I think yesterday was the hottest day the puppies have experienced yet. It was in the low 90’s here. They both would play a little outside, then plop down on the lawn and relax. It’s pretty rare for them to actually lie down in the grass, they usually just sit up in it and look around. Just an observation I noticed yesterday, even in the evening. It seemed like they enjoyed it out there, so I let them out a few extra times throughout the evening.

We kept it cool in the house — about 74F — so naturally they had to cuddle and bury themselves in their comforter to stay warm enough for their liking.

And it was my birthday, the big 57. Oh joy, it’s my Pandemic Birthday. Pretty uneventful day all around, which is how I like it. Birthday celebrations should stop at a certain point. It’s a good thing to reach maturity, but after that it’s just good to be healthy and happy. Then, later on, it’s just a good thing to wake up in the morning. I’m approaching the third phase now… The fourth? I’m not going to say. I just typed it out, then realized it was way too depressing, so I deleted it.

I turned 57 today. I think my health is a little better than is was in the past few years. My blood sugar is more under control, for one thing. And I feel pretty good. I lost a few pounds since last year, nothing major, but at least it’s a step (or thousands of steps) in the right direction.

It’s scary out there right now though. We’re all struggling to get past the whole COVID-19 thing, still wearing a mask everywhere and still trying to socially distance while at the same time trying to get the world functional again. Then the death of a black man at the hands of a white police officer occured in Minneapolis and all hell breaks loose again. Protests everywhere from Black Lives Matter (BLM) fill the streets in many cities, including Kenosha, and the bad element takes advantage of the situation to vandalize and loot what they can at the same time. It ends up sending the entirely wrong message. Whether these people are part of BLM or are just tagging along to take advantage remains to be seen, but it’s scary out there.

They’re busting out windows all over, firing weapons crazily, starting fires… One police officer’s home in Racine had pretty much all of the windows of his home and the windows of a minivan in his driveway smashed out as well as someone starting a fire inside the house.

In Kenosha we listened to the police scanner all day Sunday while watching a protest participant stream the protest live on Facebook. There was shooting, people throwing bricks at police officers and their vehicles, breaking out windows in vehicles and the windows of stores. One person came out of his house as the protesters were walking by and threatened someone with a shotgun. Things got pretty heated. The police were initially trying to stop the vehicles in the protest, but that turned ugly and they weren’t able to stop the walking protesters at all, so they decided to stop trying to stop the traffic and just keep the protest civil, but I don’t think it turned out quite that civil anyway.

The city has imposed a curfew for everyone to reduce exposure and crime in the city during the protesting. People are allowed to be out and travel only if it’s to and from work. As if COVID-19 weren’t enough, now we have this to deal with. But Happy Birthday, Me! I’m going to go play some games and stop thinking about what’s going on in the world for a few hours.

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.

265,076 deceased, of those 74,799 were in the United States. The numbers keep rising as I watch the “tote board” constantly change on a dedicated PC open to the COVID-19 stats page I previously mentioned. That many lives lost and communities are “opening up” again and more people are back out and about. Apparently there is a fine line between how much self-quarantine is too much and how much downtime it takes for local businesses to go belly-up. Most would rather risk their lives than go crazy from boredom and/or see their community die, apparently.

I guess I’m lucky to still have a job. And so I bury myself in TV, movies and games when I’m not working. Not that this is much of a change from my normal routine anyway.

These days, when I dive into YouTube or live TV I’m overwhelmed with pandemic coverage of all kinds and I have to wear a mask whenever I have to go in to work. When I go on Twitter, there’s Trump, saying something silly. This is the first time in history a US President has EVER been so ridiculous and said and done such horrible things, and still he has enough supporters to get elected President, and maybe STILL enough supporters to get re-elected. How difficult is it to just keep quiet? About anything. He would seem so much more intelligent. But he’s outspoken about everything, doesn’t keep anything to himself, and that’s what his supporters eat up.

Stephen King apologized for how close several of his horror novels have come to reality. What is this world coming to?

And I post something political? It’s the End Times.

My cousin Wayne sent me a fascinating PDF document recently. It’s a complete Kenosha Phone Book from 1953! April, 1953 to be precise. Wow, what a cool snapshot from the past! This is 10 years before I was born. It includes handwritten notes on some pages as well – it’s the real deal. All of the phone numbers are 4 or 5 digits too, none of that newfangled 10-digit nonsense of the future.

