Avanti Nut Company is very much a family business, and 10 days ago its patriarch passed away suddenly and unexpectedly. Andy Solari leaves behind a legacy of 6 children and 12 grandchildren, as well as successful farming and walnut processing operations. The funeral in Linden on Wednesday was SRO and then some. There must have been nearly 1,000 people there.

In 2007 I started working at Avanti during the walnut harvest to give me something to do in retirement other than ride my bike and bother Stoker. For 6 weeks during September and October I spend more waking hours in the scale house than I do at home. Before this I really didn’t know Andy other than by reputation as a big farm operator. But over the next 14 years I became well acquainted with him and his 6 adult children. 4 of them are involved in farming with J & A Solari or with Avanti, or both.

My job at Avanti is mostly clerical, with spreadsheets and databases. I’m also a weighmaster, a high sounding term that just means I push a few buttons that control a scale to weigh trucks full and empty to determine the net pay weight. I don’t have the skills that the Solari children all seem to have been born with to drive forklift or a yard goat with a set of double trailers onto and off of scales and unloading elevators. But despite my shortcomings in the forklift department Andy always treated me as an important and valued part of the Avanti team.

Andy was a constant motion machine, as are his offspring. They are go-go-go types, who don’t always want to slow down to carefully keep track of the paperwork. That is my job, and if I do say so myself I am pretty good at it. Order, system, and organization are what I bring to the deliveries from multiple growers and multiple ranches and multiple dryers, all of whom get paid by the weight on the scale. Excel does the work but I have to tell it what to do.

Occasionally Andy would come into the scalehouse with a question about how many deliveries came from a certain ranch and how that compared to last year. Or he might want to know what the quality grades were for a certain field. With a few clicks I was able to provide the answer, which impressed him. I can’t drive a forklift but I know my way around a pivot table!

My favorite Andy story involves split loads. Most walnut deliveries come in sets of double trailers that weigh around 24 tons net. But there are some small lots, or small lots left over from bigger fields that are put in small bins of up to 1200 lbs. and delivered on a trailer. Andy would bring them to the Avanti scale and we would start the split load procedure.

It takes me just as much time to do the receiving process for a single 1,000 lb. bin as it does for a 48,000 lb. load. A 2-way split means there are two separate lots to deal with. A 3- way split is 50% more work than the 2- way. So a 5-way split is a time consuming process. But during walnut receiving season time can be in short supply.

Andy is calm but in a hurry, not surprisingly considering the scale of his harvesting and drying operations during the walnut harvest. The scale is tied up while each small lot is put on the scale, weighed, then taken off. I have to get the bin labels printed and stuck on the bins, which means I have to put the delivery information into the computer database to print the labels. I have to keep the receiving papers from the dryer together with the correct weight certificate and draw and label the grade samples. All this takes time. Nina is usually driving the yard goat with a set of doubles poised to weigh in or weigh out and looking impatient since the scale is tied up and she is forced to sit idle, which is not to her taste at all. I try to work as quickly as I can. By the time the 5 way split is done with and both Nina and Andy are on their way, I am one frazzled weighmaster.

Now that Andy is gone, I know there will be more 5-way splits to deal with, but it won’t be the same. I’ll miss his smile and his handshakes and his laughter. I don’t think I ever saw him in a bad mood, even when his weighmaster got flustered trying to get things done at ‘Solari Speed’. Avanti means ‘forward’ or ‘ahead’. An appropriate word for Andy’s memory.

Ms. Hermana’s visit got me reminiscing about cherry season and all the years we hired pickers to harvest the fruit. For decades my father ran his own cherry crew without using a contractor. My mother did all the bookkeeping, which was vital since both Dad and I were too tired from the long work day to post box totals to each picker’s pay sheet. Mom also did those dreaded labor filings to the EDD and SSA.

But eventually all the labor paperwork and I9’s and safety training requirements and pesticide notifications got to be too much, especially since we didn’t have a Human Resources Department. We only needed 30 to 40 people for two weeks each year. So we got lucky and found an honest contractor who took care of all that stuff, for a fee of course. Money well spent.

