First we shall set the tone for this week. Click here for some listening music.

This normally is a week that I enjoy greatly as baseball season would start. I had my ticket in hand for Opening Day down at Camden Yards and was all ready. I would have had a ticket for Sunday’s game too as part of my season ticket package. Not to be. Thanks China! If you hadn’t sat on your butts and pretended that this virus didn’t exist while also prosecuting whistleblowers I might be going to see baseball this week or at least have something to watch on TV or listen to on the radio. They might have just played games with no spectators for a week or two. Considering the time of year the crowds would be small anyway so it wouldn’t have been a huge loss outside of the guaranteed (and what may be their only) sellout for Opening Day for the Orioles. The Orioles would have been the ideal team given their small crowds last year. Social distancing was already being practiced at Camden Yards last year.

I was thinking that this could actually be good for the US in the long run. It may be the kick in the pants needed to bring manufacturing back to the US and lower our reliance on China and that would be a good thing. I hate having to rely on Communists for anything. Communism is a pipe dream and yet people still adhere to it. I don’t understand it.

Spent much of the week just like last week working from home with an occasional trip out of the house. This will get old after awhile but it’s better than coming down with the CCP virus. The worst thing to happen was for the Internet to go out. I use an Xfinity hot spot since I am cheap and every few months it just stops working and then a week or two later it starts working fine again. I can pick up another in the back of the house so all affairs of state were transferred there. It’s not ideal but at least it got the job done. It gets a bit chilly in that room when it’s cold out but that might not be an issue I have to deal with for much longer as temperatures warm up.

Finished Allegiance on Tuesday night. It was a very easy read but yet had a lot of good info. It didn’t help my opinion on James Buchanan much and I think I would have done things a bit different than he did by sending reinforcements and supplies much sooner and telling South Carolina governor Francis Pickens to shove it. Yeah, that probably would have started the war earlier but South Carolina was not prepared for it militarily and it might have played out much differently. Anyway, up next is Timothy Smith’s Champion Hill. Apparently this is the only full length book about this battle which decided the fate of Vicksburg and thus the fate of the Confederacy. I don’t think it will be quite as easy of a read but I’ve gotten through a couple other of his works so I don’t think it will be bad.

Champion Hill for a long time was the largest battlefield not to have any sort of preservation but movements recently have begun those efforts and it looks like it will become a part of Vicksburg National Military Park. It is good that it is in a rural part of Mississippi so at least development has not overtaken it like in Atlanta and Nashville. I am looking forward to visiting one day and with the Mississippi Braves nearby that will be a good time. So far it has been an easy read and I got quite a bit in before the end of the week.

Thursday was of course bittersweet since I would have headed down to Baltimore around 11 for a 3:00 start for Opening Day. I do look forward to it, even if the Orioles stink, and the weather was not bad. In fact by gametime it would have been over 60 degrees and sunny. A few years ago there were multiple hour-long rain delays that made it miserable. Not today, but then that doesn’t matter now does it. I have no idea if baseball is even going to be played this year. I know they are trying to get started in Japan and South Korea but that doesn’t seem to be going too well with players on one of the KBO teams testing positive for CCP virus. It looks like my New England trip planned for this summer will be postponed until 2021.

As the week ends I will need to visit the grocery store soon for the cats but beer reserves are still in good shape as are toilet paper reserves. It does help living alone so not a lot of TP gets used normally. I want to keep a 2 week supply of food in the house so I figured I would head out to the grocery store and pick through what is left over after the horde gets through. Before this all happened I bought a little bit extra each week for about a month so my shelves are still pretty full and I feel pretty good about that decision. It could be worse for me, so at least there’s that. The stay at home order began on Friday night, not that it matters. Nothing is open so I have no reason to go out other than to visit the grocery store. It was a boring weekend other than that. I went on Sunday morning and the situation was not quite as bad as I thought it would be. Outside of toilet paper, paper towels and dry cat food (go figure, fortunately I have 2 full bags still so Haka and Squeaky won’t be going hungry) the shelves were pretty well stocked. OK, there were a few other things that were low like pasta, soup and canned vegetables but I’ll survive since I was able to get some spaghetti. I also found some chicken breasts so I had slow cooker bbq chicken tacos on Sunday and there is plenty left over for lunches through the week.