Thursday Thirteen

1. Yesterday, I went out. We rose at 6 a.m. and were at Kroger by 7 a.m. No toilet paper. Very little meat. We grabbed what we could on our shopping list and on my mother-in-law's list and left as quickly as possible.

2. I went because my husband has no idea where things are. I do. I could move us in and out much more quickly, and did so.

3. The Brambleton Avenue Hardware store has toilet paper. It is on the far side of the city, and they are charging $1 for a "commercial roll," which I suppose is the stuff you use at the grocery store that is not soft, and they are charging $1.89 a roll for Angel Soft. I think that is price gouging, personally, but I am not in retail.

4. Our adventure Wednesday was better than the one 10 days ago. It's too bad a head of lettuce won't hold up longer, but if you want fresh food you have to go to store. Unless I want to live on Vienna Sausages, soup, and Spam, I don't really see a way around going out from time to time.

5. I wore a surgical mask. My husband wore an N95 mask. I have trouble breathing through the N95 masks because of my asthma and I felt like that contributed to my overwhelming feelings of terror when we were last out. The surgical mask was better but also I felt more vulnerable. I couldn't help thinking about the Hero's Journey I posted the other week while I was in the store. It made me smile behind my mask. We all can be heroes, I guess.

6. I have been listening to Melissa Etheridge's free concerts from home every evening at 6 p.m. est. It has been a real joy to watch her play, to see someone who is a little older than me still getting it done, still playing and enjoying rock and roll. Yesterday she played two Rolling Stones songs and did a good job. Last night, she did an hour-long concert for free, with camera people and all. She played her hits. I was a bit disappointed in the camera work and I suspect she was too, because I'm sure she is hoping for a DVD release or something. Perhaps they were able to reshoot some of the things that were blurry or another camera angle that wasn't blurry will be edited in. But good on her for giving it a go.

7. We have supported local restaurants with curb-side pick up. It doesn't feel dangerous. So far so good.

8. I may ultimately end up doing the click it and pick it up thing with the grocery store. After all, if they aren't going to have meat and the veggies they do have look so tired you don't want to purchase them, then that would work for canned goods, etc. A loaf of bread is a loaf of bread, after all.

9. Interestingly, while I am enjoying the Melissa Etheridge concerts, and I have several of her albums and I listen to them, the songs I listen to the most are by Sheryl Crow, from her earlier albums. They are my background when I am writing or editing. Sheryl Crow and Melissa Etheridge competed against each other for Grammies back in the early 1990s. They are both 58 years old and have had cancer. I admire them both. Melissa is more rock, Sheryl is a little mellower. Apparently I write better to mellow.

10. Sometimes if I want real flourish, I write to the Lord of the Rings movie scores. I would like to learn to play some of those on the guitar, like this guy. He uses something called "drop D" tuning, which non-musicians will be clueless about, but basically it means you tune the guitar differently from standard tuning.




11. We have not yet received our stimulus money. Even dead people have received their stimulus checks before us. I'm not sure what they will do with it, since they're dead.

12. It rained 2" last night. I slept well. My newly retired husband is home too much because of the bad weather, though. He really needs a hobby. One that takes him out of the house. For hours at a time. I love him, but I miss my space.

13. I am listening to children's stories on my iPhone. They are soothing. We need soothing during these trying times. What soothes you?

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Thursday Thirteen is played by lots of people; there is a list here if you want to read other Thursday Thirteens and/or play along. I've been playing for a while and this is my 653rd time to do a list of 13 on a Thursday. Or so sayth the Blogger counter, anyway.

The Pandemic Journal - Day 44

I have been listening to Governor Cuomo of New York. He is articulate, thoughtful, compassionate, and empathetic. He is also intelligent.

Listening to him is a balm compared to the circus shows of last week, when #45 was holding his daily press rallies. I doubt they stop, but I am hoping for a small break from them after his debacle of suggesting we drink disinfectants to kill the coronavirus.

As for how I personally am doing, I am mostly fine. Somehow I have managed to get a huge bruise on my stomach. I don't know how it got there, as I don't recall hitting anything. I think it happened last Monday, when we were out. Perhaps I hit it on the car door or on the shopping cart in that madhouse that was Food Lion.

It isn't sore, but it is certainly a huge bruise. I am putting Arnica on it to try to get it to go away more quickly.