There are cherry picker stories galore, especially from the days when we ran our own crew. One year RL, a descendant of Dust Bowl migrants, showed up with a brand new motor home towing a Dodge Charger convertible. This was back in the 1980’s, and RL had actually won $1,000,000 in the State Lottery. The prize was paid out in installments of $50,000 per annum for 20 years. In those days this was life changing money . It was more than Stoker’s and my incomes combined in the 1980’s. Considerably more.

The money did change RL’s life; it bought him a new car and motor home. And left him broke until the next installment. So he had to go to work picking cherries to pay for gas and beer and cigarettes. No financial planning for him!

My favorite cherry picker story is completely different. One year we hired a new employee named Primo Delgado. He was the first Delgado brother to come to work for us, and it must have been to his liking because the next year he was joined by his brothers Adelmo and Juan and Jose. Those guys could really pick cherries, fast and clean, no stemming or bruising.

But on Primo’s second day of employment there was an incident. To understand what happened you should know that pickers are assigned a group of trees (usually 6), called a ‘set’. They pick all the trees in the set and then move ahead to the next open set. There is a row called a ‘drive’ which is where they place all the full boxes. My dad drove the tractor up the drive pulling a trailer with bins. He had punch cards and a notebook and a hole punch with him. He would stop at each picker’s stack of boxes. I would count the boxes and tell my dad (sitting on the tractor, no need to get on and off 100 times a day) how many so he could punch holes in the picker’s card. Pickers get paid by the box, and before we hired a contractor and Ms. Hermana did the checking, that was our responsibility.

Next I would dump the fruit from the 35 lb. box into the bin, very carefully. Then I would find the picker and tell him how many boxes we had picked up to confirm with him/her the count was correct, and then follow the trailer to the next stack. I used to lift anywhere between 300 and 800 of these crates a day. I think one day we picked 1000.

• 

• 

• 

With that backround, here is what happened. We pulled up to Primo’s stack. I counted five boxes, told my dad 5, dumped them into the big white bin, then found Primo and told him “Cinco cajas”. I like to pretend I know some Spanish.

Primo frowned and said “No, seis. Seis cajas”. Now I have a problem. There are three possibilities:

1. I made a mistake. Rare but possible.
2. Primo made an honest mistake. Possible. But people who are being paid by the box are usually quite aware of how many boxes they have picked.
3. Primo was trying to cheat me.

Possibility 3 was by far the most likely. But I couldn’t be sure, and there was no way to tell since there were empty boxes everywhere. This situation was quite rare on our ranch but when it did happen our policy was to take the picker’s word. Once. If it happened again with the same person we would pay him/her off at the end of the day and tell them not to come back. I don’t think that ever happened.

So I told my dad to mark 6 boxes. I said I thought I dumped 5 but I made a mistake. I looked at Primo and told him “Seis cajas. Lo siento” (I’m sorry).

As I turned to walk to the next stack Primo told me, in English, “Maybe five”. What followed was a kind of pax de deux, because I didn’t want him to think I was pressuring him to change his count. And he didn’t want me to think he was cheating us.

Remember this is Primo’s second day. I thought about this for a long time and I think I know what happened. Primo had probably been cheated by contractors and coyotes and unscrupulous growers many times. He had to try to get an extra box, because in his world you have to look for any edge you can get. And he succeeded. I would have given it to him, no questions asked. As I said, once.

But Primo had second thoughts. He was picking some nice trees and getting a lot of boxes. He was being well paid for those boxes, more than at virtually any other ranch around. He got away with the scheme, but his conscience wouldn’t let him keep it. He saw my dad and I working plenty hard, and saw we treated people fairly. He decided to reciprocate.

Primo’s brothers were a fixture of our cherry crew for years. They even went to work for our contractor when we quit running our own crew, which told me that we had hired an honest contractor. But Primo disappeared after a few seasons. His brothers told me he was working on “caw blay”. That is the Spanish pronunciation of ‘cable’. Primo was installing cable TV and internet lines in the Bay Area. Another move up, just like Ms. Hermana.

