We can’t travel since so many states quarantine the bozos who travel from a covid hotspot like Georgia. And travel won’t be close to safe until someone develops a proven, effective vaccine for this virus. Thus we have found ourselves with lots of time on our hands, but don’t really feel like handling library books. So we cook, Kat walks a lot, I walk a little, and we both read the daily New York Times and Washington Post on-line.

The Post turned us onto sourdough bread, and The Times had a better recipe. Sourdough is made from a combination of flour, water, salt, and sourdough starter. One could pay $5 to $25 for a ready-to-use sour dough starter, but we chose to spend the week or ten days required to create our own starter with locally-sourced wild yeast. In our case that would mean yeasts blown on the wind plus some from us and some from Brunswick, a/k/a Fatricia, our 18 pound black cat.

Sounds yummy? Oh, but it is. It’s pleasantly tart, chewy, and if it rises enough, has big air pockets. Our recipe requires no kneading!

I worry less about contracting the coronavirus than about the outcome of this presidential and senate election. Trump is on such a streak of un-presidential words and deeds sometimes I wonder if he wants re-election.

In no particular order, there is his destroy the Post Office effort “justified” by trying to make a government service turn a profit while crippling mail-in voting. His all-out attack on the legitimacy of our election was bad enough, and then he compounded it by trying to block Federal efforts to announce that the Russians are helping him win it, again. His anti-Biden ads are so full of falsehoods – many wildly ridiculous – that some progressives have dubbed him “The Lyin’ King”. He won’t get in Putin’s face for putting a bounty on our troops, nor for anything else; if he owes the Russians tons of money, there would be reason to hide his tax returns. Bill Barr’s Department of Injustice asked a Federal court to allow the good ol’ USA to step in as the defendant in his rape-induced defamation suit brought by E. Jean Carroll. (That leaves us paying his legal fees and shields Trump from providing DNA that might prove the “She’s not my type” rape, before the election.) Characterizing our war dead and maimed as “losers and suckers” really pisses me off – I knew some of those guys, and that is just dead wrong.

And the worst is the way this Mango Mussolini has mishandled our covid-19 pandemic. Bob Woodward’s book and tape recordings of his Trump interviews establish that Trump knew in late January that this stuff was very, very, very bad. Yet he did nothing to build up a national stockpile of equipment to deal with it, nor did he take any decisive action at the Federal level, nor did he even inform the governors he left to deal with the pandemic of its true danger, nor did he lead the American people to wear masks, socially distance, and stay away from large gatherings.  His approach was and is to attack the pandemic with a public relations campaign. To top it all off, he doesn’t want another covid relief bill that would help fund the states and those who are unemployed or soon will be.

Trump is a monster. We all gotta vote. If you vote by mail, do it as soon as your state permits.  If you vote in person, bring a light-weight lawn chair and a thermos for the lines and, in the Judeo-Christian spirit of community, mask up to protect those who won’t.  

Lives depend on this. Unfortunately, so does our democracy.