I looked up Trottier and found my dad and his brother Sylvester, but my grandfather, George Trottier, wasn’t in it. Sandy’s father George Wegmann Jr., and his father George Wegmann Sr. are both in there.

There’s 75 “white pages”, as we called them back in the day, and 181 “yellow pages”. The Yellow Pages were advertising for businesses. And it’s ironic in this case, since the book is so old…they’re all yellow pages! But take look, it’s worth it if you like to look back at the way things were.

I’ll probably post a few screenshots from interesting tidbits about Kenosha as I find them when I dig into this book a bit deeper. Stay tuned.

Things are still a mess, but as they say, we may have peaked. The rate of infections has slowed everywhere, we’re all wearing masks, staying six feet from everyone else, washing our hands, sanitizing (when we can find sanitizer) and doing what we’re told, for the most part.

For whatever it’s worth, it looks like the nCov2019.live website is dead as of this morning (4/19/2020) and CNN has stopped displaying their worldwide and US totals on-screen 24/7 overlaying every show on their network. I guess this means we probably peaked and things and less critical. The total in my title is the last total I remember seeing on that site, which was last night.

Now there are protests all over the country trying to get the government to loosen restrictions and “open up” the economy to allow them to go back to work. Many people are very upset, fed up with all of the isolation and shutting-down of everything, and feel they need to start getting things back to normal before it goes too far, everyone goes out of business and the economy crashes. Who know what’s best?

I won’t get into it much here, plenty of others explain the situation much better than I can. One of those is Wil Wheaton. He tells it like it is. A tragedy.

Personally, I’ll speak to our own situation. My boss is talking about having us return to working on-site starting Monday, April 27th. Just one more week of working from home and I’ll be back at the hospital working on-site full time. Right now the tech on-call works on-site two days a week (Tuesdays and Fridays), and this week (ending today, Sunday) is the second week I’ve been on-call and working from home. Working on-site isn’t too bad for us, as we can do most things from our IT office and remotely, only needing to go onto the floors when there’s an issue we can’t resolve remotely or when we need to round on the WoWs and PC equipment on the floors.

At home we’re hanging in there. We have plenty of entertainment to keep us busy with all of the movies and TV shows I’ve collected over the years. When watching these, I prefer to watch everything I can locally instead of streaming it, saving the Internet traffic for those that need it more than us. Not that it makes a difference to anyone really… I think it’s just a psychological thing that makes me feel better about consuming so much data.

Sandy is such a wonderful cook and enjoys it so much, we’re staying nice and healthy in that regard as well. She’s also cooking much healthier food than she used to, so that helps as well. Our occasional dining out has been replaced by either curbside pickup or delivery from our favorite restaurants, so that’s a little different, but we’re still dining out just as often, hoping that helps support our local businesses a bit.

For specifics:

Food: Sandy usually posts everything she cooks, as either a recipe or a video from someone else preparing the recipe. Restaurants: The Garage, IHOP, Red Robin, McDonald’s, etc.

Entertainment: We watched several movies lately, including: The Turning (hated how it ended), Bad Boys For Life, Troll World Tour, Outbreak (classic from 1995 with Dustin Hoffman and Morgan Freeman), Vivarium (super weird), The Call of The Wild, and we’ve started watching the series Six Feet Under again. I think both Sandy and I watched it when it actually started airing on HBO in 2001, but have forgotten enough of it to make it interesting again. I remember it being pretty morbid, but kinda funny as well, and stars Michael C. Hall in his pre-Dexter days. We will usually watch an episode or two of a series and see if it “catches on” with us. If we want to see more, then we’ll keep watching it. Well, this one did that, just like Bates Motel did recently, and we’re off and running. We’re halfway through season one now.

We just finished the very last episode of Bates Motel last night. Sandy and I have been bingeing that one for several weeks. It’s a 5-season series, 10 episodes per season. It’s based on the characters from Alfred Hitchcock’s classic movie “Psycho”, though it’s based in modern day and in a different small town.

We gave it a chance one night and watched the first episode. That was all it took, and we were immediately sucked in and enjoying every episode, always wanting to watch “just one more” at then end of the evening. The storyline and acting is top-notch and we definitely recommend it, whether you’ve watched the movie Psycho or not. But if you have, you’ll find some neat easter eggs throughout the show, especially in Season 5, that pay homage to the original movie, though things are “twisted” to match the series in very interesting ways.