But early in May a few years later, who shows up at my front door but Primo. He wants to know if he can have a job picking with his brothers. I said sure, but what happened to the ‘caw blay?” He smiles and said “tengo vacacion”. He had some vacation time and wanted to come pick fruit and camp with his hermanos. So I guess picking cherries along Brumby Road did not constitute worker exploitation. Take that Dr. Marx!

Last Wednesday around 5 PM Stoker and I were getting ready for our evening ritual of self medicating with a mood elevating, muscle relaxing beverage in order to watch the news of the day without getting apoplectic. The doorbell rang, and we assumed it was simply another of the endless stream of Amazon deliveries that find their way to Brumby Road. I halted my pharmaceutical preparations and went to bring in Diane’s latest purchase.

I was in for a surprise. There was a woman at the door, masked up. I opened the door and stared at her, thinking she looked familiar. When I heard her gentle voice, with a light Spanish accent, say “Hello Richard, do you remember me?” I knew instantly who she was.

Her name is not important and I’m going to respect her privacy. Let’s call her Ms. Mi Hermana. If I had a sister I would want her to be someone like the woman standing on my front porch. I was very happy to see her. It had been a long time, at least a dozen years.

Years ago, when my father and I were still farming, we finally decided that running our own cherry picking crew was too onerous a task, so we hired a contractor. This relationship worked out quite well for many years until we retired from farming. Ms. Hermana worked for the contractor as the ‘checker’. She kept track of how many boxes of cherries each employee filled and got paid for. My job was the ‘swamper’, which means I loaded the boxes onto the trailer and picked up empties and moved ladders and loaded bins onto our truck to deliver to the packing shed.

• 

• 

• 

Since Ms. Hermana and I worked side by side for many hours, we got to know each other quite well. She spoke excellent English which she was constantly, and needlessly, apologizing for. I tried to use my high school Spanish with her whenever possible. We got along great. Her husband was one of the pickers, and when there was time between our swamping rounds she would go help him for a few minutes. He is a handsome man with a beautiful voice, and sometimes while he was working he would sing something quite lovely, in Spanish of course.

After quick assurances that we had all been vaccinated, she took off her mask and we shared a big non-social distancing hug. Diane came out to say hi, another hug, and we invited her into the house for a visit.

Ms. Hermana was looking lovely as always. She was well dressed and driving a very nice red SUV. And she was bearing gifts: homemade tortillas!

When Diane was working we had a housekeeper, a wonderful Portuguese woman who came every week except for summers when she worked in a cannery. We hired Ms. Hermana to fill in for a couple of months. And occasionally Ms. Hermana would bring us some of the most delicious Mexican food I have ever enjoyed. Homemade tortillas, rice and beans, chili rellenos, and some incredible tamales, made with pieces of potato in the filling. Goodbye diet when this food was delivered.

So we were both glad to see Ms. Hermana. What follows is a little difficult to write. Diane says she got teary, and I have to admit I was quite moved. Ms. Hermana wanted to thank me.

She said that when we worked together I always encouraged her and that I told she had lots of opportunities to do something other than work the crops. I vaguely recall this. Her English was so good, and she was smart and conscientious and honest. She would make someone a great employee. But Ms. Hermana went on and on about how good it was to work for us and how nice and fair we were to our employees and how if I said she could do something different, and perhaps better, maybe she really could. It was actually a bit difficult to hear this. Her success is hers, not mine.

She told us a bit more about what had happened in the 12 years since Diane and I both retired and had no more need for housekeepers or cherry contractors. Her life path has been an ascendant one. With some setbacks, some problems, but mostly toward more prosperity and success. She was hired by the State of California, first as a temporary and then given a second contract. Ms. Hermana is quite intelligent and educated but she lacks a college degree that would be a ticket to full time government employment. But finally even the bureaucracy decided to do something sensible and accept her work experience in lieu of a sheepskin. Ms. Hermana is now a full time State Employee working with youth services, trying to help troubled young people stay in school or find work and stay out of trouble.

And she is also a brand new U.S. Citizen. She had resident alien status ever since I met her, which means she could stay in the U.S. without any restrictions. But she took the trouble to apply and pass the test and meet the requirements and take the oath. Now she is an American Beauty, by way of Mexico. I welcome her with a big hug.