I saw two coyotes this morning, very close to the house. Our cows are calving and the next door neighbors have young kids, so this isn't good, that they will come so close to us. They scare the deer, and they are very ugly creatures. We will have to keep a close eye on the babies.

Some of those babies went off to the stockyard this morning. Of course, they are no longer babies. They needed to be weaned from their mothers. We will lose money on this sale.

Here is an economics lesson for you - many of the slaughter houses have shut down for various meat products because their workers have the Covid-45 virus. That means that there will be a backlog of animals, starting with small farmers like us, who sell to a middle-man called a finisher. The finisher fatten the cattle purchased at the stockyard and then takes them to slaughter. But if the finisher has many cattle backed up, then he will pay us less for our product (the calves). However, because the slaughterhouses and meat packaging plants are shut down, the price of meat will skyrocket on the consumer end. That is lack of availability but not because of anything we (the small farmers) have done.

This is true for milk, too. Milk producers were geared to package milk in little cartons for consumption in schools. So much for the schools, so much for home use. Suddenly, that turned on its head. No school consumption, more home consumption, but the packagers were not prepared for this (though they may have been had the federal government done its job). It is the same with toilet paper - people used toilet paper at work and in restaurants. Those are closed. Now they need more home-packaged toilet paper, and the demand caught the suppliers off-guard. It should not have, because we had three months warning on this, but those who should have been listening were deaf and dumb.

Other shortages are also because of the manufacturing and distribution chain. Many of our goods come from China, which was shut down for months. So those goods were not being made and shipped here. Hence the lack of PPE, because apparently we don't make much stuff in the USA anymore. That is not a politician's fault, that is because of corporate greed created through the stock market and shareholders. It erodes society when goods are not created in place. Not only does it takes away jobs, it helps create this massive wealth division that this country is currently experiencing.

Many things will be in short supply for the remainder of the year. If there are second or third outbreaks of this virus, as well as perhaps a bad flu year this fall, expect things to be even worse.

I have realized in multiple discussions with people that most folks have no idea how things are moved around and distributed in their hometowns, whether at the local level or internationally. Schools need to teach this stuff. Beef doesn't grow at the grocery store. It grows here, on my farm, and then goes through multiple levels before it becomes hamburger on the grill.

I have no other news. Everyone in my immediate family seems to be well. My friends are well, as best I can tell. We are all practicing physical separation. Many people locally have stopped doing that, and the numbers are creeping up.

My expectation is that from now on, for the rest of my life, I will wear a mask in public. It will be some time before I venture out again, I imagine, but when I do, I plan to wear protective gear for the foreseeable future.

The old ways of the world are gone now. We need to accept that, and find a new way of life, and create a new world and a new normal. Those who cannot accept this will die from the virus or a gunshot wound or whatever.

The rest of us will do the best we can.

The World Pities Us

The Irish Times is a well respected daily newspaper. I'm just going to park this read right here without comment.

Irish Times
April 25, 2020
By Fintan O’Toole
THE WORLD HAS LOVED, HATED AND ENVIED THE U.S. NOW, FOR THE FIRST TIME, WE PITY IT
Over more than two centuries, the United States has stirred a very wide range of feelings in the rest of the world: love and hatred, fear and hope, envy and contempt, awe and anger. But there is one emotion that has never been directed towards the US until now: pity.

However bad things are for most other rich democracies, it is hard not to feel sorry for Americans. Most of them did not vote for Donald Trump in 2016. Yet they are locked down with a malignant narcissist who, instead of protecting his people from Covid-19, has amplified its lethality. The country Trump promised to make great again has never in its history seemed so pitiful.

Will American prestige ever recover from this shameful episode? The US went into the coronavirus crisis with immense advantages: precious weeks of warning about what was coming, the world’s best concentration of medical and scientific expertise, effectively limitless financial resources, a military complex with stunning logistical capacity and most of the world’s leading technology corporations. Yet it managed to make itself the global epicentre of the pandemic.

As the American writer George Packer puts it in the current edition of the Atlantic, “The United States reacted ... like Pakistan or Belarus – like a country with shoddy infrastructure and a dysfunctional government whose leaders were too corrupt or stupid to head off mass suffering.”
It is one thing to be powerless in the face of a natural disaster, quite another to watch vast power being squandered in real time – wilfully, malevolently, vindictively. It is one thing for governments to fail (as, in one degree or another, most governments did), quite another to watch a ruler and his supporters actively spread a deadly virus. Trump, his party and Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News became vectors of the pestilence.

