The quarantine continues unabated as Day 209 rolls into view. We spend the majority of our time in Lexington, returning to Richmond for Monday and Tuesday mornings so that Alison can squeeze in a few of her favorite clients. At her salon, they've implemented some strict and impressive COVID-19 measures, so we've got our fingers crossed that Alison (and, in turn, I) will remain healthy.

So far, so good.

Our time in Richmond also presents Alison an opportunity to walk with her many good friends. Pictured here are two of her regular walking buddies, Nancy (center) and Cousin Annie (right).

I ran across these two photos recently. In the first one, I am sporting my favorite-ever beard, while vacationing on Ocacroke Island back circa 2005. As much as I liked this beard, Alison did not, and as my personal stylist, she has refused to let me grow another one. She prefers my beard short, neat and trim.

The second photo was taken during our one-and-only family vacation in August 2003. We saw various sites in and around San Diego; this picture was captured at the world-famous San Diego Zoo, which was probably the highlight of this ill-fated trip. Ian was 11 years old; Eli was 7. I can't quite tell what animal they were posing with.

I had planned a big bash for my 55th birthday back in May, but the party was dashed by COVID-19. Instead, Alison contacted all of our friends and family and asked them each contribute a photograph of them wishing me well. She collected all of the photographs and put them into a hard-bound book. It was a wonderful and thoughtful gift.

Ian graced us with his presence for a week at the end of September. He had two weddings, back-to-back, in Charlottesville. We had the opportunity to spend some very socially distanced time with him for a couple of days before and after his wedding weekend. Alison was disappointed that she couldn't spend more time with him, but between a cross-country plane trip and two 75-person weddings, he was definitely a high risk.

If the Confederacy is alive and well anywhere in the country, it most likely is here in Richmond, Virginia. As the capital of the Confederacy, we've got the Civil War Museum, the Confederate War Memorial Museum, the White House of the Confederacy and more Confederate monuments than you could shake a stick at. 

Pictured at right is the Robert E. Lee Monument, the last Confederate statue still standing on Monument Avenue. Monument Avenue, in fact, is named after the Confederate statues that line it.

The monument was defaced during the civil unrest of this past summer. As much as I like the smiley face and wear my own button every day, I had nothing to do with the one pictured here 😇.

In the early 1980s, Leonard Mlodinow arrived at the California Institute of Technology (a.k.a. Caltech) to begin a postdoctoral fellowship. As luck would have it, Richard Feynman was just two doors down from Mlodinow's office. Despite the fact that Feynman's best years were behind him and he was slowly dying of liposarcoma, he was still sharp, quick-witted and irreverent.

The two struck up a somewhat unlikely friendship over the next year, and it is chronicled by Mlodinow here in this book.

Louise Penny had a successful career with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation as a radio host and journalist.  After 18 years, newly married and newly sober, she took up mystery writing and created the character of Armand Gamache, the Chief Inspector of the Sûreté du Québec, the police service of the Canadian province of Quebec. 

Penny has written 16 books in the Gamache series, with All the Devils are Here the most recent release. If you enjoy crime fiction and a flair for the Francophone, then don't miss her books. They are engaging and gripping.

David McCullough has won the Pulitzer Prize twice, for biographies and Harry Truman and John Adams. He's written many other books before and after those award winners. His very first book was The Johnstown Flood, a close and careful analysis of the Great Flood of 1889, focusing on both the people who lived and died on that day, plus the gross negligence that lead to the flood.

I've read several other books of his: The Great Bridge: The Epic Story of the Building of the Brooklyn Bridge,  The Path Between the Seas: The Creation of the Panama Canal, 1870–1914, and The Wright Brothers. I can honestly recommend them all! McCullough is a master at his craft.

This blog post is getting long, so let me abbreviate these last few books.

Aziz Ansari, of Parks and Recreation fame, has written a surprisingly erudite book about the perils of modern romance with the advent of both the Internet and ubiquitous mobile devices.

Sabine Hossenfelder is a German theoretical physicist. In her book Lost in Math, she posits that nothing useful has happened in theoretical physics in the last 40-50 years and that's because the physicists have become "lost in the math." The search for beautiful mathematical theories has led us astray, since (she believes) it is quite possible that the next round of useful theories "will not be pretty," but will be accurate nonetheless.