I don’t know if we will see Ms. Hermana again. But if we do I hope she favors us with some more of those tortillas.

I know two people who attended Yale. One is an economist I worked with and drank bourbon with in another lifetime. The other is a good friend and cycling buddy who is a physician. However I don’t think either of them attended any lectures like this from last April 6:

A flyer promoting the lecture and posted online revealed the title, “The Psychopathic Problem of the White Mind”

That got my attention. I thought being Caucasian doomed me to look hopelessly foolish on the dance floor and the basketball court. I didn’t realize it also came with embedded psychosis.

The lecturer was Dr. Aruna Khilanani, a psychiatrist from New York. Here is part of what she said:

She told a Yale School of Medicine audience that she had fantasies of “unloading a revolver into the head of any White person” that got in her way.

• 

• 

Dr. Aruna Khilanani made the remarks at the Ivy League institution’s Child Study Center on April 6, adding that she’d walk away from the shooting “with a bounce in my step” and that White people “make my blood boil” and “are out of their minds and have been for a long time”

Undergraduate tuition at Yale runs $55,000 per year, but a quality education doesn’t come cheap. And neither does administrative CYA. The official reaction:

“Yale School of Medicine expects the members of our community to speak respectfully to one another and … does not condone imagery of violence or racism against any group”.

It took a very well compensated public relations specialist to issue such a firm rebuke. Put that tuition money to good use.

Does anyone remember the fable about the emperor’s new clothes? A con man told the emperor that this was a special suit that only very sophisticated people could see and appreciate. Then since no one wanted to look a fool everyone pretended to admire the fine raiment until finally one innocent boy declared ‘but he is wearing nothing at all!’.

I would like to say what I really think about this lecture and lecturer, but I lack the courage of the boy in the tale.

Stoker is going on a bus trip with Setness Tours at the end of August. She and my sister-in-law Jeannie are going to see the sights of Idaho and Montana, including a red tram ride up Going to the Sun Road to Logan Pass. But Stoker has been there before…

Back in 2012 we brought our tandem on a Cycling Escapes Tour of the Canadian Rockies. On the second day we faced the longest and hardest ride we had ever attempted: from West Glacier Montana to Many Glacier Lodge over Logan Pass. The route was 72 miles, with 5,500 feet of climbing, most of it on the 10 mile climb over Logan Pass on the Going to the Sun Road.

We knew this day would be a challenge, but we were well prepared. Prior to the trip we did quite a bit of riding in the hills, including Stoney Creek Road and Ram’s Horn Grade. We also rode from Sunol to Milpitas on Calaveras Road and did the infamous “Wall” on the return. All of these roads were steeper than anything we would face in Montana and into Canada. Not as long, but steeper. And on the tandem ‘steeper’ is really, really hard.

We were up early on the morning of July 23, and at 6 am we were enjoying a continental breakfast from the Cycling Escapes support trailer. The official ride start was at 6:30 am, but Stoker and I were nervous and got rolling by 6:15. The reason for our apprehension, besides the nearly 11 mile climb in front of us, was because there was a time constraint. We had to get to the summit by 11 am, which was when the road closed to cyclists until 5 pm. The rational is that there was too much afternoon auto traffic to co-exist with cyclists. I was certain we could do the climb in 2 hours of riding time, but we wanted to have plenty of margin.

The climb is long, but the gradient is remarkably steady at 5 to 6%. I’m pretty sure it never goes over 7%, but I know it never gets below 4% either. It is a long slog. There were several places where we had to stop for construction, and long stretches of the road were unpaved hard packed dirt, which added to the difficulty and made the bike quite dirty. After each of the construction delays we were passed by a long line of cars. Most people were quite nice and gave us a thumbs up or a friendly wave. One woman shouted “You guys are awesome” from the open window of the passenger seat. I had to agree with her, what Stoker was doing really was awesome.

• 

• 

We were all smiles at the summit and got someone to take our picture at the sign marking the pass. The 6,646 foot elevation was by far the highest the tandem had ever been, although we would top that a few days later on Highwood Pass in Canada. That one was 7,250 feet above sea level.

