Well, lookathere, it’s now Saturday afternoon. Time has been all whacked out during the pandemic. You would think that it would go more slowly, being mostly stuck at home, but instead it races.
I’ve been avoiding politics as much as I can make myself do it, and since hospitalizations are at a high with not many (or any) ICU beds available it has become time to really hunker down again. When I went to work yesterday I mostly closed my office door and had little contact with anybody, even at a masked distance. I plan to keep it that way for a while. I don’t think that we are going to do Thanksgiving, even. My brother-in-law is having heart surgery soon, and they need to be extra careful. I am still considering going down to the lake house but Sandy doesn’t want to go.
Twitler and Mikie and the Ratlickers have been hitting North Carolina hard this week and last, bringing more Covid to our state. North Carolina has always been a purple state. It’s been gerrymandered badly during the past decade so it has been a tough slog at the state level. We have a Dem governor and attorney general and a deeply red state legislature. The GOP is not even embarrassed at what they do to suppress the vote and get their people into power by any means necessary any more. So I am looking forward to getting my Social Security and getting the hell out of Dodge at age 62. Hopefully we can wait that long, and we will survive in good health that long. I spend a lot of time on ex-pat Portugal Facebook pages these days. It’s doable, but it’s gonna be rough on my anxiety and the cats.
On Election Night I am doing a Zoom meeting with some artist friends connected through Leighanna Light’s Facebook page, where we will all have some kind of creative work that we are individually doing and some emotional support. I expect that unless it is a landslide we will not know who won that night. Certainly it was a devastating surprise in the 2016 election the following day.
Anyway, another hurricane remnant came through this week: Tropical Storm Zeta. This one was fast and strong and blew out a lot of power in central/western NC. We had no problems. We seldom lose power in this house.
The other thing that happened was that I did an online chat with an Orbitz rep to ask some questions about my Aer Lingus credit, and it was good that I did, because they told me that it expired at the end of June and was surprised that someone from Orbitz told me differently. Fortunately I had enough misgivings that I had not booked our flight. Now it has been passed up another level and I might get a refund since I have documentation of the Orbitz rep saying that I had until Nov. 30.
That would be splendid if I get the money back.
On the tax refund front, however, we are still stuck with nobody to help. I think that when Kathy Manning gets elected to Congress and we actually have a Rep who might help us we will call her office. I highly doubt that Tea Party Ted could be bothered to help out a Dem/Independent couple. I would at least like to know if we should re-submit our tax return.
Still working on moving the Flickr photos over to WordPress and changing the links in my blog posts. That is a pretty tough job considering this blog has moved three times and I’ve been posting since 2005. However, on the second move I lost a LOT of posts because it was so boogered up on GoDaddy that I moved a lot of it manually, and in doing so I skipped a lot of the more mundane entries. I lost the links to a lot of my photos too. In the noughts I wrote a lot, often daily. I have been working on this project for a little more than a year, and plan to not pay Flickr anything come 2021. They became too expensive and I’d rather pay WordPress to host my photos. Then I ended up dealing with moving the Tapestry Weavers South mess of a web site and I lost a lot of time. At least it is on WordPress.com now where I can deal with both of them in much the same way.
Sandy has been doing a lot of handyman work around the house and it has been a very good thing. I got some more of the front porch painted but it was stormy this week and I have dealt with my mental health by spending a lot of time in bed, unfortunately.
Okay. Back to cleaning and a bit of art work. I finished The Good Lord Bird this week and it is a great book. Amazing that the subject of John Brown could be made so entertaining and funny. I want to read more James McBride. Right now I am sticking with mid-19th century U.S. historical fiction and starting Lincoln in the Bardo.
slowly she turned 
Hi…I just found your site, left a comment and it seems to have disappeared. So my apologies if its only hiding and turns up! I had a request about a previous posting about a type of heirloom bean you called ‘beautiful beans’ that your friend discovered in a freezer. Is there any chance I could purchase a few of those from you? Your site is wonderful and I’ve put it at the top of my ‘visit list’. These covid days, I do a lot of ‘visiting’. Thank you so much and all the best. Be well.
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