Monthly Archives: March 2020

COVID19, moving

the chaos, the chaos

the chaos of moving is exacerbated by the chaos of the COVID19 pandemic, which is still on its way up. keeping track is pointless because it keeps getting worse by the hour, and our “leaders” are deliberately misleading us, much to the delight of 51% of the population… who have been consistently the first ones to die, as a result. 😒

i, on the other hand, am, apparently, immune, because of the fact that i already had it… and the fact that, in the past two weeks, i have interacted with exactly three other people, one of whom is my wife (the other two are my wife’s boss, and his wife, who have been helping us with painting, because their vacation to mexico got cancelled).

thanks to them, the master bedroom is no longer an awful green, surmounted with a repeating stamp of bears and trees.

we’re under an official “stay-at-home” order, from the governor, but… i’m moving… which “home” should i stay at: the mostly empty one that we’re painting, or the chaotic, half-in-boxes one that we’re moving out of? 😒

i’ve been making one run a day to the new house, with my car full of boxes. in the past 5 days, i haven’t even come CLOSE to filling the floor space OF THE GARAGE, and, once we’re done painting, the stuff that i’m currently putting in the garage will get distributed to its locations throughout the house… we’re going to need a dining table, and chairs, again, because we have a dining room that will be an empty space without it…

spam, the mallet

spam update

i have now, officially, blocked IP address ranges in the following countries:

afghanistan
albania
angola
argentina
aruba
australia
austria
bangladesh
belarus
belgium
bhutan
bolivia
bosnia & herzegovina
brazil
british virgin islands
bulgaria
cambodia
canada
chile
china
colombia
congo
cote d’ivoire
croatia
czech republic
denmark
ecuador
egypt
el salvador
estonia
finland
france
georgia
germany
ghana
greece
guatemala
honduras
hong kong
hungary
iceland
india
indonesia
iran
iraq
ireland
israel
italy
japan
jordan
kazakhstan
kenya
kyrgyzstan
latvia
lithuania
luxembourg
macao
malaysia
mexico
moldova
monaco
mongolia
morocco
myanmar
netherlands
new zealand
nigeria
norway
pakistan
panama
paraguay
peru
philippines
poland
romania
russia
serbia
seychelles
singapore
slovakia
south africa
south korea
spain
sweden
switzerland
taiwan
tajikistan
tanzania
thailand
Trinidad & tobago
turkey
UK
ukraine
uruguay
USA
uzbekistan
vietnam

the big winners are china, russia, and india, and the runners up are spain, uzbekistan and kazakhstan…

and the good ol’ united states of ‘merica makes an appearance, as well.

before i started blocking whole swaths of IP addresses, the CPU usage on my server was between 75% and 100%, pretty much always. since i started blocking IP address ranges, my CPU usage is between 2% and 5%… which means that my web sites respond more quickly.

a side benefit is that, often, the same IP address ranges that are used by spammers, are also used by crackers, skript-kiddies, and other miscreants, so by absolutely blocking them (using both the IP Blocker and the Global Email Filters) i kill two birds with one stone. 😉

the down side is that i’ve been catching a few false positives, which are messages from people within north america, but, through no fault of their own, sent their messages at EXACTLY the right time, so that the date in their message ID gets caught by the rule that’s supposed to catch IP addresses… 😖

but, honestly, there have been fewer than 10 false positives in the last 6 months (they tend to come in spurts: i’ve caught 3 today, but haven’t seen one for months), whereas, if left unfettered, i would have received, easily, 100 times that many spam messages PER DAY, so, in all, i’m almost ready to make my list available to anybody else who wants to cut down on the people who send you spam… 😉

COVID19, health, stress

COVID19 update

one of the people moe “manages” (one of the doctors who is not the owner of the clinic) got on an airplane yesterday.

shortly after she got on the airplane, word came down from the state that any healthcare provider who gets on an airplane has to voluntarily quarantine for two weeks. in this case, “healthcare provider” apparently applies to veterinarians, as well.

so, along with ramping up her side hustle (she’s already more than half-filled the webinar that she’s giving next sunday), moving into a new house, and managing a veterinary hospital (which is a job, under the best of circumstances), now she has to figure out how to cover for a doctor who potentially “has COVID19”. 😒

but here’s something that i never considered: during the first couple weeks of january, i was sick for two or three days. i got my (very first) flu shot (ever) in november (or it might have been october), and, at the time, i just thought it was a mild case of the flu… but moe says that the symptoms didn’t match the flu: there was minimal nausea, just coughing and fatigue… moe says that it’s possible that i have already had COVID19, and just didn’t realise it.

it’s not totally out of the question: i have spent, at least, the past year’s worth of weekends at the pike place market, which is the first place tourists from cruise ships, and other conveyances, go when they land in seattle…

and healthy people don’t get as sick to begin with…

one of the other doctors moe manages (still not the owner) got sick a few weeks ago, and got better almost immediately, but she still has a lingering cough, and moe thinks she may have gotten COVID19, as well.

