Stephen Michael Kellat

To grumble a bit

Stephen Michael Kellat at

Okay, things have been stupid yet weird in my life. The transmission rate for SARS-CoV-2 has gone up to where we'll move from "Moderate" to "Substantial" on the CDC's metering here in Ashtabula County as of the cutoff tomorrow it appears. Masks will return to being needed as of Sunday with the new provisio that vaccination status will be disregarded. The delta variant of SARS-CoV-2 is a nasty bugger.


There's not much I can say in this respect that is positive or happy. People locally are not taking the situation seriously. We have a very small amount of beds in the local intensive care unit so if this takes off and gets bad frankly our county hospital will be overrun after just 20 patients.


I have made the determination that I am not going to conduct door to door canvassing at this time for the municipal campaign. The benefits do not outweigh the risks. I have to choose between using Skype meetings or doing something with Microsoft Teams to hold virtual events. Why not Zoom? That's got enough emotional baggage tied to it in the popular culture that using a different tool might have fewer objections.


According to the board of elections website I apparently have the only contested race in the city right now. That's the current standing at least but there is a chance a replacement candidate could be fielded for the fifth ward here in the city. We shall see.


The question came up again as to why I am not married. The impending birthday in September usually brings this question up each year. The normal answer is that I would much rather marry within the church and there are zero prospects for doing so at any of our particular congregations in Ashtabula County. I would have far better luck in and around one of "The Institutions" but I am not up for relocating at this time. If I lose the election I may look at relocating but that is still quite a long way off.


Beyond all of that mess it does appear that I am slowly but surely heading towards resuming podcasting. I'm looking at how various folks are doing such using static site generators. Right now I'm still building up an experiment plan and don't want to commit fully to a show. This would be a bootstrap effort that would have to build up incrementally, I think. If I could find a general podcast player app for Roku set-top boxes this would much more readily move forward. Yeah, video would be the goal rather than audio.


Lots in motion, I think. Hopefully things don't get too bad with the current wave of SARS-CoV-2 that my local public library (pictured in part) ends up going back to curbside-only. I like being able to visit in-person.