The man stared weary ‘cross the valley o’er all that he had wrought, what he had yet still to do, and felt a yawning despair overtake him. – Anonymous Forty-five years, eh? Malformed though I am, I somehow surpassed my expectations to reach this point, and it’s certainly been an interesting life thus far. College, marriage, a few books, and perhaps even the pinnacle of my career, and then what?

I generally try to stay out of politics, primarily because they tend to be highly charged and particularly polarizing. One of the discussion panels I watch semi-regularly did a live viewing party of Biden’s speech last night in Philadelphia. Disregarding their commentary for the moment, what I saw and heard on that stage was extremely alarming. I now believe it’s a moral imperative to vote Joe Biden out of office as expeditiously as possible.

Well, it finally happened. A caught Covid a couple weeks ago starting Monday July 25th. Despite being in Italy in early 2020, I somehow dodged the initial outbreak and then remained Covid free for the next two years. I was even beginning to believe I’d already caught it asymptomatically some time in the past and was actually immune now. Like that time I had a random two-week long dry cough in 2020.

Jen and I have been using a Dyson DC-15 Animal ever since we got an apartment together in 2007, and it has been showing its age for a while. The brush driver was extremely hard to turn by hand, it frequently left things behind, and one it has always emitted a high pitched tone that drove me to don firing-range hearing protection. I’d recently disassembled the agitation brush system to clean out a bunch of cat hair and dust that had caked itself into the gear assembly that drives the agitator.

The TL;DR here is that my long vehicle search is over. The last few weeks have been a ceaselessly expanding and contracting series of criteria based on whatever seemed available at local dealerships and Facebook Marketplace. I probably should have just ordered something at a dealer to get exactly what I want, but the supply chain is still extremely precarious, and I’m not convinced the 3-4 month order pipeline will remain viable.