I was sure the rest of the ride was going to be a waltz. It turned out to be a death march. The descent was a bit breezy but with our new rear disc brake it was easy to control our speed and we made it down without incident. After lunch we had 10 miles heading north, followed by 12 miles heading due west to Many Glacier Lodge, where we would spend the night.

But when we turned left onto the final 12 miles, we got hit by a headwind that approached 40 mph with gusts even higher. I had expected this part of the ride to be a relaxed and triumphant spin, but it was actually worse than the big climb. It got so bad that our speed on flat ground dropped below 7 mph and I had to shift into the granny gear, which is unheard of when we aren’t going uphill. Later I learned that a couple of riders were actually blown off of the road, including our guide Eric. He had been a professional rider in Europe and his bike handling skills were off the charts, as he demonstrated later in the tour by doing one-wheel bunny hops. If he got blown around imagine what fun I was having trying to control the tandem.

That last 12 miles took about 1-1/2 hours instead of the 45 minutes I thought it would. We arrived tired and battered, but after a hot shower I gave Stoker a reviving leg massage and told her how proud of her I was. It wasn’t an easy day and her pilot was nervous, but she rode strong the entire time and never complained once. I couldn’t have made it without her.

So when Stoker returns to Logan Pass this summer, I hope she thinks back to that big ride and feels a little proud of what we did together. She will be the only person on the tour who made the climb under her own power instead of in a tour bus. A real Rocky Mountain High…

Now that summer is here I have gone into my full BBQ grilling mode. I fire up the grill once or twice each week. I’m no pit master but I do a fair job with a few items. I almost always get steaks right. Burgers or our delicious homemade sausages taste wonderful hot off of the grill. I do a mean pork tenderloin using a combination of direct and indirect heat and a rub I found on the internet. Boneless chicken breasts or thighs get the direct heat treatment, while pork ribs or a bone-in turkey breast use the indirect heat method. And my grilled lamb chops are to die for, if you like lamb. And don’t forget the grilled vegetables, particularly the asparagus.

I have never owned a gas grill. I use charcoal only. This is a little more work and adds a little more uncertainty to the process. You really have to take into account the weather and what you are cooking, otherwise you can end up with too much heat, or worse, not enough.

I also do not use lighter fluid. I’m no environmental alarmist, but even I think the petrochemical odor of the stuff detracts from the pre-cooking libation I’m enjoying while building the fire. So I use a chimney starter with some old newspapers for the ignition source.

We save old newspapers for this precise use. And back in the day when we farmed and could burn pruning residue or dead trees and stumps, we used lots of newspaper with small dry branches to get the fire started. Tending the fire on a cold winter day was a great job. The heat warmed your face and hands and felt wonderful against the chilly air.

We went ‘digital’ last year, but my parents still take both the local paper and the WSJ, so I have an ongoing fuel supply.

Because the newest papers get put on the top of the stack, I operate on a ‘last in, first out’ system to select which issue to consign to the pyre. But the other day I reached to the bottom of the pile of papers and was startled to see the issue was dated August 8, 2005!

I looked this antique over and noticed some things right away. The size of the pages was larger. And there were more pages with many more features than today’s version. There was a business section and an expanded sports section, and more local stories by actual local reporters. How quaint!

But what really caught my eye was the crossword puzzle. Take a look:

The 2005 puzzle is 2.5 times larger than its 2021 counterpart. The clues are easier to read and the squares are easier to fill in. And if you have to erase (I always have to erase) the 2005 paper is of higher quality and doesn’t smear, while the 2021 paper is a mess every time you have to rethink a clue.

There is a computer print menu command called “Shrink to Fit” which takes the selected material and reduces it so it fits on a single page. As the newspaper business has contracted I suggest ‘Shrink to Fit’ has become their business model. Get your reading glasses ready and try not to make any crossword puzzle errors.

People who are fully vaccinated against coronavirus no longer need to wear masks while indoors or outdoors or physical distance in either large or small gatherings, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky announced during a White House COVID-19 briefing Thursday.

For months we have been told that the CDC is the ultimate authority providing ‘mandatory guidance’ on how we are all supposed to behave. No matter how outrageous or economically devastating, their word was law, except it wasn’t anything of the sort.

