This is terrible. I pre-ordered Fugitive Telemetry (The Murderbot Diaries Book 6) ages ago, and it crawled into my Kindle app overnight and is sitting there, tempting me.

There’s no way I can read it now. I don’t have the time.

But…on the day I turn in my final grades in mid-May, the sun will be shining, the weather will be balmy, and I will be relaxing on the deck, reading this book, free of all stress, every muscle unkinking, brow unfurrowed.

And the day after that I’ll be scouring the countryside for spiders.

I’m coming around to Iris‘s point of view. I have a bird feeder just outside my office window. It’s supposed to be squirrel-proof (nothing is squirrel-proof).

Birds are constantly coming by. Our cat sits there twitching, watching them.

Unfortunately, these big meaty monster squirrels keep climbing up on it, terrifying the birds. There’s a bar for the birds to perch on, to the right, but it’s hinged so that when a heavy rodent climbs on it, it folds down, closing access to the seeds inside. So far, so good.

Only now what the squirrels have figured out is that they can climb onto that silver roof and twist that red handle until it unlatches, and then get on the bar and pop the roof off, allowing them to climb right in and wallow in bird seed. It’s very annoying to find the roof removed and a brushy-tailed rat inside, indulging in gluttony.

I’m trying something different now. I’ve put a line of sriracha sauce all around the roof, and also dabbed it on the latch. We’ll see how well that dissuades the thieves. Otherwise, I wonder if a line of squirrel skulls would work.

Anyone else have other suggestions?

Hey, everyone! It’s Saturday night, during a pandemic, and I home alone with a cat that hates me, so it’s a perfect time for a pity party. I walked out to the liquor store and got some cheap whisky, and I’ve already downed a couple of shots, so you better get to work to catch up. I have many things to be miserable about, and I wanted to get a head start.

• I’ve already mentioned my monster load of grading. I don’t need advice, I know it’s my fault — but I also feel an obligation to cram in a lot of stuff the hard way because this zoom teaching is not my bag at all. I’m clearly overcompensating and suffering for it.
• Speaking of which, this has just been an agonizing year. All the compromises I’ve had to make are driving me crazy, and all the good stuff about teaching have been lost. I hardly know my students — they’re names on a roster. Getting any kind of interaction with them is a struggle. I did not sign up for this career to be a voice on a computer talking to an array of black rectangles.
• I’ve been regretting more than a few choices. Forty years ago my dad suggested I go into refrigerator repair, and even lined up an apprenticeship for me. Sometimes now (especially now) I fantasize about a 9-to-5 union job with good pay and paid vacations…I wonder what that would be like?
• I used to enjoy getting out to events and talking with other people about science, or the folly of religious dogma, or the importance of social justice. I was traveling roughly every two weeks to meetings, and then, abruptly, that all dried up about 8 years ago. Sheesh, you expose just one high muckity-muck skeptic rapist, and your phone stops ringing. It was impressive how quickly and thoroughly the blacklist was implemented.
• The fun was only beginning. I learned gradually that the movement I’d spent years promoting was infested with patriarchal asshats and harassers. I get so much hate mail now! It turns out many of the rank-and-file of atheism sound like refugees from 4chan. Or whatever that hellhole is called now.
• Some of you regular readers got a taste of what my in-box looks like — we had a troll come by and leave a series of obscene comments talking about how I enjoyed fellating transsexual individuals, among other such crudities. Don’t bother looking for them, I delete them as fast as I find them, but here’s a taste of one of his milder comments:
  

  Myers is a bitch. And she was bitchslapped long time ago by almost everyone in the atheist community and made a pariah [he’s right, you know–pzm]. Thoroughly deserved given the damage that C*unt did.

  Once upon a time I thought atheists would be more rational than theists. Boy was I wrong!

• But, you say, that’s just some bottom-of-the-barrel nobody — a loud-mouthed twit who has never contributed anything positive — so who cares? But then tonight I also got email from a more senior member of the atheist community, with a high position in a regional organizer. She’s been pestering me for years, and now she was writing to me to get my support (why, I have no idea — I have zero influence) in a crusade against American Atheists. This is what some high-ranking atheists sound like.
  

  Have you see this?
  Access the article by clicking on the address way below.
  Notice that the tranny within AA, Alison Gill,
  is coming down hard on Dawkins.
  Dawkins is not perfect but I’ll take him any day over Alison Gill.
  Dawkins’ main problem is that he doesn’t speak “American.”
  I think he means well but he doesn’t come across very well
  to Americans. But he is basically correct.

  Rumor is that the Humanist organization
  has also been taken over by LGBTQ people.

