View from the Hermitage, Day 389

I'm probably making today a quickie post today so as to finish something I've been putting off for over five years. Five (or more) years ago, we bought a scanner that will digitize the slides I took in a past life. Since I've been going through camera equipment, I figured this would fit right in. It somehow never occurred to me that I would have to do this one slide at a time. No conveyor belt sending them through one right after another. I'm about a third of the way through the first tray of 300, which covers the 1990 part of our academic year in the Netherlands. To complicate matters, it seems that I only wrote down on the guide sheet where the first 150 were taken. I can probably identify the rest, though, and always have The Professor if he remembers where some shot was taken. 

And what a walk down memory lane! Son #1 was going through the not-so-terrible twos, and The Professor was the young man I had met in a laundromat five or six years before. Son #2 was in utero for the first set of places and a babe in arms in the others. I have yet to see myself in any of the slides given that I was the family photographer as the kids grew up. I should show up in some eventually. Somewhere around here is a box labelled "slide projector." Besides a projector, that box contains the slides I took while doing study abroad in Spain and some general travel throughout Europe in the summer of 1975. I saw said box in the basement a few weeks ago; it is possible that The Professor moved it out to the garage in his quest for organization. When we find those slides, I'll be going even farther down Memory Lane.

Quickies from the coronavirus's international front: There is an outbreak in Bangkok that may take two months to control. That can't be good for tourism. India has set a new daily case record of 126,789 cases. Possibly related to this, New Zealand has for two weeks suspended entry for all travelers from India including citizens of New Zealand. Due north of here, the province of Ontario is entering a one-month lockdown; new cases tripled throughout March. ICU admissions have increased at a rate faster that the province's worst-case scenario modelling. The French Open tennis tournament will be held a week later than planned in response to the coronavirus situation. Personally, I'm not sure a week will be long enough.

Here at home, the British variant is now the dominant strain of coronavirus here and is one reason that case numbers are rising. Between March 30 and April 6, cases in Nebraska increased in the 50 to 100 percent range. Increases between 10 and 50 percent were recorded in Washington, Oregon, Montana, Minnesota, Michigan, Maine, Rhode Island, Illinois, Colorado, Arizona, Hawaii, and Delaware. The only states showing decreases between 10 and 50 percent were Wyoming, South Dakota, Kansas, Missouri, Texas, Arkansas, Alaska, North Carolina, Connecticut, and the District of Columbia. All the other states, including Virginia, are holding steady between decreasing 10 percent and increasing at the same rate.

Cases in children have been rising due to re-starting many youth sports such as soccer. One article mentioned parents who said that their child's emotional well-being depended on whether they could do organized youth sports. I guess kids don't just go to the park and kick balls around or shag fly balls any longer. While that would also allow virus particles to spread between kids, there would be fewer kids there than there are in an organized soccer game. My kids did t-ball for a year or two then no longer wanted to. They were never interested in soccer. Both did play ultimate Frisbee while in high school, but that was about the extent of their organized sports experience. Now, of course, they both run ultra-marathons, definitely not a team sport. 

As might be expected, the pinata business has been hurt by the coronavirus. No parties means no real need for pinatas. There is, however, one pinata in particular that has been very popular. That would be the pinata shaped like a spiky coronavirus particle. I could almost see ordering one of those for a party marking the official end of the pandemic. 

Back to those slides!

The View from the Hermitage, Day 200

Day 200 sounds like a good reason to open the second bottle of champagne tonight. I didn't do anything special to mark Day 100, but I might have if I had had an extra bottle of champagne then. Maybe I'll get party horns for Day 300 and add streamers for the one-year mark. On an interesting side note, I have been copying all the posts and comments into a stand-alone Word file. Through Tuesday, Day 198, the length of that document stood at 199 pages.

Facebook offers me memories the first time I log on in a day. The last couple have been from 10 years ago. The first one mentioned that my dad was improving and I was looking forward to the Fall Fiber Festival coming on the weekend. The other one mentioned that I would be at the festival for two days then heading to Florida to visit my father. He had been admitted to the hospital following a routine visit with his primary care physician. Dad was a survivor of prostate cancer and was battling multiple myeloma. He had been improving, but on the night before festival setup, I got an email from my stepmother saying that I should come sooner. After coordinating with my brother in Maine, I did festival setup on Friday, worked on Saturday when the booth owner could not be there, then took the o-dark-thirty flight to Orlando Sunday morning. 

Midweek, Dad's condition was not improving, and he moved from the ICU into a hospice facility. Given the flexible nature of my job, I was able to just skip the flight home I had booked and stay on as long as I wanted. Dad passed the middle of the following week. Those last days were very special. I had taken with me my Macbook which held pretty much my entire music library. Fortunately, my library included a number of Frank Sinatra CDs, and Frank was one of Dad's all-time favorite artists. We would sit, saying nothing, but listening to Sinatra. I will admit that I still have trouble listening to Sinatra because of the memories certain songs bring up.

I think I may have said it before here, but I am actually glad that my dad passed before the days of HWSNBN began. He had always voted Republican but in 2008 seemed to veer even more to the right. He sent me a photo of himself (they weren't called selfies then, were they?), smiling, with the yard sign he had re-done to list Palin at the top of the ticket and McCain as her running mate. I don't know how much communication he and I would have had in the last five years, starting with HWSNBN's 2015 announcement that he was running. And somewhere along the way, Dad re-invented his life story to include a PhD in organic chemistry as opposed to the EdD in science or biology education he really had. I'm sure he had his reasons; I just can't imagine what they were.

