Pen's Nest

My LFT this morning showed the faintest of lines against the T - so faint I didn't notice it at all, until Beast squinted at it and said he thought there might be a line there. I'm hoping that by Thursday it will be completely gone.

I spent a while this afternoon putting some of my poor tomato plants into gro-bags. I am so fed up with the garden chaps *not* doing anything about my veg beds. If they had sprayed the weeds last Wednesday the situation would be much more workable now. Instead, there is still a forest there and the chaps didn't even show up today because it has been raining - lightly - all day. Hmph.

So I gro-bagged a bunch of tomatoes, hope they will perk up a bit as a result. And planted herbs in my magnificent new herb bed which is along one edge of the magnificent new patio. Rosemary (from my own cuttings, *pride*), thyme (a rescued remnant of the previous plant), lemon thyme (bought today), marjoram (bought at the allotment plant sale a couple of weeks ago), parsley (have had it for a while), sage (bought today), basil (grown from seed), oregano (salvaged from previous herb bed), chives (ditto), tarragon (grown from seed), and more parsley. And two kinds of mint in pots. Also put in three little pelargoniums that have been hanging around sing last year's Macmillan Coffee Morning, when someone brought a bucket of plants along to see if they would sell. I put a few into pots and ignored them, but they are cheerfully growing, so they deserve a chance.

I got my second vaccine (Pfizer) on Wednesday, and as far as I could tell only had a mildly sore arm, less sore than after the first one. But, and it may or may not be related, I have developed a *huge* red rash on the front of my neck. Itchy and weird, and I'm not sure whether itching began before the jab or not. :-(

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In other news, it's possible my brain fog was more attributable to living with and taking care of FIL and less to The Current Situation than I had realised. And I've started singing around the house again, now there is no fear of waking/disturbing him. We continue to be unable to make much progress on the many things that must be attended to after a person dies, but Beast has a telephone interview with the Registrar next week, and BIL will be here tomorrow and can start picking out any of his dad's possessions that he would like to keep. After that, we should be able to make a bit more progress.

Sometimes it feels quite callous to be moving on to the clearing up stage already, as though there ought to be an official period of mourning, but there isn't, and in many respects, I think we mourned him before he died. As with my father, who had a stroke, and died 20 months later, FIL underwent a considerable loss of personality due to the dementia. The sadness is at its most acute while one is still experiencing it, and after a gradual and expected death, it's easy to get back to normality. And there is a lot to do.

FIL had his first COVID vaccine yesterday. It was local, but too far for him to walk, so I drove and Beast went inside with him. I lucked out in getting a parking space; there was, unsurprisingly, a lot of demand. I'm not clear how many people were scheduled for the same time—appointments were being offered at five-minute intervals, but there were a lot of people going into the building at nine o'clock.

There was a good set-up. Someone to oversee the car parking, someone inside to do temperature checks and someone else to dispense hand sanitiser. Beyond that I did not see, but Beast reports quite a long form that needed to be gone through, and as FIL said Yes to one question, he had to be checked by a doctor before getting the jab. And afterwards, everyone was kept for fifteen minutes, to check for reactions. All in all they were in there for about three quarters of an hour, and I was devoutly wishing I had taken my coat!

Second dose will be twelve weeks from now, so policy on that is fairly clear.

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Still no sign of the mouse.

Don't tell Donald he's not re-elected today. Genius!

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Interesting article, with good graphics, on how coronavirus is spread.

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There are lots of interesting things in this MetaFilter link collection, about duck-billed platypuses, which are not only egg-laying, aquatic mammals without nipples, but are also venomous and, apparently, bioluminescent!

The sunshine_challenge is not quite what I was expecting, but that's probably to the good, as I've done the snowflake challenge several times, and the same prompts again would be a bit stale.

So, today's challenge is Red, and as it so happens, I do have a Red, because I wrote a story that may have been for that prompt, or may have been retro-fitted to that prompt, I really can't remember. But it's here, if anyone would like to take a look. A fantasy AU (The Chronicles of Lancyn and Ser Chrisfer), and the red in question is blood.

