Skip to main content

April Fool's Day, Distance Edition

Ah, April Fool's Day, the day in which a middle aged man such as myself gets to clown around at the expense of friends, family and colleagues.

Not this year. The world is on edge and there is palpable tension in the air. Everyone is feeling anxiety, about the COVID-19 pandemic, the economic crash, shortages, physical distancing and more. Speaking for myself, it doesn't help that the Empire State Building is lit up like an emergency vehicle:
This year, I'll go home to my family. Instead of pulling a prank, I'll ask how the day went. My son has piano class (over FaceTime for the foreseeable future) on Wednesdays, so I expect to hear a song or two. Dinner, a little TV, then end the day.

2020, you win. But I'll be back. We'll be back, We always come back.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

In Memorium: Shaun Mullen, A Most Generous Man

Author, editor, blogger, and so much more Shaun Mullen has passed. Noting his blog  Kiko's House  hadn't been updated in a while, I did a search and discovered his  obituary . My friendship with Shaun goes back to 2006. While living in Australia, I'd discovered his blog when searching for informed commentary on US foreign policy in the Middle East. Sadly, much of that policy remains unchanged 14 years later, but that is for another post. Shaun  had noticed that his blog wasn't rendering correctly in Internet Explorer and asked if anyone could suggest a fix. I, being a bit of a tech head at the time, suggested Firefox or similar browser, and the problem was solved. We kept in and out of touch, finding common ground in music (I mentioned my love for the Grateful Dead and Shaun sent a dozen CDs of concert recordings. By International mail. The man was generous to a fault.), worldview, and more. My old site got its greatest number of hits when Shaun linked to a few of m

Tiny Treasures: Geocaching With A Kid

The Loot Need a little adventure in your life? Try  Geocaching . It's an old-fashioned treasure hunt made modern by GPS and a global network of players. Just download an app, sign up and go hunting. With millions of caches across the globe, chances are you'll find something.  A typical cache is a small container, within which is a log of players who have found it. Also likely to be included is any number of small keepsakes, the treasure of the hunt. The photo above is of some of the loot found on a recent outing with my wife and son.  Speaking of which, if you want a lot of adventure, go geocaching with a kid. Even a grizzled old veteran of the game like myself is made youthful when a kid plays, because the expression of wonder and joy on the face of a child who finds a small box hidden away by persons unknown is truly a sight to behold. There's something magical about the act, and the taking of a keepsake (and leaving a replacement of your own) only makes it better.  Some

The World In Which We Live: Safety Is An Option Edition

In a world in which Fight Club , The X Files , and the complete works of Phillip K Dick have collided into one twisted reality we call normal (with a dash of Black Mirror and The Big Short for flavor), we now learn that software upgrades that could have prevented the crashes of two Boeing 737 Max passenger jets were available... at a price . "Want your passengers to live to fly another day? Sure, but it'll cost you." And I'm unsure who is more evil, the manufacturer for making safety features ON A FLYING MACHINE optional at additional cost or the airlines for declining to install the features. This is a stunning failure of human decency in the eyes of this writer. Perhaps I shouldn't be so surprised. This is business as usual in our extortionary economy. In the US, medical bills are the leading cause of bankruptcy , a real-world manifestation of the "your money or your life" ethos of the street thug in literature and film. The hand wringing over w