I'm Thinking…No!

Her Ladyship and I went for a drive today, and I can tell you all that it’s official.  Every highway, secondary road, back road, country trail, and a good percentage of driveways are now under construction.  Road crews are busy as bees digging up or smoothing out every road in New Hampshire, and most of Massachusetts too.  There are some solid reasons for this.  The pandemic has kept many people off the roads, so it’s holding up fewer people – although the DPW doesn’t want to advertise this.  They want us to think they’re holding up thousands. Also, and some of you may not know this, but Juno, for which the month of June was named, was the Roman Goddess of Road Construction.  Oh, yes.  Rumor and folklore have it that she personally oversaw the resurfacing of the Appian Way, limiting chariots to one lane. Continue reading ““End of Road Work” – My Happy Sign”

What I’ve written here, or said out loud in the past, here now, or sometime in the future will probably offend someone.  So, in the interests of keeping the peace and preventing gatherings outside my front door, I apologize. In fact, my front door mat says, “Go Away”.  I’m sorry for those of you that come to the front door and take umbrage at the sentiment. I just thought it was definitely a message for our time (and totally hilarious). Continue reading “I’m Sorry”

So, what happened to all the toilet paper some months back?  There was a time when we could hit the supermarket and buy toilet paper in moderation – I typically would buy a package or two of four-roll, two-ply because I’m very sensitive, which would last us a week or more.  All of a sudden, pandemic hit and there was not a roll to be found.  Empty shelves as far as the eye could see. Hand sanitizer too, along with paper towel.  For months, you could always tell where these sanitary items were in the store. Chips and snacks, sodas, greeting cards and then, nothing. Empty shelves as far as the eye could see. So, what happened?  Other than those brothers in Tennessee that were stockpiling in their garages to resell online at a huge profit until the long arm of the law shut them down, who does that?  It does say something about a person’s character when they see a profit to be made in panic. Symptoms of the coronavirus were fever, cough and respiratory problems.  I didn’t remember reading anything about loose bowels or diarrhea. Continue reading “Shopper Hoarding”

Only in America can wearing a face mask during a pandemic when going out be a divisive and political issue.  Everyone else in the civilized world realizes the importance of not exhaling germs though breath.  We see them in South Korea to Italy and Spain.  It’s a necessity that prevents the spread of the most vicious virus in a century.  The Chinese are doing it, perhaps because they tend to follow directions better.  Around the world, as the infection spreads, we all need to take precautions.  Not in America.  Here we storm state houses with assault weapons to protect the right to not protect ourselves.  Ministers are ranting and raving about reopening their churches, even though they know full well it could cost lives.  One pastor this morning on the news was screaming that church is “essential”.  I’d like to have been on a communication wave that allowed me to respond, “Not if you’ve done your job properly in the past.  Then your flock will know what to do.”  Yes, indeed. Apparently “pro-life” can be flexible or selective.

In one tweet reported this week, a solid citizen wrote in response to a reopening plan, that she needn’t wear a face mask because, as she put it, she had a constitutional right to control her own body.  First, it’s not her body we’re worried about – it’s the unlucky souls that happen to venture into her sphere of contamination.  And second, she was probably waving signs protesting at a Planned Parenthood facility some time back because she feels that other women don’t or shouldn’t have that same right of control.

Why is it that some Americans have a poor grasp of safety precautions or even recommendations?  We pat ourselves on the back for a job well done, while the virus is spreading out-of-control in more than two dozen states.  The experts tell us we’re not even close to containment, while other countries, including China, the epicenter, are controlling the spread and seriously reducing the numbers of infected people and deaths. But we’ll follow our fearless leader, out on the golf course this weekend.  There’s the image of Nero and his fiddle. Some of us, not a majority but enough to keep the ball rolling, persist in our general lack of common sense.  When told that cruise ships are having serious issues and are unsafe, there they are, bounding up the gangplank.  They’re also the ones not long after sobbing into the computer screen where they’re confined, asking why they can’t be allowed to go home. Just today, two news items about new clusters of disease.  One was a teenage pool party attended by 100 young people, and boom, up goes another mushroom cloud of COVID-19.  In a related article, two hairdressers had symptoms yet still felt compelled to go in to work, and infected 150 of their customers that could be tracked, so there may well more. They’re the ones in the grocery story without masks, heading up the aisles the wrong way, or pile into the person ahead of them in line and start unloading their groceries without regard to safe distancing.  I heard a lady in the store the other day and, although she had mask, talking on her cell phone all the way around the store.  Her voice was quite raspy and thus distinctive, and she’s a better than even odds a carrier.  Fortunately for me, she was in a cashier aisle a distance from me, but I noticed that once she put the phone away, she started an animated conversation with those around her.

A recent survey showed that 8% will refuse to wear a mask at any time or place.  It’s that bold, as my grandfather used to say, “My mind is made up – don’t confuse me with facts.” mentality that will continue to cause surges in the coronavirus in certain parts of the country.  The medical experts are coming up with more and more useful information.  We now know that the virus travels not just on surfaces we touch, but in the air we breathe and the droplets of moisture we exhale. Disease doesn’t particularly care if you are conservative, liberal, or moderate.  It’s not curtailing your personal freedom to keep others around you safe.

