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This will a brief update. It is also late. I was interrupted.

I have worked all night and all day, and I am headed into the next night. I grab a nap when I can.

I spent Tuesday and all night Tuesday and the morning of Wednesday working.

I am tired, and it is hard to write. I am waiting for someone to reply back to my request, so I have a few minutes to write.

Today I ordered lunch from a Smaaken Waffle Sandwiches delivered. My sandwich was more like eating a sponge around some real food. Maybe not something you should have delivered. I had slipped in a nap late morning, having only a few hours of sleep overnight, so a waffle in the afternoon sounded good. It was not.

I continued to work on the issues at the shoe company and made dinner of beef ribs thinly sliced cross-cut. I marinated them in teriyaki sauce and did them on the gas grill. Perfect. I tried to make steak fries in the oven by slicing potatoes and roasting with salt and pepper. The fries were just average and a bit undercooked.

I am back online working and trying to contact the India team to take up the issue that happened at 9:00PM local time. I have another sleepless night coming.

Our weather was rain and more normal Oregon weather. Funny when you welcome back gray weather.

I received a new book today, Digging Up Armageddon, from one of my favorite authors: Eric H. Cline. This book is the re-telling of the 1920s dig at Megiddo. I visited the ruins of Megiddo in Israel in 1994 with Susie and a church group. The author’s lectures are online, highly recommended, and I loved his previous book 1177BC: The Year Civilization Collapsed. 

For my reading, this is another 1920s story and more homework for my Call of Cthulhu role-playing game writing. What is a real dig like in the 1920s? Looking forward to reading this and using it as a model for my own horror adventure. It will go next to my copies of 1926 reports on the dig at Stonehenge.  

The market was up today. Oil was the main discussion, and it appears that the panic is over, but there were a lot of money changing hands due to options trades. ETFs were also called out for causing some of the chaos over the last week. The president of the NASDAQ said that they are experiencing a large increase in options activity. I bet!

Today the reports show that more than two-thousand three-hundred Americans died from the virus this Wednesday. One of the hymns I can actually can sing for today: Lift High the Cross.

Today was a bit more stressful at work, as various items have come together to put me on a 7/24 call and work schedule. I am waiting for India’s day to start to work some more, and thus, I will be back at it early this morning. Another issue has been escalated to “very high,” and I am the contact for that too. Thus the chances for sleep tonight are low. But those are the breaks if you are an IT professional in today’s never-ending workdays at home.

This was contrasted by a card I received from my cousin’s daughter, Grace Bailey, and her soon to be husband. I had received a wedding invitation and was thinking of going to Michigan in June to attend. With the virus messing with all my travel plans, canceling trips to Australia and Florida, I had completely spaced the wedding! The card stated that the reception was postponed. The computer problems paled to this. My niece cannot have us there to celebrate her wedding.

I found a Christmas card, The Twelve Days of Oregon, crossed out Christmas and wrote in “Lockdown” and wrote a short note that I sorry about the virus canceling their event and that I was still working for Nike here in the center of the virus. I then wrote a decent check to Grace and sent it–I always write the check out to the gal. I hope the card, silly as it is, and the money will make her and Jeffrey happy and help with any expenses. I feel terrible that I had forgotten them with all the chaos.

And then to remind me of how silly I was, I fell out of my work chair. I dropped a pen on the floor and leaned over and the chair tipped and landed me on the floor and into a sharp edge of my desk. Yes, the computer architect of Nike cannot handle a pen and a chair.

It was so unbelievably stupid. I took a selfie sitting on the floor.

On the subject of stupid, the stock market is still going down, about three percent, as a reaction to oil prices. It seems, eyes-in-full-roll-mode, that oil is still being pumped and that there is no way to stop pumping it. Since we are not driving much and winter is over, the gas and heating oil use is down–I thought we knew this. Well, oil is still being loaded into tankers and pipelines, and there is no real way to store it. The price of oil is now about the cost of the barrel to put it in, $7USD, or so. And of course, that answer is not to shut down production but to give money to the oil industry to make up for the low prices they are getting. I think I should fall out of my chair again.

