The Other Don Kelly

Happy Birthday to me! It was my birthday the other day. We didn’t do anything in particular about it; Anne made a cake and we ate it while we did a video chat with my parents. We’ve been doing a lot more of that kind of thing lately: I had a cello lesson on Zoom this morning, we’ve done several “virtual happy hours” with friends — our weekly Sunday nights are now online — and we both have been using internet video to keep in touch online with our families.

I’ve also been riding, mostly road with Anne but some towpath as well. This (bicycling, or even just being outside) isn’t so great right now because the pollen is pretty bad, but the masks Anne made seem to help there. The other day I did a towpath ride and saw a bald eagle, not ten yards away, flying low over the canal, probably looking for fish or frogs or something. I also saw mounted police riding through the neighborhood when I came home, something I’ve never seen before but possibly part of some social distance enforcement.

The town has cracked down on gatherings in the neighborhood parks. We have been allowed out to get some socially distant exercise, like the rides or daily walks we do, but people have also been playing basketball, and playing on playground equipment, so the baskets have been disabled and the playgrounds are covered in “DO NOT CROSS” police tape. We do a daily walk if it’s nice enough, and we still see plenty of other walkers but the playground crowds are gone.

Meantime, we don’t need to do much shopping. We’re pretty well stocked with staples, so all we really need is fresh fruit & veggies. Friends of ours are farmers; they are the “farm” for a bunch of high-end New York “farm-to-table” restaurants, but those restaurants are now closed so they’re selling their produce to neighbors like us. They do things like baby lettuce, arugula and bok choy, so we’ve been eating tons of really good salads, as well as a lot of really good bread. Anne and a few friends are making bread to give to neighbors, through Donna’s “Little Free Library” which is now doing extra duty as a “Little Free Pantry” and “Little Free Bakery” to help ease food insecurity.

Some Things To Watch

We just saw the Season 2 finale for “Killing Eve,” and the latest (the penultimate) episode of “Devs.” Wow! No spoilers, but both were pretty shocking.

Right now I’m re-reading The Girl With All The Gifts.

Anne usually gets up a bit earlier than I do. This morning she got up around 7:00, and I was just beginning to stir about half an hour later when we heard a crash outside. In my sleepy state I just thought some snow had fallen off the roof (by the way, of course there’s been no snow), but Anne runs in, looks out the window and says “someone just took out our fence with their car!”

I jumped up, got dressed, and joined Anne out back in the corner of our yard, where the car was stuck on a part of our fence that’s still standing. One of the fence posts is snapped off, and some sections had fallen over. Anne was talking with the driver, a woman from the neighborhood; she had stopped on the way to work (to drop off cloth for people to make face masks), but she had neglected to engage her parking brake, and her car had rolled backwards down the alley and through our fence. She was pretty distraught, and also late for work…

We took some pictures and got some information, then (after breakfast, with some help from John & Donna) we got the fence back up and reasonably together, enough at least for a few days until a contractor can take a look at it.

And that was our morning!

We’re now deep into the first week of our national “social distancing” experiment. Anne took to it pretty well, and I think that, except for the obsessive hand-washing, I was born for this. We’ve been finding things to do while staying in, and getting out for some avoid-other-people walks and bike rides. I’m not sure how long this will last or what the end game might be, but we at least are doing OK, so far.

I just re-read World War Z for the umpteenth time, and now I’m re-reading Fighting the Plague in Seventeenth-Century Italy, a small book (a monograph?) from a historical demographics elective I took in college. Not sure why these are my reading choices right now, must be something in the air… Both books are interesting, WWZ for its pass-the-popcorn tale of an apocalyptic pandemic (especially the early denial, and then panic, phases), and the plague book for its look at public health measures and policy, once the unthinkable becomes the new normal — by the 1650’s, plague had been endemic in northern Italy for two centuries. The comparisons, from each book, with our own situation are very insightful.

In other news, I was down visiting my parents for a few days, to help out while my mom got a procedure done. I went down Thursday night and came home Sunday, and I brought just about everything I could think of: some books, the laptop, a scanning printer, and the bike.

The procedure was a success, though it took longer and involved more waiting than I would have liked; it didn’t help that I disliked the book I brought (Rama II by Arthur C. Clark “with” someone else; I should have spotted this as a red flag). It was so annoying I couldn’t even hate-read it… I spent other time down there hanging with my parents, helping my mom with some IT issues, and scanning old photographs. (I was going to post some here, but I’m not really happy with the scan quality. I may have to re-do them.)

I tried riding Allaire Sunday morning, it’s not far from my parents’ house, but realized (once I got there) that I’d left my cycling shoes back at their place — D’OH! Oh well, I got in a decent towpath ride yesterday, down to Riegelsville for lunch, for a round-trip total of 40 miles.

I’m not entirely a creature of habit, but I do get in a rut sometimes. Last week was not one of those times as I did some things outside my habitual comfort zone…

One Thing

Last Thursday I went to the local WordPress group’s monthly meeting. I’d been seeing the meetings posted on the WordPress news feed for years now without any real interest, but the topic for this meeting (security) caught my eye, and since the meeting place is within walking distance — and they’d have free pizza — I decided to check it out.

There was some networking/social time before and after the presentation. I knew no one there, but they seemed like a pretty good bunch, split pretty evenly between young and old, male and female, and was a mix of hardcore techies and “I use WP in my web-design business” types. The presentation was likewise a mix of very technical information, and not-so-technical good practices that I found easy to implement here. It was a really pleasant and informative evening.

And Another

Saturday night we had a party, and later in the evening the discussion turned to old railroad rights-of-way. We all pulled out our phones and consulted our maps to look at the railroad in question — it was the line that crosses the Monocacy Trail just south of Burnside Plantation, something once called the Lehigh & New England. The evening ended not long afterward, but I guess we were still curious the next morning because Anne and I decided to do a little hike to check it out, and we got a text from Scott who wanted to do the same.

We met Scott at the trailhead near Union Boulevard, walked down the trail, and headed west when we reached the tracks. It was like being in another world: we walked through homeless encampments and past industrial sites both current and ancient, all in a little corner of town less than a mile from home. The tracks were in good shape for the most part, with rails still in place, but past Eighth Avenue it started to get overgrown with sticker bushes. We eventually cut through a truck yard to get back on regular roads, walked across an overpass, and suddenly we were back in the normal part of town, on a residential street only a few blocks from home.