Stayin' Alive

 

It's been six weeks since we started sheltering at home. We've settled into a routine and often we don't know what day it is. Without the boundaries of a schedule, rushing to and from work five days a week, one day bleeds into the next.

Friday we started phase one of the plan to reopen the state. Churches have been given the green light to reopen with social distancing, but most have opted to wait, possibly until June. Businesses that are open are required to have social distancing protocols in place. Some people are wearing masks and some are not. Probably only 25% are wearing masks. Many people think this is overblown. I think it's more difficult for people to take seriously when they don't live in a densely packed urban area where the virus can travel much faster.

As of yesterday, Idaho had 2,061 confirmed cases of Covid-19. Zoe made the observation that we aren't getting the daily notifications that we used to get. As if this is now just the same ol' same ol' part of our existence.

The stores have toilet paper now, but Kleenex is in short supply and hand sanitizer is still very difficult to find. Also, yeast is hard to come by. Stores are limiting meat purchases to one because several meat packing plants have had major outbreaks. I'm worried about those workers and many others.

We are managing. We got out for another hike last week. We barely made it a mile in before we had to turn around because the trail was snowed in. We will definitely be back to hike this trail when the snow melts. All together this is part of a trail that is over a 100 miles long along an old railroad. What we got to see was beautiful.

Baney is really loving the hikes.

The weather has turned and we have had some very nice days. Our pasture is starting to green up, so we have to monitor Pudgy PJ's intake now because he'd eat grass until he tipped over if we let him. Then he'd probably side chew the grass from his reclined position.

We finished widening the driveway and we're pretty happy with the way it turned out.

Peanut Head is happy that he can pull straight out of the garage now.

When the weather is nice Zoe tries to work in riding breaks. PJ needs the exercise too. This picture makes me laugh because I have to ask "Who is the horse here?" She explained that she likes to work them in the round pen first, and she doesn't like them to cool down when she has to walk them back to the hitching post to tack up. She's so considerate.

Hello Spring

We've had a couple very nice spring days recently. Saturday and Sunday were glorious and I was outside the entire weekend. The sunshine really helped my mood.

Idaho currently has 1,802 confirmed cases of Covid-19. We're hanging in there, not increasing exponentially. We're still under a Stay at Home order until May 1st to slow the spread. We are expecting that things will not just go back to normal. We're going to be fighting this virus throughout this year and into the next until we have a vaccine. People are getting anxious and restless. Many people are in trouble financially.

The girls are not enjoying doing school online. It's boring and difficult to focus, and it's definitely not easier. If anything, it's more difficult. They will not be going back for the remainder of this school year. There are whisperings of universities not opening again until 2021.

It's easy to forget there is a pandemic going on when we don't live in town. We tend to be homebodies anyway, so weekends at least, are very normal for us. We're always working, working, working on the farm, and we tend to not drive into town unless we have to. The big difference for us is that we are now working from home.

We got out for our weekly hike, and this time we went to Craters of the Moon. It's closed to traffic, but you can hike four miles in on a paved road to get to the hiking trail Peanut Head picked.

We did.

Some spots were snow covered, but it was mostly passable. Not like last week.

Once we got to the trail, Baney and I said good-bye to our sweet family and hobbled back to the car.

I'm so glad I didn't go all the way with them. My portion of the hike was 8 miles and they went 13 miles. I went to bed at 8 p.m. that day.

Here's my secret to get Baney to look into the camera when I'm trying to get a selfie with him.

Here's another project I started at the "If You Give a Mouse a Cookie Farm." We have wanted to do something about widening our driveway since we moved into this house because our driveway is not as wide as the garage. That means that when Peanut Head pulls in and out of his side of the garage, he has to drive on part of the lawn. The current driveway was the width of the old garage which is now our master bedroom. I think. I'm speculating, but all the clues point to that explanation. Sort of. There are a lot of things about this house that don't make any sense at all.

Peanut Head used the walking tractor to till most of the grass we need to remove, but we had to do the edges by hand. Well, with a shovel.

This picture is looking out of the garage from inside so you can really see how narrow the driveway is compared to the garage.

Peanut Head is going to level those red pavers as the new edge of the driveway, and we will fill the rest in with gravel. At some point we may cover it with asphalt or concrete, but for now we're going to do this because it's cheap and we already have the gravel.

We were also able to work in another planting area and round out the lawn with another mowing strip. I planted a rose bush for now, but I'd like to add some bulbs as well.

It's not finished, but I'm hoping it will be finished by the time I do my next post. That will depend largely on the weather. Stay tuned.

