at high risk. For anyone at risk, anyone who was or had been in the market was a dangerous carrier.

6. "No problem for you, right, Pris? You're immune." Well yes, obviously I am immune. I've still not been tested but yes, going by the results, I'm 99% sure I had my trivial little case of coronavirus in August. I had no reaction to being coughed on by COVID spreaders. None. I kept paying bills, and looking for heavy chores to do at home to prevent weight gain, and loving that feeling of being able to work your average town-dwelling student into the ground. 

7. Because most people do seem to be feeling better than we were this time last year. Because the level of glyphosate exposure from the air, water, every kind of food, even paper products, is lower! In 2019, I was seeing puddles of blood-flecked froth beside the road I usually walk into town, continually. In 2020, I've not seen one. I have had a few celiac reactions, but by far fewer and less unpleasant. Humans have made 2020 a very bad year; as if to compensate, nature has made it a lovely one, with an early spring, a mild summer, and a long, long autumn. And people have been free to enjoy it...whenever they weren't worrying about their employers or their business going bankrupt, anyway.

8. But, y'know what, about my case of coronavirus? I apparently got it from someone who was also immune. And that person would also have spread it to Yona, whose last words to me were about an over-the-counter cough suppressant that "really works, but lately I've been feeling just the way I did before I had that heart attack a few years ago." Yona and the mostly young crowd with whom he worked did not take the coronavirus seriously. Because he could still work longer and harder than they could, Yona did not take seriously, either, the fact that he's old enough to be their father. He didn't get it from me but what he's had has been deadly serious. Adayahi's still monitoring a family member's progress day by day, not venturing to report, also. And the loudest, cheeriest coronavirus-fear-denier in town has been on my prayer list since I emerged from quarantine myself, and she said "Oh, we've all had a cough, but nobody's been ill," and then proceeded to sound sicker every day thereafter.

9. I predicted this, not because I'm psychic, but because modern immunology was the hot topic when I went to university. About 99% of all coronavirus, for about 99% of all humans, is not serious; it's "the other cold," "the uncommon cold," the virus that normally doesn't even make people sneeze. But it's still one more way immune-compromised people can die, like the gray-green mold that can grow on their bodies and the harmless little streppy-bugs that can give them pneumonia and several other things most people don't feel a need to think about. People who are immune don't notice the disease any more, but any person, or animal, or object can still spread any airborne disease. Without noticing it.

What some people see as Trump's big mistake--though I don't believe for a minute that coronavirus would have got here if Trump had never existed--was trying to act as if there's one answer to the question "How serious is this disease?" There's a continuum of seriousness for diseases. Even AIDS and rabies aren't 100% fatal, though close to it. Even the strain of streppy-bugs that are sometimes used to process milk into nice digestible yogurt aren't 100% harmless, though close to it. Coronavirus is a lot closer to the harmless end but, like most diseases, it's serious for some people not others. The question Trump had to answer was how seriously to take the fears of the immune-compromised minority. In my county (official reports aren't broken down by town), out of close to 24,000 people, so far we've seen 12 people actually die of coronavirus. How much people want to sacrifice, for 1 out of 2,000 people, is a very subjective decision. Trump's initial answer to that question was Trumpy to the max, but if he'd called for a full lockdown, the virus still would have got here and probably about the same number of people would have died--leaving behind a majority of Americans for whom coronavirus is not and never was a serious problem. Unless that one vulnerable person among the two thousand we know happens to be our favorite one of those people, anyway.

10. So, in my corner of Virginia, the stampede to send kids back to school, have football and basketball games again, sit in restaurants, drop tots off at the library, go back to church, and some people even rushed to drop their masks...all coincided with the arrival of cooler weather and thinner, less Vitamin-D-rich sunlight and lots more non-serious cases of coronavirus. Just as the legal restrictions stopped pouring out of Richmond, those of us who understand what modern immunology has to say about coronavirus went into voluntary lockdown. Meaning, among other things: NO open-air markets for me this winter. I want to maintain my record of not having spread this virus to anyone for whom it might be serious.

11. So I ended up bribing somebody to reactivate an Internet connection that was disconnected for years because it was unreliable, in a private home, on the same edge of town where I live. Meaning I can use the Internet under a roof (well, a leaky sunroom roof, but still...) without walking through my locked-down town. When the weather's just right. During almost the reverse of my previous schedule: now I'll be online mostly in the evening. For the duration. Courtesy of a different founding family, but most of this clan are also Republicans. (I will be online under the roof of a Trump voter. Tweeps, please keep your opinions of Trump reasonably clean.)

12. So I finally got online. It took a long time, because the speed of Dell laptops, generally, has not improved since the Sickly Snail's time, and because this Dell laptop is a piece of garbage (that's its name, The POG), programmed among other things to balk and wheedle for cables even when it's set to work from a wireless connection. I click on the button that says "WiFi" and a message pops up saying "Can't connect to this WiFi connection" until I run a "Troubleshooter" program that reminds the POG it doesn't need cables. I would not have made this up but, at the risk of being a positively annoying blessing-counter, it is primarily responsible for my getting such a good price on this POG. (No need to pop my little balloon about this. I still hate using the thing.) 

13. And then...I have to share this because I find it hilarious. I've been in lockdown mode, right? I walked all the way into town to vote. I made three quick dashes into specific places of business in people's cars to use the drive-up windows. I have not been in a place where I could look at a newspaper to see who won the election, although, going by the number of Biden signs that popped up outside the polls here in the Heart of Kilgore Country, I would've bet it was Biden. 