The grotesque spectacle of the president openly inciting people (some of them armed) to take to the streets to oppose the restrictions that save lives is the manifestation of a political death wish. What are supposed to be daily briefings on the crisis, demonstrative of national unity in the face of a shared challenge, have been used by Trump merely to sow confusion and division. They provide a recurring horror show in which all the neuroses that haunt the American subconscious dance naked on live TV.

If the plague is a test, its ruling political nexus ensured that the US would fail it at a terrible cost in human lives. In the process, the idea of the US as the world’s leading nation – an idea that has shaped the past century – has all but evaporated.

Other than the Trump impersonator Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, who is now looking to the US as the exemplar of anything other than what not to do? How many people in Düsseldorf or Dublin are wishing they lived in Detroit or Dallas?
It is hard to remember now but, even in 2017, when Trump took office, the conventional wisdom in the US was that the Republican Party and the broader framework of US political institutions would prevent him from doing too much damage. This was always a delusion, but the pandemic has exposed it in the most savage ways.

Abject surrender
What used to be called mainstream conservatism has not absorbed Trump – he has absorbed it. Almost the entire right-wing half of American politics has surrendered abjectly to him. It has sacrificed on the altar of wanton stupidity the most basic ideas of responsibility, care and even safety.
Thus, even at the very end of March, 15 Republican governors had failed to order people to stay at home or to close non-essential businesses. In Alabama, for example, it was not until April 3rd that governor Kay Ivey finally issued a stay-at-home order.

In Florida, the state with the highest concentration of elderly people with underlying conditions, governor Ron DeSantis, a Trump mini-me, kept the beach resorts open to students travelling from all over the US for spring break parties. Even on April 1st, when he issued restrictions, DeSantis exempted religious services and “recreational activities”.

Georgia governor Brian Kemp, when he finally issued a stay-at-home order on April 1st, explained: “We didn’t know that [the virus can be spread by people without symptoms] until the last 24 hours.”

This is not mere ignorance – it is deliberate and homicidal stupidity. There is, as the demonstrations this week in US cities have shown, plenty of political mileage in denying the reality of the pandemic. It is fuelled by Fox News and far-right internet sites, and it reaps for these politicians millions of dollars in donations, mostly (in an ugly irony) from older people who are most vulnerable to the coronavirus.
It draws on a concoction of conspiracy theories, hatred of science, paranoia about the “deep state” and religious providentialism (God will protect the good folks) that is now very deeply infused in the mindset of the American right.
Trump embodies and enacts this mindset, but he did not invent it. The US response to the coronavirus crisis has been paralysed by a contradiction that the Republicans have inserted into the heart of US democracy. On the one hand, they want to control all the levers of governmental power. On the other they have created a popular base by playing on the notion that government is innately evil and must not be trusted.

The contradiction was made manifest in two of Trump’s statements on the pandemic: on the one hand that he has “total authority”, and on the other that “I don’t take responsibility at all”. Caught between authoritarian and anarchic impulses, he is incapable of coherence.

Fertile ground
But this is not just Donald Trump. The crisis has shown definitively that Trump’s presidency is not an aberration. It has grown on soil long prepared to receive it. The monstrous blossoming of misrule has structure and purpose and strategy behind it.

There are very powerful interests who demand “freedom” in order to do as they like with the environment, society and the economy. They have infused a very large part of American culture with the belief that “freedom” is literally more important than life. My freedom to own assault weapons trumps your right not to get shot at school. Now, my freedom to go to the barber (“I Need a Haircut” read one banner this week in St Paul, Minnesota) trumps your need to avoid infection.

Usually when this kind of outlandish idiocy is displaying itself, there is the comforting thought that, if things were really serious, it would all stop. People would sober up. Instead, a large part of the US has hit the bottle even harder.
And the president, his party and their media allies keep supplying the drinks. There has been no moment of truth, no shock of realisation that the antics have to end. No one of any substance on the US right has stepped in to say: get a grip, people are dying here.

That is the mark of how deep the trouble is for the US – it is not just that Trump has treated the crisis merely as a way to feed tribal hatreds but that this behaviour has become normalised. When the freak show is live on TV every evening, and the star is boasting about his ratings, it is not really a freak show any more. For a very large and solid bloc of Americans, it is reality.