The shows stars Freddy Highmore, from The Good Doctor–another reason we chose to give this show a shot. He plays such a unique character on The Good Doctor that we wanted to see just how different he would be in a completely different role. It also starts Vera Farmiga, an excellent actress we’ve seen in a lot of other things, and Olivia Cooke, who played Artemis in the movie “Ready Player One”.

Everyone is now asked to wear a mask in public. You can have the virus and not know it and you can spread it to others by simply breathing or talking to them. I wore a mask when I walked the dogs yesterday. I saw a few others walking, but they had no masks. Sure, if you stay far enough away from everyone else, maybe you’re safe. But there’s wind and particles travel. It’s still a risk. And you can always take the example of our leader – President Trump, who refuses to wear a mask at all. He says it’s just “not for him, it’s just a recommendation.” The number of infected continues to escalate faster and faster.

The price for gas is $1.24. This is great, but where would we go? Everything’s closed. Gatherings are prohibited, dining in is out. A trip to the store is about it, just to gather essentials and get back into isolation. Everyone who works at the hospital was given a letter from the CEO explaining that we work at a hospital and we are essential workers. He suggested we keep a copy of this letter in our vehicle at all times, in case we need it. People just driving down the road may soon be stopped and cited for not obeying the stay-at-home order.

Since I started writing this post 10 minutes ago, the Covid dashboard now shows 1,135,911 infected. Over 600 more infected in just a few minutes…that we know of.

This is bad. I’ve never seen anything have such an effect on literally everything around the entire globe as this pandemic has. All Restaurants, Bars, parks, and even many stores have closed to try to help control the spread, but it continues. All public gatherings — meetings, concerts, or literally anything where 10 or more people might gather together for any reason — have been cancelled. Everyone is instructed to stay at least 4 feet from anyone else at all times. Millions of workers have been asked to either work from home or are getting laid off indefinitely.

No one knows how long this might last either. Weeks? Months? There’s no telling. Symptoms present much like the flu, but the disease is not. There is no cure. They say they’re “working on it” and hope to have a cure within a year. Meanwhile society starts to panic. There are mass shortages of toilet paper and hand sanitizer, of all things, probably having to do mainly with a few people who decide they’re going to try to make some money by hoarding and re-selling these things for a huge mark-up. It’s funny to see the stories in the news of people who end up stuck with thousands of cases of hand sanitizer and/or toilet paper, now unable to sell the items because online retailers recognize the scam and block them from selling it on their site.

That was last week. I held off on publishing the above, thinking I would finish it later that day or at least in the next day or two. Now it’s a week later. The hoarders have been pushed out of the news and there’s an abundance of toilet paper again. Sanitizer, well that’s another story entirely. But the pandemic continues to spread despite stricter and stricter rules being places on the public. I think it may have slowed, but we’re current approaching 700,000 infected worldwide and the US surpassed China (where it originated) in confirmed infected two days ago. Everyone, for the most part, is on lockdown. Authorities insisting we remain in our homes, in isolation–no visitors, no groups of more than two people now. Everyone’s looking for ways to entertain, occupy and educate their kids while in isolation.

Personally, since I work for a hospital in IT, we’re working from home too, but our on-call tech has to go on-site twice a week for issues that can only be handled in-person. Last week was my on-call week so I had the pleasure of going on-site twice last week. We scheduled on-site visits for 4 hours, but Friday’s visit was so busy with so many issues, I ended up working my entire 8-hour shift on-site. The scariest departments to visit for issues are the ICU and the Emergency Department, both most likely containing infected patients. I just stay clear of everyone, work on the necessary equipment and get my butt out of there as soon as possible. For issues that can be done in the IT Department, I move the hardware there, which is fairly isolated, repair it as needed, then deploy it back to the department it came from. I’m glad my on-call week is over tomorrow. The other two techs we have will rotate the on-call for two weeks now, then it’s back to me again. So we’ll see if things are better or worse on-site in two weeks.

At home we’re hanging in there. The puppies are doing well too, but we’ve noticed several of their toys no longer squeak because they like to attack and chew on them trying to squeak them, then play tug-of-war with them until the squeakers get punctured and no longer squeak. So I looked up toy squeakers on Amazon and bought a 50-pack for a few dollars. Sandy then performed surgery on a bunch of their toys using a seam-ripper tool and replaced them all with new squeakers. The dogs are once again happily attacking and fighting over their favorite toys again.

