Monday, 27 April through Sunday, 3 May 2020
"Time keeps on slippin' slippin' slippin' into the future." (per Stevie Miller)
And that's just about the way it feels. The days are each happening, and I can remember each one, but they seem to be doing not much besides bringing the future. That future keeps looking different, too, thanks to our changing levels of knowledge about the coronavirus.
I'm guessing that a lot of the frustration and eruption into mass groups on beaches and in parks that we're seeing is due to cabin fever. I lived too many years in Alaska not to have a healthy respect for the power that feeling can generate - and that's what this looks like to me.
The trouble here is that the stakes are a whole lot higher. I'm getting a little tired of the it's-my-life-and-I'll-risk-it-if-I-want-to line of arguments, which completely ignores the crazy ease with which this virus is transmissible. But, as I said, cabin fever is a powerful force that can override reason.
Daily life
I'm still keeping to the RV as much as I can, aside from walking the dogs 4 or 5 times a day. One of the best things about this "campground" David and Anna are running is the number of different routes the dogs and I can take. This being an actual neighborhood and not a campground, we can take different roads and take them in different orders, which keeps our walks from being boring.
I started a 4-week subscription to the Dallas paper, which has been nice. I like paper newspapers much better than digital ones, and I've really missed the Sudoku and crossword puzzles on my travels. Plus, the paper articles seem more in-depth than most of those I find online.
But one thing online that I did enjoy was Brad Pitt's take on Anthony Fauci for SNL. I've never been a Brad Pitt fan, but this was something special. I actually had trouble finding the whole clip but, if you haven't seen it, here's a link. https://www.huffpost.com/anthony-fauci-brad-pitt-snl
I spent most of this week editing the photos I took at the Birmingham Civil Rights Museum. At least, that's where I thought I'd taken them. Finally, Saturday afternoon I discovered they were actually the 2nd batch of photos I took at the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis. The ones I posted a few days ago were only half of what was there. I remember now that by the time I got that far into the museum I was feeling a little overloaded with information and took a break, got some barbecue, walked the dogs, then went back for a few more hours in the afternoon. And it's those afternoon photos I spent the week editing. The ones I took in the Birmingham Civil Rights Museum I'd dumped into the trash. Fortunately, I haven't emptied the trash for just such a situation so was able to retrieve all the photos from there. Once I'm finally done with Memphis, I'll move on to Birmingham and then FINALLY I'll be caught up.
Errands
On Tuesday I took my usual Weekly Cleanliness Trip. One of my first stops was at a Valvoline Instant Oil Change place, to get some way-overdue servicing done on the RV. I'd called ahead to be sure they had a door that was tall enough to take me, and when I pulled in the guy came running out and said "there are 3 others ahead of you" which I didn't think anything about. But then I waited and waited, watched 2 of the 3 clear out, watched 2 of the 3 employees doing nothing, and got more and more irritated as more time passed. Finally the guy came out and said they'd have to take care of me out on the drive because they didn't have room inside, and I knew then that something was wrong. No way were they going to do an oil change out on the driveway. Turns out they thought I wanted a state inspection done. He never bothered even to mention it, let alone ask me. And though I didn't mention it either, when a business is named "Instant Oil Change" I'd think they'd assume it was an oil change I was there for. He apologized and gave me $20 off, but that wasn't enough for me to think he was doing a reasonable job managing the place. Still, the oil got changed, which is what I wanted.
I dumped some more stuff at the storage place, but some day I need to go back and spend some serious time rearranging boxes and figuring out what I have in there and how I can store it better.
I stopped at a PetsMart and bought a couple of new dog beds because I'd had to throw out one of those I had. On Sunday morning, Gracie started gagging, and since she was standing over the floor at the time I thought it'd be easy to clean up. Then she moved onto her bed and (before I could get to her) instantly vomited. There was a lot of it for some reason and when I pulled the cover off I found it'd soaked past the cover (which anyway was coated in dog hair) and into the bed before I could even get to the paper towels. At that point I gave up on trying to clean it up and took it outside for the trash pickup. Dogs are still easier than kids, but sometimes it seems like a tossup.
Then I went on to this week's dump station - a business called National Indoor RV Centers, which sells and services fancy Class A RVs. They also have 3 dump stations, which they let anyone use for free, and also access to potable water, which I needed to fill my almost empty tank.
This place was on the other side of Dallas in Louisville (the Fighting Farmers, per the slogan on the city water tank). On the way I went through actual countryside (though I'm sure the developers will build more houses on it in the next 20 years), with cows and at one place a herd of llamas. An actual herd (or whatever you call a bunch of them). I'm used to seeing just a few at any one time and this was a lot more than that.