And this will get worse before it gets better. Trump has at least eight more months in power. In his inaugural address in 2017, he evoked “American carnage” and promised to make it stop. But now that the real carnage has arrived, he is revelling in it. He is in his element.

As things get worse, he will pump more hatred and falsehood, more death-wish defiance of reason and decency, into the groundwater. If a new administration succeeds him in 2021, it will have to clean up the toxic dump he leaves behind. If he is re-elected, toxicity will have become the lifeblood of American politics.

Either way, it will be a long time before the rest of the world can imagine America being great again.

Pandemic Journal - Day 38 (The Descent Into Madness)

Yesterday, I ventured out.

Having not been out much since March 13, except for car rides to look at lovely landscapes, it felt freeing to go riding down the interstate and into the city.

The purpose was to finish up my husband's retirement paperwork. When I last wrote, I had not planned to go. My husband had said I wouldn't be allowed in the building. He would bring home papers I needed to sign, and then we would have to find a notary.

When he came in to ready for his appointment, he wondered if they would let us in the building one at a time. Could he finish his paperwork and then have me go up and sign what I needed to sign, so we wouldn't have to seek out a notary?

He suggested I go with him to find out. "Get out of the house for a while, anyway," he said. I put on a little eye shadow and mascara - since I would be wearing a mask I saw no need to do more - and we hopped in the car.

We made a stop prior to going into the city that I will save for another post. Then we went to the municipal building. He donned his mask and went inside.

I sat. And sat. I hit the electric button to turn on the air but it doesn't get cold without the engine on, and you can't turn the engine on without hitting the brake pedal in my car and I was on the passenger side, so I rolled down the window.

The city was quiet, but a few people walked by. Not a one moved away from the car. When I realized they were going to pass close to me, I rolled up the window, or else grabbed my mask and donned it as they went by.

One woman called me a "fucking bitch" as she walked past me, I guess because she saw me putting the window up. She passed within a foot of me. What else was I supposed to do?

I amused myself for a time watching two young teenagers using their skateboard on the circuit courthouse steps. They were filming each other as they took long jumps off the steps onto the sidewalk.  I kept waiting for one of them to fall and break a leg, but neither missed badly enough for that. Finally, an adult told them to stop and they vanished.

My husband appeared along with someone from the finance office. She notarized my paperwork by the car. And just like that, my old fella was officially retired from the fire department.

There should have at least been a fire truck to send him off, but these are strange times.

Then we went to Sam's Club. My husband left me in the car again as he donned his mask and trekked inside. He bought some of what we needed, although apparently there is not a piece of paper (towels, tissue, or toilet paper) left anywhere in the valley. We are not yet in dire need of toilet tissue but an extra four-pack would have been nice. Oh well.

I watched folks go in and out of the store. I noticed a strong lack of children, which was probably good. It felt a bit like playing Skyrim, which is a video game that has a lot of AI presence but only a few children in it. Many people wore masks, but many did not. I thought more women then men wore masks. Perhaps it is not manly to wear a mask, although my manly man doesn't mind it a bit as he values his life more than his pride.

Once my husband returned to the car and unloaded his purchases, we set off again. This next stop involved me. We went to Food Lion. I had his mother's grocery list and he had ours. We both donned masks and gloves, and went into the maw of the zombie den.

And it truly was like being in a zombie video game. Some people had on masks, others didn't. People were rude, simply shoving carts out of their way. They did not hesitate to step close to you and few gave you distance. I don't know how many times I moved to get away from people. Lots, judging by the steps on my Fitbit.

The entire place seethed with anger, fear, and frustration. It was so strong, you could smell it and I certainly felt it. People looked beaten and mad. The only thing missing from my zombie video game was a noise in the background going, "I want brains. Must have brains."

I felt terror being in there, shopping amongst my neighbors. I think the last time I felt that so strongly was after 9/11. People were terrified and angry then, too.

Food Lion had no paper products and no cleaning products, both of which were on my mother-in-law's list. I decided I would give her my emergency toilet paper package and an extra can of Lysol I had, even though it was not the scent she wanted. I finished gathering her items and then helped my husband with our list.

It was a madhouse even trying to leave. No one left you space at the cash registers. I felt hemmed in by people who should have been far away from me. I was grateful I had on a very good mask even if it was fogging my glasses and giving me a bit of claustrophobia. I wouldn't dare go into a grocery store without a mask after seeing that craziness in there yesterday.

