I spent the weekend chronically online. More about that later.

But as part of this, I was witness to the Internet speculating about Where’s Donald? The hashtags #WhereIsTrump, #TrumpDied, and #IsTrumpDead were apparently trending over the weekend. I know that at one point I watched a Reel on FB that claimed that three helicopters took off from the White House headed towards Walter Reed Hospital. Sadly I did not click “save” fast enough and when the video ended, the next one started, and now I have no way to go back and research the account that posted it to find out of they were reputable or a crackpot.

Things that happened this weekends that are actual facts or reasonable assumptions:
* There were no events on the First Felon’s official schedule last Wednesday, Thursday, or Friday.
* The FFOTUS usually spends his weekends golfing, but according to this Golf Tracker, he did not golf at all over the three day weekend because there were no confirmed sightings of him on the golf course. (If you click back through, he’s played golf virtually every weekend since he moved back into the White House.)
* On Sunday, his Truth Social account posted photos of him supposedly playing golf with Jon Gruden, BUT they were from the week before (confirmed by matching the clothes Gruden was wearing with the photos Gruden posted on Instagram LAST week of his golf date with FFOTUS).
* Outside of that, the only photos taken of tRump all weekend were from a long distance, and thus were quite blurry.
* Most of the posts on his Truth Social account were memes, photos, and sharing articles. Which made people suspicious that someone else could have been posting using his account.
* People said that the text posts that did appear weren’t written in typical tRump style (See Gavin Newsome’s recent social media posts) and thus they couldn’t have been written by him. One pointed out the presence of complete sentences and em dashes as evidence that AI probably wrote at least one of his posts this weekend.
* Rudy Giuliani was in a car accident over the weekend, but the only statement The Donald made about his old friend and lawyer was that he was going to award him The Presidential Medal of Freedom. Nothing about the car crash or that his friend was (briefly) in the hospital.
* One of his posts was merely two words, “GOOD NIGHT” which again, made people wonder about why such a short post?
* The Donald recently said, “I want to try and get to heaven, if possible, I’m hearing I’m not doing well.”
* And our slimy VP, JD Vance recently said that he is prepared to be president, if “God forbid” President Donald Trump experienced a “terrible tragedy.”

So yeah, I can understand how (especially with those last two bullet points) people got started speculating when they hadn’t seen the FFOTUS for a couple of days over the weekend. Not that he’s the sort of President that makes public appearances on holidays like a normal President.

Now, what drives me nuts is that people have forgotten that it’s OK to speculate based on facts, but let’s at least TRY to maintain some dignity and not join the Tin Foil Hat Brigade over at the Conspiracy Theory bar and grille getting punch drunk on sweet sweet speculation.

Silly things I’ve seen as part of the “he’s dead or in the hospital” conspiracy theory:
* There was a motorcade filmed driving through Washington DC that included an ambulance. But Presidential/Vice Presidential motorcades ALWAYS include an ambulance, it's a standard part of the motorcade. For all we know, that was Melania going to get a facial or JD Vance going out for lunch.
* Speaking of Melania, a woman posted that she was at Walter Reed for a pre-natal checkup and saw Melania visiting the patients in that part of the hospital. People assumed Melania was there with her husband. But if you’ve watched Melania lately, she seems to spend most of her time avoiding him. They’re hardly ever seen together in public anymore. Chances are, if she was at Walter Reed, it’s more likely that The Donald was not.
* Someone started out their video roundup of the timeline for the weekend with “This was the day the British Psychic said was The Day.” and I noped out of that video. We do not rely on pronouncements from psychics as data.
* People said that the blurry, long-distance photos weren’t of tRrump, but of a body double, without providing any proof.
* People used AI to enhance the long distance photos, and then used the weird artifacts that you get with AI image enhancement to say there was something wrong with his face.
* Someone used the Pentagon Pizza Tracker site to speculate that due to the increase on pizza orders near Walter Reed Hospital to proclaim that the Donald was in surgery. WTF?

I mean, I hope to read an obituary as much as the next person, but let’s not get too excited just yet people. Just because he mentioned last week that he wants to get into heaven doesn’t mean that he bought an express ticket to get there.

For months now I have been hearing random yelling in the building. It’s pretty upsetting when you hear just a random shriek that sounds like someone is being murdered. There have been times when it’s been so disturbing that I’ve gone out into the hallway, not sure if I should be calling the police or not. This has been going on for months, and it’s been driving me NUTS.

There was just a really loud, incredibly long shriek, long enough to finally let me confirm that the noise was probably coming out of apartment #3.

So I went down and knocked on the door. Repeatedly. I could hear the voices in the apartment getting quieter. Nobody answered the door. I knocked again. Still no answer. Then the TV turned off. I think I knocked five or six times? Because I really wanted to talk to someone, but no one answered despite the fact that I could hear them in there! I finally went back to my desk, but I kept an ear cocked.

A couple minutes later I heard someone come out of the apartment and head down the hall towards the door of the building. I stuck my head out, and it was the mom. I asked if anyone in their apartment had been screaming, and she shook her head no, nobody was screaming. She asked if I had knocked, and I told her yes. That I’d been trying to figure out where the screaming had been coming from, because every time I think someone’s getting killed.

She told me again that no one in her apartment had been screaming. I said I thought that maybe it was someone playing a video game and screaming when they scored points or something? But that it still upset me, because of one time that the Wasband and I heard screaming from the downstairs neighbors having a fight, and then suddenly, clear as a bell, the wife yelled, “Put that knife down!” and we immediately called the cops.

She again denied that anyone in her apartment was screaming (She has a teenage daughter, which is why I was thinking video games…), but she also didn’t walk out of the building, she turned around and walked right back into her apartment. LOL, I hope she went to tell her daughter to shut the f*** up.

When my sister and I visited my parents in April, I said I would probably come back at Christmas time and help mom clean out some more of the stuff she has crammed in every drawer and closet. And I penciled that in my calendar as when I would make the visit.

Today my sister emails me about when in October do I want to go rent the beach house so that she can buy her plane tickets? WTF? The plan was to go through more junk in the house, not vacation at the beach.

Anywhoo, I looked at my calendar, and there is literally not a week between now and Christmas that I do not have either a work commitment (Offsite in Berlin, virtual offsite, Hackathon week, monitoring the Docs channel in Slack, our annual Open Source user conference), a doctor's appointment (one year follow ups for my gallbladder yeet, a colonoscopy, a mammogram), events I want to go to (a local cat show, King Dick's at the new site), or events that I've already bought tickets for (Comedian Josh Johnson in Boston, John Cleese and a showing of Monty Python and the Holy Grail in Lowell, New England Crime Bake, a screening of Stand By Me with Wil Wheaton, Jerry O'Connell, and Corey Feldman in Concord, NH). I am literally booked with at least one blocker to spend a week away from home ever week between now and Christmas. So, I guess I'm sticking with my original plan. If my sister wants to visit the folks at a different time, that's her choice.

Now I feel really old.

My email this morning informed me that I had a new achievement on Live Journal! Even though I left that platform for good back in 2017.

Apparently I've been blogging for 20 years now.

Not that I needed a reminder this morning about how freaking old I'm getting.