January 14, 2021

Yeah, I know, it’s the middle of January and I’m posting a picture of our Christmas tree. This is one of the most perfect trees we have had in recent memory and, unfortunately, we couldn’t share it’s beauty with friends and family because of the COVID situation. So I’m sharing it with you today. We did undecorate it two days ago and it’s just sitting there in the corner nude, waiting for me to get off my butt and take it down and carry it outside.

The missus and I were watching a show on the Cooking Channel the other night and the host, Andrew Zimmern, went into a restaurant in Missouri for some good ol’ comfort food chow. Who does he sit down next to? None other than Billy Gibbons of ZZ Top fame, who said he eats in this particular restaurant often. Billy had trimmed his beard from his old ZZ Top days when it was damn near down to his belly button. It got me thinking that, other than our daughter, we haven’t been with family since last Christmas, so they haven’t seen Ziggyman’s Billy Gibbons beard. It’s now about the same length as Billy’s current whiskers, but by the time this pandemic is over, mine will probably rival Billy’s ZZ Top days.

I mentioned in my post yesterday that our power had gone out at 12:30 am following the huge wind storm. As I write this, we are still on generator power. I checked the PGE website and it now says they estimate our power to be restored at 11:00 pm on Saturday. I had to go down to town and get more gasoline for the generator this afternoon, and as I was going down the hill, about 2 miles from our house were two houses next to each other with trees on top of them — big trees. There were five trucks from Rich’s Tree Service working on getting the trees off the houses. I guess we’re lucky we just have a loss of power to contend with.

I also wrote yesterday about Oregon’s vaccination clusterf–k. The lead story on OregonLive.com today states “Oregon has almost 200,000 unused COVID vaccines. The state’s attempts to track them are a mess.” Yep, I’m not too confident that I’ll have access to that shot in my arm in the near future. Related to the coronavirus news, I see where more restaurants are not following the rules set by the Governor and Oregon Health Authority, by opening their establishments for indoor dining. One even posted a notice on their entrance door stating “If you are a government agent conducting an inspection our management requests that you get a warrant.” This particular restaurant serves liquor, as well as food. How naive, or emboldened by current politics, that they think an agent with the Oregon Liquor Control Commission or inspector from the Health Department needs to have a warrant to enter their establishment. The authorities better put a damper on this kind of crap immediately. Fine them, pull their liquor license, and if they have lottery machines, yank em’. It’s not fair to the restaurant owners and their employees who are following the rules in order to reach an end to this pandemic.

Whoopee! The power just came back on! I will leave you now, shut down the generator and prepare for this evening’s activities. Keep smilin’. Ziggyman