(no subject)

Working from home again today. Actually, working from home today and Monday and ... probably all of next week. The office is on 'work from home at employee discretion, but we recommend work from home' status until declared otherwise, and I need to keep an eye on kitty health matters at least until I hear from the doctor on Saturday.

Don't know if I'll be able to fly Sunday. If I do I'm taking Claritin beforehand, as it's on the FAA's okay list, and taking cough drops with me. Unwrapped ones. A helicopter cockpit is no place to unwrap anything.

The birds outside are loud, or they were before the current round of rain started. There's either a flicker or a downy woodpecker in the area; I heard the drumming but didn't see the drummer. Probably downies. I haven't heard the 'wait, what's with the jungle noise sound effect' call that usually means a flicker is nearby. Mind you, I spotted a freaking woodcock in Boston last week, so for all I know there's some other species of woodpecker that's blundered into the Winthrop area.

(I am absolutely positive it was a woodcock. It was, alas, dead; I took several photos and ran them through the Merlin bird ID app on my phone,w hich uses the Cornell Lab of Ornithology database, and yeah, woodcock. Why it was dead in front of a Bank of America location I do not know. Not like it was the kind of building where flying into a window was especially likely.)

WELP

Boston Marathon postponed to September due to coronavirus

The Boston Marathon will be postponed, and rescheduled to Sept. 14, officials are set to announce Friday morning.

Governor Charlie Baker and Mayor Martin J. Walsh, along with officials from the Marathon and its sponsors and from other towns along the 26.2-mile route, are set to hold a press conference Friday morning at City Hall where they will announce the new date for the race. It will be the first delay in the 124-year history of the Marathon, which had been scheduled for April 20, and comes as large and small gatherings worldwide are being canceled and postponed to help blunt the spread of coronavirus.

They chose to reschedule it Sept. 14 — a Monday — in hopes of best replicating a typical Marathon three-day weekend, and to fit in among various other major events in the fall, such as college move-ins, Jewish holidays, and the Chicago Marathon, said a source familiar with the planning. Doing that will require special legislation to declare the day a state holiday — like Patriots Day — which Baker plans to file soon.

Officials are hopeful that the event — which typically brings more than 30,000 runners, and their friends and families, from 120 countries — will spark tourism and help hotels and restaurants at a time when, hopefully, the region is recovering from coronavirus-related shutdowns that are expected to last weeks if not longer.

Race organizers agonized in recent days over whether to cancel, reschedule, or hold the race only for elite runners, before settling on the new date when they hope to recreate as normal a Marathon weekend as possible. Though one thing will be different: The Red Sox are out of town.

This is a developing story and will be updated.

(no subject)

*looks at news*
*looks at Twitter*

*sigh*

"The nearest of those old ones is Napoleon. We know that because two chaps made the journey to see him. They'd started long before I came, of course, but I was there when they came back."
"But they got there?"
"That's right. He'd built himself a huge house all in the Empire style—rows of windows flaming with light…."
"Did they see Napoleon?"
"That's right. They went up and looked through one of the windows. Napoleon was there all right."
"What was he doing?"
"Walking up and down—up and down all the time— left-right, left-right—never stopping for a moment. The two chaps watched him for about a year and he never rested. And muttering to himself all the time. "It was Soult's fault. It was Ney's fault. It was Josephine's fault. It was the fault of the Russians. It was the fault of the English." Like that all the time. Never stopped for a moment. A little, fat man and he looked kind of tired. But he didn't seem able to stop it."

C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce (1946, Harper Collins edition 2001) 11-12.