We’ve been video chatting with the grand-kids, Matt and Anna to keep in touch and make sure everyone’s doing ok, and we run out for the occasional meal (curbside pickup only, there’s no more dining out now) or grocery items as needed, but otherwise trying hard to just stay put, stay sane, and somehow keep active in both mind and body. Here’s a good dashboard of the pandemic. I keep one screen in my home office up with this page constantly, and I set it to auto-refresh every five minutes:

https://ncov2019.live/

So at this point it’s the little things. Just doing everything we can to keep it together and maintain our sanity through this and try not to get infected ourselves. It a few days the number of infected with surpass one million people. The idea is to slow down the infection rate as much as possible as doctors work to develop a treatment that will work. One or more trials are already in progress, but there’s no word yet on their effectiveness, if there is any at all.

Many have lost their jobs, either permanently or temporarily, and the economy is taking a severe hit, obviously. This pandemic will clearly change the world. What it looks like afterward and how we move on if anyone’s guess.

At least we have some decent technology to deal with the situation a little better. As I work from home, we have a meeting every few days using Zoom – a nice meeting app that allows hundreds of people to meet using video and audio. For us it’s only five people, so it’s pretty easy to manage. My phone at work is forwarded to my cell phone, so I still get all of my work calls as I normally would, and the Help Desk line that us three techs manage goes directly to voicemail and the three of us rotate who constantly checks and responds to the voicemails. In addition to that we have a ticket system we also rotate responsibilities for. With everything still ramping up and more and more of our users needing to be setup to work remotely, the past couple weeks have been pretty hectic. But it certainly passes the time quickly.

Let’s see what the next week brings.

We had a nice dinner at Texas Roadhouse last night for Sandy’s 61st birthday. I’m paying for it today. I woke up in the middle of the night last night with really bad cramps and in the morning my blood sugar was way too high. That’ll teach me.

I understand the high blood sugar reading, our celebratory dessert we had later in the evening at home was pretty sweet… in more ways than one. I don’t know what it was that gave me the cramps though. I only ate half of my meal and brought the rest home to eat for tonight’s supper. I guess if I have the same cramps overnight tonight I’ll know for sure it’s either the loaded baked potato or the steak.

This morning I typed up a sentence in a document at work and re-read it as I always do. I make frequent small typos, so I always try to re-read everything to make sure it’s spelled correctly. This time I typed the word “using” as “sungi”. I transpose two letters a lot, but to scramble an entire word is a first for me, and I sure hope it’s not a sign of anything. Just worrying out loud.

I lost 4 pounds last month. I’m sure I’ll find it again with little effort. Seriously though, I feel a little better, got a little more energy these days. We’ve been slowly trying to ease into the keto thing, which seems to be working in a major way for a lot of people I know, so it sounds like something that might actually help for us as well. Sandy and I are both getting started with changing our habits and what we eat. So far so good.

We were very saddened this past week to hear of the passing of Jada, Jay & Shell’s daughter. She was only 18 years old. Our thoughts and prayers go out to them as they go through this difficult time. Here’s a couple links that explain everything very well, as well as a couple of awesome video slideshows of Jada.

https://www.gofundme.com/f/jada039s-memorial-and-celebration-of-life Please donate if you can.

https://www.messingermortuary.com/obituary/Jada-Thoennes

Ernest Cline includes a really awesome description of humanity in his book “Ready Player One”. It’s so awesome, I’m going to repeat it here:

I wish someone had just told me the truth right up front, as soon as I was old enough to understand it. I wish someone had just said: “Here’s the deal, Wade. You’re something called a ‘human being.’ That’s a really smart kind of animal. Like every other animal on this planet, we’re descended from a single-celled organism that lived millions of years ago. This happened by a process called evolution, and you’ll learn more about it later. But trust me, that’s really how we all got here. There’s proof of it everywhere, buried in the rocks. That story you heard? About how we were all created by a super-powerful dude named God who lives up in the sky? Total bullshit. The whole God thing is actually an ancient fairy tale that people have been telling one another for thousands of years. We made it all up. Like Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny. “Oh, and by the way … there’s no Santa Claus or Easter Bunny. Also bullshit. Sorry, kid. Deal with it.“

There’s much more after that, but that’s the beginning of it. Some might find it a little offensive and might say it’s just not true, but that’s when we get down to the age-old debate we’ve had for thousands of years.

