March 294th.

It's about time to pause my job search for a couple weeks, as the industry tends to just hibernate until the new year. New job openings will appear, as everyone finalizes their 2021 headcount. It'll be fine.

Last night the Shitgibbon and his pet lunatics sat down in the Oval Office and discussed how to stage a coup, by physical force, using the military and everything. Attorneys on Twitter are now (re-?)acquainting themselves with the dust-caked federal crime of "seditious conspiracy," which seems to mostly get pulled out for terrorists (even white ones) because, let's be honest: it exceeds the ambition of most criminals. Unlike every other conspiracy charge, seditious conspiracy doesn't require you to have gone as far as to start your overthrow of the government or its laws, so this seems to qualify. Good times!

This is the first winter I've had a violin nice enough to really feel affected by the weather. Higher-end violins are built more lightly, so they can resonate more, which makes them more sensitive and harder to play, and also makes them more likely to disintegrate when rented to students (who are mostly kids). I also haven't particularly liked my rental violins, so it's a treat to have one I really enjoy. It's still a stupid instrument.

My violin teacher, already working remotely, and with finances only somewhat better than you'd expect for a Millennial musician, went down to Puerto Vallarta a few weeks ago. My first question was "Are you coming back?" and the question is open, but he's certainly ripe for the expat life. Absent the ability of the Bay Area to put you in a room with the right people, you might as well go someplace else.

(There's a famous Scottish fiddler named Alasdair Fraser, who actually lives relatively nearby here, and whose son Galen is also a local musician. Alasdair wrote a pair of tunes I learned in simplified form, but my teacher described being out at a jam session, and "Galen's Arrival" came up, and Galen said, "That's me! I'm Galen!" and of course the song was written for his birth. But there are no jam sessions.)

We're staying home. We should walk the dog more. We're all healthy, for the moment, but the pandemic is looking grimmer than ever.

One nice feature of a new job will be that I'll have less time to read Twitter.

March 288th.

The fascist coup has failed, this time around. We get a short grace period before fighting the next one. The Democratic Party establishment has not been doing shining work since the election: Biden has already made some deeply ungood Cabinet choices, and Pelosi started working on strategies to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory even before the fascists started filing lawsuits. The pre-2004 Red Sox would have recognized fellow travelers.

This magnificent trio of Scandinavian women performed this at Fiddle Tunes last year, and I've been lusting after it ever since:

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It's written by Anna Lindblad (on the left there), inspired by the music and friendships she made at the Tønder Festival, but it's a Zydeco tune, like this one. It's on her album Med Vänner ("With Friends"), but the original is a complicated tapestry of many instruments, and I've wanted to pick apart this simpler version, but didn't have a good recording.

The job hunt is going well, I think. I'm grateful to not have to be in a rush. The downside is that I don't have a job, but I'm better situated for unemployment than at any other time in my life? It's worth it, to land in the right situation, and it will take a little time: one of my good friends said, "You're amazing at managing down and sideways, but not up. So if you're head of Engineering at a small company, that more or less takes managing up out of the equation." She's been in executive roles for a while now, and sure enough the one VP role I've been interviewing for so far is much more suited to me. So we'll see how that goes.

Eight months ago I would have said "Defund The Police" is a little extreme, but after seeing how thoroughly their only response to concerns about police violence is more violence, watching one after another police union president stand up and scream like an abusive alcoholic dad on a bender that we're all horrible people because we don't appreciate how much they do for us, hearing how they continue beating and killing citizens with impunity, well, sign me up.

<blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">call me crazy but i&#39;m starting to think that it&#39;s bad that every city in america funds a small standing army of right-wing nutjobs that hates it</p>&mdash; Dr. Samantha Hancox-Li (@perdricof) <a href="https://twitter.com/perdricof/status/1322732916489756672?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">November 1, 2020</a></blockquote> <script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>

The institution is rotten to the core, including liberal bastions like the Bay Area. Just dissolve every police department. I don't care if we have a replacement plan, although people do. We'll figure it out. It won't be worse than the status quo.

And that's our news, on this 288th day of March 2020. Good night, and good luck.