(Trump wants to sue? How's he figure that? I will tell him, and I'm sure many other Virginians who are Republicans, or at least "Never-Trump" Republicans, or at least they sometimes seriously consider voting for a Republican, will tell him the same thing. If Congress voted for another round of handout checks, and Trump then vetoed that--which was the rumor all over town during the week before the election, though I found no official confirmation of it--then yes, Trump, there is a way to lose Virginia. You should have asked Congressman Griffith about this. I want honest work for honest pay and you can keep the handouts, but I was catching hate for having expressed this opinion on a daily basis when I was in town on a daily basis. Most of my townsfolk do not realize that even the first round of handout checks are coming out of their own pockets, sooner or later. If it's not true that Trump vetoed the handout checks, then he has grounds for a lawsuit all right. If it is true, he should just go back to New York now.)

So today I fiiiinally get online. Two and a half weeks after the election, in Lockdown Mode, I'm still waiting for official election results. I go on Twitter, I look for the election results...and...it's still not over?!?!?! 

Well, I call that funny. I did laugh. I'm a cheerful Irish-American Independent, not one of your grim, hate-spewing partisan-type voters. Actually I think this election was pretty grim but y'might as well laugh as cry.

Some elections held during this century really were close, and the results really were tainted. Both W Bush and Obama should have had to wait for more closely monitored do-over elections before either took office the first time. But if Trump was personally responsible for refusing to give free money to people who vote with their feelings, in a year when even the town richies are wailing about how poor they think they are...nobody would ever expect Trump to jump the net and shake our hands if we'd beaten him at tennis, but nobody's going to believe he didn't know that that veto amounted to throwing the election away. Either he's just become the most grievously slandered human in history, or else he has only himself to sue. 

14. And meanwhile...I am sincerely grateful to the people who wanted to advertise masks at this web site. (Youall know who you are.) This is a general, personal web site that's not really focussed on any product, unless we count "books" or "blogs" as products. As such, it's not SEO (search engine optimized) for consumer products such as masks. For this web site that wouldn't be appropriate. For your web site, if you have one...ah that's another story. Last spring I did a lot of research and writing about monarch butterflies. Google "monarch butterflies," send me your top ten results, and I'll confide to you where I rank at SEO writing for SEO-appropriate sites. After posting my articles, my client's site has been in the top ten. Once I saw it showing above Wikipedia woo-hoo yee-haaaa goodygoodygoody...

This web site's own traffic has hit zero during the second month without an update. I see Web traffic going down generally as people have less money to spend and have to spend whatever online time they have on work or school, but we'll certainly bounce back above that. I have no intentions of changing this site to get daily page views over five figures. It is a real-books-and-writing site, after all, maintained by and primarily for a small group of quirky people most of whom are related by birth.  I can post about fashions, including face coverings. I can link to pictures of flattering masks, comical masks, positively sexy veils, retro bandanas, and of course cozy knitted cowls. 

Here are some topics I'm not particularly interested in writing about: How to get rich quick. How to self-diagnose and self-medicate for anything. How to lose weight by buying anything (most Internet readers don't carry around all that many coins). How to hate any political candidate or party, though I am willing to consider reasons to vote--soberly, dispassionately, appreciating their good qualities and wishing them success at something other than politics--against them. How horrible, unlovable people find True Romance by flopping into bed with people they don't like any more than anybody else ever would. How to feel good about having a lot more money (or a lot more of whatever else, such as time) than your friend has--without sharing. How big totalitarian systems have never achieved anything like real small-scale communism, but even bigger totalitarian systems might (in George Soros' fever dreams anyway). 

That leaves pretty much everything else. Last summer it was butterflies. Last spring, dragonflies. Before that, for most of a year it was a series of SEO forum posts about international studies that went live in some European countries. E-books I've written very fast have been about language, communication, psychology, and religion, which I studied at school and about which I own dozens of classic books. (Most of the time I even remember which book to quote, though that's not to claim that I'll be able to find that book and copy that quote overnight.) Science, history, food, clothes, and travel take more research time, but I enjoy it. Genre fiction usually writes itself fairly fast, for me (except last winter when I was fighting the flu and one mini-novel just dragged); working it up to suit the client can take longer. Small un-cuddly animals became a bit of a theme for this web site because The Nephews were at the age to think they were cool, and remained one because they seem popular with readers.

Investigative journalism, as in Glyphosate Awareness, coronavirus, and other current-events-behind-the-news topics, is a genre I admire, but (1) it's not cheap (I take "legwork" literally) and (2) I've done relatively little of it, partly for that reason. I would love to write a book like some I've read by Dick Reavis, Roger Morris, or Carey Gillam. I would not claim to be able to write that kind of book anywhere near as well as they do, but I'd have a lot of fun trying.

I'm working on full-length, printable books about frugality, glyphosate, and (I think proposing this may have been a symptom of coronavirus, but I'm working with it) knitting, so can't guarantee e-books quite as fast as the ones I cranked out for Guru clients. But I can guarantee they'll get done. E-mail your proposal, mail your money order, and let's write something. My biggest health-related fear at the moment is that the dreaded Retirement Syndrome will start in either body or brain, so please help keep your perky Auntie Pris perking.