Sandy, Kevin and I watched this movie the other day. Wow. We were not quite expecting that. I saw that Nicholas Cage stars in it, so I figured it can’t be that bad, right? It wasn’t bad, I just wasn’t expecting him to be in this kind of movie, and I thought it was just a weird sci-fi movie. The movie is from an old HP Lovecraft story about an organism that falls from space and lands on this family’s farm. It turns everything into a really trippy psychedelic experience, and gets creepier and creepier the further into the movie you go, With today’s makeup and special effects, I thought they did a great job making it very disturbing. Sandy thought she might have nightmares after that one. Kevin was fascinated, and even watched it again the next evening with his friend. That just doesn’t happen, so I think that says a lot for it.

The background information I read about it on Wikipedia explained a lot. The director of the movie grew up on HP Lovecraft stories–his mother would read them to him when he was a child–and when his own mother was old and ailing he would read HP Lovecraft’s stories to her as well. They loved them. I know Stephen King also grew up as a HP Lovecraft fan, and was a big influence on his work.

The movie is worth a look, but not if you’re squeamish. It’s equal parts science fiction and horror. They avoid a lot of the potential exploitive gore with cutaways at just the right times, but it’s enough so you know for sure exactly what you missed and you can picture it vividly in your mind. This effect, I think, can sometimes be more disturbing than showing you everything on-screen.

I’ve been on a “MAME Quest” recently. This is a quest that might last for months. Maybe even years, if I’m lucky. Let me explain. MAME is an arcade game emulator. The first version of it was released in 1996 and it’s been evolving slowly over the years. MAME allows a user to run original arcade game software (ROMs) on whatever device you have the MAME program install on. There are MAME versions for PC, Linux, Android, iOS, and many other platforms, allowing users to play thousands of classic arcade games on just about every popular device and platform, including smartphones (Android and iOS) and consoles (Nvidia Shield, which runs on a fork of Android).

Nvidia Shield Pro is the platfom I run mine on, and the one I’ve had the best luck with, successfully running the most ROMs that I have found. It’s also key for me to be able to use a standard controller to play games instead of trying to use a PC keyboard or a cell phone touchscreen. I have to have that tactile control or I just can’t play a game. Nvidia Shield has some nice controllers that feel good in my hands and I feel very comfortable playing games with them, so this is a great fit for me personally.

Another key to the whole thing is the ability to FIND the ROMs you want to play. Fortunately, there are a lot of free ROMs and ROM sources out there though, so if you’re not too picky, it’s pretty easy to find a lot. But if you’re looking for something specific, it will most likely be much more difficult. Trust me though, there are tons of great games out there. I’m not saying it’s all legal and on the up-and-up though, because a lot of it isn’t. It’s a lot like configuring Kodi for the motherlode of “free” content consumption. You have to be very careful or you risk receiving warning letters to stop from your Internet provider, and possibly eventually losing your ISP and/or a serious legal issue with copyright owners and their lawyers. But that’s a whole other can of worms I’m not going to get into. MAME itself is free and legal and there are plenty of free ROMs out there, like I said. I have searched for most of the old arcade games I recall from my days in “Funway Freeway”, the arcade I grew up in when I was in my teens–the arcade that my old friend Hans worked at and eventually managed. That’s where we first met. But that’s a whole other story–one that might even already be published on this site somewhere. But as I was about to say, I’ve searched for most of the great arcade games that I grew up with just by searching Google using this format: “name of game MAME ROM” and I’ve had great results finding 99% of them as a simple link allowing me to download the ROMs. Some of these sites try hard to get you to click the wrong link or delay the actual download so you’ll get sucked into clicking elsewhere or view an ad, etc., but that’s par for the course these days, and I can always wade through the crap and get the actual download accomplished. Be sure you have some decent malware and antivirus protection while doing this, naturally.

I’m finding it very fun going through the list of thousands of games, looking for the true gems, and separating them out so I’ll have a pretty solid collection to enjoy in the end, hopefully playing my ass off living in the past until I’m much further into the future.

We watched Uncut Gems the other night. Wow, it was a loud, fast-paced mess. I think that was the point though. I think it was Adam Sandler’s first serious role too. I wasn’t sure quite what to think about it in the end. It was a pretty tragic story by the time it was over. It built up to this huge pay-off you think is coming, and then BAM, it’s all over in the midst of it all going down. I thought the music throughout was a bit odd and misplaced most of the time, which drew my attention to it too much. When the music and audio is just right for a movie I usually don’t even notice or mention it, it simply makes the movie that much better. But with this one, you definitely notice it. And it continues long after you think it should have faded or ended at many points. Just a little odd I thought. Overall though, it was a decent movie with excellent acting and a good story.