The directive above would seem simple enough. But there are complications. Here in California we still have a mask mandate, vaccinated or not. You might think Federal Guidance would trump state rules, but this is not automatically so. Anyone who wants to use pesticides or paint thinner or purchase a gas can knows that California rules are different from much of the nation.

Many large businesses have decided to follow the CDC guidance, with the caveat that state and local regulations still apply. So if you go to a Costco in Nevada or Idaho you can keep your airways free, but if you head to my Costco in Lodi you will need to cover your orifices. Both of them people! If you are going to wear the thing do it right, comfort be damned.

Of course these contradictory mandates are producing confrontations. People show up to stores and offices vaccinated and mask-less and they are being denied entry. Debates ensue. So far there are no stories of them escalating into violence, but it is early days yet.

All this leaves aside the question of whether non vaccinated people will do as they are supposed to and put masks on. The CDC guidance is for ‘fully vaccinated people’ which Stoker and I both are, along with most of my Pod and Peeps. But what is to stop someone at the door of Walmart telling the greeter they are fully jabbed when they actually haven’t been? At present, nothing. And since you do not need an ID to vote, it is hard to image that a vaccine passport is coming anytime soon. But even if you do have to show proof for the privilege of going bare faced, what about fakes? Some enterprising tavern owner in Clements got busted for selling fake Covid vaccination cards. I’ll bet he’s not the only one.

I’d like to stand up for my right to go mask free, like the CDC says I can. But I’m a wimp. The Japanese have a saying “The nail that stands up gets hammered down’, and I don’t want to get bashed. So the Costco person checking membership cards will get no argument from me.

When it comes to marriage I’m strictly a one woman man, and Stoker is she. That is her preferred pronoun. I like to say my hobbies are cycling, chess and monogamy. But when it comes to bikes I fool around.

My cycle harem consists of 3 beauties. None is really current state of the art, but they all are quality framesets built with high quality components and none of them will hinder the performance of a strong rider. Since I’m not really a strong rider, all I can say is that they make the most of my limited physical resources. And in no particular order, here they are:

The Sampson was my first really nice bike. I got it back in 2000. It has been my primary travel bike and I’ve ridden it all over the western U.S. and in Italy and France. The titanium frame will last longer than I will, but over the years I’ve changed the components from Dura Ace 9 speed to DA 10 to Ultegra 11 speed. As you see her (all my bikes have specified their preferred pronouns to be the same as Stoker’s: she and her) she weighs 18.2 lbs.

Next in line is my rocket ship, a 2014 S Works Tarmac SL-4. With SRAM Red mechanical components and HED Ardennes wheels this beauty tips the scale at about 5 paper clips under 15.0 lbs. That includes the pedals and water bottle cages too. She is stiff as a board and light as a feather, but with Schwabe road tubeless 700×25 tires at 90 psi the ride isn’t too harsh. I love this bike. It is my favorite of the three. I even do fairly well going downhill on it since the ride is so solid and stable.

Finally the most elegant and stylish of the three, a LOOK 586 Limited Edition. The frame is labeled #146/200, which gives it cachet. It is made in France, which gives it more cachet. I got it back in 2010 to replace a similar LOOK 585 that was stolen outside a coffee stop in Moraga. The thief knew what he was after: there were 13 very nice SBC bikes lined up but he took the most well known expensive one; easy to fence.

Depending on which wheels I put on the 586, she weighs from 15.4 lbs. to 16.3 lbs. Her components are Dura Ace 10 speed so I’m going to need to update at some point, since even DA does not last forever and I think these levers and derailleurs have something like 25,000 miles on them. But the big drawback is that these older DA components will not allow anything larger than a 28 tooth cassette, and I need lower gears at this point in my cycling life.

We also have a very nice CoMotion tandem and I have some very nice ‘extra’ wheel sets. If I were to add up all the discretionary income I spent on this equipment I might be taken aback, and most non cyclists would be absolutely shocked. But this good stuff brings me a lot of enjoyment and pleasure, and it is nice to have some variety in one’s cycling life. But Stoker’s ‘infinite variety’ will suffice in the relationship department.

