Journal of the Plague Year, Day [indecipherable squiggle]

Things have calmed down slightly, since my last post. At least here on my side
of town. I've been working mostly normal shifts, and even finding time for the
odd bit of cleaning and home-improvement. If I don't leave the house and don't
look at social media, it's easy to think that things are back to normal.
Well... the new normal, that is, of a month ago. The normal of living with a
global pandemic.

As soon as I leave the house, though, it's clear that things aren't how they
used to be. I can bike past the charred spot where a car burned. If I turn one
way, I can ride past a half-dozen boarded-up businesses, some of which still
haven't reopened. I rode over to the last surviving hardware store on this side
of town; they'd been looted in the unrest, but reopened. I stopped on the way
back at a little hole-in-the-wall gyro place; I hadn't had any fast food since
the pandemic hit, and, uh, support local businesses, right? They'd been broken
into and looted; the only evidence is some stains on the walls and ceiling,
where someone had sprayed... BBQ sauce? all over.

And everywhere there are signs, telling the world that theirs is a
minority-owned business, that Black Lives Matter, et cetera.

Going to the store felt weird. Minnesota requires face masks, now, in all
businesses. Or... they're supposed to. There are a lot of chuds out there, not
wearing masks at all, or wearing them wrong, mostly not covering the nose. Some
have real masks, some have homemade masks, some are... wearing bandannas.  But
virtually nobody's wearing gloves, or using hand sanitizer anymore. The glove
thing I understand, but... use frickin' hand sanitizer, people. It's not
difficult.

They're starting to make arrests in some of the fires. All white people, from
the suburbs. Interesting, that. The suspects they're still looking for are only
slightly more diverse, but I have a feeling most of them are also going to
prove to be from outside the cities.

The weather has been alternating hot and pleasantly warm. Not a lot of rain,
which is fine with me; less humidity, and less lawn-mowing.

Apparently there was some sort of major DDOS campaign launched against the US
yesterday (the 15th)? I heard about it, but it didn't seem to affect me. Nobody
ever calls or texts me, and my 'net connection stayed up. With 95% of my
employer's servers located outside the US, we were unafected as well, though
the customer service folks got a lot of the inevitable reports that people
couldn't access our stuff, or it was super slow. All user-side problems,
though, so nothing I could do anything about.

Nice thing about this weather is bread proofs and rises amazingly fast,
compared to winter/spring. Yes, still making bread regularly, since I'm
disinclined to go to the grocery story--anywhere, really--due to the pandemic.

That's it for me, today. Hope you're all doing well, Internet. Stay safe, stay
healthy, and watch out for fascists.