4/26/20

Saturday was warm and sunny.  Been a long time.  Most of April has been at least three layer weather (tee shirt, sweatshirt and flannel or similar long sleeve), often with a jacket for good measure.  Yesterday I worked my ass off wearing only a tee shirt and pulled a muscle in my shoulder.  The pile of tree branches that fell  during the winter (Silver Maples shed like dogs) got cut up and moved to the front yard where the town will pick them up sometime.  The two  trees in Harry's yard that have required trimming for years got trimmed.  Now I can mow under them.  I put the pickets that had fallen from the fence over the winter back  in place. I had a nice lunch with a beer.  I tilled the garden place where we plan to put the long-wished for asparagus patch and Hickory hauled in some horse poop which I  tilled in again and then I  dug an asparagus trench.  (Someplace in this process, I fucked up my right shoulder. I had a two-beer break.  Will and Swillar made a delicious burrito dinner.  

On Thursday I hired the computer geeks and they spent an hour trying to get Zoom to work, which it finally did.   There was a big problem with the sound.  It worked fine for the Democratic Committee meeting Thursday, but crapped out early on Friday when we attempted to happy hour with friends.  No sound.  Will be back to the geeks tomorrow. 

So instead of watching my friends blather drunkenly on the Zoom, I watched Contagion.  It's a typical movie from the 80s made in 2011.   It has a couple of smart assed heroes, Dustin Hoffman and Cuba Gooding.  They break all the rules but stand for truth and justice and, appropriately,  science.  Kate Winslet is the hottie who,  with  a 21st Century twist, is also a scientist, but she is mostly a hottie who is in love with, but divorced from, Dustin Hoffman, and dpoesn;t get what all the shouting is about until FINALLY she listens to Dustin.  There is  an evil  military guy, Donald Southerland. (How many times has he done this scheming bad guy role?)  It has a bad virus (some form of ebola, also a popular choice for movie plagues). And there are a bunch of dumbasses who unwittingly (for greed) spread around the virus.  (Unlike our current dumbasses who spread it  around by exercising their First and Second Amendment rights.) There are some nice small town folk victimized by the virus and in danger of being even more victimized by the military industrial complex, Finally there is a lot of chasing about by car and truck and helicopter.  I say this movie is better than Birdman.