Amy is coming to visit today and will be here for a week. We will likely spend time doing the usual tooling about, working on arts and crafts, watching movies, and playing games, both digital and analog. It is going to be a great time having her around with BHK and me.

Pearl has been having a really good time lately, too. We have been seeing quite a few deer and skunks outside on the cameras, and she is getting more interested in being a sweet lap cat when she is not actively exploring and being a sweet little goofus.

I have not been doing much doodling lately, but I have been reading a bit more. Some recent additions to the future queue include *So Far Gone* by Jess Walter for book club, *The Winter Folk* by Jen Julian, *Other Minds: The Octopus and the Evolution of Intelligent Life*, *James* by Percival Everett, and the rest of the Murderbot novellas after number two.

On a different note, I am getting a little tired of some of the nonsense going on in the Roanoke region’s social media lately. I am really glad Facebook and Twitter are not on the menu these days, but looking at Instagram and Reddit is bad enough. I went through and weeded out some of the extreme nonsense because I do not need the mess of character assassination aimed at folks who are just trying to do good.

I will still keep an eye on Flock cameras, city council, and budget updates. It looks like some folks have to be reminded that single-issue voting is a bad idea. We can all agree that Flock cameras and a surveillance state are rotten, but I sure as heck do not want conservative or Republican policies spreading more evil by hurting taxes, education, housing, and mass transit just because we agree on one specific topic.