The country is a mess.  COVID-19 runs rampant as the holidays fast approach, and it’ll get much worse.  It seems like people are putting too much faith in the upcoming promised vaccine(s), so they’re not taking the suggested precautions, no matter how much they are told to.  If we ALL just conformed for a few straight weeks we could kill this thing, once and for all, even without a vaccine yet.  But we can’t.  Half the country still believes masks don’t work, it’s all a hoax, and Trump has a chance at overturning the election results.  Because it doesn’t kill most people and some infected people have very mild to no symptoms, people are willing to take the chance of catching it.  COVID-19 is not political.  It’s a virus.  It doesn’t care if you’re left, right, or non-partisan.  It infects and kills indiscriminately.  Wearing a mask is not political.  It’s protection.  It protects you from catching the virus, and also protects others from catching the virus if you happen to have it.  If you think you may have been near someone who was infected, it is recommended that you isolate yourself for 3-5 days, then get tested yourself.  This prevents the possibility of false-negative results if you were to get tested immediately, since it takes a few days for the virus to show up in your system once you’re infected.

In other news, yeah, it’s been slow here.  We’ve been cleaning a lot this past week, working on the basement lately, and I’ve also been scanning more old photos so we can get rid of the many boxes we have stuffed with old photo albums.  After I disassemble and scan them, they then go into a “scanned” box, and when that’s full I give it to my sisters Beth or Penny, whoever wants it.  For me, after they’re digital and online, I don’t want them taking up any more physical space in our house, unless they’re mounted on the wall.  With how many I have left, I’m making slow progress.  I’ll need to take entire days and weeks off of work to speed things up a bit in this area.  Right now, my current pace is as much as I can handle without going crazy.  I’ve also found a lot of old home movies on DVDs, VHS tapes, and 8mm tapes.  I’m working on the DVDs at the moment–the easiest to convert to digital–so those you’ll find on my YouTube page, if your interested, as I rip them from the DVDs.

So it’s a toss-up what I’m working on on any specific evening or day off work – I could be scanning photos or ripping DVDs, or trying to find the cheapest way to convert our old VHS and 8mm tapes to digital, but that’s pretty much my life at the moment. Except for today.  And probably the rest of this week…Today is “Ready Player Two” day.  It’s the release of the sequel to Ready Player One – one of my favorite books – so I’ll be reading / listening to the book during my commute this week and any extra quiet time I can fit it in after work.