This is the time of the year I really hate it in Socal. Hot (very), dry (very). It hasn’t rained in eight months. It’s 96 degrees at 10am, going to about 105 today. Just another nice Fall day. Hard to believe tomorrow is the first day in October.

And as long as I’m in a mood, just a few words about last night’s “debate”. It was a national embarrassment, just another thing that Trump has touched and killed. Two old white guys (three actually, including the so-called moderator) yelling and talking over each other. Our Presidential election process is a mess, yielding these two as are our best and only choices.

I’m doing the Nth rewrite of chapter one of my novel, and that isn’t helping my mood. It’s hard to throw away the words previously written, but…it is getting better. I’m anxious to declare Ch 1 good enough and move on (again).

Pretty sure I’m having a flareup of COVID cabin fever. Can’t visit with friends because COVID. Can’t enjoy the outdoors because heat. Have to sit a lot and keep the knee elevated because surgery. Can’t fly out and see the grandkids because COVID. There’s a whole lot of can’t in life these days.

2021 needs to be the year of “can”.

UPDATE: It got up to 107 today at the house, 109 out by the freeway. The standing 50+ year all-time record for this date was 100, back in 2004. New heat records being set here about every other day. So yeah, climate change feels real to me.

It’s been 28 days since my knee surgery, and all is well. In fact, things have gone much, much better than I expected. Just two days ago I played my first round of golf – nine holes riding in a cart. But the moderate walking and the swing itself just weren’t a problem. That was a huge milestone for me.

Sure, there are days when the leg feels “not great”. Today is one of them – sciatica has set in. But keeping up with PT and Tylenol has minimized those days, and I’m already much more ambulatory than before the surgery. Lots to be thankful for here.

Today I go see my surgeon for the first time since the surgery. She’ll tell me if I’m nuts for pushing things as hard/fast as I have. We’ll see.

UPDATE: The surgeon gave me clearance to do pretty much anything, including extended walks and golf. The bionic knee is solid and the incision is healed, though still a little rough looking. I’m a lucky guy.

I’ve come around to the somewhat fatalistic opinion that Trump’s nomination of Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court isn’t the life-or-death deal that many think it is. Yes, she’s almost certainly an arch-conservative on par with Scalia, Alito and Thomas. And yes, she’ll probably be around for a loooong time. This will hurt.

But I think this is a case where short-term issues outweigh long-term. Right now we have some near-term, existential actions that must be taken.

• Get rid of the Trump crime family.
• Get rid of McConnell’s stranglehold on lawmaking in the US. He is the disease that has infected Congress, and needs to be excised.
• Repair the damage to our country’s image, to democracy in general, to environmental regulations.
• Get the US economy back on track with intelligent subsidies to save jobs until normal capitalism can kick in.
• Re-educate people and their understanding of how we can dampen COVID until vaccines are widely available.
• Do something intelligent in terms of police reforms and address the growing mistrust/hate of law enforcement. That just can’t go on in a healthy society.

These are all things that can and must be done in the short term, where I’m defining short term as 1-3 years. So while Barrett may do some damage to the progressive agenda during that time, dealing effectively with any/all of these items is more important, IMHO.

And in the spirit of keeping things in perspective, here’s my new favorite picture.

Tough morning, tough week. I’ll (mostly) avoid whining, but let’s just agree that any day that starts with sleep deprivation is a tough day.

Tough week because it’s been awful watching Louisville make the national news over the Breonna Taylor tragedy. I’ve come to embrace Louisville as my second home, and seeing it torn apart by protestors and police is tough. Tragedy upon tragedy.

I have a pithy, high-minded, fully formed essay about all this somewhere in my head, but it’s hidden away after a sleepless night. The gist of it is that the protestors are protesting the wrong thing. Don’t blame the cops – they’re just doing what they’re trained and told to do, albeit poorly. Blame the law. Protest the legal system, not the enforcers. In no world should it be legal to break in a citizen’s door in the dead of night and rush in with deadly force. Our homes are our safe place, our sanctuary, our castle. Government-sanctioned entry to that place should be rare, should be a highly-regulated event and should be documented vigorously. For example, it should be illegal to fulfill a warrant and enter a private space (home or business), without a video record (body cams).

But in this lovely year of 2020 the powers that be in Louisville have ruled that the break-in and shooting that killed Breonna Taylor was legal. So be it. But that doesn’t make it right, or just. So attack the legal system. Change it.

Going to war with the police is (a) the wrong target, (b) unwinnable, and (c) also unjust. Two wrongs won’t make a right. So take all that protest energy and change the system.