  I wrote back to tell her to stop sending me her poisonous crap. Like my usual trolls, she didn’t stop.

  PZ, This is not hateful and this is not poisonous.
  You know me better than that.
  These people (LGBTQ) have taken over AA and
  the Humanist organizations.
  “Tranny” is a well-known nickname for transgender people,
  which is a mouthful to type. It is not meant negatively.

  Dawkins is correct. The right wing fundamentalists
  are using the “transgender issue”as a Trojan horse to get at us.
  We need to separate the transgender issue from atheism.
  We are science oriented.
  You do not become a woman by amputating your male genitals.
  But if they want to do that, they are free to do so in America
  but don’t connect it with atheism.
  THAT IS ALL WE ASK.

  Depressing, isn’t it? I don’t want to be associated with these people any more. And she doesn’t know me at all.

• I’ve got lots of legal debt that’s going to drain all of my disposable income for the next few years. Yeah, that’s the happy ending to my atheist career.
• I’m running out of whisky.

Fuck it, party is over.

It’s been 14 months since I had a haircut. Today it’s been two weeks since I got my second Pfizer shot, so to celebrate, I visited Shear Designs in Morris and had Solange shear me.

Yes, I’m wearing a mask, and so did she, the whole time she was lopping off all that shagginess. As our local paper reported this week:

In the past week, Stevens County more than doubled its number of COVID-19 cases for April from 22 April 11 to 48 as of the Minnesota Department of Health’s report Sunday. [Whew, that’s an inelegant sentence.]

Those quickly rising numbers reflect what is happening in much of western Minnesota this early spring as people begin to let down their guard. They are gathering again in crowded bars and restaurants, and other places, with few wearing masks.

…

[Health Commissioner Jan] Malcolm said new COVID-19 infections are up 60 percent in just the last two weeks and are hitting levels not seen in Minnesota since late last year.

It’s not over yet. I at least got my haircut, but now I’m retreating back into the hermitage and won’t be coming out again for a while.

---

Yikes. Speaking of the continuing pandemic, our local buffet/pizza joint is closed.

We have been notified today of a positive case in one of our employees. While this employee has not been around our full staff while working, we are going to be Closing today , and going through this Friday to clean and sanitize the store and equipment. We will re-evaluate our staffing situation as we get test results in. We plan to re-open on Saturday, but will make that decision more towards Friday when we know more from our staff.
We thank you all for your business and understanding! Each day I am finding more truth to the meme…
When Covid ends is sounding more and more like, “When the Vikings win the Super Bowl.”

I had no idea it was open! The thought of going in that place at any time in the past year gives me the heebie-jeebies.

On top of everything else, today I have to make a trek to the hardware store to pick up some mouse traps. “Why?” you might ask, “Don’t you have a vicious evil cat?” Yes, I do, one with a temper and long needle-sharp claws and fangs she will bite me with if I have the temerity to pet her too familiarly. But we currently have a little mouse problem, and she’s not doing the job. We had a cold snap after a week of warm weather, and whenever that happens the outdoor mice scurry into the nice warm house for a while, and then decide they like it and want to stay a while.

So last night I found the cat posed sphinx-like on the floor, it’s paws before it, and between them…a very fat roly-poly little mouse. “Well, stop torturing it and end its misery,” I said, “so I can clean it up.” But then I noticed that the cat was purring, and the mouse was softly ch-ch-chittering, and the cat was nuzzling it with her nose. They were having a conversation. And the cat had her claws fully retracted.

That’s what rankled. She doesn’t even grant me that little favor.

So now…mouse traps. I don’t think the cat has ever killed a mouse in her life, and now I understand why: they’re her little friends, and she likes them better than me. Well, I’ll take care of that.

Yesterday dawned bright and beautiful; skies were clear, the sun was shining, it was warm, it felt like the start of a fine spring day. Then Mary drove away to help take care of our little granddaughter for a few weeks to a few months, and immediately the gray skies rolled in, the temperature dropped, the winds were howling, and the rain drizzled in. It got cold again. The mice have moved back into the house (the cat is a totally useless mouser, I’m afraid.) And now it’s Monday.

I think I’m going to have to be really mad at Iliana. It’s all her fault.

Oh no! The cuteness defense! I am helpless!

I was talking to a student from the Middle East yesterday — we are eyeballs deep in academic advising, I’m already booked up solid today with more student meetings — and she said she was very excited to be moving to the Midwest in the fall, and getting to experience seasons. Yeah, she’ll get that here. She’ll also get to experience that “oh my god will it never end” feeling.

Now to crawl back into my zoom-hole, from which I will not emerge until 6pm this evening.

“oh my god will it never end,” again.