Out With the Old and in with the New OCD Easter Bunny

We've had serious problems with our Easter Bunny in the past. I first documented those problems back in 2009 when the Easter Bunny completely failed to come. Then in 2011 Stinky started to ruin the magic with her skepticism. Finally, in 2012 Zoe learned that I am a Liar, Liar, Pants on Fire.

But now, for 2020, I think we've finally found an Easter Bunny we can rely on.

It's Stinkerbell. Last night she came into my bedroom with the Easter baskets in tow. She proceeded to fill the baskets with grass and then she went to my super secret hiding spot in my closet and pulled out all the Easter goodies. Too many of them. Peanut Head goes a little overboard when he buys candy. 😉

I didn't stop her because why? I'm always frantically putting the baskets together last minute anyway, and she looked like she wanted this thing to go off without a hitch. So okay, knock yourself out, Sister.

"I'm not going to put the jelly beans in the grass like you always do, Mom. That's gross."

Really? That's the way the Easter Bunny has always done it, but whatever, this is her gig now.

I sort of love the way that she put the jelly beans in their own baggies. 💕

So today is Easter. It's not a normal Easter, obviously, but it's by no means a bad Easter. We aren't having our usual friends over because of the Shelter in Place, but it's okay. We're together and that's what matters. I have a ham in the oven, and we're just keeping it low key.

We've been sheltered in place for three weeks now, going out only for supplies. Idaho had 1,407 confirmed cases of Covid-19 as of the end of the day yesterday.

We went to Sam's Club yesterday to pick up goat cheese. Stinkerbell is turning 17 this week and she requested a cheesecake for her birthday instead of the usual chocolate cake. I have an awesome recipe for cheesecake with a lemon shortbread crust using goat cheese as well as the usual cream cheese. It might sound weird, but it is AMAZING.

So we grabbed the goat cheese at Sam's Club and we were walking away when we saw this gigondo bottle of hand sanitizer, locked down with a cable to the sink unit. That's how bad the crazies have gotten I guess.

Yesterday I read an article in the CNN Business section titled "Walmart CEO says we're in the 'hair color" phase of panic buying." No lie. I have been seeing and hearing a lot of commercials for hair color, and it's about that time when people are starting to need their grooming appointments.

I can already see it in the Zoom work meetings. We're all devolving from perfectly presentable people into Muppets. Men are growing facial hair and people are willingly exposing their poor fashion choices. We're all covered in dog hair and we don't care. Not only will 2020 be remembed for the Great Toilet Paper Shortage, but also the No Dress Code Enforced period. I'm still wearing jeans everyday, but I feel like I could be on a slippery slope. Like, I don't even have enough sweatpants to properly capitalize on this opportunity.

I know that some of the online meeting platforms have a feature where you can blur out the background, but we need one that will blur us out and bring the background sharply into focus. Can the IT guys get on that?

In other news, Spring has moodily arrived. We had a few really nice days this week and I accidentally took a few longer than normal lunches. This was my hibernating strawberry patch.

This is it after my long lunch hour removing the mulch. My next task here is to move them to the new beds that Peanut Head made for them.

Right here. It's not happening for a few days because Spring is having a fit right now and I'm a weather wimp.

Peanut Head has been rearranging planting beds so he can fit some more in the garden. I feel like we might actually be ready to plant on time this year instead of last minute like our pants are on fire. 

Oh, that's another thing. Seed companies are overwhelmed and they can't keep up with the demand. It seems everyone wants to plant a garden this year. You can't complain about that. Gardens are awesome.

Baney likes to hang out with me when I'm working outside. I like how he's using one of my bricks as a pillow. Hey, I'm just glad he's not in my lap. He's a very needy baby.

We went on our second hike for Zoe's now online hiking class. I need to see if I can get a credit for this class because it is going to kill me. I am not the woman I once was.

This time we went hiking in Pocatello, and as you can tell by this parking lot picture, we were the only people there. I'm sure it had nothing to do with the fact that the trail was snowed in hither and tither.

I know that here everything looks great and the day is sunny and beautiful.

An actual sign with directions. Already this is better than last week's hike.

The trail is very obvious and we did not have to squint our eyes to decide which way it was supposed to go next. "Is it here, or there? Is it anywhere?"

Best of all, it wasn't too terribly steep too quickly.

We did make Baney pack his own water this time. The slacker.

And then I stopped taking pictures. Because we started running into sections of trail which were covered by snow. And I am not a graceful person. I fell down, on my butt, in the snow, 87 times. Perhaps you are thinking no big deal? In places the snow was more than a foot deep, so I could not just stand up. Being no longer the woman I once was, I had to roll over onto my hands and knees and slowly, awkwardly, right myself. Sometimes only to fall again.

