The View from the Hermitage, Day 64

I just watched the governor's Monday presser. Next week, Monday-Wednesday-Friday becomes Tuesday-Thursday. I guess there won't be as much to report after that. The beaches at Virginia Beach and its neighbor to the north, First Landing State Park, will open as of Friday for certain activities including swimming and sun-bathing. Tents, groups of umbrellas, and other "structures" that might contain people at a less than social distance are not allowed. Beach parking lots can only take 50 percent of their capacity. There was no mention of the crowds that were out on the Virginia Beach beaches this past weekend; the media photo suggested that social distance was a theory rather than practice.

The governor also raised the issue of schools reopening come fall, both at the K-12 level and the college-university level. There's a committee or two (it was difficult to tell) to study the issue. Membership(s) include the State Secretary of Education, various division superintendents, and college and university presidents. The local university has said they will make an announcement in mid-June, but that even if they open for on-Grounds (the local university does not have a "campus;" it has "Grounds") all classes will be available online for students unable or unwilling to come in bodily fashion. It will be interesting to see if any explanation of the ultimate decision makes any reference to university athletics. If it is not safe for students to be here in person, it should not be safe for student-athletes, which would mean no football. Given that football and basketball, which also begins in the fall, revenues pretty much fund the whole intercollegiate athletics program, not being able to have them is a pretty big deal. I'm not sure which side I'd place money on right now--open as usual with sports, or online only without sports.

Some states saw an increase in the number of cases between this week and a week ago. Among those were Tennessee, Louisiana, and Michigan, the state in which armed protestors surrounded the state capitol. Texas is allowing offices and gyms to open at 25 percent capacity today after reporting its largest single-day jump in confirmed cases on Saturday. Cases in Georgia actually declined, two weeks out from the reopening there. However, it can take two weeks for symptoms or positive test results to appear, so it will be very interesting to see if the decline holds for another week.

I sent four more scrub caps out in today's mail, for a total of 17. I may or may not make more. My ER nurse friend says not to feel obligated. She also said that when she brings them in they are greeted similar to XBoxes at Walmart on Black Friday. I think I'd move from batiks to my collection of Asian prints for the next set should there be one. I've been working on a cross-stitch project more than 30 years old in the evening while the husband does crossword puzzles. I also want to weave a scarf from some Icelandic wool I have in my yarn stash and get back to some needle-felted ornaments. Finally, there's a quilt top I want to get pinned so that I can start quilting it. So many projects ... so little, oops, so much time.

Also on the ways to spend time list, today I ordered six books to be given to older son once I've read them. Interesting that in two cases the Kindle price was equal to or higher than the paperback price and in another, the Kindle price and the hardback price were the same. Is Amazon under pressure from publishers to try to make "real" books more competitive against e-books? I also exhausted the $500 Amazon gift card I earner in one of the university's health challenges. It was nice while it lasted.