The year so far?

What's been good about 2020?  Well, the pandemic, and especially our national response to it which was and is criminally negligent and extremely political and slothful (does the man actually have a job he does?) isn't one of them, as over 149,000 needlessly dead Americans could attest to.  But November 3d is coming up in less than 100 days and that is good after four four chaotic, dystopian years; make sure you all carefully vet the candidates this time, eschew wishing upon a star when you vote this time, and actually vote, and responsibly, this time!

I went to a wedding in a ballroom in a new hotel along the new DC waterfront in January and that was a great time, dancing well into the night, and I caught the very last train back to Virginia that night, by 3 minutes!  I went to see the Academy Award winning best picture Pandemic, er, Parasite, on Valentine's Day in a movie theater (perhaps my last visit to a movie theatre ever), and during the lengthy, dystopian foreign movie in Korean with English subtitles I started coughing, and by nighttime I was coughing my lungs out and spent the next two weeks with a debilitating malady that still goes undiagnosed ("you had the flu" everyone tells me, including a doctor I spoke with on the phone later trying to get an antibody test so I could participate in plasma therapy--naw, Kaiser doesn't that).  I went down to the Tidal Basin on a weekday morning in the spring and enjoyed seeing an early version of the Cherry Blossoms before the nation shut down in an effort to control the coronavirus which we have since squandered.

I have enjoyed infrequent meals at a Little Tykes Table on my front porch a have dozen times with a friend who comes over from the District (she doesn't have a place that would afford outside seating), and I keep up with a friend, former colleague and mentor who lives in Florida now via bi-monthly virtual lunches on FaceTime on that very same front porch.  I enjoyed reading, or re-reading, To Kill A Mockingbird, a Pulitzer Prize winning novel (I almost always read history for relaxation) that I thought I had read in ninth grade but now I'm not so sure because I wasn't familiar with any of it, and good on Boo Radley.  I finally put my eye travails of the last two years (detached retina) behind me, for now, by fitting my fifth and last procedure into the tiny window I had between my recovery from my February malaise and the nation shutting down, along with almost all health services, for a long time; the laser-shot treatment following my four eye surgeries improved my diminished vision noticeably, so that was good.

I went to two protests in the District on behalf of BLM and against our out-of-control president and his chief henchman the butterball inveterate liar Bill Barr, and I enjoyed treading on BLM Plaza a block north of the White House, and I tried to speak with National Guardsmen guarding various monuments who Trump brought into the District to "dominate" the streets but mostly they wouldn't tell me where they were from or why they were here.  I stopped going anymore when such gatherings seemed to sometimes turn into potential flash-mobs that might act upon a momentary notion to tear down statues as diverse as Andrew Jackson and Mahatma Gandhi.  I really enjoyed seeing a magnificently restored B-29 bomber roar over my house on July 4th at about 500 feet escorted by four P-51 Mustang fighters, two WW2 planes that played an outsized role in winning the war against Germany (Mustang) and against Japan (B-29); that moment still stands out as I just hang out in the house or yard these days.