My friend in England tells me her stores have set up one-way routes up and down the aisles, with tape on the floor so people know where to stay six feet back, and they are doing exactly that. God forbid we be that civilized here. No, we have to shove carts out of the way and reach over top of people for fear that we won't get the last remaining item on the shelf even though there are plenty of them there (except for the paper items and there wasn't even any use going down that aisle).

We came home and unloaded our groceries first - my husband didn't want his ice cream to melt - and I handed him my toilet paper and the Lysol to take to his mother. Then, while he went to his mother's to unload her groceries, I wiped our purchases down and put them away. It was a relief to return to the relative quiet of my little hobbit house.

At least here I feel calm and sane.

Out there, in the world, lies madness.

Brains, indeed.

Pandemic Journal - Day 37

We have two cows down, one who lost a calf (stillborn), and another that hurt her foot. We must watch the mamma cow for mastitis. She and other are in the barn lot where we can keep a close check on them.

The turkeys have been strutting a lot in the fields. Mating time.

My husband continues to move forward with his retirement. He signs the final paperwork today. Hopefully it will all work out, but in these days of unknowns, well - who knows?

Spring has come and is quickly heading towards summer. The trees are greening up with amazing speed. They are almost nearly leafed out, bedecked in green finery that will last for a while.

A few cold nights slowed the grass growth a bit. A little frost won't hurt it, though I do worry about the fruit tree growers nearby. Perhaps it didn't hurt them if the cold was nearer to the ground.

We have all we need so far. We are staying away from people as much as possible, aside from grocery shopping. We've cut that back to about every 7 to 10 days. If the stores are out of things we normally eat, we either substitute or do without.

My niece wrecked her vehicle over the weekend. I haven't spoken to her and only learned of it this morning from my brother. He said she is fine though the vehicle did not fair so well.

I still watch Melissa Etheridge in concert every night. We have also added Tommy Emmanuel's concerts on Friday night to our watch list. My guitar doesn't have all the notes those two can play!

The numbers have stayed steady in our county so far as the Covid-45 continues to keep things shut down and the economy in flux. However, the nearby city is rising, creeping upward, and that is worrisome. We're not that far away and sometimes you have to go into the city for things you need.

All in all, so far so good.

Thumbs up!

Pandemic Tuesday - Day 31

Sunday night, I couldn't stand it any longer. I grabbed the pair of small shears out of my husband's hair-trimming kit, stood naked in the shower, pulled the mirror to me, and hacked away at my hair.

Normally I wear a shag style. Now it's more like a mullet that stands out straight on one side. It's shorter, anyway, and what's done is done.

I took about 2" of hair off of my head. I picked up what hair I could and shoved it into a bag; my husband filed in with the battery-powered vacuum and took care of the rest. I showered and blew my grey locks dry. I knew the cut would be bad - a previous effort to trim my bangs had not gone well. It's all I can do to manage a curling iron.

My hair had been 4 days overdue for a cut when the pandemic shut-ins began. My previous cut had been a tad short, so I was letting it grow out a bit for just a trim - a trim that probably won't happen for at least another month, if not two. Or three.

Who knows?

Hair is something that will grow back, so whatever damage I've done will one day be remedied. In the meantime, I can wear a hat.

Honestly, it is not like I'm going out anyway. I've left the house four times since March 13, and during all of those outings, I stayed in the car. My husband is insistent that I not leave the safety of the vehicle.

Since I last wrote, I ventured out to ride with the husband to drop items into a FedEx drop box, pick up medication at the drive thru-pharmacy, and to purchase lunch from Bellacino's at the curbside pickup. We ate with his mother. We try to do that occasionally so she doesn't die of boredom up there alone in the house. At least he and I have each other to fight with.

He is here all the time now since he has retired. Well, he is off farming and putting in septic tanks at times, but after 37 years of getting up at 5 a.m., he has discovered he likes to sleep late. He likes to fix breakfast. I let him. My routine is in flux. I can't expect anything to become regular, though, until the virus issues lessen.

I've picked up work editing a manuscript, so that has been fortunate. It helps the afternoons go by more quickly. From 2 p.m. onward, I struggle. I start roaming the house. My restlessness seems endless and ongoing. I fight not to eat (another) candy bar. My husband has lost weight in the months he has been home because I do not fix the major meals he had at the fire station. I haven't lost a pound. I am still eating just as I always have, if not more. My exercise routine is nonexistent, not because of lethargy but because of a bad case of heel spur/plantar fasciitis in my left foot. It is all I can do to walk to the kitchen, must less contemplate a 30-minute bout on the treadmill.