We’d all like life to return to “normal”, or what it was before the pandemic.  Yes, I’d like to be popping over to the hardware store for a quart of deck stain, rather than ordering it online, paying a $35 delivery fee, and hoping it matches the old stain.  Yes, this is the time of year that I’m zipping to the nursery for plants and gardens I’ve been dreaming about and planning all winter.  But whatever comes up from previous years will just have to do for now.  Everything is rather stark, but, oh well.  When you look at the staggering numbers of obituaries in the newspapers every day, it’s a sobering reminder that the risk is just too great to be going out all the time.  Home is just safer.

Be well, my faithful readers.

Answering machines and voice mail have been the new norm for long enough that, well, now they’re the old norm.  Do you remember when they were first developed, back when they were separate devices hooked up to the telephone?  We’d record the message about six times until it was just right. Now, of course, they are built right in, so if we don’t answer the phone after four rings, as we do in the age of screened calls, the system springs into action so the caller can record something excruciatingly long that often goes well beyond the allotted time.  Comedian Jerry Seinfeld has a great routine about people calling just to leave a message. “Oh, you’re there.  I thought you’d be out and I’d leave a message.” There are those, however, who still don’t know to wait for the “beep”, so we only get the last bit of their message, something like “call me when you get this”.  Great.  Who are you again? Continue reading “Please Leave A Message!”

We’re becoming more and more familiar with what prison life must be like.  Can’t, or shouldn’t go out when we so desire. Sitting in a coffee shop, or even going into one, is fast becoming just a memory.   We’re getting up at the crack of dawn to go grocery shopping, or for those that are city dwellers, waiting for it to be delivered. Leaving the mail in the box for a few days or weeks to make sure it’s not contaminated. Even filling the gas tank is a rare event.  “Curbside service” used to be something special, like valet parking.  Now, it’s a staple of life.  I even used it this past week to fill the barbeque grill tank.  I know – it ran dry last fall and I thought to myself, “I’ll leave it until spring. There’s plenty of time.”  Oops.  So many things that are now becoming fixtures in our lives – drive-up windows, deliveries on the front porch, stockpiling toilet paper.  I really can’t understand that last one.  Why are shoppers going nuts with toilet paper?  For all advisories, bladder failure isn’t one of the symptoms.  Perhaps if you’re taking the President at his word and drinking Windex, maybe.  For the rest of us, “business” as usual. Continue reading “Isolation Fatigue”

We all have, or claim to have famous persons dangling precariously from branches of our family trees.  My middle name, for example, is a family one – Hardy.  My grandmother, my father’s mother, was a Hardy that reputedly came over on the Mayflower.  Visiting the harbor in Plymouth, England some years ago, I found no Hardys on the manifest, so that’s probably a myth.  However, one distinct feature in the family is the beaky nose.  We’ve referred to it has the “Hardy” nose.  My father, grandmother, two great-uncles, great grandfather, and more cousins that I can count had it.  Looking up images of the famous author, Thomas Hardy, for which I should mention dramatically here, drum roll please, I’m NOT named, he too had the renowned Hardy nose.  Are we related?  Perhaps distantly, as the family goes back to the Norman Conquest.  So too in my mother’s family, the Doyles from southern Ireland, Arthur is a family name – my grandfather’s middle name and my great-grandfather’s first name.  Are we related to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle?  It’s possible, and family folklore has long claimed it. Continue reading “Tracing Her Roots”

Every so often, I reread material that I’ve previously posted. As I went out this morning to get my newspaper and white, fluffy rain was dropping from the sky, I thought this appropriate to repost.  If you’ve read it before, feel free to move on.

OK – I’m looking out the window and snow is again falling from the sky.  We’re getting on to late April, and apparently Global Warming is not fully doing its job. Last weekend, we endured freezing rain and lots of it – I considered leasing one of those big Duck Boats that conveniently come up behind you and quack loudly in city traffic.  The floodwaters had subsided after a few days, so I thought – “I’ll bring out the deck furniture”.  That would create the illusion of some open space in the basement, but no . . .  . . . Continue reading “It’s Snowing Again! Again”

We in America are now beginning a national debate.  Do we sacrifice health and safety – human lives – for the economy to reopen and get the country working again, or do we protect lives and continue with preventive measures by staying home and letting large segments of the economy continue to idle?  Here are a few thoughts. Continue reading “Health and the Economy”

So, what do we do now?  Sit home and wait for the government to send us checks?  While I really like that idea – I was a supporter of Andrew Yang’s guaranteed monthly income – I feel, as many Americans do, that I should be doing something.  I’ve done some inside painting, and put some wallpaper up in the bathroom.  (An accent wall – too much HGTV).  The last of the snow has finally gone, but not much is coming up in the gardens yet.  The clean-up crew came through with their blowers last week.  I’m not sure if it’s too early to see what’s still alive or if the blowers took out everything and I’ll have to replant.  Typically, I’d be making plans to hit the nurseries about now – it’s still a little early yet to plant or set out containers.  But we can dream.  Plants and planting are the opposite of social distancing – they want to be close, personal, and friendly.  A few sturdy daffodils and tulips came up a while ago, in the warm spell, and then were covered in snow.  Now, they’re out there looking terrified – “Do I keep going and bloom or don’t I?” Continue reading “Spring is Cancelled”