I’ve spent the past few months at home, like most other people. But unlike most of those people, I didn’t really mind it. That’s normal for me. I like it here. It’s quiet, I have everything I need (for both work and play now), and (probably unfortunately) I don’t socialize all that much.

I still watch the COVID-19 tracking board daily. It has slowed down a bit, but never stops going up. Right now the world is at 5,481,141 infected, 346,071 dead. 97,906 dead in the US. I just worry that everyone is way too anxious to get out there and open everything up again and socialize this soon, maybe too soon. But I can also understand the need to get things started up again before everything is “too far gone” to recover, and thousands of businesses die a horrible death in addition to the COVID-19 victims. It’s hard for anyone to say what’s best. It’s a really delicate balancing act we’re walking now. Are the lives of the extra victims worth it? Keep a mask on out there at the very least.

Soon I’ll have to start going back to work the old-fashioned way–by commuting again–but I’m not looking forward to it. I saved a LOT on gas the past few months, and my puppies took quite a liking to their daily lunch walks, which will soon come to an end, except for on weekends. Like me, they’ll adjust.

In other news, I’ve been keeping plenty busy. Our movie server’s network card died recently, and unfortunately it was a pretty cheap PC which had no expansion slots at all, so I couldn’t even install a replacement network card in it. I tried an external wireless card, but it couldn’t even handle that. We have 400 mbps Internet service, and all I could get out of it was about 20-30mbps. Definitely not something I could live with for streaming our movies and TV shows, even if we stream the most from home. Kevin and I both also stream when we’re away from home, and even at lunch at work occasionally, so we need as much bandwidth as we can get. I know the drill–upload speed, which is what we’re using when streaming while away from home, is pretty slow as it is, but believe me, it was intolerable with a replacement gigabit wireless card in that PC. For some reason it just couldn’t handle it, so I threw in the towel.

Kevin had a much newer desktop PC he hadn’t used in over a year though, so I made a deal with him to buy it, and our new movie server was born. It took several days of imaging, configuring and indexing, but it’s done now and fully back up and running much better and faster than before. And with one less PC in the house I just had to buy another one of course, which went into my man cave. I called it my birthday present to myself for this year. Now I’m using the new one to play all of my games. Setting all that up has kept me busy as well, but has freed much more space on the other PCs in the house quite a bit. I (and probably they) feel much better now that they have much more “breathing room”.

We’ve been bingeing on Ozark for the past few weeks. As Matt said, it’s like “the new Breaking Bad”, and I think that’s a pretty good description. Unfortunately it’s only three seasons long though, and we’re on the last season already. Fortunately I found out last night that the series will continue, so we can expect a fourth season and hopefully even more after that. I think if I had known it’s still an active series we wouldn’t have binged quite as quickly as we did though. Now we’ll probably have to wait nearly a year for the next season to arrive.

Lastly, today it’s nice and warm out, in the high 70’s, so we’re enjoying it. Sandy’s cooking out, our Memorial Day cookout, since it looks like tomorrow (which is actually Memorial Day) looks like it’s going to be rainy. I took the dogs for a nice walk around lunch, and this is the warmest it’s been for one of our walks yet, even though it’s only in the high 70’s. We walked a little over a mile, and on our way back, Shadow pulled a “Socks” on me! Seeing a nice cool spot in the grass at Towerline Park he just plopped himself down to rest. He was done walking. The poor guy was exhausted. Tiger, on the other hand, was still ready and willing to walk and not stop. Maybe it’s just black dogs–how they absorb the heat so easily and overheat, but he’s only a year old, I would have thought he’d be able to handle a one-mile walk in the sun. Socks didn’t start doing that until his later years at 15 or 16. Shadow’s a little overweight though, so I guess that doesn’t help. We’re working on that. He scared me a little at first, but after a minute of rest he was back up and ready to finis the walk home. He did stop once more, but this time it was just to sit down and it was a much shorter break, but then he was fine. They both had a nice long drink of ice-cold water when they got home and now they’re just lounging around the house recharging.