Lisa reminded me that one of the reasons we spent so much money on groceries in the past week was so that we could stay safely at home away from people who participated in super-spreader "celebration" events. As I had nothing pressing this morning (unlike tomorrow morning, when I have a convention-planning meeting), I took heart from her words and made my own breakfast fry-up, without a frying pan.

( Simple but Satisfying )

I know it's pretty simple, but it's tasty, and I like it. It just takes a lot longer than buying it from a restaurant. Having worked as a short-order cook for a while when I was in college, I understand why, too. If I had the fully-equipped kitchen I had back in the day, I could dash out a meal like this much more quickly, too.

Seriously, I continue to be grateful that we have done well enough to keep stocked and be able to stay home, stay safe, and still eat well.

Guy Gavriel Kay put out a call on Twitter a couple of days ago for a "virtual cocktail hour" starting at 4:30 ET on Saturday. We were all encouraged to post pictures of ourselves with a drink of our choice, and were encouraged to dress up nicely. Unlike Guy, I do not own a tuxedo, but I did the best that I could.

( Cleaning Up Nicely )

But what to drink? I don't like the taste of alcohol, so what sort of "mocktail" could I make? With a nudge from Cheryl Morgan, I found a mixed drink I find I like.

( A New Vice )

I discovered that this non-alcoholic (and in this case sugar-free except for the fruit) drink was quite nice and I think I'll be drinking it more often. I might even get some lime cordial that appears to be also part of the recipe. Not sure about the bitters, even though it is still considered to be nominally a "soft" drink with only a dash of them. Maybe I'll try the "full" version sometime when I'm somewhere with access to all of the ingredients and feeling slightly adventurous. I know that it's a good thing that wasn't an alcoholic drink, because if it had been, I would have been sloshed to the gills given how many of them I drank once I discovered how much I liked it.

Lisa and I are still significantly offset in our sleeping schedules, so the start of my day is the end of hers. This morning after I got up and ready to go, we went to Reno in the hope that WinCo Foods wouldn't be busy on this Easter Sunday. They were not. More and more people are wearing masks, and it seems to us that more are getting that leave space between people. Even better, the supply chain seems to be slowly catching up, as we were able to get most of what we wanted, and nothing we wanted had purchase limitations.

We also went to the Raley's in Sparks because they carry there some of the things that Lisa wanted that the Fernley store does not.

Even going to the grocery store makes us nervous. At least when we get back out to the van, we figure it's safe to remove our masks after treating our hands with hand sanitizer. These two stops were enough, and I was happy to get home, where we unloaded everything and Lisa headed off to bed.

Cheryl interviewed me yesterday on Zoom (this time I got the settings right on Zoom so it picked the right microphone) as we discussed this year's Hugo Award finalists and I got to play the technical expert for her audience on Bristol's Ujima Radio.

It is for now still a waiting game. Our original schedule before the pandemic hit would have had Lisa and I up in Seattle this weekend attending Norwescon, with me flying back to the Bay Area to spend a week working at the office there and to deal with some routine (now canceled) medical/dental appointments. BayCon would have been a few weeks away, with Westercon 73 on the horizon and New Zealand after that. Now everything is canceled, postponed, virtual only, or waiting to see whether they can actually happen or not. I'm not all that confident. Personally I'm doing fine, as the transportation-management day jobbe is very busy and thanks to all of the canceled trips, I'm trying to put a dent in our debt. We're spending a lot more on groceries, of course, but we're comfortable. Things could be so much worse, and I am grateful to be having only minor worries, not major ones like losing our home or wondering where our next meal is coming from.

I think I'm mostly caught up on things that can be done right now. It's still a waiting game on a lot of things happening later this year.

Formula 1 racing is, like almost everything else, on hold right now, but F1 is authorizing an e-sports version of their grands prix, with a bunch of actual race car drivers and a few celebrities competing. I watched today's race, which used the Melbourne track because Vietnam (whose turn it would have been this week) isn't in the 2019 version of the game. It was entertaining enough to pass the time. I didn't see the first race two weeks ago, but from the commentary this week, I understand that they turned off some of the realism so that when you whacked into a wall, you just bounced off rather than actually crashing, on account of few of the race participants had any experience with the electronic version of the race, even if they were experienced actual F1 drivers, and that makes sense.

I ventured out on foot to collect this weekend's mail and to buy a gallon of milk. In keeping with the newest advice from the CDC, I wore a face mask while in the post office and the Family Dollar store. (Not an N95, of course, but one of the particle masks we bought for use with home improvement projects. I wish we'd remembered to wear them while we were accessing the attic space a few days ago, for I'm sure we inhaled some fiberglass insulation while moving the trap door.) Away from the store, on the open streets, with nobody else in sight (save a few passing motorists), I figured it would be okay to take the mask off. I sprayed it with Lysol when I got home. It may not make much of a difference, but what it can do, I did.

