Shopping, Posturing, Rebuilding
As relaxing and therapeutic going to the beach was on Wednesday night, I contrasted that by deciding to get the Costco shopping down last night. Going into Costco is never a fun experience because of the abundance of human beings but since we are out of snowbird season, it was not as awful as it could be. I was out of there in around 30 minutes.
On the way home I stopped to get coffee at DD for Cindy and myself. Our old go to DD location was on the way so I placed the order there. That place is just in disarray. The longtime manager left and the staff that is there is pretty ineffective. I placed an order in the app to pick up in the drive thru. When I got there one car was ahead of me in line. It took 15 minutes until I got the two drink order (which they messed up). I made a mental note to do whatever I can to always choose the new location 3 miles from our house where the employees seem much more in sync.
Wow if anyone has any doubt that Ron DeSantis is posturing for a presidential run all you have to do is look at his recent legislative actions. His cancellation of all pandemic emergency orders seems primarily just about telling people what they want to hear. India declared all clear in February and look at the disaster that has ensued since. Giving people the sense that there is absolutely nothing to worry about is the wrong message IMO. It feels like he thinks there is an invisible, impenetrable virus wall around the state. If there was any lesson to be learned from this mess, it’s that these type of outbreaks do not respect boundaries and can leap across the globe at a lightning pace.
The availability of the vaccine certainly helps dull the edge but it certainly does not eliminate the problem. I just feel like saying “all clear” sends the wrong message, just ask George Bush how that worked out.
The other funny legislation looked like it was right out of Trump’s playbook. There evidently was some covid discussion that Ron had with some scientists that was pulled off of FB. They flagged it as having questionable covid 19 information. Ron did not like this and whipped up some meaningless, unenforceable legislation that would penalize tech companies for censoring political figures.
I absolutely agree that companies like Google or FB can be overzealous in their reach when it comes to this. Hell I got a warning on YouTube for a video that had covid tips I was sent early on in the pandemic. It was all pretty much common sense practices and included nothing as crazy as injecting disinfectant into your bloodstream, but it was pulled down. However these same companies have been broiled in the past for doing no monitoring of what was getting posted on their powerful and influential platforms. Have they swung too far the other way? Perhaps, but throwing together paper tiger legislation such as Ron has has one purpose, to make him look better in 2024 and little else.
This weekend the main project will be working on the garden. We are cutting it’s size in half and setting up higher raised beds, made out of metal. It is going to be a pretty labor intensive task but as always, I have a loose mental blueprint of how it will go, subject to change of course.