I know, easy to say but tough to do. But the right thing often is.

Big day today. The folks who designed and installed our fire protection system are finally coming to start it up and test it. So, after two years (!!) of waiting, we’ll have an automated system to protect the house in case of fire.

The system was mostly complete after six months, but the installers disappeared for a long period. I worried that they had gone out of business or simply taken our money. They returned in the spring of 2019, finished the system and we scheduled the startup/test. I had to be somewhere else on that day so we tried to reschedule, and they disappeared again for over a year. Maddening.

Part of the problem is that the same guys they use for system installation are employed in a private firefighting team that roams over CA, NV, and OR. They’ve been busy these last two fire seasons, each the worst the West has ever seen. But that doesn’t excuse their lack of attention to a paid-up customer in Socal. Good system designers, but the worst project management and customer service ever.

Pictures coming later. Fingers crossed that they show up.

UPDATES: The fire system installers are here. We’ll get to test today. Pictures in progress.

Also, my home state and even my home town are in the national news today. The Breonna Taylor news about charges against the officers who killed her are in (just one officer indicted), and they won’t make anyone happy. Both law enforcement and the protestors will hate it.

And the CEO of Kings Daughter’s Hospital, the very facility where I was born, is pleading with local residents to mask up and keep distance. The hospital is at capacity with COVID patients and the projections look a lot worse.

Here’s a little something to make you happy. Grandsons Hudson and Jesse giving their Halloween costumes a trial run. I’ll call it Buzz and mini-Buzz. Just makes me smile to look at them.

Also in good news today, I went to the driving range and (carefully) hit a small bucket of golf balls. Big success, no pain. 20 days after surgery – this is a big, happy milestone.

Not 30 minutes after I posted my gloomy Friday summary, we get the news that Ruth Bader Ginsburg has died. Rest in peace RBG.

Just another gift from 2020. Where we go from here…it’s hard to be an optimist. Damn.

I’m stuck in my chair today, letting my knee rest from yesterday’s ill-advised overexertion. Exercised too much / too hard, went out into the world and ran errands – acted like all was normal. This morning when I woke up the knee was more swollen, stiff and painful to walk on. A classic setback. Doh. So today I’m a lump in a chair. It doesn’t help that we’re having another all-time record hot day – 101 today in Fallbrook. Yay for the best weather in the world (?).

That give me time to think and read. First up, my daughter turned me on to this notable plea for empathy from a fellow eastern Kentuckian. Tyler Childers is shaping up to be this generation’s John Prine, and that’s high praise.

In Trumpland, there’s a whole lotta crazy-evil going on, as usual. Everything he touches dies, even when it’s something that might be good for Americans. I give you a drug deal gone bad.

Then there’s this little bit of schadenfreude. I hope the pastor recovers, but I hope he’s learned something.

This isn’t really new news, but a White House aide (Pence’s aide, to be precise) has gone public with insider stories describing Trump as a stone-cold sociopath. At least that confirms things for us all.

Moving on, one of my favorite contemporary intellectuals is Andrew Sullivan. In an essay today he talks about how social media and targeted ads are brainwashing Americans and driving the great cultural divide. He’s likely right, and it explains a lot of what’s happened the last decade.

Finally, grandson Hudson and his Dad are going to camp out in the backyard tonight, taking advantage of some nice weather back in Louisville. I hope they have a great time. Intrepid campers pictured below.

Not much new to report on the knee. Healing continues, and every day it’s getting less swollen and more usable. I’m very happy with progress and results, as is my MD. Walking is becoming pleasant again.

The biggest change is that exercise / rehab has pretty much taken over my life. My portfolio of exercises has grown quite a bit, and between the things I do hourly and the things I do twice per day, it’s a fairly packed day. There’s little time for anything else, but given the priority of making the new knee work, I suppose that makes sense.

For the next few days I get to enjoy watching the US Open golf tourney in between exercises. It’s a small thing, but I’m grateful for it. I can watch and daydream about the day I can get back out and whack the little white ball.

In macro-news, the western US is still burning (though a bit less), the Gulf states are staring down a string of potential hurricanes, the US is still doing a ridiculously bad job of pandemic management, and civil unrest (black versus white, Democrat versus Republican, flat-Earthers versus science) is at an all-time high. Basically, we’re living in Mordor. So maybe staying inside, exercising and watching golf, isn’t such a bad idea.

46 days until the elections. And 105 days left in a cursed 2020. Hang in there…