While my family was laughing. Mostly trying not to laugh, but you know how you can see it in their eyes.

One time Stinky fell and she was all "Mom! See, I fell too!" [don't you feel better because I also suck at this?]

Here's the thing though, her one time was 87 to the zero power compared to my falling. It did not make me feel better.

Peanut Head kept insisting that it would get better up ahead. It did not.

I took this picture because this is where I sat down and said I was not going any further dammit, unless it was back the way I came. As you can see it was only 3.25 miles after an hour and 45 minutes, much of it horizontal, but also at the end of my rope.

I took this picture because this is where I filed for divorce. I'm going to miss that man. He is such a handy guy.

I sort of love this picture because it shows that Stinky was tired from the hike. I felt a little bit validated. Never mind that she was running circles around me.

Also, Peanut Head partook of the Aleve with me that night. I still love him.

Losing Track of Time

It seems like I was just here posting, but I look at my calendar and it's been a week. Idaho currently has 1,170 confirmed cases of Covid-19. That number is just an illusion. We (our country) still don't have enough test kits, and we are still only testing people that check all the boxes as far as symptoms go. If someone dies of Covid-19 and they were never tested, they still do not get tested. Not tested means not reported. There's no comfort in that number. We know it's far worse than what is reported.

New York has 131,916 cases and 8,898 deaths now! It's terrifying.

Mostly I try not to dwell on our situation and how unprepared we are as a country. Being at home we have lost all track of time. Weekends do not feel like weekends, and weekdays do not feel like weekdays, despite the fact that we are all working or studying from home.

Spring has arrived and that is something to smile about. It's been rainy and gloomy, but the light is changing, and it's starting to green up outside. I love Spring.

The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) is recommending that people wear homemade cloth masks when they have to leave their houses for essential supplies. This is so that people who have the disease and don't exhibit symptoms and/or don't know they are infected cannot infect others. It doesn't protect the person wearing the mask from catching the virus, but it is a good reminder not to touch your face.

I made masks like this for my family, and I'm continuing to make more for others until I run out of elastic and fusible interfacing.

Wearing an N95 mask can protect you from catching the virus they are in short supply and must only be used by health care workers and first responders. There isn't enough personal protective equipment (PPE) for health care workers and it's ugly.

Working at home is weird. After the first day I really struggled to stay focused. Today was better, but it's so isolating. I'm thankful for the home gym we set up in our basement last year, because sometimes I need to just get up and walk on the treadmill. It's also nice to be able to start a load of laundry and move it when it's ready for the dryer when I need a break from sitting. Staying up on the little chores like that is easy when you're working at home.

When we aren't working on work, we try to make a little progress on any one of our million projects we have going on at any given time. Whenever we can be outside, it's much easier to put the virus out of our minds.

Here is my dry creek bed. It was looking so much nicer in August, before we had to pull a large section up in order to dig a trench to run a propane line. Our oil furnace died so we took the opportunity to switch to a propane furnace. It was a lot of work, but we don't have the diesel smell when our heater is running now, and we're actually spending half of what we used to spend on heating because our new furnace is a high efficiency furnace and not 30 years old like the last one.

We got it all put back together before the snow flew, and then we had a crisis with our well at Christmas and had to dig another trench through the same general area. We were digging for a week solid starting Christmas Day. It was horrible, miserable, work. Over spring break we got that trench mostly filled in, and now we're starting to put it all back together again. If we get some nice weather this week, I should be able to right everything and move onto newer projects.

I'm very excited about this project that Peanut Head has been working on. These are new roosts for our chickens.

The best part is the tray that collects the droppings. It slides out in order for me to empty it. It will save me so much time when I clean the coop. 

Sadly our flock is down from 13 to two hens and one rooster. We lost five hens to a predator last spring when we were letting them free range. We even lost two babies. Then several weeks ago we lost another four hens to a predator, again when they were free ranging. Needless to say we aren't letting them free range anymore unless we are outside with them. We get one egg every other day now. Bad timing.

We recently bought three Rhode Island Reds and three Sapphire Gem chicks, but one of the Sapphire Gems died. 😥 We've also ordered six Brahmas that we are hoping to get this month. I love the Brahmas because they are big and they have hairy feet. Or maybe that's feathery feet. It will be fall before any of the new hens start laying.

We got out for a hike on Friday when the weather was just barely decent. We went to Menan Buttes and it was nice. It was a little over four miles with a lot of vertical incline and a lot of rocky terrain.

My family kicked my trash and I was sore the following day. Honestly, we haven't been hiking together since Zoe was a baby. It was a nice afternoon.

