A couple of Fridays ago, I had what might be considered a bad day. As I was getting ready to leave for work, I broke my glasses. Well, actually, the glasses broke themselves because I did not do anything to facilitate any breakage, so I blame it on the glasses. 

It was announced earlier this week that one of the major movie theater chains has planned on closing all of its U.S. and U.K. locations indefinitely due to the pandemic. 

My brother and I were chatting online the other day. We don't do it as often as we would like because we are both pretty busy and since he lives in Ireland, telephone calls can get quite expensive. I had sent him a picture of our grandmother who we both haven't seen for a while, mostly due to distance, but also because of the coronavirus stuff. 

The other night, after dinner, my wife pointed to a small stack of mail on my desk. She had noticed it getting a little taller and eventually it caught her attention. She picked it up and dropped it on the keyboard of my laptop. 

Once again, America has found itself at crunch time. We are a stone's throw from another presidential election. 

There has been a lot of talk these days about the human casualties of the pandemic. It is a very serious subject and I am not here to make light of it. To do so would be offensive and ignorant and I try my very best not to be either. 

Well, most of the time. 

I have had difficulty lately coming up with new and fresh topics for the column. When you write a column pretty much every week for five years, you have to be conscious of repetition. Repetition of not only topics, but jokes, one-liners and anecdotes as well. 

Across the country, in the next few weeks, school children should be going back to classrooms and seeing friends and meeting teachers and preparing for a new school year. As we all know, 2020 is not playing by the same rules as other years and a lot of school systems are not opening for in school learning right away, if at all.

Aug. 14, 2020 will mark the five-year anniversary of this column. It has outlasted a few editors, one newspaper, and three laptops. This column has won an award, has been shared internationally by some readers and has even generated one or two letters of fan mail.

I heard a radio spot this morning talking about "The New Normal." I was quite confused, as I had understood what we as a nation were going through was temporary.