We feel more secure now. I hear all the stories about the issues with Ring devices–how hackers easily break in, how they partner with the Police Department to make neighborhoods more secure, but how that’s supposedly a bad thing, etc. etc.. But I’ve found most of the negative things be unfounded, and a few other apparent “issues” have two or more sides to them. You can look at them as being good or bad, or positive in some ways and negative in others. And either way, all of the conversation about them has only served to educate more and more people and helps improve the products and the company as they evolve and adapt their services and products.

As far as our situation goes, we went a bit beyond what most people do, just for extra protection and redundancy. I’m not going into it further than that though, you know what “loose lips” do.

Anyway, In such little time I’ve learned a lot. Things like when, exactly, the paper-person delivers our paper in the morning…and exactly what he’s wearing. I think he’s cycled through his entire wardrobe already at least once. When the mailman (-person?) delivers our mail. When our fire hydrant is flushed. When each neighbor walks his or her dog(s) – boy, Shadow and Tiger REALLY make sure we know when THAT is. But even when they miss one, we see it. What time of day the tree shadows are just right to trigger motion at our back door. When the weeds in the front yard need to be cut because they’re triggering more of those motion alerts. And if there’s even an accident at our intersection, I’ll have it fully recorded and on the channel 6 news well before the next day’s paper comes out.

The puppies had their first (and hopefully ONLY) major fight the other day, and we were able to go back and determine pretty much exactly what happened and how they brawled. Take a look, it’s interesting.

Then there’s the critters that apparently come out at night and frequent our driveway and garage. Racoons, spiders and dragonflies, oh my! There’s at least a couple of cats that cut through our driveway at least once or twice most nights, as well as a few stray dogs and even a fox now and then, not to mention the racoons and bunnies.

And the road work that proceeds at a snail’s pace in the street in front of our house. Whenever something changes I go back and see when and what they did. But at least we can see pretty much everything surrounding our house and yard, so both Sandy and I are very happy at this point. This also means neither one of us an get away with anything ourselves either. We’ve both already caught and questioned each other when we do something the other isn’t aware of. I won’t get into any more detail than that, but there is that “downside”, if you want to call it that. We think it’s fine though–it’ll keep us more honest.

It’s such a comfort to be able to let the dogs outside to play, then sit down and watch a movie or TV show and monitor the dogs in the backyard at the same time, just to know they’re ok. We know exactly when they’re back at the door and ready to come in too. We set up our “control panel tablets” (one upstairs and one downstairs) with Alexa and Ring, then set the motion alert ringtones on them for back door motion to be a bunch of barking puppies. We never miss when they’re ready to come in anymore.

Call me a geek one more time. Go ahead. Do it.

We watched The Night Clerk last night. It stars Ty Sheridan, who played the main character in Ready Player One. The movie is a little odd, but we went in expecting that. It’s about a guy who has Asbergers Syndrome–a high-functioning type of Autism. He works as a Night Clerk for a Motel chain and has some odd habits, but apparently also some very good tech skills. He likes to hide miniature cameras in the hotel rooms and then watch customers going through their day to day routines, memorizing and recording their habits and conversations.

He seems to do this only as a way to learn everyday conversation and habits, then he emulates them in his day to day life. Ultimately (and as we expected) this ends up getting him into a lot of trouble down the road though. A customer staying in one of the rooms he has cameras in is murdered and he captures it all on video.

It’s a good story, the only complaint we have is that it’s UNFINISHED! The movie just seemed to end in the middle of the story, leaving us with a lot of unanswered questions. Way too many to give us any kind of satisfaction at all. In the end we felt like we wasted a couple hours of our time.

Whoa, what just happened? Sorry, I’ve been ill. I had an upper respiratory infection that hit me kinda hard, so I’ve been out of it for the past week, groggy and resting as much as possible to get past it. Anyway, the Oscars came and went, obviously, and here’s my two cents:

BEST PICTURE – Parasite
I don’t understand how a foreign language film could even win best picture… Isn’t that what the “International Feature Film” award is for?? I’m so confused. Yes, it won for THAT award too. A guess Parasite is “catching.” In light of the Coronavirus outbreak though, it figures. I still haven’t managed to watch it. I will, very soon though.