Baney was exhausted too. He's snoozing right behind me.

Here's a better picture. I love his sweet little crossy legs. His crossy legs are what made me fall in love with him. He's such a Delicate Flower.

The New Normal

Only businesses which provide essential services are allowed to remain open. That includes grocery stores, trucking companies, doctors and hospitals, etc. Hair and nail salons are, of course, not considered essential. That means Peanut Head wasn't able to get his monthly haircut at Great Clips, and as his hair grows out, he tends to look a little like a Q-tip. Thus, I was forced to start a little side hustle by giving Peanut Head the first hair cut at #CoronaCuts over the weekend. He will likely be my only customer as the girls aren't that desperate.

Today was my first day working at home. We expect to be under this Stay at Home order through the end of April, so this is going to be our new normal. Idaho currently has 423 confirmed cases of Covid-19.

I sat down at my desk at 8:00 a.m. this morning and got to work. I was actually pretty productive, which was a pleasant surprise. This was only day one though.

The girls were also busy with school and Peanut Head was working in his temporary office in the basement. When he turned to go downstairs this morning I said "Have a nice day at work, Honey." He thinks I'm whackadoodle.

I was happy to see that our internet supported the four of us working throughout the day, although only one of us at a time participated in video meetings.

I haven't been away from home since the middle of last week when I couldn't find flour anywhere, and my friend, John, surprised me with a 25 pound bag of flour. I have never had a 25 pound bag of flour before, and you can't just store it on a shelf.

I ended up dividing it into five one gallon freezer bags. I'm thankful for the flour.

Modeling by scientists tells us that the worst is yet to come. Two weeks from now New York will be at its peak of infections, which is insane because today they have 67,325 confirmed cases and 1,342 deaths. Governor Cuomo implored any available health professions to please come to New York to help. It gave me goosebumps.

The United States has 163,932 confirmed cases and 3,169 deaths. Worldwide there are 790,111 confirmed cases, and 37,896 deaths. It should be noted that we don't necessarily trust the numbers coming out of certain countries. China, for example.

It may sound corny, but we are living through history right now.

Waiting for Spring and Freedom

I feel like I'm in a dystopian novel. Idaho currently has 189 confirmed cases of Covid-19. More than double what we had two days ago. New York has 38,977 cases, and the United States as a whole has 85,476 cases. We have now surpassed China and Italy for the number of infections.  

Yesterday I went into town to get groceries, since I was going I planned to pick up more landscaping bricks at Home Depot since I have time on my hands this week. Well, one of the entrances was blocked off and they were controlling how many people could be in the store at a time. Their magic number was 100. While waiting to get in, customers were to stand the required six feet apart. X marks the spot.

While checking out, the cashier warned me that Winco was doing the same thing, except she thought their magic number was 200.

Here's Winco. I power walked to the entrance to claim my spot in line, but I still had to wait about ten minutes to get in on a Wednesday in the middle of the day. 

I wanted to get a bag of flour to keep my food storage stocked up, but there was zero flour. Also, no chicken noodle soup, ice cream, or decent hot dogs. I didn't need the ice cream anyway. I was just checking for a friend. Riiiight.

While I was in the store, I got a notification on my phone that Governor Little finally ordered a 21-day shelter in place. He took too ding dang long on that call, in my opinion.

Upon seeing the shortages, and then getting that notification, I think I panicked a little. I told the fam when I got home that we weren't going grocery shopping again for two weeks because I had just spent two weeks worth of budgeted grocery money in one trip.

Fred Meyer didn't have any flour either and now I know that there is a national shortage. I think it's because everyone is making cookies during quarantine. I know that I've been eating more than usual while on lockdown. I think it's the anxiety.

We're trying to be careful about not letting food go to waste. Here is Peanut Head making tortillas and quesadillas with leftover ingredients from tacos and other assorted items. They were pretty good.

Stinkerbell finally decided to do her chores. She either doesn't do her chores at all, which makes me lose my mind, or she does do them and goes a little overboard. I snapped this picture after she had moved all the family room furniture into the kitchen so she could vacuum. Then she dusted each piece with precision and returned them to their rightful place. Here she has just dumped everything out of the drawer of that side table so she can dust each item inside the drawer as well as the table itself. Items which she felt did not belong in the drawer, she deposited on my bed for me to figure out what to do with. She doesn't know this, but I just put it all back in the drawer when she wasn't looking. She didn't get her passive aggressive behavior from her Daddy, that's for sure.

My plan is to stay home and not go back to town until we desperately need something. Monday Peanut Head and I start telecommuting and the girls start online school. That's going to be interesting, for sure. Until next time, stay safe.