The View from the Hermitage, Day 125

Number play ... today is Day Five to the Third. The next perfect cube is Six to the Third, aka 216. What are the odds I'll still be doing this then? That's lots of catchy post openings and closings to engineer.

I can skip detailed discussion of the latest covid-19 counts of cases or deaths, locally or nationally, and simply repeat that we're fucked. I just read of mask-less parents with no social distance between them, shutting down a board meeting in Utah called to discuss requiring that students wear masks. The state of Illinois is suing a couple of schools, at least one of which is a "Christian Academy," that are saying masks will not be required. Their explanation? "We're not anti-mask. We're pro-choice." Can we pull out part of that and say that they actually support a woman's right to choose when it comes to pregnancy?

I am getting a wee bit tired of reading "if only" analyses or op-ed pieces relevant to the pandemic.I am afraid that by the time the next pandemic rolls around--and I'm betting it's less time than the 100 years between pandemics that we had this time--will we even recall all the "if onlys"? Can we wrap all the "if onlys" into a user's manual of how to handle a pandemic? Oh wait, didn't we have a group that was going to act like a user's manual to handling a pandemic? Didn't someone decide we really didn't need it? Wouldn't it be nice if we'd kept that user's manual up-to-date?


The floor guy came this morning to pick up the keys and get contact info for older son who will be our pipeline to the outside world. We talked things over, ten feet apart, all masked. He said the reality of the pandemic was driven home to him when one of the local hospitals called him to ask if he had some N95 masks he could sell them. You know something is up when a hospital calls a small, local, floor-refinishing company for needed equipment. He said that now, after four-plus months, the masks he can find to buy for his company cost five or six times as much as they used to and are not the same quality.

Life is getting real when it comes to the floor refinishing.  The family dog is a bit nervous but is coping well. She's not really letting me out of her sight, though. That's understandable given that the ASPCA thinks she was dumped. The last time she saw a house being packed up she might have been shoved out of a car that drove away. The family cat is hiding. I can't say I blame either of them. I mean, it does look a bit strange.

That pretty darned empty space is what passes for our living room. (Like the "accent wall"? My blog post on whether I should get an accent wall has been read by almost 800 people though I can't tell you why or how they found it.) Once I publish this post, I will take up the carpet tiles shown. The husband and older son will empty out the rest of the furniture tomorrow morning.

I recognize that this will give me the opportunity to "stage" my house, something I would otherwise never do. We started this whole process six months ago; it may take longer to put everything back in place, in a different place, in a thrift store, etc. As things have emptied out little by little, I have come to like how the space looks with less stuff in it. I intend to be judicious in what I put back where and how I plan to use it.

Tomorrow at this time, I will either be on my way off the grid or already there. I have gone on international trips before on which I heard little news of what was going on at home, "home" then being the United States. Now, I am going a mere 90 minutes driving time away, but will get only what news highlights I can get in the nightly check-in call with older son. Will the world I return to even resemble the world I am leaving? I think of The Twilight Zone or Outer Limits, with episodes in which a character (usually just one person because someone has to be on their own with no help possible), comes out from somewhere (a night's sleep, time away at a cabin in the woods) and finds the world totally changed. All the people are gone; the streets and buildings are empty. I know nothing like that will happen here; still, I have a younger son who would comment to that last thought something like "nothing will have happened yet."

Since I probably won't post anything before we head out tomorrow, I'll "see" everyone on the flip side. I don't want the world to have changed to that extreme degree in the time we're gone.