Sometime after noon today, I realized I’d run out of dry cat food. Lyndon had been pointing this out in increasingly shrill Siamese tones, but I’d ignored him, murmuring, “I know, Buddy,” and thinking, I must have an extra bag of salty crunchy stashed somewhere. When I went to the trouble to look, I realized, […]
I don’t know about you, but I experience the pandemic and lockdown as this weird mingling of fear, rage, despair, joy and religious awe. Now, granted, I was a volatile, giddy creature before Covid-19 came into our lives. But now I have a heightened sense of doom, mingled with awe and simple pleasure. Take this […]
It’s Independence Day. All of the firework shows in Tucson were cancelled because there are fires raging out of control in the Santa Catalina mountains, and we are in the middle of a global pandemic. Naturally, this means that all of my neighbors started shooting off fireworks around 10 a.m., and the various amateur shows […]
Today I looked at Arizona’s numbers — I’m experimenting with using the Johns Hopkins website, which is updated more frequently than covidtracking.com, but sends my iPhone into a frenzy of error messages and page reloading — and I panicked. Here’s how we look on coronavirus.jhu.edu: Arizona, US Confirmed: 79,215 Deaths: 1,641 Recovered: 0 Active: 77,574 […]
I’m back working from home after a long stint in the lab. Remember what I said about seeing what really happens in the neighborhood during daylight hours? In the middle of a long afternoon of skimming over shock and vibe data, I looked up from my monitors and through a window, and saw a pillar […]
It’s not easy to keep your guard up here in Baja Arizona. Don’t get me wrong. Viewed objectively, the increase in confirmed cases is alarming. Human beings are an unstable blend of wishful thinking and optimism, though, so we’re pretty good at watching positive test results go from 70 to 13,169 and thinking, Yeah, that […]
