Dreadful Typewriter

OK not much of a title, but I don't care. I'm trying to seriously plan my back-to-Florida move. I know it won't be any time soon unless I somehow win the lotto, the plan now is to wait until my 401K cashes out, which will be in about two and a half years. This of course assumes a number of things: that I'll still be around then, that the 401K will have any money in it at all, that there's no crash happening, etc. Also there is the whole "job" thing, I doubt I'll be able to retire at 59. The ideal is a transition out of this office job into some working from home gig that nets me at least as much as I make now, and hopefully more since Florida isn't cheap if I manage to make it all the way back to Miami, which is what I want to do. If the housing situation stays the same in my old home town, rent will not be cheap, but may be manageable. The outlying areas are of course my best bet, Homestead and around there. I do not want to live in the north part...

I read Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere sometime in the 1990s I think. Spoilers to follow if it matters for a book published nearly 30 years ago... It just occurred to me now how a tell of just how mundane and bourgeois Gaiman is was how he telegraphed the villainy of the "good" angel character by how he got the main characters, a twenty-ish man and a younger woman (who was also, I think, underage -- sixteen maybe? It's been a while) drunk.  His Sandman comics were my main thing for a time. On the surface they were rather progressive (sexually ambiguous characters such as Desire, plenty of gay characters who weren't obvious stereotypes, etc.), but there was an overlying cisheterosexuality that promoted traditional domesticity as an ideal if not one that all the characters were suited for, and that was seen as a semi-tragedy or fatal flaw (Dream can't seem to have a relationship that doesn't end with something horrible happening to his lady friends, Barbie leaves K...

Well, I guess I'm going to keep on ignoring my "official blog" in the space I actually pay for and use this free one, in a space I've been on for... nearly 20 years! Hahaha. I'm so old what the hell happened to my life. Anyway, well. Early this year, around the end of December, I got sick. Then I stayed sick, for like, weeks. Everyone in the office was sick, passing around the same thing like a Christmas gift they were trying to get rid of. Finally I felt better and felt like I was out of the woods. Then at the end of February, I went to the emergency room. "You have bronchitis!" I was told. "But it's not the flu!"  I don't know if I had covid-19 or not. No one was testing up here. But the symptoms I had sound a whole lot like a lot of people who did: fever, body aches, coughing so hard I threw up, getting well for a while and then relapsing. I didn't get pneumonia at least. On the other hand, there's a possibility that I just h...