I started writing a blog for E San Joaquin way back in 2014. The Editor of The Record invited me to write about Stockton Cycling. But I pretty much wrote about whatever I wanted, although I tried to keep it mostly apolitical.

Things went along like that for years. I didn’t think anybody was reading most of the time. But then I wrote a piece about a colonoscopy in 2017. I did the prep, that delightful prep. I arrived at the outpatient center on a very windy and rainy winter day, and then the power went out. And it didn’t come back on, so they sent me home fully prepped but un-scoped and furious at the fact that I was going to have to do all that ‘prep’ again in a few weeks.

This was on a Friday. Two days later on Sunday we were attending the Italian Gardeners Society annual members’ dinner. I know this is hard to believe, but there were over 400 people there all shaking hands or embracing and standing close together and jabbering away without a surgical mask in sight.

I walked over to say hello to my friend Don and his wife Jennifer, both of whom I’ve known for years. Jennifer told me she laughed hard when she read about my colonoscopy fail while at the same time saying she felt so sorry for my situation. I had no idea she even knew I wrote a blog but she said she read it all the time. The proof was she was aware of something I posted the day before!

So there are a few folks out there who at least scan my offerings. I know Stoker hangs on every word of every piece. But until I wrote ‘Going Digital’ I never got much attention from my overseers. That changed, as you know if you are a regular reader.

So I left E San Joaquin and payed for my own domain and now I can write pretty much what I like. But the other day I wanted to retrieve something from an earlier blog so I went to my old E San Joaquin home. All my stuff was gone!!

I thought man, they must really have not liked ‘Going Digital’. Or they didn’t like that I was writing on my own, even though The Editor suggested in a terse e mail that I probably should take my act elsewhere. I thought removing everything was a bit ‘cancelling’.

But I was wrong, the purge wasn’t just for me. E San Joaquin disappeared completely. None of the other bloggers got notice or a chance to save their stuff. Since I’m pretty sure I signed something that said they could do that, I’m not overly concerned. I would like to have been able to save the prose for my own perusal and for some ‘best of’ blog posts, but Avanti! Avanti! Dai Dai Dai! Rough translation is Forward! Come on!

Which I will endeavor to do.

Our Federal Government is working hard at printing money and giving it away to people because of the economic disruptions of the Covid panicdemic. This is fine as far as it goes; I have nothing against the occasional $2,000 check, which for Stoker and me is only a partial refund of estimated income tax we pay every quarter. And certainly enhanced unemployment benefits for people who lost jobs seem reasonable. Although if the benefits turn out to be more money that the person made working it does kind of take away any incentive to rush back into the labor market. And if would be nice if EDD wasn’t so incompetent and didn’t pay out $10 billion in fraudulent claims.

But when I heard a Public Service Ad on the radio advising citizens that FEMA has financial assistance for funeral costs of a Covid victim I was incredulous. But it is true! This is from FEMA’s web page:

Who can apply for COVID-19 Funeral Assistance?

You may qualify if:

1. You are a U.S. citizen, non-citizen national, or qualified alien who paid for funeral expenses after January 20, 2020, and
2. The funeral expenses were for an individual whose death in the United States, territories or the District of Columbia, may have been caused by or was likely the result of COVID-19.

Leaving aside the question of why unqualified extraterrestrials are not eligible, I think this carries Covid relief aid too far. FEMA is supposed to operate in emergencies. How a funeral constitutes an ‘emergency’ is not clear to me. Or if a funeral is an emergency, why should the cause of death matter? Isn’t this death discrimination? Are some causes of death ‘more equal’ than others?

The answer to this is yes. Covid is a special panicdemic, more important and more dangerous and requiring more lock downs and shut downs and mask wearing and more government ‘mandatory guidance’ than anything in Human History.

• 

• 

Poor old grand dad has a heart attack that punches his ticket to heaven, and FEMA says ‘No Cash For You!’ to relatives wanting to give him a nice send off. But if you can get a doctor to say that Covid ‘may have caused’ the cardiac failure then the FEMA Funeral ATM is open for business. Put in your PIN and have a heck of a wake!