The holidays are over. Daily life resumes. I’ve read all the columnists predicting, extrapolating, interpolating, deducing, inducing, reducing and producing a lot of heat but not much light. Those on the Left are either whistling past the graveyard or shrieking in fury that all of this bad news is Trump’s fault. Those on the Right are rubbing their hands together and licking their chops and crowing that Joe Biden will be the downfall of Left and everything will be back to where it should be. Blah, blah, blah.
Where we really are is interesting. Omicron is delivering much as predicted. Everybody is catching it but almost everybody is asymptomatic or experiencing a cold. Very few people are going to the hospital and very, very few people are dying from it. Because of the enormous number of people testing positive even the Covidian true believers are facing reality and minimizing the impact of the “stop the spread” protocols. Instead of staying at home for fourteen days after testing positive, it’s five days at home and then five days wearing a mask at work. And I read where some hospitals that fired non-vaccinated nurses and doctors were pleading with them to come back temporarily to help out during the spike. The powers that be are pushing the same narrative of death and destruction for the unvaccinated but the average person is starting to realize that the story doesn’t fit the facts on the ground. It should be interesting to see if Biden decides to declare victory and fold his tent soon. Probably the biggest test will be what happens on January 7th when the Supreme Court reviews the OSHA vaccine mandate. If they throw it out that might be enough to force the feds to say uncle.
Outside of COVID many of us are looking out at a high inflation economy and thinking of ways to save a few pennies here and there to avoid eating away at the nest egg. Well, they say Americans are too fat. Maybe we can all tighten our belts a little bit and save some money that way. But for families with children, it’s a little more of a problem and definitely not a laughing matter. This general anxiety over money will continue to hound the administration and will come back to bite the Democrats in the November elections. Good.
I read a ton of copy on how urban crime is a top concern for citizens. And Mayors are wringing their hands trying to convince their constituencies that they’re doing everything humanly possible to rein it in. I very much doubt that they are and so the problem will fester and I believe that this deterioration in law and order will become the largest factor in political change over the next several years. The inability of Democrats to address unchecked black criminality will be their Achilles Heel. But whether the cities will be restored to safety is very much in doubt. I’m of the opinion they will become like Detroit and Baltimore, third world hell-holes that reasonable people will avoid at all costs.
On the personal front here at the compound, we’re still battling the war against cold because of our defective heating system. Our heating oil provider (which is also our heating system maintenance contractor) has made almost ten trips out and still hasn’t solved the problem. I believe there was a problem with the installation of a fan called a “power venter” and this installation issue has metastasized into a fatal flaw. I will have to fight the good fight and convince the bureaucrats at the oil company that they are the guilty party and must make things right. Camera Girl is very vocal in her opinion that I haven’t been forceful enough in my efforts to goad the contactor to take action. But the truth is the mechanics who might be able to get something done have been away on vacation and won’t be back until Monday. Forcing them to send out the “D” team on a holiday weekend is worse than useless as we found out last week around Christmas. We’ll limp through until tomorrow and then I’ll ramp up the pressure for a final solution that probably involves replacing the replacement unit and performing a careful installation. Ah, it feels like the good old days of project engineering when haranguing mechanical contractors was my daily exercise.
On the review front, I’ve made it to the halfway point of season three of Star Trek and it’s very painful. Many have told me to abandon this horrible and meaningless pursuit but I’m just too obsessively compulsive and stubborn to quit. What renders this task so Kafkaesque is that each succeeding episode is an order of magnitude worse than the preceding one. Don’t ask me how that is possible but it’s true! I plan to bang through the rest of the episodes as quickly as humanly possible. I apologize to the readers in advance. Read them at your own peril.
So here we are in January. It’s a weird and confusing world but some progress has been made.