Audiobooks are my friends. So is music. My one bright spot of the day for the last two weeks has been the live 3-4 song concerts Melissa Etheridge is putting on for her fans. Every single day on Facebook at 6 p.m., there she is, playing favorites and telling us all to drink lots of water, take a walk, and spread the love. She is a damn good guitar player and my eyes are glued to her fingers while she plays. Her songs are full of difficult chords; I want to see how she does it.



Me jamming with Melissa Etheridge. This is after my haircut. Can you tell where I scalped myself?

I call my brother frequently. He is running an essential business; he makes frequent trips to the store. He brought me Easter candy to give to my husband. I fret over his being out in public so much and worry that he isn't taking precautions. I have been dreaming about him regularly, and this concerns me. In our family, we're a little fey. Dreams are not taken lightly. Fortunately, they are not bad dreams, but I do not dream about him as a rule. So every morning after I dream of him, I call and ask him if he is ok. He knows it is because I dreamt of him. I don't even have to tell him. I don't know if he is amused or irritated by my concern.

Other family members I've not heard from in years have called. My first cousin in Texas, Matthew, called and talked for a long time (the first time in about three years I'd heard from him), then sent me pictures of his daughter and his new truck. The next night I texted him and told him guitar legend Tommy Emmanuel was performing live on Facebook. I found it funny because he'd told me in our phone conversation that he didn't waste his time on things like Facebook and Instagram. His wife, though, has a Facebook account and the next thing I knew we were texting about guitar licks as we both watched the man play.

My husband's cousin, whom I've met about three times, lives in California, and she called Friday and talked for well over an hour. I kept suggesting she call my mother-in-law, who is her aunt, but I don't know if she did.

When I was a reporter, I learned that the secret of good conversation is to talk little, listen a lot. People like to hear themselves speak. They like to be acknowledged. No one wants to be alone all the time, not really. Not even someone like me, an introvert in the extreme. I like to let the long pauses grow longer still during conversations. That is when someone will pop out with the most unlikeliest of sentences.

Sunday night, we had 3" of rain. It flooded to the south. Monday morning, I opened the patio door and listened to a symphony of birds as they sang their hearts out after the long night of heavy rain.

The wind picked up and blew the grass dry in between rain showers as the day progressed.

Last night, I stepped out on the patio to breathe in the fresh, clean air. The wind had died down, and in the ensuing silence, I heard an unmistakable noise.

It was the background chatter of the 17-year locust.

Pandemic Monday - Day 23

No reason to write a daily update of our lives as we live at home, doing  . . . whatever it is we're doing. Things are happening and changes are occurring, but at the moment I'm not free to write of them.

Stay tuned.

What I can write about is a little weekly diary of how I am feeling about this pandemic, and how we're managing. As a long-time married couple with no children, we mostly have only ourselves to rely upon. Fortunately, we do have family close by - I have a brother who has called frequently, bless his heart, and my father and I have talked some, and my husband has checked on neighbors and his mother. We're not exactly sequestered in silence up here on our little knoll.

That doesn't mean I don't want to get out of the house. My outings previously were limited mostly to trips to the grocery store, the chiropractor, and Walmart, but at least I got out. Now, I go nowhere except on short drives "around the block" which here is an hour's ride because we don't have blocks but eventually you loop back to where you started.

My husband insists on doing the grocery shopping. Because I tend to catch everything, he doesn't want me out of the house.

When things come in the house, they either sit in the sun or are sprayed with Lysol or wiped down with a Clorox wipe. He takes a shower every time he leaves our property and comes back. I stay six feet away from him until he's clean. I wear gloves to handle food until it's all been washed and put away.

I freeze grapes. I used to not do that, they'd go bad faster than I could eat them, but now I am immediately taking half of them and putting them in the freezer. I also froze a half-gallon of milk so I would have milk here if I needed it for recipes. I put two cups each into smaller containers and froze those. I mean, you never know when you may need two cups of milk.

Spring is bursting out all over the place. The grass is green and the cows no longer need to be fed - they ignore the hay in favor of the new grass. The blackberry brambles have leaves. The oak trees have growths of green. The redbuds have been beautiful this year. The dogwoods are starting to bloom.

