Every year since it started, I have judged the Jose Gouveia poetry contest sponsored by WOMR, our community radio station.  For several years, there were readers who weeded out the unlikely poems, but I realized their taste was too academic and they were going for the more convoluted poems and discarding any that were in plainer language or colloquial.  I then took over the job of reading every poem that is submitted.  There were about 75 entries of up to five poems each for the regional contest.  I got that done and sent it off to the station.

However, this year because of Covid and everybody being locked up in isolation, an unbelievable number of poems came for the national contest.  They filled a box. Not a small box either.  A good sized box.  A size that could hold a medium dog --  say a golden retriever. I am slowly making my way through them all, but I have other things to do, so it goes slowly.  I can’t any longer say glacialy slow,  because glaciers are rapidly melting.  I will have to think of something else that goes slowly—but I’m not as slow as the drip that lengthens a stalactite.  But a lot slower than time passes when you’re waiting for a doctor’s  appointment socially distanced in a drab waiting room and you forgot your cell and can’t do anything but stare at the bland painting on the opposite wall.  Sailboats or a barn or flowers.  Why are barns so popular with bad painters?

I am so pissed at the way Gov Baker has organized or rather didn’t, just let happen, the rollout of the vaccine.  I keep trying to make an appointment. I am told that no appointments for the over 75’s can happen till Feb first. Then I go one website of the only place relatively near me, only 2 towns away, and am told they have filled all appointments for the next 10 days.  He has no central information source but every place that has any vaccine is on their own to set their own rules.  It’s a fucking mess.

Have you ever noticed how almost nobody in ads wears a mask?  They are dangerously showing happy people frolicking, eating, drinking, traveling but never with a mask on.  And the car commercials: always driving down a highway without another car in sight, traveling through empty city streets.  And the ads for medicines – body looks even slightly ill.  Obviously they just eat the pills like candy.

 Our furnace broke down early in the week.  It’s fixed for now, but this is the 4th time this winter we have had to call for repairs.  We know we need a new furnace, but the oil people don’t seem interested in installing a new furnace.  Obviously we can’t do it during winter.  It was 14 last night, the coldest day of the year so far.  We have snow on the ground finally. We had snow earlier in the week, but it only lasted a little while. in the morning, it was all gone.  This bunch seems as if it will end up deeper and stick around.

I am still ordering seeds.  I started in late December, but a lot of seeds re already sold out, so I have to order from new places.  I just spend 22 minutes waiting on the phone for Vermont Seed to answer, and then gave up.  I can’t order from their website as my browser thinks their site is damaged and knocks me off it every time I try to put through my choices.  Nothing works any longer, have you noticed?  Except bills.  they come with the same regularity,  they always dd, but just slower. I am getting bills form Comcast that are due [with penalties for being late] the same day or the next.