COVID19, health, ptsd, stress

COVID19 update

safeway has started designating the hours between 7:00 and 9:00 am as “senior hours”… they reset the store at night, then the first thing on tuesday and thursday, seniors get “first crack” at everything in the store. the first one was yesterday.

except that hoarders showed up at 6:00 and cleaned the store out.

i went to safeway this morning.

apparently, hoarders showed up at 6:00 am today, and cleaned the store out, as well. at 10:30 am, there was nothing in the pasta/rice/beans department, all of the paper products were gone, most of the fresh vegetables were gone.

this was AFTER going to costco and finding a line that stretched all the way across the costco, and most of the way across the hobby-lobby next door. they were only letting in a certain number of people at a time… since i only had one item i needed, i decided to go elsewhere, because waiting in a line for ≈45 minutes with other people, many of whom were wearing masks, is just asking to get exposed to the virus.

i’m not afraid of getting the virus, mind you, but i’m not stupid. and there have been rumours that getting the virus also puts one in danger of getting pulmonary fibrosis, which i definitely DO NOT WANT! 😠

i went to fred meyer this afternoon, because i didn’t know that moe needed stuff. fred meyer was a little better, but they didn’t have any paper products, or canned goods.

the thing is… there’s no shortage. there’s ABSOLUTELY NO REASON to panic-buy anything. this is a virus, it’s not a famine… it’s pretty much guaranteed that this panic-buying of stuff will absolutely NOT accomplish ANYTHING execpt to make life extremely difficult for people like me, who are trying to survive as best i can.

fortunately, the moisture festival has been cancelled, so i am pretty much hanging out at home, by myself. moe had a (virus-free) massage this morning, but i’ve even been socially isolated from her, because she is ramping up a new side hussle, now that her old side hussle cancelled on her. 😒

house stuff, moving, stress

ok, it’s official…

moe and i are moving.

that’s right, with the coronavirus running rampant, people freaking out and buying the entire store because the world is, literally, COMING. TO. AN. END… moe and i are moving into a new house. 😒

we bought a bigger house. it’s about as far away from downtown seattle as we currently are, but the house is about twice as big as the house we’re currently in, and the yard is about twice as big as the yard we’ve currently got. the address is maple valley, but, in reality, it’s in between issaquah and hobart. it’s right around the corner from one set of friends, and about 10 minutes away from two other sets of friends. i’ll be living a lot closer to ian, for a change. 😉

how it happened is complex beyond imagination, and mostly happened before everybody started freaking out, but, basically, moe has been given the money to buy this house by her employer, who wants her to live “closer” to the clinic. where we live currently is anywhere from 45 minutes to an hour and a half commute to mercer island — where the clinic is located. the new house is only 30 minutes away, during rush hour.

the “good” part about this is that we don’t HAVE TO move right away, or on a certain date, and — for a short period of time, anyway — we will actually own TWO houses… maybe for a longer period of time, if things go a certain way.

my understanding is that we “close and take posession” on the 26th (next thursday).

thrill… 😒

COVID19, health, stress

COVID19 update

everybody has been “panic buying”… first it was toilet paper, now it’s pretty much everything…

but here in seattle, one of the “hot spots” for the virus in the US, it’s a different matter entirely: i went to costco yesterday, to buy bread and peanut butter. it was busier than usual, for a monday afternoon, but i’ve definitely seen longer lines at costco. all the shelves were comfortably stocked, although there were some items — like toilet paper and hand sanitiser — which had voluntary limits placed on them. everybody was calm, there was no fighting… i only saw three people with masks. there were standard precautions, people wiping down the carts and everything with clorox wipes (which, it turns out, are NOT on the CDCs list of things you can use to fight coronavirus)… i didn’t use a cart, anyway.

the word of the day is “social distancing”. i would say i have not been “social distancing” more than usual, but at this time of year i’m normally hanging around with huge crowds of people from all over the world — in the moisture festival, which has been “postponed indefinitely”. they also cancelled my circus classes, and pretty much everything else that isn’t essential: restaurants and bars are closed for “in-person” dining, although they’re still open for take-out and delivery service. all gatherings of more than 50 people are banned, including church services (although there are many “christian” churches which are ignoring this, at their peril). in four days we’ve gone from 1,000 cases to 5,000 cases.

