we spent a week at the beach, for moe’s birthday. instead of going to the house that we usually rent, which was down the street, we rented a different house, because we thought that more people were going to show up. at the last minute, one of the people bailed (she had the flu, so it was probably just as well), so it was just me and moe, and micah and shaya (moe’s friends). also, on the web where moe first found it, the place we rented claimed to have WIFI, but, in reality, it doesn’t. this wasn’t very much of a problem for me, moe and micah, but shaya had a lot of work to do that involved people in hawaii and africa, and the lack of connectivity was a real problem for her. the beach was the beach: calm, relaxed… the weather was typical for january, meaning that it was windy and rainy, but not that cold. there were a couple of days where there were very strong winds and rain pretty much all day, there were a couple of days where the weather was windy and rainy for part of the day, and there was at least one day where the weather was sunny and cloudless. i got to fly my kite a few times, moe took the drone out a couple of times, the doggles got thoroughly worn out running on the beach…

but then we came back to “reality”… EEEeeeewwwww!! 😡

the political situation continues to get orders of magnitude worse, on an hourly basis. the most recent things are #drumpf signing executive orders starting construction on “the wall” — which he continues to insist will be paid for by the mexicans, although he admits it “will probably be a complicated process”, and has, meanwhile, begun petitioning an all-republican congress to start eliminating things like medicare and social security so that he can fund building the wall anyway — and starting the deportation process for millions of migrants who are undocumented and/or muslim. of course, there is a lot of protesting going on, on a daily basis, but it doesn’t appear to be making a lot of difference. meanwhile, Resident Chump (as kiki calls him) is putting gag orders on the public parks department, and various different scientific and environmental departments, all of which are publically funded, saying that they are no longer “allowed” to state their findings to the public. there’s a lot of me that wants to give up and move elsewhere, and a good deal of the rest of me that would love to see a revolution. unfortunately, i don’t think i’m ever going to have the resources to leave this country, even for a short period of time, and i’m not sure how effective i would be as a part of a revolution, in spite of how much i would like to see one… and, to be honest, there’s no guarantee that what would happen after a revolution would be any better than what we’ve already got.

in other news, people are still trying to break into my site using the old web developer’s username, and they continue to get blocked from ever being able to access the site. at this point, once or twice a day, i’ll log in and block anywhere from 10 to 50 unauthorised login attempts. it’s getting annoying, but i’m sure having my web site cracked would be even more annoying.

also interesting is the fact that i have had an inbox that is, for the most part, empty, for closing in on a month now… i get two or three emails that i have to hold onto in my inbox for a few days, every now and then, and i usually keep emails for orders that i’ve made, or orders that i have to fill, in my inbox, but i file them when they’re complete. it has been five years or so since i had a completely empty inbox for any significant period of time, and this time is appearing to be quite a bit longer than any time since i started using email on a regular basis… probably 30 years…