March 307th.

While 2020 can indeed fuck right off, I'll call it done when I feel safe hanging out inside a coffee shop for an hour, or if I ever see my violin teacher in person again (he's doing Zoom lessons from Puerto Vallarta).

We had a mellow Christmas here, as always. On Christmas Eve I was wondering why it didn't feel particularly Christmasy, and I realized that the distinguishing feature of my Christmasy feeling is of gathering around and spending quiet time...at home. Not exactly an unusual feeling for 2020. Next year, perhaps we'll spend Christmas someplace else.

I finished a paltry 52 books in 2020, even if 10 of them were the 3.2 million words of The Malazan Book of the Fallen. Compare to 59 in 2019, and 97 in 2018. 2020 was a year for watching TV, of course, and I spent a lot of time playing my flotilla of musical instruments. I bought myself a lovely 5-string violin, which is sort of oriented towards folk music, but it humors me as I learned a piece by Couperin to start learning ornamentation, and a concerto by Vivaldi to start playing in the higher hand positions instead of just up by the head of the violin. I had never heard of Couperin, but I wanted to play this first Québecois tune with all the ornaments to make it sound right, and since Couperin wrote Baroque music you could describe frankly as "frilly" or "froofy," it's got ornaments every few notes (of which the grace-note is only the easiest and most familiar) and good for learning.

(Voices of Music is local here to the Bay Area, actually, and has dozens and dozens of these amazing videos, though I've yet to make it to a concert. They're doing "historically-informed performance," which is why the cello has 5 strings and no endpin, the violins have decorations on the fingerboards, and the whole ensemble is tuned a half-step down from the American standard A=440 Hz, which would be [looks it up] A=413.5 Hz.)

The dog groomer noticed a funky growth bleeding in between a couple of her two front toes, so somedog got to go to the vet. There turned out to be two of them, and the first had a bigger base than expected, so instead of just "skin glue" (medical-grade Superglue) she got a few sutures, and 10 days in a cone. It's her first cone since she was spayed maybe 5 years ago, and the pathos levels have been high.

She's not in pain, but in this time of trial, she gains even more succor from her true god, the heater vent. With a truly doggy grasp of cause and effect, she will sit in that spot multiple times per day until May or so, trying to get the heat to come on.

One thing that's been really striking is that without her customary cat-like grooming, she really does have a lot of crusty oozing around the eyes, that she takes care of herself; and without licking herself with her unstoppably disgusting breath, she smells better.

Except for one week over the summer when businesses boarded up their windows–the gun shop up the road decided to just leave theirs boarded–we've been free of the civil unrest of the larger cities nearby. You never know, though, and as I'm big on self-defense, I did some digging into projectile weapons.

(I have knives, and I know how to use them, but knife fighting is dangerous, and your only reasonable goal is to kill the other guy, and win or lose, you should expect to get cut up a bit. I definitely don't want to get cut up, and I definitely don't want to kill anybody, so I looked for other options.)

I don't really want a firearm in the house, even though less-lethal shotgun rounds are myriad: among other things, you need to practice with whatever device you get, which is a pain in the ass in normal times, and more so now.

From watching this veterinarian firearms aficionado testing less-lethal options with/on a friend, I learned about PepperBall, which is a paintball "marker" (the paintball industry wisely and studiously avoids saying "gun") where the balls are filled with OC (oleocapsaicin–pepper spray) instead of paint. In one of those unreasonable intersections of regulation that liberal states like California stumble through in the process of trying to do the right thing, chemical irritant projectiles are illegal outside of law enforcement. So guns are legal, but OC projectiles, which you might use to avoid killing people, are not.

(As an aside, California did a clever thing and instituted background checks for ammunition, mostly identical to the background checks required for guns. This means mail-order ammunition has to be sent to a licensed dealer, just like guns, instead of to your house. And many mail-order businesses around the country have just decided it's not worth the hassle, and don't ship to California any more. They also made it a felony to circumvent the system by shopping in our libertarian neighbor Nevada and bringing it back here. I assume catching people doing this is like shooting fish in a barrel for cops, just looking for California plates at gun shops and following them over the border. 

It's incredibly obnoxious if you're just a normal human who wants to buy ammunition, since this exacerbates the long-running ammunition shortage; but I appreciate the creativity, because the Second Amendment says nothing about a right to buy and own bullets...among other things, when the Second Amendment was written, people were still making their own musket balls at home.)

Given all those constraints, I finally found these guys, who take a paintball marker which is the platform for the Pepperball™ "launcher" (Pepperball™ also avoids "gun"), and work them up into something that is no doubt considerably more painful: the video shows a different model shooting through a cookie sheet. They're in Maine, with delightful accents to match. And I can practice in the Terrible Garage, for as long as it stands.

That's not even everything that happened this year. I don't know when March 2020 ends, but we all hope it's soon.