The deer and turkey have been roaming around the house, unfazed by our continued presence. Sometimes it seems like we're the ones in the zoo and they're the ones looking in.

Around 4 a.m. this morning I woke to a bright shining Strawberry moon, not quite full, as it sent moonbeams sliding into my window. A cloud soon covered it and I went back to sleep.

I tire easily these days. I don't know if it is the atmosphere, the constant drumbeat of "something is wrong," or simply my age, but I feel worn out by the time afternoon reaches its zenith. I don't nap, though, because I don't sleep at night if I sleep in the day.

That constant hum of "all is not well" has become a monotonous drone in the background, rather like the chatter of locust in summer when they come out, or maybe it's like tinnitus, which I have and which frequently sounds like a high-pitched squeal. But now there's a low frequency background,  one not of my own making, resounding in my heart. Drums beating out an unspeakable message: stay home, stay home, stay home.

As an introvert, staying home is not awful. I like to be at home. What's got me bumfuzzled is my changing routine. I had a routine and then my husband had his ankle surgery. That changed my routine significantly. Now he is up and about, and my routine is not yet back into something recognizable. Because now I have to spend much time wiping down doorknobs and wiping off the groceries and worrying over him if I know he is out beyond the boundaries of our farm. I do more laundry. That constant hum of "all is not well" overlays everything, and I can't think clearly, and my focus is that of a butterfly, flitting from flower to flower and never quite landing safely.

So this is the Pandemic Monday notation. It's a partly cloudy day, though we've had a sprinkle of rain. And my routine will once again be interrupted today, because I'm off to watch my governor update us on the latest number of deaths and positive cases, and see what else the officials advise.

Be well, be safe, stay healthy, stay inside, dear reader. Take care of yourselves as best you can.

Pandemic 2020 - Day 18

It was a Friday the 13th when the United States stood still - and the toilet paper disappeared.

That day in March of 2020, the public realized that we aren't immune to things that affect the rest of the world, and the race to the grocery stores left everyone stunned and frightened.

Essential supplies vanished overnight.

Here at the ol' farm, I'd been stocking up a little bit at a time for about two months, picking up an extra can of soup and such here and there. We have always had plenty of toilet paper, a habit I apparently inherited from my grandmother. It's a staple we have always purchased in bulk and in multiples of that.

What I miss the most is the fresh food - and getting out of the house once a week or so for a tour around the grocery aisles. I have not been in a store since the 13th, as I have asthma and my husband believes that he has a stronger immune system than I do, even though he is older.

I've had a few Sunday drives with him, but mostly I've stayed home. It rained most of March, so the weather was dour and glum. This did nothing to help the situation. On warmer days I tried to get outside a little, wearing a dust mask because I am allergic to everything and the pollen has been high. I also was sick for two weeks with something - not Covid-19 - I had a little sore throat and laryngitis but ran no fever. It is another reason for my husband's insistence I stay home, though.

My hair is growing by leaps and bounds, and a week ago I took the scissors to my bangs. Unfortunately, I wear progressive lenses, and I can't see a thing without them, but I can't cut my hair with my specs on. The cut was too high and crooked, but the hair is out of my eyes for the time being. I discovered one needs a very sharp pair of scissors for hair cutting. Mine were incredibly dull. I thought about ordering a pair but apparently so has everyone else, as all but the very expensive hair cutting scissors were out of stock.

Oh well.

I still talk to my friends on the phone, and we text and email. Aside from my trips to the chiropractor and the grocery store, little has changed except for this general uneasiness that has gripped me. I've had vivid dreams and nightmares, and I've noticed it is difficult to concentrate. As much as I'd like to start a new project, I'm not sure now is the time to do it.

We did have one issue come up this weekend - the mattress on the bed has developed a failure on one side. The mattress is still under warranty but it will be some time before we can attend to this matter. For one thing, I don't want strange people in my home right now and for another I don't think any of the mattress stores are open.

Today, Governor Ralph Northam initiated executive order no. 55, which tells us to shelter-in-place. We are only to leave our homes for food, medicine, and fresh air/exercise.

That's a rather clinical assessment of the last 18 days, I think. Perhaps I will get more into the emotional toll at another time.

For now, I simply wanted to make a note of this strange and unprecedented time in my blog.

Be well, dear reader, and may the universe look after you.