Day 247 – 11/17/2020
Emerging into the sunlight today, thankful for hot water and long showers. And Asian food. And people walking dogs in the sunshine. This epoch, with its endless hours available for thinking, is bringing it home for me in so many ways… and one semi-detached observation is that I’m clearly not evolving upward for the long haul, so I have to fix that ASAP.
That’s not even the half of it. I’ve “dialed” a wood-encased crank phone on the wall – our ring was one long, three shorts. My playlist back in the day, before transistors and recorders, came from Les Paul & Mary Ford 45rpms spun on a 32-volt player because we had to generate our own electricity on the farm via a windmill and a wall of batteries until rural electrification finally came along and changed everything. Our tiny black & white TV didn’t show up ’til I was in 6th grade and we had one channel, mostly snow, and a max of three channels in the end. Out there in the country, we didn’t know steps were for counting – they just got us from here to there while we blew the stink off. I see food as legitimate art, but nobody told us we were supposed to be documenting it in photos, so the world missed seeing some killer hotdogs and salmon cakes.
It isn’t that I’m feeling old, just succumbing to road-weariness. We have the great relief that Joseph Biden has been elected president of the U.S., balanced by the fact that DJT intends to follow the norms in the same manner he has from the start, which is to say not at all. So the news is good, but everything continues unresolved. In the meantime, nobody seems to be on the job at the White House, nor in any way managing the COVID pandemic while it rages and replicates by the hour. That’s the only reality that matters right now – until we tame the virus, all else suffers. The virus doesn’t move, we move it… and that’s the rub.
Sometimes humans have a hard time believing in things we can’t see, hear, smell, touch, or taste, so the pandemic is a true challenge, but it’s out there and it’s having its way with us. Kansas right now is #1 among nine states in rate of case rise. People are dying of an illness they deny exists with their last breath and they don’t stop yelling abusive crap at nurses until they’re intubated. It’s a challenge to deal with that kind of idiocy, but it’s here, it’s real, and are we going to let the experts jump on it before it wipes us out? That’s really the question now.
Playing for Time 
Nov 17, 2020 @ 15:45:05
Totally with you (and the restaurant owner) on all of the pandemic issues, but as to the history of television watching, when we were kids, we had 8 channels once PBS came onto the scene – however we had the Topeka and the KC affiliate stations for ABC, CBS and NBC. I miss having KC channels, but they did away with that option once cable tv came to be. Cool true story – when my first husband and I lived in Montana, we had (even with cable tv) the local Missoula MT channels and the same affiliates in Washington state, and they ran shows at night with a two hour show time difference, so we didn’t need to record anything, if two things were on at the same time, we could watch one on the local channel, then catch the other when it ran two hours later. There was only a one hour time difference, but that’s the way it was set up. Little things sometimes mean a lot. Now we have dvr, and on demand, but back then, it was watch one thing or the other, no other choice. I think there may have been vcrs, or more likely Betamax machines coming into the scene but we never had one back then (late 70s, very early 80s). Now we have hundreds of channels, and the ability to record almost as much as we could ever want to, and sometimes there’s still nothing on! I remember being in grade school and the mayor of our city came to talk to us about this thing called cable tv – it seemed like some space age stuff back then.
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Nov 17, 2020 @ 17:48:17
“Now we have hundreds of channels, and the ability to record almost as much as we could ever want to, and sometimes there’s still nothing on!”
Oh, the ironing…
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Nov 17, 2020 @ 14:49:19
Right on, woman!
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Nov 17, 2020 @ 14:50:27
Hope you and the furbabies are having a sunshiny day over there. 💋
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