As if a greater surge of the pandemic weren’t enough, our erstwhile president, who has abandoned the country for the golf course, is also wreaking havoc with the transfer of power to President-elect Joe Biden. He seems determined to leave a wake of destruction behind, both nationally and internationally, until he’s officially out of office on January 20. We, the people, on the other hand, will continue what we’ve been doing in an extreme time: guarding our health, caring for each other, feeding each other, and assuaging loneliness and despair. Not just American values, but human values. Look up the meaning of Tolerance, as defined by children (page 12), in the first of what will be ongoing excerpts from a book yet to be published but eager to be shared. While 2020 has been a rough ride, it provided spectacular distractions for skywatchers. In October, we had two full moons, with the second a Blue Moon on Halloween. The Leonid meteor shower continued all month but moves out Monday. Last Tuesday, November 17, the crescent moon gave the first hint of what’s to come in December. Jupiter and Saturn dimly joined her around sunset in a narrow window of time. As our Backyard Astronomer Eric Fitzgerald will explain (page16), starting on December 16, the moon, Jupiter and Saturn are destined to be participants as they move toward a spectacular cosmic event, The Great Conjunction on December 21. That is also the Winter Solstice and marks a major shift into the Age of Aquarius says astrologer Kait Leonard (page 17). Jupiter passes Saturn in a conjunction every 19.6 years, so the event is already rare, but December 21 will be the closest conjunction of the two (one-tenth of a degree apart) since 1623. Our holidays this year are not what we want them to be, but everyone I know has cancelled even the smallest of gatherings to guard against contracting or spreading COVID-19. Poet Jane Marla Robbins’ new book, “Poems of COVID-19,� (page 8), is reviewed with excerpts to entice you to buy it (surely, it’s at Claire Denis’ Café Mimosa). It will lift and break your heart in the same breath. It’s still fire season, you know, so pages10-11 feature our third consecutive fire story. This one, however, is a new tool for firefighting and has HOPE spelled all over it. The humongous CH-47 Chinook helitanker held a joint exercise at 69 Bravo Helispot at Saddle Peak on Tuesday, November 10, dropping its 3,000-gallon payload around the 34-acre property. What does Hope become once it’s here?