The View from the Hermitage, Day 224

Thirty-two weeks, and the livin' ain't easy? I don't think that's the case. We're at least getting by when it comes to some things, while others are easy. All I have to do is set my standards appropriately, and what comes after it what it is. 

My mom went from being one of three covid-positive residents at her facility to being one of 14. I told her I was sorry that she got demoted. One of three is clearly superior to being one of 14. She took the news well. I looped her Primary Care Physician in yesterday. He called her and they discussed options should she develop symptoms. I'm still comfortable with the care she's getting. They're doing another round of testing on Wednesday. If she then tests negative, the first result may have been a false positive. It could also be that the second result is a false negative. Either way, I expect they'll keep her in strict quarantine for the full 14 days from the first test.

I have to make another correction to something I said recently. I believe I said that the upcoming election would be the first one I'd missed since I started being an official in 2004. Nope! I skipped the June 2020 primary election for the same reason I'm sitting this one out, to protect against possible exposure to the novel coronavirus.

I mentioned yesterday having photos for the post. I've started carrying my iPhone to listen to music. That also gives me a handy camera should I see something meriting more attention, things such as this 

on the end of a branch on a small pine tree. If I look at it right, it turns into a strange creature possibly up to no good. Yesterday was foggy but strangely. Normally, it's foggiest in the low part of my walk where I go down one hill and up another. I took the shot below after coming out of that swale. There was more visibility lower down.

The fog is nice when walking in this direction. Otherwise the sun can be quite bright in my eyes. Before my previous eye doctor retired, she told me that my light-colored retinas likely mean cataract surgery earlier than normal, with one way to delay it being wearing sunglasses or a hat with a visor to keep the sun out of my eyes.

A few posts ago, I commented about never taking the annual first-day-of-school photos and other such traditional favorites. There is one shot I really wish I had started and continued taking. 

This shot doesn't  really show the base of the tree in the center, but it's growing out of what was once a pile of manure. The developer of our subdivision dumped it there in the spring of 1987, when I was pregnant with Son #1. I did not really have morning sickness as much as I had early evening sickness, but those aside, stepping out onto our porch and smelling the manure made me want to hurl. The developer never used the manure for anything, and eventually plants started growing out of it. The trunk of the tree is a fairly impressive size. I should try to remember to get a shot in December or January when the vegetation about it is gone. I wish that each year on Son #1's birthday, I'd taken a photo showing his growth and the tree's, side by side. 

I shall shortly go upstairs to inquire of The Professor just when he would like to dine this evening and whether he might be interested in watching Lesley Stahl's interview with The Orange Foolius on 60 Minutes. He probably will not, but I'm not going to assume that without asking. He'll probably prefer an old episode of Law and Order, but we'll see.

Uncle Joe is apparently hitting at The Foolius's handling of the pandemic in his stump speeches. I find it hard to understand how people can let him just dismiss it. Science may never recover if it has to fight The Foolius and friends for four more years. The Foolius keeps saying, incorrectly so far, that the virus in going away, will miraculously disappear, and so on. He at least acknowledges that it is real. I cannot understand the virus deniers who refuse to recognize its existence, nor can I understand the conspiracy theorists who see it as having been intentionally created and launched. If you know even a bit about science and/or medicine and a bit about history, you should have known another pandemic would eventually occur. You might have not predicted this one specifically, but you had to know one was coming. And, yes, there will be another one after this one, but hopefully not for another century or longer.

Tomorrow we start into the final week of the campaign. Fingers crossed that there are no final October surprises.

The View from the Hermitage, Day 196

We aren't far from 200 days. The husband and I have finished one of the two bottles of champagne I was given on Friday. I told him we should open the other on the 200th day of this pandemic recounting. I don't know why I initially thought the pandemic would be over quickly. I certainly never foresaw it lasting the 28 weeks it already has. The joke is on me, I guess.

Older son took down some more boxes from the mountain of boxes in younger son's room. Several contained books on knitting, crocheting, or felting. I'm putting them on lower shelves below where I will be putting my yarn stash. I need to put something, anything, on lower shelves to deny the family cat access to my wool. One of the boxes had some notebooks I sort of remembered but hadn't looked at in two or even three decades. One was the journal I kept in Spanish for a bus tour of Southern Spain we took the summer I studied in Madrid with a group from another university. I glanced at that long enough to know that it would take me a while to read it since I would have to use context to translate a lot of it. 

Another journal I found was one I kept from August 1989 to July 1990, the year we spent in the Netherlands where I gave birth to younger son. I worked from this journal to craft weekly letters that got printed, copied, and mailed to family members and close friends back here. I kept a copy of each of those as well. Talk about a cascade of memories. It appears I was quite honest in those letters about the feelings of isolation, only having the husband for adult conversation and older son for not-so-adult conversation. He had been in day care when I was working, so that year was the first time I'd been with him 24-7. I had forgotten just how interesting he was at the age of two. It was especially interesting to read the last entry/letter, a summation of the year. Among other things, I noted the number of nights we had at least one guest in the house and, being a data nerd, the number of guest-nights reflecting that we had, at least once, three visitors staying with us the same night.

It was interesting to read my writing as something of an impartial reader. I have been told, typically in business settings, that I write well, and I usually just dismiss those compliments. They make me uncomfortable, especially while writing the next thing I write. Expectations can weigh heavily on one's shoulders. Reading that last journal entry and some of the others, I can see why people have told me that. I would tell the person whose writing I was reading that she writes well.  

Continuing in the forgotten writing vein, I also found a notebook that contained assorted poems I wrote in the 1970s as well as various essays I wrote for freshman English in the fall of 1973. I did not read the essays, but I did read the poems. I was surprised that I wrote some of them. They sounded, well, not too bad. Needless to say, many had been inspired by people or events in my late high school and early college years. Another rush of memories. I will have to spend some quality time reading more of all this found writing and get reacquainted with my younger self. 

The park was foggy this morning and seemed to get foggier as our walk there lengthened. Here's a shot on the arrival side of the visit, at the start of what turned out to be a three-mile walk.

And here's one on the other side, on the way back to the car.

Driving home post-walk, it suddenly cleared. By the time we got home, the sun was out. Mother Nature likes to keep us guessing.

And so I have successfully avoided discussion of the broader world. It was a good day, and not watching the nightly news might keep it that way. We shall see.