hey, snookums took a walk on the cold side

After his little adventures yesterday, today my CAT woke me up because he wanted to go outside.

I assumed he was hungry because that's why he usually wakes me up, but when I prepared food he sniffed it and immediately went to sit against the exterior door and make a demanding little yelp.

So I moved the barriers and folded back the plastic curtain to the Cold Side of the House (it's under construction and several of the radiators aren't working there) and he had a great time exploring in the chaos. He made so much noise joyously yelling about it, and coming to tell her and then running back there, that the BB got out of bed and went to check it out with him. They both discovered a sunbeam on top of the temporary worktable in our kitchen-to-be:



And he later ventured upstairs and discovered the sunbeam at our someday-bedroom window directly above it, and the BB followed him up there too. Once the sun had moved far enough for the sunbeams to reach their napping cushions in the kitchen, he discovered that while prowling around; and, failing to rouse the BB by running up and down the stairs yelling about it, he came and yorped in my face and then did what I call his Little Timmy's Down the Well act, leading me first to the sunny cushion and then to the door to the cold side. So I went upstairs and found the BB snoozing on a hard chair and carried her back to the warm side, with Snookums watching and commentating from the stairs and then following me. I deposited her on the cushion and he immediately jumped up on the other one and they went to sleep before I finished putting the barriers back.

international wealthy flee coronavirus... by thronging vacation destinations?? (cw)

I noticed this pattern a few days ago on Twitter and at the time I tried to Google for any news covering it as an international pattern, but no luck. So far I've seen reports from ( the Scottish Highlands, Finnish Lapland, the Hamptons, Martha's Vineyard, Norway, and (south-of-Lapland) Finland. )

I'm not an historian or a medievalist, but this rang a bell because I remember learning about the wealthy doing this during the Black Plague. Specifically I remember it because it's relevant to Edgar Allan Poe's classic short story The Masque of the Red Death, and I've always been a Poe fan. The setting there is an unnamed Renaissance-flavored country estate at which a thousand members of the wealthy nobility have holed up to escape a plague and are having a masquerade ball. The plague is fictitious and the setting vague in that story, but this is a well-documented behavior from the time of the Black Death (eg The Decameron uses it as a framing device).

It was also on my mind because I'd already seen multiple Twitter threads in the past months from either leftists or imitations thereof claiming that the wealthy were [going to] literally ("") escape covid-19 by retiring to their walled mansions etc. in the country where they would survive; but in fact history (and acquaintance with the amount of travel and person-to-person contact involved in most rich people's vacations) already made this doubtful to me before I started seeing these news stories. I suspect there are a lot more of them out there. ETA: But, perhaps ironically, this behavior is actually worse than if they were able to literally escape, because by consuming all the food and collapsing the medical infrastructure they are stealing resources from the less wealthy permanent residents, but worse still, they're endangering those residents and everyone else by accelerating the spread of the disease.