So the song for today is from Bob Dylan: I Used to Care But Things Have Changed. Bob’s most cynical song.

Lunch was from Wild Buffalo Wings, “Asian Zing” traditional wings and a kid’s cheeseburger with fries for Susie. I had that delivered. I made spaghetti and Italian sausage with Vodka sauce, from a jar, for dinner. We opened a bottle of wine from Purple Cow Vinyard, I said to Corwin and Susie, “We need to improve the quality of our drinking,” so we did. It was a 2010 bottle, and it is perfect. And that reminds me of this movie moment: This takes the sting out of being occupied.

The report is the worst so far in the USA. Over two-thousand eight-hundred people passed away from the virus today. I went with an Irish hymn: Be Thou My Vision.

This will be my shortest update.

I was up at 2AM and 6AM working on a computer problem.

This was followed by meetings all video conferences.

I am very tired.

My books on Elric are here today. I have already finished the first part of the first book. I forgot how much I liked Michael Moorcock‘s writing. I will go back to read some more soon. My favorite Doctor Who book is by Michael Moorcock–Pirates sailing solar sail ships in space: The Coming of the Terraphiles.

I had soup and garlic bread for dinner. I ordered from La Provence a Tuna Melt sandwich. Susie is having the French Onion soup that came with the sandwich for dinner. It was delivered.

I managed a walk today. The flowering apple trees are always bright in the spring. The apple trees here are very old and from the original farm that became all these houses. I have one, partially fallen, in my backyard. We would call these cider apples when I young in Michigan. Here is one near our street. It is planted in a straight line with the other Apple trees, a memory of the original orchard.

The Reedville Elementry School will not open until the fall. I walked by and miss all the noise and bustle of the school that is just a block away from our home. April should be the beginning of wrapping up the school year. The school wrote on their sign that they miss the families. They have food boxes for pick-up on Monday’s for folks who need help.

Tonight was also Dungeons and Dragons 5e online at Roll20 and the continuation of The Tomb of Horrors with my four players with eight-level characters. We played for just an hour and a half as I was so tired, and the adventure has a false ending that I managed to fool them with. We will start next week with them no longer fooled and a bit wiser (and ninth-level). Actually, Bill, one of the players, said he was happy that his imagined character did escape the legendary adventure with loot. Next Monday, the adventurers will again descend into the Tomb, knowing that they have the deadliest parts to come.

Oil did an unexpected thing today; it went to negative values. There is no storage left, and they are pumping it still and not refining it. According to the reports I watched, you cannot store oil for long and refined products age fast. Oil is priced by contracts, and apparently, investors sell the contracts before delivery except for today. There were no buyers this Monday, and the price crashed. Literally, you cannot give oil away, you have to pay them to take it. Once again, the price war and the virus at the same time have brought ruin to oil producers.

The stock market fell a bit today. At first, the USA market was fine and Europe closed up. The sudden and unintelligible stupidity it took to drive oil to negative prices confused the USA stock market, which fell more than two and a half percent. Just head shaking from me.

The reports show the virus took just short of two-thousand American lives today. There was also a mass shooting in Canada. We remember who we lost with an old hymn: Sweat Hour Prayer.

Just a short easy day.

I made stir fry cumin beef for dinner from Cook’s Illustrated magazine. I did not care for it. Corwin said it was good. I did order lunch from Red Robin. Burgers for Susie and I. That I enjoyed.

I read and took it easy. I tried to get my Robot stuff to work–nothing worked. So I put that aside too. It will take more effort than I am willing to give today.

So Susie and I attended church online at 2PM. We all talked about the temptation to be over isolated and the temptation to fight against the isolation. We talked about how it is not about me but about us as a community protecting each other from the virus and finding a way to go on.

Returning to making dinner, I had no rice and had to head to Safeway again. I carefully followed the new rules with the one-way signs and picked up things for the stir fry and for dinner over the next few days. I know most of the checkers, and they wave to me and told me how happy they are to see me and asked me if we are fine. “We’re OK,” I tell them with a smile that reaches my eyes–all they can see with the mask.

