end of the fourth week

Inasmuch as your legislature is Trumpist, and Trump is itching to drop all precautions, I imagine they only reluctantly extended the lockdown, and with an eye on what their great man will demand from them next. 

I used lockdown because that is the word that seems to apply to closing bars and restaurants and non-essential businesses and that six foot thing.  At first it was called shelter in place, but that's kind of wordy and odd sounding.  I've been calling it house arrest, but that doesn't seem to be catching on.  I date Illinois's house arrest from March, Friday the 13th, my last beer in a bar. Saturday I had a large order of bbq pork fried rice in a fastfood,.  I think the word came down Sunday, but didn't take effect until after Monday.  It was originally going to be two weeks, but at the time everybody knew it would at least be a month, and now we know it will be indefinitely.  I'm calling it the end of the fourth week.  It seems like longer than that to me too,  A couple days ago I had to check the newspaper to know what day of the week it was.  I expect that will become more common.

I have a Friday eggplant parmigiana sandwich and my Sunday barbacoa burrito so I have my weekends marked, but weekdays it's hard to tell one from another.  Another thing I've noticed is that a month ago when I had my improv, two art classes, lunch with my sister, Ten Cat, and brunch every other week with an old pal, none of which lasted more than four hours, I marveled that I had ever worked forty hours a week.  Nowadays I wonder how I found the time to fit in my classes etc.

But it's working. in the sense that it could be much worse.  They are predicting 60,000 deaths now and before they were expecting 100,000 if you trust the experts which Beagles is often loath to do.  But consider the Ten Cat bar on the 13th, maybe twenty people in there, but people come and go so more than that, and just one guy wanders in with the corona.  Probably five to ten people will get infected from him,  Some of them won't even have a sniffle but they will be packing.  They go home to their families, their buddies, their work, and then it goes to three of four people there, and those people in turn go somewhere else.  Consider next week when all the people that were in the Ten Cat are now sitting home watching tv and grabbing beers from the fridge, and if anybody has the corona it stays with them. 

That Finlandia does not seem like the sort of song we used to belt out on Christiana Avenue.  The Old Rugged Cross over and over and over again was more to our tastes, and what do you know the author of that song was a Michigander though from the southern part of the state which Beagles looks down on, though I think what he really means when he says southern part of the state is Detroit.

We had a brief brush with snow yesterday.  I looked out my window and there it was, although when I looked back again it was gone.  Speaking of early birds, well birds, I am worried about our great flocks of pigeons.  They used to get by on the morsels of food left by the downtown throng and now that throng is gone.