nobody knows how long this pandemic will be, how many of us it will take, whether it will come back worse than it is now, or fizzle after a good vaccine is developed. our children - their lives already permanently altered - may live or not, depending on how healthy they are anyway, and how careless they are about interactions. i suspect, ours are not so careful. but it's not like they haven't been warned. if they get the virus, and bring it home, they just have to live with the consequences.

one thing my relatives were saying is, sometimes you can be careful, and still get it. in one story, some guy is standing in a doorway, and his friends walk by. friend gets the covid from saying hello as he walks by the doorway. sometimes you can't avoid it. it's there in your path.

it's a cool, rainy day way out here in the mountains. because of the rain, we've been burning. here's the story. piles and piles of what we call "slash," old trees, sticks, leaves, pine needles, are sitting around all through the dry season, just being fuel. one spark and it could set the mountain on fire. not only "could," but also "would be likely to," or "has done it before." you got too much dry stuff hanging around, you got trouble. so now it's rainy season. it rains every day, or every couple of days. sometimes things are soggy, but sometimes they dry out between rains, and that's a good time to burn what you can. quick before it rains again, get rid of some of these piles of straw.

i noticed that my neighbors were doing it when my daughter told me of her friends having a "bomb fire." i thought, well, i should be having a bomb fire myself. instead i've been opting for smaller campfires - don't warn the sheriff, just keep it small, do it now when there are no fire restrictions, and burn about a fire full every time. it would be easier to burn the whole darn pile at once, yes, but it would also be a much bigger production, and if i keep it small i feel like i have a little more control.

it's the dry straw i really love to get rid of. the sticks, yes, they are fuel too, and there are too many of them, so i say, be gone. but the sticks on some level can create heat in a wood stove. the straw, on the other hand, just sits there waiting for a match. in piles. be gone with you! it's not like i'm going to make a straw mat out of it. just thousands of pine needles sitting in a pile, making everyone anxious every day through a long ten-month dry season. fortunately we don't have a lot of cigarette-smoking drivers along our road.

did a blog report - this here blog is my number one of about forty blogs. lots of them are long dormant - you're talking ten, fifteen years - but they still seem to gather in some views. i'm not sure what constitutes a "view," if half the time they take one second to figure out it's not what they are looking for. but sometimes, i fancy that they stop and look at the blog, read the template, notice stuff. i'm not sure. this month, 11,625 "views" altogether, 1926 on this blog alone. last month, only 7,037. but that's better than what i get on twitter. i'm mulling over going commercial. i've always kept the blogs off the commercial realm. but of the forty, there are probably some i could make commercial. not this one of course - this one will stay what it's always been. but it might be interesting to just boldly go commercial - go for the "hits," and see if it will help as a marketing plan.

of my six projects, unwritten things, or in some cases written but not produced, i consider ordering them in terms of importance. namely, if i catch covid tomorrow, and i'm finished, what do i want to be already finished? my present priorities are based on this: what can i get off my table as soon as possible. or, what am i really most wanting to work on? unfortunately the answer to all three questions comes out different, every time. and half the time, i just want to start a new project. but then there would be seven, because you know i wouldn't finish that one either.

last month i managed to update only eleven of my forty or so blogs. my general campaign, though, has meant that i've updated more than half of them in a few months, and that's what accounts, probably, for my rising numbers. you come up higher on your google algorithm, if you have a "current" "live" blog, and as pointless as some of them are, they are at least "alive" and that's partly 'cause i haven't kilt 'em yet. it's nice having a remote outpost in cyberspace, that represents one of your aspirations, or ideas, or projects. no reason to abolish such things, except that, in a sense, it's like a kid on a street corner, sit there long enough, trouble will find it. a general campaign of awareness is called for here. i'll keep you posted. that way, when i die, you'll know my intentions.