Sunday morning highlight, after the local newspaper and a quick perusal of the New York Times, we dined on a special treat - Eggs Benedict with made-from-scratch hollandaise sauce - delicious, but with three egg yolks and two sticks of butter, a little rich for everyday. But it sure was tasty to say the least.
Local news is that the smaller communities dotted around the great state of Nebraska have become COVID 19 hot spots due to the beef, pork and chicken processing factories located in Grand Island, Lexington, Fremont and other points. Grand Island’s population is less than 20% of Omaha’s, yet they have surpassed Omaha in both number of cases and number of deaths! Amazing is probably not the correct description, better to say devastating.
Mark is continuing his gardening classes by attending Zoom lectures over noon hours and sending information out to his crews as they continue to work the Hospice House gardens. We completed a week’s worth of gardening around the homestead, removing the leaf litter from all the beds, uncovering the growth and marvelling at the fact that 6 inches of snow did not harm a single plant, peonies popped back up, tulips shook off the snow and started to bloom, and Hosta just shrugged.
Deb’s Tuesday night drinks group was called back into session via Zoom - 3 of the 4 members were able to “zoom” in. Next week should be a full complement. Wednesday is shopping day, so we headed out to the grocery stores, Deb braving the crowds of unmasked strangers while Mark waited in the car to spirit her and the food home. Mark sat through another class over the noon hour while Deb, alone in the car, managed to make it to Costco for two huge arbor vitae plants and to the local Ace hardware for another flat of perennials for the garden.
We have plans to create a new garden along the west side of the house and so are looking for a small- job contractor to chop out and haul away the concrete sidewalk that is in the way. Tough to find someone for such a minor job, but we keep trying and buying the plants to populate it as we go.
As usual, more bread and cookies popped out of the oven and had to be delivered before we became to big to get out of the house. Darcy is moving back to Abigail’s house this week as her 14-day quarantine is over. She will take some time to settle back in, but she and Norman the dog are happily back in their own beds and are looking forward to some outside yard time. Plans for a large vegetable garden are being laid; better for us than bread and cookies for sure.
We continue to spend our evenings hollering at the PBS Newshour, dining, reading and watching some TV. The new season of Bosch just dropped and so we are 4 episodes into that, as well as trying to begin the new Killing Eve after Bosch is complete. So much to do and so little time when all we have is time. Very confusing. At least we can get some entertainment by listening to all the scientific ways that our Dear Leader has for cures - there will now be a run on Lysol and large hypodermic needles as the faithful rush out to inject themselves with disinfectant.
As we enter into the sixth week and move towards the end of the initial stay safe time, we, at least, don’t see any change in the near term. If we are able to travel again by 2021, we will be surprised.