The debate fallout continues. Will there even be more presidential debates? I have not heard any chatter about canceling next week's vice presidential debate. I certainly hope that Pence and Harris stick to whatever rules are announced for their debate. I actually just read that HWSNBN does not want the rules of the debates changed since he so handily won the first one. I so do not like the direction in which we are headed.

Something like 28 states are seeing covid-19 rates increase. We will not be out of the woods for some time. New case numbers in Virginia seem to vary a lot from day to day. We were down to 450 new cases yesterday, the lowest since early July. University numbers also fluctuate quite a bit. One never knows at what point they insert the athlete cases into the overall ones. It does not seem to be the same time at which they announce them.

The husband, older son, and I all had flu shots this morning. It was my first time out around general other people in about 200 days. I wore two masks and gloves and touched nothing anyway, so here's hoping I dodged any viral particles floating in the air at CVS. I am not that optimistic about what the intersection of covid-19 and influenza might hold. And if someone tests positive for flu, will they also test them for covid-19? Or will there have to be a specific covid-19 symptom since as loss of smell and/or taste? I think it's been about 34 years since I last had influenza, but I remember it well. I do not think I have ever felt so generally miserable. I do not want to go through it again, even with no complications. 

Time to start thinking about when to pop the cork. I will raise a glass in honor of all who happen to read any of this. I do enjoy the comments, finding them thought-provoking and enlightening. There is a lot that differs between places and people, and also a lot that is the same. I'm learning a lot from this whole daily blogging process.

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.

The View from the Hermitage, Day 76

Several years ago, one of the local camera stores had a special in which you took them 150 photographs, and they would digitize them and return a CD of all the images. I took advantage of it but never really did anything with the CD. Since all my time now is supposedly free, I asked the husband to transfer the images from the CD to a thumb drive (I was too lazy to look for the portable CD/DVD device). Given the the file names were all of the form "some 17 or 19 numbers strung together with a .00# suffix," I decided to rename them after the person(s) shown. Older son and younger son can find the photos containing themselves, with the photos containing both of them named BOTH00#. I started an Excel spreadsheet with the name of the image and a brief description. This was going swimmingly until I slipped up and sorted the file names without having them linked to the relevant description. Did I do this and remain able to undo the sort? No, because I actually sorted the file that way a couple of times. Checking each image and giving it the proper description took a while and did not make me happy. It took until late afternoon to finish all 150 images.

Why am I mentioning all this? Because, as you might imagine, going through the images brought back a wealth of memories, virtually all of them good memories. Many of the shots were from family vacations, and seeing those brought back a flood of memories of that year or that place or whatever we were doing at the time. Events such as the husband and sons trying to (and succeeding in) robbing a Pepsi machine that had somehow caught and sucked in the hackeysack they'd been kicking back and forth. I think I had four of five different shots of that escapade. Not to mention the image of the fly younger son decapitated using a cheap souvenir shop "mosquito trap" that looked like a leg-hold trap. Younger son had me set it with a piece of orange when we went to bed. The next morning, the family awoke to my "Holy shit!" upon seeing the dead fly with its head off to one side.

Continuing with memories, I've been skiing to nowhere daily to DirecTV's music from the '70s feed. The second song I heard this morning was "Seasons in the Sun," a song that always has at least a minor emotional effect on me. The second line is "We've known each other since we were nine or ten." This morning, I found myself thinking that I can't say that about anyone. We moved across the continent after I'd completed Grade 5 (I was ten) and two years later moved one state over, which is where I went to high school followed by the local college. Did I retain any high school friends? I did not, though I have reconnected with some via Facebook. Friends from college? One, who was a bridesmaid in my wedding, but others only through Facebook. Because I've stayed in the city in which I went to graduate school, I've retained friends who were not fellow students. I do see one fellow student who also stayed here but only when she comes to vote at the precinct for which I am an election official. Considering all that, I may be more anti-social than I thought, not to have formed any real lasting friendships with peers.

Songs of the '70s, a time in which I was in high school (I'm high school class of 1973), college (class of 1976), and grad school (master's degree in 1980). As each song starts, I try to place it in its proper period. (Note: It may be notable how many songs come up that I do not recognize or are by musical artists or groups I do not recall at all.) To what event or person do I associate each song? Was it on my spring break trip to Florida? The year between college and grad school in which I worked at Vanderbilt University? Memories, some embarrassing, flood back.

I do not really listen to contemporary music now. I'm usually on an oldies-type channel or listening to an artist from a past life or a playlist based on some time in the past. Will there be music by which I will remember the pandemic of 2020 or the burning of Minneapolis? There is not a song I currently connect to the pandemic, but there is a song for Minneapolis. With every report--and there are far too many--of a black person being shot by a police person, I think of Bruce Springsteen's "American Skin (41 Shots)." I always wonder while hearing that song how differently I would have had to have raised by sons had they not been of the ethnicity in power. My heart skips a beat whenever I hear Lena getting her son ready for school.

I may not have a song to pandemic by, but how will I remember these days in the Hermitage. One reason to keep this blog is to be able, if I want to, to see some of what I was thinking as the pandemic wears on. I get frustrated seeing the number of cases in a state head straight up starting two weeks after mitigation measures are loosened or done away with. Re-imposing mitigation measures such as stay-at-home orders will be harder than imposing them initially. I expect the resistance to re-imposing them will be greater than the initial resistance. I wonder in how many cities the frustration at pandemic restrictions is fueling part of the demonstrations, and how large that part might be. Thoughts for another day when I might be more focused on the present than the past.