10-Year Anniversary of My Silly Blog Interrupted by a Worldwide Pandemic

The only kind of people who get rich while working in public office are criminals.

Harry Truman

WordPress congratulated me a few days ago on the 10-year anniversary of my blog. During the 10 years that my blog has been in existence, I wrote 763 posts (including this one) and I’ve had about 10,000 comments (2 of them are pending). I don’t know which ones are pending. I normally don’t approve comments for publishing on my blog, they are published automatically, but when WordPress suspects that some comments are junk, it suspends their status and unless I approve them, they will not be published. So I probably forgot to approve these two comments and they will be forever suspended somewhere in the blogosphere because I will never find them.

A lot has changed during those 10 years. I am officially retired as of two years ago, which means that I don’t need to work to pay my bills. I sold my house in Virginia and gave most of the money from the sale of the house to my ex-wife. I never got rich, possibly because I am not a criminal, the house was basically my only important possession, and I basically gave it away to compensate my ex for having to put up with me for 34 years.

I hope she is happier now without me. Towards the end, we basically could not stand each other anymore. I don’t think we humans are meant to stay married to the same person for 30, 40 or more years. The permanent, forever marriage system used to work when most people used to live to about 60 and some change, if they were lucky. But we are just not designed to put up with another person for so many years, which is one reason why most marriages nowadays end up in divorce. I also think that most people who do stay married for a long time mostly just suffer in silence … and then they die.

After the divorce she returned to Tokyo, and I to Southern Bohemia, where I have been living for about the last year and half …. after living as a translator on three continents: for 1 year in Germany, 1 year in Japan, and 35 years in the United States. I may return back to America again if I decide to do so one day, or move to another country if I decide to do that. But it is more likely that my wondering years are over and I will stay where I am now. 

Although I still translate myself and manage translation projects, a decade ago I worked much more than I do now. I also used to write a new post for my blog at least twice a week back then, while now I write something new only about twice a month. Since the average length of my post is about 1,500 words (they used to be much longer during the first 5 years or so), I must have written well over a million words for my silly posts. I know, I can’t believe it myself either.

10 Days Later – Corona Virus Now Attacks Also My Little Bohemian Kingdom

For some reason I could not think of what else I to write about, so I put the post aside, and now it’s 10 days later and just like the rest of the world, my little neck of the woods is too under attack from the corona virus.

Being a retired freelance translator, not that much changed in my world. The only thing that changed so far is that I can’t go to my local restaurant on Saturdays and Sundays as was my habit because restaurants are closed now, at least for the next three weeks or so.

Otherwise, it seems that unlike the rest of the young, working and active population, we retired translators are well positioned to deal with the latest plague.

I don’t really have to go anywhere, unless I want to. Most shops are closed anyway, with the exceptions of grocery stores. People here are encouraged not to go out for any reason unless absolutely necessary. I am having lunch delivered Monday through Friday because I don’t know how to cook (didn’t have to for 34 years). I am too lazy to learn and I have been ordering groceries delivered from Tesco anyway for over a year. The three local grocery stores in my neighborhood are still open, so after I finish and publish this post, I will go and check out whether they are still open and how well they are stocked. They had plenty of everything yesterday and the only difference was that some dude was disinfecting the floor with some kind of a noisy washing machine.

My son told me yesterday that it’s pretty crazy in Los Angeles and that there is no toilet paper available in the supermarket. Plenty of everything here, including toilet paper.

That is, plenty of everything except for what is needed the most: face masks and respirators. We are supposed to wear face masks or some kind of a scarf or shawl or something over our mouth when we go outside. But the masks are not available yet and I don’t have anything suitable at home to cover my mouth, so I will ignore the order until the masks are available. Hope the police will not be shooting at me (just kidding, I hope !!!)

Have you seen the movie “The Postman” from 1997 with Kevin Costner?  I loved the movie, saw it twice. It’s beginning to look kind of like a scene from an apocalyptic movie now here too, but it seems that the virus might peter out after a few weeks. I hope this movie will not last too long.

I certainly do hope so. But like I said, as a retired freelancer translator, I am well positioned to survive the latest pandemic, or at least I hope so, although I belong to the group that is most at risk (people over 60).

I wonder how and where and how the virus originated and who are the people who are getting rich from this horrible situation, while thousand will die and untold millions of people may be going bankrupt. I can’t think of all kinds of scenarios, but I think that we will probably never find out.

I hope you are doing fine, wherever you are, that better, less scary news will be available soon, and that I will be able to write my silly blog for at least another 10 years.