Staying Home Is Not So Bad
Respecting the request by the Governor of New Hampshire, upon our return we are voluntarily staying in for 14 days, 7 of which have now taken place. It’s not so bad actually. Now we are home there is much to do. We can be outside and garden and do things in the house. I have been for a couple of walks in the woods and not seen a person or a bear. I have also done a couple of walks with Katie around the lake and on the outskirts of the town. We see very few people and the ones we do see are keeping their distance as are we. What I have noticed is how very quiet it is here. Dataw had the Sound of Freedom fly over every day and they are incredibly noisy. Also there is the sound of multiple leaf blowers going pretty much all day as well as the machinery used to keep up the golf course. There was traffic too but not as much as there usually was. Here we have only traffic related to the homes in the neighborhood and since people are not going anywhere there is very little of that. I hear the bells from the Colby-Sawyer College clock carried on the wind, I hear the beautiful songs of the birds who have returned after winter and occasionally I hear the high pitch of a young child calling or laughing from the far end of our dead end street. There are no planes flying overhead although I think I might have heard one the other day. I understand there are only 10 flights a day leaving from Manchester Airport so this is no surprise.
Jenny Lane Update
John and grand daughter Libby are making a vegetable garden together. There was one already established but it needed a lot of work to bring it back to health. They found chives and asparagus coming back up and an assortment of herbs. They cleaned all the big rocks out of it and then mixed in some Alpaca compost to provide some good nutrients for the vegetables that will come soon. It is fun to see what is coming up in various parts of the yard now that spring has sort of arrived. We moved in during the fall so everything is new for us.
We were so pleased to see all the work that had been done on the house in the last eight weeks in person. It looks even better than the pictures that were shared by our daughter Katie. We were able to meet, at a distance, with the contractors to begin to plan the next phases of the project. We prefer for them to work outside for now so they are going to work on improving the screen porch. We need a little more living room space now that there are four of us in the house all the time. This is a good opportunity to do that project even though it wasn’t part of the original plan for now. Seems you need to constantly decide direction based on the facts when you can.
Doing Our Part Too
John and I decided that we could finish the painting in our bedroom ourselves. I was not comfortable having painters come into the house and be here for the amount of time it would take them to finish the job. So we took over and I will say we did a wonderful job. All the trim has been painted and the second coat went on the walls. It took the two of us working together about 6 1/2 hours to complete. The paint dried very fast so we could do second coats pretty quickly. The wall color had been put on by the professional painters but only one coat. All the trim was pre-primed so it made the painting pretty easy to do. We can now really settle in here. In fact John is hanging pictures as I write this. That is real progress.
We took over Jack’s room for an office since he has decided to stay in Asheville for the summer and work there. He has a small studio apartment near the aunts and is available to help when the baby comes by taking their dog Brew for walks or whatever is needed. He was finally given the go ahead to go to campus to get the rest of his gear that he left there thinking he was only going on spring break for a week and would be returning for the last term. As we all know that didn’t happen. The college is scheduling times for the students to come and collect their belongings. I am sure he will be happy to have his own things around him again. Meanwhile we have an office to work in which gets us out of everyone’s way. John is building some furniture for our room which is the reason for the big boxes. It is great to see him busy and engaged in all these projects.
An Interesting Read
The vegetable garden will be a wonderful addition and the fun Libby and John are having planning it and working on it is very special. Katie and I get into helping too. Wait till those first tomatoes are harvested. Yum!
As you know I am a big fan of Blue Zones living and try to adhere to many of their tenets regarding food and exercise and social interaction. Here is a current article that may be of interest regarding the world we are currently living in.
Blue Zones – Why Covid Hits Some People and Places Differently
I do believe we all need to do whatever we can to keep ourselves strong and healthy and out of harms way as much as is possible. For those of us who are over 70 and may have a health issue such as I did five (5) years ago, we are at a much bigger risk of being seriously compromised by this virus. Therefore we are planning to stay out of the mainstream for awhile longer. We neither want to get nor do we want to transmit the virus. I hope others will wear a mask when they need to go out in areas where social distancing is very hard to do. It is a small price to pay to help stop the spread of this virus and even if you are not sick you may be asymptomatic and could transfer the virus to someone whose health is compromised. We have quite a collection of masks here. Some are plain white and some are very pretty.
Is It or Is It Not Spring?
We arrived home last Sunday to lovely warm weather and sunshine. It was 70 degrees when we got here at 5:30 pm. Somewhere in the latter part of the week the bottom fell out of the weather in the North East and we had a significant snow storm and bitterly cold weather. The ground is warm so the snow really didn’t stick around for very long so we only got a couple of inches. The wind howled and blew the snow around for awhile in there and if it had been January we might have said it was a blizzard. I most certainly hope that is the last gasp of winter weather we get for some time.