at this point, i’m staying home and not interacting with people as much as possible. i went out to costco and the dispensary yesterday. today, i went to the compounding pharmacy in issaquah, and i went out for a walk. tomorrow, i’m getting together with hobbit and making a couple of videos.

i’m not really concerned for myself, but i’m terrified for everybody else, because they are, literally, freaking out to the point where i’m thinking, more and more, that this is, in fact, the “end of the world as we know it”.

hybrid elephant, web design

deliberate misdirection

this weekend, at “some point” — which means for 30 minutes, some time between 0:00 saturday and 24:00 sunday — the Hybrid Elephant web site will be updated to a new, more “appropriate” design in which i had A LOT more say than the previous one…

see this post for as much of a reason as i ever got.

thanks to rick cano at DesignWorks NW…

which means that, on monday, everyone should remember to flush your cache (all my browsers are set to zero cache, already) and buy some incense from my new web site, okay? 😉👍

COVID19, health, stress

COVID19 update

all public and private schools in king, pierce and snohomish counties have been closed for five weeks.

seattle has over 1,100 cases currently, and projects having over 25,000 cases by april 7th, unless more is done to contain the virus.

broadway has cancelled all performances indefinitely.

the NHL, MLS, NCAA, NBA and MLB sports organisations have cancelled the season.

the mormon LDS church has suspended all worship services, worldwide.

the CATHOLIC CHURCH has closed all churches in italy.

but our #SCROTUS — who has been in close contact with foreign leaders who are CONFIRMED COVID19 cases, and in close contact with several U.S. leaders who are currently “self-quarantining” over concerns that they have come in close contact with foreign leaders who are CONFIRMED COVID19 cases — is, resolutely REFUSING to be tested, and continues to shake hands with everybody as though he is immune to the virus…

he’s not, of course, but he doesn’t have anything to worry about, because he’s #SCROTUS, and we’re not… 🤬

health, stress

COVID19 update

they’ve cancelled public school in seattle for the next two weeks. as a result, they’ve cancelled classes at SANCA for at least the next two weeks.

they’re recommending that the public not gather in groups larger than 250 people. they’re recommending that people “socially isolate” and “self-quarantine” because of lack of reliable testing. 😕

ETA: Under the Health Officer’s order in King County:

  • Events with more than 250 attendees are prohibited.
  • Public events with fewer than 250 attendees are prohibited, unless event organizers can take steps to minimize risk.

they’re saying that 80% of the population will probably contract COVID19. not 80% of americans, 80% of humans… on the planet.

they’re saying that a vaccine (which is the ONLY thing that will stop COVID19 from spreading) could take as long as a year and a half, and, that there probably WILL NOT be a vaccine sooner than a year from now. 🧟

the center for disease control recommends that people over 60 years of age not travel on airplanes… but the #SCROTUS said that they can’t recommend that, so they took it back… but they’re still, privately, recommending that people over age 60 don’t travel, regardless of what the #SCROTUS says. 😒

last week, #drumpf said that there were only 15 confirmed cases, and that by next week there would be zero cases. in reality, last week there were NINETEEN cases, and this week there are somewhere between 50 and 100 cases JUST IN WASHINGTON STATE.

ETA: “more than 1,000 cases in the U.S.”

#drumpf has placed pence in charge of this disaster PANDEMIC, a religious, science-denier who, when he was governor of indiana, and faced with the largest HIV outbreak in history, did, literally, nothing. 🤬

AND, i found out, today, that my great-aunt rosemary, who i went to warrensburg, missouri to meet in 2015, actually VOTED for #drumpf! 🤮

moisture festival

moisture?

due to the current almost-pandemic of the novel coronavirus COVID19, the moisture festival has been “postponed indefinitely”.

it’s probably a good idea, since washington state is one of the epicenters of the coronavirus outbreak in the united states — as of the last time i checked, there have been between 12 and 14 deaths from coronavirus in washington over the past week — and we’ve got people travelling in from, literally, all over the world, so postponing the festival is definitely the right thing to do…

but panic and disinformation, both of which are running rampant, currently, are just as, if not more dangerous than the coronavirus itself. and, naturally, both have been massively exacerbated by the dimwitted orange buffoon who currently occupies the presidental office…

just more reasons why i wish i had died when i had the chance… 😒