Kata in the Carport

It’s over six weeks since we locked ourselves away.  It’s been easier than I expected.  I’m used to working alone, for one thing.

I’m trying to start the day with kata in the carport.  Then I have lunch and spend a couple hours playing Horizon: Zero Dawn.  I’m no longer clear what day of the week it is.

At least I’m doing a lot of writing.

I totally respect any desire you may possess to get off the planet entirely.  If you want an idea of where to go, you can check out the five recommended deep space stories on Tor.com.  (Hint: one of them is by me.)

Perhaps unfortunately my future seems terrestrial for the foreseeable future.  Since temperatures this week are expected to stretch into the 90s, I ventured up a precarious ladder to the precarious roof, where I readied the AC for the summer.  So far it hasn’t broke like everything else.

I spoke to my cousin and his wife in Minnesota the other night.  They’re both retired and are a little past 80 years of age, and they live in the country.  They have cable TV but no internet or cell phones, and thus don’t have access to the vast amounts of information and deranged madness with which the rest of us are daily bombarded.  If you want to communicate with them, you call the landline or send a post card.

This is okay except that they’re cut off from a lot of the information available to the rest of us when it comes to dealing with COVID.  They were kind of amused that I wore a mask to go shopping, and I was about to recommend a site that would tell them how to make their own masks, and then I remembered it was on the internet and they had no access.

They’re cut off from their kids, who are scattered about the country, with the exception of a son who’s still working in the mine.  (I don’t know who’s using the steel, or for what.)  Fortunately food is not a problem for them, since just before the lockdown they butchered the last steer out of what was once a moderate herd, and stashed the beef in the freezer.  I reckon it will take a while to eat their way through 750 pounds of cow.

They will be fine if they don’t get sick.  They’re used to looking after themselves, and they’re otherwise in reasonable health.  And hell, they’re Finnish (one by adoption).

Virus walks in the door, they’ll beat it to death with a haunch of frozen beef.