There seems to be a sizable Korean community out in the Carrollton/Lewisville area, based on the number of churches I saw with Korean letters on the signs.
I got behind a delivery truck that said "Texas Born, Texas Bread." It was a truck for Mrs. Baird's Bakery, which I'm delighted to see is still in business. I remember our Brownie Troop went on a tour of their bakery in Waco. That must have been 60 years ago, and I still remember it. Amazing thing, memories.
Weather
For most of this week, the temperature has been higher than normal, which isn't really what I wanted, given that this isn't December. We've had several nights where the temp inside the RV was well into the 80s when we went to bed and didn't get even close to 70° until about 6:00 AM. I have one little fan that works only if it's about a foot away from you - so not enough. Anna and David have loaned us 2 more fans, which really help, and I run the fan in the ceiling unit from about 2 PM on. It's humid, too, which makes it seem hotter than it is. On my errand run this next week I'll stop off at a Target or somewhere and see about getting another fan or two, since it looks like we won't be able to leave for a cooler climate any time soon.
It did cool off real nicely one night, though - that was the night we had a serious thunderstorm that scared both my puppies quite a bit. I hadn't been able to sleep anyway because of the heat so noticed when the thunder started up about 10:45. I looked at the floor and saw both dogs huddling by the bathroom door. I patted them and said encouraging things, which I'm sure they didn't believe, but the thunder still kept up for a couple of hours. It brought with it quite a bit of rain and wind, and I was really glad I had believed the forecasts and closed all the windows and skylights, even though it meant we'd be hotter. As it happened, the storm cooled things off just fine, so we were okay.
Ants
On Thursday morning, I opened the cabinet to put some things in the trash and saw, to my great dismay, that there were enough ants crawling around in and on the trash can for me to start an ant farm. It was really strange because there hadn't been a one 20 minutes before that when I'd gotten the pet food out of the same cabinet.
Anyway, I bundled up that bag of trash and put it outside for the next day's trash pickup. A day or 2 later, David and Anna picked up some ant spray for me, which turned out to be very timely. Because of the gazillion warnings on the label about it being hazardous to pets, I planned to take the 3 critters over to their house for a few hours on Sunday while I sprayed around the cabin.
Well, Sunday morning, there were another ant-farm's worth of ants crawling all over the trash can. This time I took the can outside and sprayed it all over inside and out with that spray and just left it outside for a while.
I also found a dead baby Robin lying on the drive near my RV, poor little thing. I found a broken Robin egg near that same spot a week or 2 ago, so I worried about whether the parents had been able to produce any surviving birds. But then I looked them up and learned Robins normally lay 4 eggs, so I'm hoping they'll have some survivors. Anyway, I had to bag up the dead baby and the ants that were crawling on it and then spray that spot and the surrounding area.
Once Anna was supervising my babies, I spent an hour emptying cabinets and getting pet beds off the floor and sweeping up Gracie's hair and so forth. I turned the fans off to do the spraying, to keep the spray from getting on things I didn't want it on, so it was a pretty hot and sweaty chore, but it had to be done. The whole time I worried about the health risks and how to protect us in such a small space from the cure being worse than the disease (as our elected officials are wont to say these days). I also sprayed some of the outside of my RV and the power cord that trails for its whole length across the ground to meet David's power cord.
I turned on all the fans and went back over to my family's air conditioned home. I'd especially worried about Lily adapting, but I closed off all the bedrooms to limit the number of places she could hide and she spent more than an hour exploring the 4 main rooms she could get to. Actually, so did Dexter. Dext tried to chase Lily but lost traction on the wood floor and slip-slided away while Lily took up a strong defensive position under the coffee table. When he got to her again, she hissed and clawed at him, which he deserved, and that seemed to settle him down a bit. Otherwise, she was fine. She voluntarily got up into Anna's lap a few times, which I wouldn't have thought she'd do. By the time I took them home a few hours later, she made a beeline for her litter box, but I was relieved she didn't just pick a corner of a rug or something before that. She has better manners than I expected.
I also spent several hours doing my laundry, which is never a cool chore, so by the time I got the cabin put back into order and my laundry put away and the dogs walked, I was really hot. Weather.com said it was 90°, with a feels-like reading of 94°, so no wonder I was warm. But I found after I sat for a while in the breeze from Nature + the fans that I'd cooled down to a temp that wasn't life-threatening. Imagine running a fever in these conditions. I'm so very thankful I'm still healthy.
I hope you all are staying safe.
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