Today and yesterday.

My Bride and I love our little PDXStrength gym. She's a committed gym rat, and I love what it does for her, and we both love our Sunday morning yoga class. And at 62, lemme tellya - yoga once a week (with the occasional sun salutation every other day or so..) makes a difference between "stiff" and "petrified".

But here's the State of the Union, starting with a typical class from a year ago:

The Bride is in there, but I won't dime her off and you can pick and choose. But this was pretty much standard for the class up until this winter.

The the Plague Year arrived.

Here's the very last in-person class, from February. Notice the social distancing!

This time I can't hide her - that's the Bride in the foreground.

Well.

This was yoga class today; our awesome instructor Jessica led us over "Zoom" through vinyasa in our living rooms.

I'm glad I'm still safe and healthy and able to do this.

But this is our lives now.

I compared it to Russian roulette last time. But the more I think about it, as a military history buff I can't help comparing the Plague Year to the accounts you read by defenders and inhabitants of cities under siege.

The primary sense is of a slogging progression of days that combine the worst of human conditions; boredom, mild (or severe) deprivation, and lingering fear. All you could do is watch as the besiegers sapped towards the walls. Every new set of parallels, every new battery, meant you were one day closer to the moment when the storming parties broke in. You scanned the horizon in hopes of seeing the signs of a relieving army just as we read the stories of treatments and vaccines...but every unrelieved day is a slow trickle of dead and wounded, sick and weakened.

At least Vienna had Rudi Starhemberg. What have we got? Fucking Jared Kushner? The guy who couldn't lead four privates to a whorehouse?

Well.

Fuck.