If you enjoy theoretical physics, then read this book. If you don't, then don't 😉.

The Terranauts was a very odd book. The author took the real-life story of the Biosphere 2 project outside of Tucson, Arizona, and overlaid additional, fictional storylines onto that story.

Now, the real story is gripping enough, as told in various other books like ​The Human Experiment: Two Years and Twenty Minutes Inside Biosphere 2, written by one of the eight people that sequestered for those two years. I saw no need whatsoever for the introduction of fictional storylines.

If you are interested in Biosphere 2, then read The Human Experiment. Skip this book.

Paul Simon is a towering presence in the music industry. At 79 years old, he is still actively writing songs and releasing albums — and good ones at that! Here he is in 2016 on Live from Here.  He is performing Rewrite, a catchy little tune.

Martin Sexton is the 10th of 12 kids from a large, Catholic family in Rochester, New York. Two or three decades ago, he parlayed a successful stint as a busker on the streets of Boston into an equally successful career as a professional musician. His music spans various rock genres, but his style is definitely and uniquely his own. I've seen him live in concert several times. He's not to be missed!

Herb Alpert is a Jewish, American trumpeter who has been making music since 1957. He led "Herb Alpert & the Tijuana Brass" in the 1960s, at which time he also co-founded A&M Records. At the age of 85, he's still going, albeit not necessarily strongly. Here is an Alpert arrangement of Irving Berlin's "Puttin' on the Ritz" with a dance accompaniment. Notice that the entire dance was performed within a single, uninterrupted take!

A favorite idiom of mine refers to "the best laid plans of mice and men." I've often wondered about its derivation and whether it was inspired by the John Steinbeck novel Of Mice and Men. So, given the copious amount of time on my hands recently, I decided to go figure it out.

It turns out that the phrase comes from a poem To a Mouse by the Scottish poet Robert Burns. The poem tells how the author, while ploughing a field, disturbed a mouse's nest. The poem is an apology to the mouse:

Along with the vast majority of Americans, and for that matter, the majority of human beings on the planet, Alison and I have been quarantining ourselves in an attempt to avoid COVID-19. Today is our 15th day in quarantine, which we've spent entirely in Lexington. If you need to stay home, you might as well stay in your vacation home!

During this time, I have been quite busy with work. Busier, in fact, than I've been in years. Go figure. Alison, on the other hand, is on vacation. She objects to that designation, but given the amount of sewing, hiking and kayaking she's been doing, it sure looks like a vacation to me.

No one in our extended family has contracted the virus, so that's a good thing. On the other hand, we're staying away from all of them, out of an abundance of caution. One keeps hearing how older folks and people with underlying medical conditions are at the greatest risk, and given my recent health history, I definitely fall into the latter category.

My brother Matt and his girlfriend Ginger had intended to tie the knot on April 18th. As bad luck would have it, it's not a good time for large celebrations with people in close quarters. So, they've postponed the wedding until November. Let's all hope that we're out of quarantine by then!

For those of you who are not on our holiday card list, I've posted this year's letter here. The list is currently 178 friends and families strong, and we're shooting for a cool 200, so if you'd like to get on the list, just let me know. These blog entries tend to be infrequent, but you can always depend on our annual New Year's Card.

We were blessed with a visit from our very favorite niece, Abby Noga (pictured, on the right). She came to Lexington for the weekend with three of her college friends from Clemson. Having graduated a year ago, Abby is working at the bottom rung of the medical profession and trying to decide which ladder to ascend: doctor, nurse, physician's assistant, or nurse practioner. We look forward to her decision!

The 1918 flu pandemic was commonly known as the Spanish flu. It lasted from 1918 to 1920, infected a quarter of the world's population (500 million people) and killed between 20-50 million of them.

To maintain morale during World War I, most war-torn countries minimized early reports of illness and mortality. The exception was Spain — neutral during the war — whose press were free to report the effects of the epidemic. These reports created the false impression that Spain was especially hard hit, giving rise to the epidemic's nickname, Spanish flu. The actual origin of the epidemic was never adequately identified.