A Distant View of Hills

Peter has my new computer in good working order but I am still waiting for a delivery of the thingy I have to plug into it in order to download pictures from my camera. This used to be a port in the side of my computer, but in their great wisdom/desire for flawless design/greed/or just plain overthinking things, it has been eliminated from the new MacBook Air. The price has not been reduced accordingly. They also seem to have eliminated most of the functions in Photo that I tend to use, but since I am of the generation that needs a written manual and complain because I cannot be expected to just intuit which changes have been made and where I can find them it may just take me some time to find my way around.

We got a rather insulting brochure from the power company reminding us that fire season is coming and that in order to prevent their long neglected equipment from starting another conflagration, they will be re-instituting their much reviled Public Safety Power Shutoff Program subtitled 'smaller, shorter, smarter'. All it did was remind us that while our solar battery backup is all installed, we have no idea whether the inverter is working. It converts is supposed to convert the solar power to mains power and switch to the 'critical control panel'  connected to the battery if the power goes off. So far, calls from us and from Ali, the engineer,  have gone unreturned....We had the same problem with them when they installed the simpler inverter when the solar panels were put up. Unfortunately they a seem to be the only game in town...as is the power company. We are getting very cranky about it.

I was wondering if my sanity is being threatened by continuing isolation when I looked at the paper and felt the urge to laugh at the mostly dire headlines. 'Technical problems' in reporting positive Covid cases may have resulted in undercounting of the recent very minimally improving numbers. 'Technical problems'...exactly what does that mean? The paper says it's a 'glitch' in the electronic system used to report COVID-19, but it also takes up to two weeks to get results from tests, rendering them totally useless. This in California, the home of Silicon Valley, Google, Apple and numerous other high tech companies that ought to be finding a solution rather than cheating me out of my memory card port on my computer.

The power company can't keep the power on, we can't get confirmation that the backup battery system is working, the county can't keep a simple case count of a deadly disease, yet we are being locked up to prevent its spread. 

Somehow 'smaller shorter, smarter' doesn't quite cover it. I think this comment in a letter to the editor, while not exactly relevant to my current bad mood did quite a lot to relieve it:
EDITOR: Anyone who has done even a modicum of observation, research or fact-checking knows that Donald Trump is a narcissistic, self-pitying, petty, rude, bigoted, misogynistic, thin-skinned, dishonest, preening, unethical, amoral, corrupt, incurious, rabidly vindictive, unpatriotic, insecure, hypocritical, mean-spirited, neurotic demagogue....why would anyone elect this man to any position of public prestige and power?

Not to put too fine a point on it, I couldn't have said it any better myself....