Today is a day of hope.

There is a guitar just outside our door in the hallway. Sometime soon we'll be brave enough to touch it and disinfect it. Nobody risked anything to put it there. The upstairs people had it all along. I hope I'll be able to play it. But that is mostly what the guitar is for me: a symbol of hope more than really an instrument to make beautiful music with my great talents.

And today I bought some cheese. Oaxaca cheese. I bought it from Bernardo the Cheese Man of Zihuatanejo. He, for me, symbolizes all the good of Zihautanejo. He has a beautiful smile and he coils up long strings of cheese and sells them to 3 out of 4 tables in any of the restaurants he visits on Playa Ropa. Everyone wants his cheese. When his five gallon cheese pail is empty, the women line up to dance with him. And believe it or not, he is also a full blown Caballero with a horse.

And when all the people left Zihuatanejo and the restaurants closed down, there was nobody left to buy Bernardo's cheese. And that is sad for Bernardo and all the people of Zihua and the other towns who make their living in tourism. And sad for me. I asked somebody to post a picture of him so I could remember his happy face. One thing lead to another and Eli Brady found a way to buy a few kilos, leverage up matching donations and get Bernardo's cheese safely into the hands of people who need it through the Zihuatanejo food bank.

It's a difficult time everywhere in the world. Our own friends and families and food banks in our own towns no doubt have greater needs than any of us can fulfill right now. But it also seems so important to reach out and help our friends in faraway places even if it is only a few symbolic kilos of fine Oaxaca. People of the world need to know that we are all in this together and those feelings of fear and desperation will diminish.

I pick cheese on the beach over soldiers on the border.

And I had a call today from a couple of my favourite engineering students. They've been looking for open source projects to contribute engineering design talent or manufacturing capability to provide critically needed medical equipment to hospitals in need. Turns out there is a huge gap in knowledge on real time demand and medical vetting of open source ideas that companies want to manufacture against. So Foster and Noah are putting together a project platform brief and want to get this idea in the hands of a benevolent CEO very fast. So if you know Jeff or Elon or perhaps Bill, get back to me. This needs to happen fast. My boy gives me hope.

And the most interesting tale of hope for me today comes from our friend Donna down in Zihuatanejo. She has a loaner copy of I'll Shave My Head Too and tells me she is really enjoying it and hasn't skipped ahead so she's very hopeful. I've heard other people say as they read the book how hopeful they are. What the hell?

And that is the triumph of the human mind that allows us that hope. That makes me even more hopeful.

Send cheese.

(Photo credit: Stolen from Stuart Cooper in low res - forgive me Stuart there's a global pandemic)