While it's maddening that we have such an incompetent boob leading the country at the national level, and some have (rightly) stated that the haphazard US government structure can hamper a unified response to a worldwide threat, I do think that the federal structure means that those of us living in states with someone saner leadership (mostly, but not entirely, led by Democrats) have at least a somewhat better chance than those people in those states whose leaders apparently want their own citizens to die so that their stock portfolios will increase in value.

A local pawnshop owner very active in city politics was quoted in the local Lyon County newspaper insisting that he would continue to stay open despite Governor Steve Sisolak's declaration of a state of emergency ordering all non-essential businesses to close.

(It should be understood here that while governor Sisolak is a Democrat, as is a majority of both houses of the state legislature, most of the state outside of the two largest metropolitan areas is heavily — like upwards of 80% — Republican. In fact, there's a foothold of the political thought in the Nevada rural areas including where I live that the Republicans are way too weak and wimpy. There are a bunch of rural Nevadans trying to recall him; I'm amused to see that some of their fellow Republicans are chastising them for chasing a fool's errand. But I guess there are a lot of people who are convinced that the only Real Murikens are those conservatives living outside of large cities, and that unless you're a Sworn Member of the National Trumpist Dominationist Party, you're a traitor to Murika.)

The pawnshop owner opined that unless martial law were declared, nobody can force him to close. Well, I think he's right that the governor's order doesn't apply to his business, but not for that reason. I went and looked at the declaration itself, and it included a reference to an opinion from the Nevada Attorney General that Nevada Revised Statutes (NRS) section 414 (the laws that govern emergencies) cannot be used to close businesses that sell firearms, and that pawnshop very definitely sells lots of weapons. So in my opinion (IANAL), the pawnshop owner reached the right conclusion, but for the wrong reason, and is grandstanding for the benefit of his political career.

This is the same person who was obliged to resign from the city council when he moved from the ward from which he was elected to another ward, but didn't resign until a court ruled that if you move our of the ward from which you're elected in a municipality with geographic wards, you must resign your seat. To his credit, while he did not resign until the court ruling came down, he did stop attending city council meetings between the time he moved and the time he was obliged to resign. He's also chair of the Fire District, whose members are elected at large and thus he didn't have to resign from it.

In any event, those people insisting that no business can be ordered to close by the Governor are wrong. I went and read NRS 414. There's a declared public health emergency, and the Governor is exercising the powers delegated to him by law. You might not like that law, but it's there. I'll be really surprised if the Freedom At All Costs Including Everyone Dying people get any traction, should they try to take this to the courts.

Wednesday morning, I went onto the front porch (before dawn, because of my Day Jobbe hours) to get a log for the fireplace and felt crunching under my feet. Turning on the porch light, I saw that we'd received a tiny bit of snow overnight.

( Is This the End? )

Had this not become the year of The Great Cancellation, today would have been the start of the three-week trip to the Bay Area and the Pacific Northwest. I sort of was hoping a big storm would come through and dump so much snow on Donner Summit that I-80 would close (as has been happening over the past week or so). Then I could have said, "Oh, well, I wouldn't have been able to go anyway. And those grapes were probably sour, too."

Instead of a trip in the Rolling Stone, Lisa and I drove into Reno to attempt to do some shopping. Home Depot had not yet gotten any cans of Lysol spray back into stock. (We have one can left, but it's been our normal practice to keep several anyway; it's just bad luck for us that we were on the low end just before there was a run on it.) Cost Plus World Market has closed their stores (although initially they were open during the early days because of their food selection, which was why we were going there). WinCo Foods was open, however, and we only had about a five minute wait in the queue to get in.

We tried really hard to maintain social distancing, but it's not easy when the people around you don't seem to see a need to do so and instead walk around aimlessly, ignoring everyone around them. But because of WinCo metering people in and out of their stores, the general density was relatively low. We got what we could. We're trying to keep the stock of groceries extended in case the quarantine has to go hard, which we reckon could happen any day now.

I really should have been more busy today. There's a report due to the SFSFC Board of Directors by their meeting next Saturday, and today would have been ideal for writing it, but I have been completely out of energy today and got nearly nothing done. Lisa and I did get out for a couple of walks, though: one in the afternoon and another one after dinner. We had the rest of the pork stew left over from last night as we watched an episode of Hec Ramsey ("CSI: The Wild West") from the 1970s. Lisa spotted that they couldn't possibly have had electricity in the town of New Prospect, Oklahoma in the very-definitely-established episode date of 1902, and we looked it up later and confirmed that rural electrification didn't reach Oklahoma until the 1930s.

Anyway, I hope I'll have the energy to write that report about Westercon 74 in the next couple of days so I can give it to the Board to have enough time to read it before our (exclusively online, of course) meeting next weekend.