Thoughts for a Monday

The boys are on Spring Break; Beautiful Wife and I are not. We're alternating days on who's trying to work from home and keep an eye on them, and who will be somewhere else getting meaningful work done. Meanwhile, we have -- I desperately hope -- gotten the last of Secondborn's outstanding work turned in to his teachers. Getting the video of him in costume portraying Nathan Hale off of Beautiful Wife's phone, into a proper file format, back onto Secondborn's school Chromebook, and uploaded to the proper app has taken an hour and a half of my life that I will never get back, but it's done. Speaking (obliquely) of Nathan Hale, I saw a window sticker on a truck a couple of weeks back that just said, "Pro Patria Mori" and since this is the Dallas/Fort Worth Metroplex I have absolutely no idea if this is some sort of Right-Wing call to arms, or if they were being ironic with a reference to Wilfred Owens. I'd lean towards the pre-1920s un-ironic interpretation, but who knows? Some good news, at least: back on Friday, I managed to get my first shot for the Moderna vaccine ("for COVID19," I add for the benefit of future historians). Pure dumb luck: they have been giving the vaccine out at my workplace and had some extras, so they were going around asking people if they wanted to get vaccinated. I happened to be there, so I was. I've heard varying reports, but for me it was about the same experience as getting a flu shot: my shoulder (where they injected me) got very sore after a couple of hours by was fine a day later; I spent the evening and the next day kind of run-down, groggy, and cranky; but otherwise it was pretty unremarkable. Well, I mean, I woke up thinking about what a great guy Bill Gates is and how I should believe anything he says, and there's this odd mark that seems to be forming on my forehead, but apart from that the side effects were very minimal. Unfortunately -- and partly as a result of that -- no writing got done this weekend. We are, however, gradually catching up on laundry -- and to complete the trifecta of Dying For One's Country topics, I found myself watching Blackadder Goes Forth, which is set in World War I. Dulce et Decorum Est, indeed.