Browsing Feedly this morning I noticed a couple of posts showed up from my own blog. Which I found interesting given that I had not written anything. They were bot-produced spam ads for an internet paper-writing service, hilariously written in some of the most garbled uncanny English one could imagine. Perhaps the most desperate of cheaters, in the waning hours before a course term paper deadline, on their sixth cup of coffee and still staring at a blank Word file, would forgive such trifles, or even be impressed with the occasional (and apparently random) insertion of dollar-plus vocabulary to pad out the ol’ word count. But otherwise, how the hell does spam like this sustain itself?

Fortunately the offenders were not intelligent users, just bots exploiting a dummy test user I’d set up and forgotten about, and probably didn’t bother to give a strong password to. (Pro tip: delete your old unused WordPress users. Luckily I am good about more thorough about this at work where I am compensated for maintaining WordPress sites.) Easily deleted, but I’ll always remember them.

Anyway, while I’m here, I guess I could check in about the pandemic at least once for the historical record. Not that this website will be in the top 100 million sources future scholars will study to understand how society dealt with it in real time. And also, my experience hasn’t been that unusual.

I’m still struck by the speed in which things shifted. When it started to creep into the country in early March, my wife and I were still thinking we’d make a planned trip to the UK at the end of the month. But we’d probably try to keep an eye on the news when we were there, in case anything happened. My boss was planning a trip to Florida to watch spring training baseball. On Monday the 16th he came to work having reluctantly decided he’d have to forgo the trip, prudently assessing that going from stadium to stadium while a virus was spreading was a poor choice. By Friday, they weren’t even playing the games anymore and we were obviously not going to the UK. It wasn’t even a discussion. I think Tuesday evening we were just like, “Oh, we’re not going, are we.” Everything was cancelled and I was working from home indefinitely.

I’m fortunate though. Perfectly healthy. My job translates fine to working from home and it’s stable (in fact a lot busier) for now. We don’t have kids so were not thrust into surprise full-time parenting. I wear a mask when I go anywhere, upped my food bank donations (and made several others) and have been tipping the hell out of my service bills. My quarantine hobby is trying to learn some Spanish (an interesting endeavor and worthy of another post sometime). Me llamo Josh! Estoy estadounideste y hablos un poco de español. ¿Como se llama usted? (I bet I got that wrong somewhere because my app doesn’t make me write anything, just read and speak.) Edit: I did get it wrong somewhere and had to fix it, though I don’t dare consider it right yet.

All for now but maybe I’ll try to do a few more posts soon. Please email me if you want to purchase any essays though!