I note with some trepidation that Ashtabula City’s municipal government is looking for volunteers to serve on boards and commissions. Considering my failed campaign for a seat on city council in 2021 I really, really don’t think it would be kosher for me to apply for any of the openings. If anything I wanted to challenge the elected chief executive of the city as an independent candidate but I’m burying that silly fool notion.

In terms of more productive ideas, I will note that I am trained in the Homeland Security Exercise and Evaluation Program. Despite the high-falutin’ name it’ll look quite a bit like a modified version of tabletop role play gaming to people. I’ve been listening to the episodes of the Critical Role audio podcast and seeing that the skills from HSEEP are transferable to other areas. For the next fiction work I may as well write up a scenario, wargame it, and then make the fictional work be effectively the wargame report. Even the navy’s manual on how to conduct wargames that I’ve got on the shelf talks about using a twenty-side die at points so I have some ideas here.

Developing a news operation is basically on the backburner indefinitely. Costs are too high in the current market. Ohio’s minimum wage is over ten dollars and the prevailing wages for the workers that would be needed is almost double minimum wage. This area is not sufficiently grounded economically. I would need at least one year’s runway to launch something and there is no viable source to raise the money from locally. Although money could be earned via passive monetization such as advertising there is no reasonable expectation that that would be enough to make things sufficient. Opportunities like Ko-Fi and Liberapay do exist although I don’t think either have ever been used.

Church proceeds well. The livestream of services that we produce is gaining viewership. Our church is the only one locally that outright says to the local population that they should not come if they are sick and that we are glad to assist with tuning in so that people who are ill can worship from home. God answers prayers but God is not a vending machine. Sometimes the answer people get is “no”. Sometimes the answer is given in a form you don’t expect. I know it is very popular for the so-called evangelicals to pray for miraculous healing yet they can easily overlook the miraculous gift that is modern medical science. There’s still lots to unpack there.

The dating and relationships front has been in abeyance since the day after Christmas. With the medical news since Thursday I have to seriously evaluate quite a few parts of my life. Some things are now very firmly foreclosed to me. Some things remain possible but only at insanely high cost. Non-procreative relationships are very difficult to discuss in the current sociopolitical environment in this country and especially in this county. I just have quite a lot to think about and frankly no easy answers within my grasp at this point.

Sleep would probably help in terms of these conflicting emotions and thoughts. We’ll see how hard that is to do. Practice with the praise team at church building is in a few hours after all…