ACTOR IN A LEADING ROLE – Joaquin Phoenix – Joker
Really enjoyed this movie, it was way more serious than I thought it would be and definitely not what I was expecting. Joaquin’s performance was worthy.

ACTRESS IN A LEADING ROLE – Renée Zellweger – Judy
Didn’t see this movie but heard it was very good. I’ll have to watch it some time.

ACTOR IN A SUPPORTING ROLE – Brad Pitt – Once upon a Time… in Hollywood
I think I mentioned this last time… I didn’t care for this movie, but now, given its popularity, I think I need to give it another shot. I’ll watch it all the way through next time to give it an honest chance.

ACTRESS IN A SUPPORTING ROLE – Laura Dern – Marriage Story
This movie was very good and Laura Dern’s performance was also very good. I’m not so sure I would vote her best supporting actress though.

ANIMATED FEATURE FILM – Toy Story 4
I really enjoyed every Toy Story movie, including #4. It’s so rare that ANY film franchise on it’s fourth movie can still hold up just as well with such a solid story and cast, not to mention how teachable and timeless it will be for generations.

CINEMATOGRAPHY – 1917
Excellent all around. Well worthy of this award. Watch this movie.

COSTUME DESIGN – Little Women
Excellent movie, excellent costumes. I haven’t watched the previous versions of “Little Women”, but I did find them and will watch them eventually, just to compare.

There were a bunch more awards, but I’ve taken way too long to get this post up, so that’s it for me.

First of all, before I forget (again), click here for a printable list of all nominees on one page. I love these “ballot-style” pages they make each year. They’re great for contests too, if you want to see who can pick the most winners each year. The Oscars are on Sunday, February 9th, 2020 at 8e, 7c, 5p, Now back to the movies. Here’s some more we watched:

1917 – Incredible movie. Just amazing as they created it as a one-shot floating-camera experience. It actually made me a little dizzy at times, and I felt exhausted by the end of the movie. It follows two soldiers during World War I, sent on a cross-country mission to get a message to a specific general who is about to send hundreds of men unknowingly into a German trap. If they can make it to him in time, hundreds of lives will be saved. The movie literally FOLLOWS those two soldiers every step of the way, seemingly non-stop, along their entire journey. It’s a winner. Seriously. I can see it winning in several different Oscar categories. Mark my words.

Richard Jewell – This is a pretty good movie. It’s the true story of what happened to Richard Jewell, the security guard who was railroaded into being blamed for the Olympic park bombing. It was directed by Clint Eastwood. It details Richard Jewell’s previous employment history up to the bombing and what he went through afterward. Kathy Bates is nominated for Best Supporting Actress in this one.

Bombshell – A well-done, well-cast version of the former Fox News leader Roger Ailes. It stars Charlize Theron, Nicole Kidman and Margot Robbie. Like I said – well-cast! It’s about as good as it gets for a 2-hour synopsis of the story. There’s a much longer mini-series called The Loudest Voice on Showtime that goes much more in-depth, if you’re interested in the story. This one is also very good, and Roger Ailes is played by Russell Crowe, who I think had a much better performance than John Lithgow did in Bombshell. But Bombshell did focus on the women the most, while The Loudest Voice focused on Roger Ailes. Bombshell is nominated in three categories.

Three Christs – This one isn’t nominated, but it sounded interesting, so Sandy and I watched it. We thought it was really good. It’s the story of three different people in a psychiatric ward who all think they are Jesus Christ. They all have very different personalities, and one doctor takes on the mission of exploring what would happen if all three of them were put in a room together to try to help them with their issues. One of the stars (who thinks he’s Jesus Christ) is Game of Thrones alumni Peter Dinklage. Very good movie.

Motherless Brooklyn – A private detective in the 50’s who struggles with Tourette Syndrome, except that back then they didn’t have a name for the disorder. It’s fascinating to watch, and is a must-see for anyone who likes gangster or mob movies. Very well done and authentic to the period. This one wasn’t nominated, but was a great movie.

And So It Goes – This one is an older movie, so it’s obviously not nominated, but Sandy and I watched it and enjoyed it. It’s a Michael Douglas movie, and I stumbled onto it after Sandy and I started binge-watching The Kominski Method on Netflix. That is an awesome series that just finished up a second season of episodes. Sandy and I just finished Season 1 and started Season 2. I highly recommend The Kominski Method, especially if you are a fan of the old movie “Grumpy Old Men”.

More coming soon.