Woke up to a sunny morning and silence outside.

No cars moving -at least not yet- and all seems pretty calm.

Yesterday I wrote about the end of 2020 and today I’ll try to focus on the future.

In the immediate future, we still have 20 days left of Donald Trump and his “presidency”. I don’t want to keep harping on this but on January 6th the election results will be announced in the Senate/House of Representatives and, according to CNN, there may be as many as 140 Republicans in the House, and at least 1 in the Senate, who will object to the results and slow down, likely only for a few hours, the official results of Joe Biden’s win.

These people, it can’t be emphasized enough, are borderline seditious in their actions. Biden won by a lot, some 7 million more votes and more than enough electoral votes and every single attempt by Trump and his cronies to try to negate this election has been swiftly struck down. If memory serves, only one of their lawsuits, involving a technical issue which didn’t change even a single vote, was “won” by them.

Worse for them, so far the only voting fraud exposed -and its been just a couple of cases- involved people trying to vote for Trump.

Ah well!

Regardless, I suspect the next 20 days will be quite the rollercoaster ride because of this.

Meanwhile in Georgia, we have the run off election for 2 Senate seats. Bluntly, if the Democrats win both seats, then the Democrats will have control over all three branches of power and will then get to push their agenda much more freely.

If they don’t, then Republicans, and Mitch McConnell, will remain in control over the Senate and things will slow down considerably.

We’ll see about that as well.

In near term, its my hope that as soon as Biden does take control over the Presidency he and his team work extra hard on getting the vaccination program going properly.

This is the key to getting back to some kind of “normalcy” and the fact that we’ve had only some 2 million vaccinations in December versus the hoped for 20 million further proves, to my mind, that Trump and his team simply ordered the vaccines in bulk but had no plan as to how to do the actual vaccinations.

Sheesh.

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On a personal front, I’ve been working here and there as I can -and it is difficult during these days!- on my new novel which doesn’t have anything to do with the Corrosive Knights series.

This is a standalone story which I will hopefully get finished off, at least the first draft, in the next couple of months. I’m already some 50+ pages into it, of a quarter of the way there going by my usual 200 or so pages (10 point, single spaced), but I do have to work out several elements, including the story’s conclusion. I have some idea of how it will end, mind you, but I’ve always wanted to make sure all my books end strong and I’m not quite there with this book yet.

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So here we are, at the start of 2021 hoping for the best.

Let’s see where we are a year from now!

What a year.

Seriously. What a year.

I’ve been around a very long time now and truly, there’s almost nothing that compares to what we’ve been through this year and, for the most part, it revolves around one thing: COVID-19.

This was the year of the pandemic and because of it, also the year where we saw the limits and ineffectiveness of the body politic, especially when its being buffeted by misinformation, conspiracy theories, and general stupidity and laziness.

There have been serious outbreaks throughout the world but there have been places where proper cautions have resulted in control over this virus. Specifically, we’re talking about Japan and New Zealand, where the rate of COVID-19 is almost negligible and the people there -who took the virus very seriously- have managed to get on with their lives while so many other countries -our included- are still wallowing in denial, neglect, and (here’s that word again) stupidity.

There is a light at the end of the tunnel in the form of vaccines, but so far there have been a little more than 2 million people who have gotten it and we were promised by the current administration we’d have some 20 million vaccinated by now.

Yeah. We’re only 18 million short.

It’s been noted that if we keep this pace (I doubt we will) it will take 10 years to vaccinate enough people to create the desired herd immunity which will allow us to return to our more normal lives.

Next week we have the certification of Joe Biden’s election and we have one Republican in the Senate, Josh Howley of Missouri, will join the firebrands in the House of Representatives to protest the certification which will lead to some delay but ultimately no results for Trump.

Yet Trump, if nothing else and while damaging the Republic, keeps charging this particular hill. Like the spoiled child he is, he cannot accept that he was defeated in the election (twice if you count the votes he lost by to Hilary Clinton!) and, I very strongly suspect, he realizes that once he’s out of power the legal floodgates open wide against him.

It wouldn’t surprise me if the rest of his life is spend in one litigation after another and his fortune suddenly looking very shaky.

Meanwhile, however, his administration is botching the vaccinations and he’s devoting no energy toward issues regarding COVID or the bombing in Nashville (its rather startling he hasn’t mentioned this at all so far!), instead continuing his infantile and seditious attempts to overturn a legitimate election while playing golf at his resorts.

January 20th can’t come soon enough.

But enough about that.

One great thing about the New Year is that mentally many of us feel like we’re starting fresh, with another 365 days ahead of us to do better for ourselves and others.

I’m optimistic about the New Year, partially because it seems like we may -at least toward the middle of the year- finally make great strides against this virus and perhaps… maybe… hopefully reclaim the life we’ve had before.

It’s been a crappy year but there’s no reason to think things might not get better.

A lot better.

Let’s hope it does and, even more importantly, let’s work to make it so.

Have a Happy New Years!

We’ll see each other again in 2021!