So just a slow day of cooking and cleaning and reading.

An aside: I do all of this work on my Apple.

(everything will be good; I have The Ring)

An update: The little sparrow that has a nest on the front door, behind the wreath, is still sitting on the nest. I try not to disturb the bird. I do stand on my toes to see it through the little window on the top of our door, and it then sits-up on its nest and looks back at me. That use to make the bird fly away. Now it just watches me. We are getting used to each other.

On the longer-term finances, my 401K has lost only 7.5% this year-to-date. Thus, I have already recovered most of the loss. Yes, my totals are matching my mid-summer 2019 values. I am reading that panic is starting, and the advice is to hold until May and then sell to cash–according to these authors, that is when the economic damage and bankruptcies will start. In other words, the word is that The Fed and Central Banks and the vast governmental stimulus plans are creating a bubble and it will all collapse. For you that are already putting in your sell orders, these are the same people who previously told you that everything was great in 2008. I am touching nothing, except I increased my contributions to my 401K. I want some more–sorry I am the son of a capitalist.

I have a new book coming. The Abebooks site is still running and I am supporting book stores. I find Powell’s website, our local super book store, to never work right or have what I am looking for even when I know they have it. So I order from small book stores all over the country. I have purchased the first two books in the Elric series, not the expensive collector versions I use to buy cheap in East Lansing’s Curious Bookstore, but a newer printed version that is not that expensive (yes, if you have cheap-back-then DAW Elric first book in some old moving box in the basement, you might want to retrieve it).

I wanted to read them again. The second in the series is coming from California and the first is oddly coming from Eugene Oregon. 

The reports today show the death rate in the USA slipping to one-thousand five-hundred this Sunday. The total number of deaths in the USA broke forty-thousand. I picked a Psalm of Ascent to remember all the people we lost: Shir Ha Ma’alot – Song of Ascents (Ps 126).

So just a short note for today.

I had trouble sleeping, and using computers causes pain. The bright screen causes pain. I have turned down the brightness for this writing.

I went slow this morning and worked on my robot project. I managed to get the infrared control working on a Playground Express coded in Python. I used the Christmas Ornament project. The Playground Express has eight bright neo-pixels that you can control. I used the code that turned the neo-pixels on when you point a remote at it and press a number. Press a different number on the remote and point at the microcontroller for different colors.

I was not happy with the infrared as the range was too short. It is easy to code, and putting a Playground Express on the boat would be easy. Just attach to a mast or a funnel on the model. It could then talk to the main microcontroller by a few wires using standard serial communication. The range made it a poor choice.

I noticed that I have purchased a lot of LoRa boards. This is the networking for DIY projects that need networked devices. It is a lot more than a few commands that I need for my robot boat that I was thinking of. I load up all the enhancements to my development software for Arduino including manually loading various libraries. The hardware can use Python for coding too. I manage to get one of the boards working. My headache stops me from going on.

I tried to watch another “Inspector Morse” episode. I have three that are free on Amazon Prime. This is a crime show from the 1980s that I really like–I like the books that the show is based on too by Colin Dexter. My migraine returned, so I got about halfway.

I made chili for dinner. I ordered lunch from La Providence, delivered about noon. I went with a corned-beef hash with poached eggs and a croissant (it was still warm). It was perfect, as usual. I opened a bottle of Purple Cow Vinyard’s Marechal Foch to help the cooking go easier. This is a drier red wine locally made from our Oregon grapes.

I saw that The Phantom of the Opera at the Royal Albert Hall 25th Anniversary was now free on Youtube. So I watch that–a favorite. Slightly re-staged, but nearly perfectly done. It was a free stay-home concert.

Masquerade – Phantom of the Opera 25th at the Royal Albert Hall

I received a new radio and speaker from my sister and mother for my birthday. It is made to look like a pocket version of an old tube radio. It plays with great sound.

Today the reports count more than one-thousand eight-hundred deaths from the virus in the USA. This spoke to me today: Down to the River.