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Pandemic stuff, vaguely
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This is fun: A really long outdoor Rube Goldberg Machine.

http://nautil.us/issue/86/energy/why-birds-can-fly-over-mount-everest Very interesting and not very long piece about evolution. Cool stuff about birds (and dinosaurs, and giant insects) and how things fit together. Which led my Beast to investigate the birds stuff a bit more and find some diagrams on Wikipedia.

By the way, I'm going to be tagging posts which mention The Situation with 'covid-19', so if you are trying to avoid an overload, that should help.

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I'm trying to do a bit in the garden, after our home yoga sessions. So I'm doing small, manageable pieces. In my two sessions so far I have weeded, dug and added compost to three of the cold frames. I suppose the next project might be the odd-shaped potato patch. I'm not really a gardener, but I can do a bit of grunt work, and it adds to the exercise regimen. I don't think FIL can manage it any more, and if I want there to be fresh veg this summer—which I do—I'm going to have to put in some forkwork. In truth, I'm not sure how much of a contribution it will be to FIL's wellbeing and activities, as he is able to do less and less. And apparently does not have the sense to take off his jacket when he is too hot, but that's another matter.

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Are you getting dressed, these days? I've been reading things by people who stay in their pyjamas all day, even for work meetings, or are not wearing anything but underwear on their bottom half, or whatever… I'm sticking to my usual routine of putting on fresh and reasonably respectable clothes—not even going with the elasticated waist yoga pants, at least not very often. Like the discipline of exercising at ten in the morning, it's good for me. I'm fortunate to have a Beast about the place, because without him it would be so very easy to lapse into a loafish state.

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This site appears to be Good News About Covid-19 That You May Not Have Seen. So, yay?

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I've been embroidering on a rather exciting piece of textured felt that I bought quite a while back. It's basically done, and I want to mount it against a rich dark orange sari which I have had for years (it used to be a window embellishment). But I can't find the sari.

So your question for today is, where did I put that sari material? Suggestions welcome!

Exercise today involved using resistance bands—I've had them for a while but never remembered to use them at home before—and then going through our yoga routine again. We seem to do the yoga in about 35 minutes, whereas the actual class runs for more than 45, so I must have forgotten some stuff.

This evening I got to see most of my chorus members again. It has been ages! They didn't get to see me, because this monitor doesn't have a camera, but Beast says we might have one somewhere so I will see if I can do better next time. We did quite a lot of cheerful helloing and a little bit of warm-up singing (some of the exercises are very cool when sung effectively as duets, with our MD singing and everybody else muted and singing at home). I can sing! I still have a gluey throat, which is unpleasant in the evenings and quite nasty in the mornings, but I can sing!

One of the people in the Zoom works for the anaesthetists in a local private hospital. That hospital is now being taken over as an outpost of the big NHS hospital here and will house cancer patients and, I think, A & E, to leave the big hospital to deal with covid-19. They have been retraining the staff like mad. And there was the 8 o'clock clap, which, I dunno…. but we had a break in our Zoom meeting and everyone went outside to make a noise, and there was certainly a lot of clamouring, hooting and loud noise-making in this vicinity. Will it make NHS staff feel appreciated? I guess. A surprisingly large proportion of our chorus work for the health service in some capacity, and several more have family who do.

Spent a lot of time this afternoon watching YouTube videos about musicals, including an analysis of the music of Sweeney Todd, which was interesting but referred to the hideous Tim Burton film instead of a stage version. And as there actually was a snippet of video from the truly superb version I saw in the West End with (astonishingly) Michael Ball as a really menacing Todd, there was no bloody excuse for using the film. Johnny Depp as Sweeney is an… understandable choice, I suppose, if you want to sell a musical, but Helena Bonham Carter as Mrs Lovett was *ludicrously* miscast.

These Finnish cats are even floofier than my Princess Fluffykins! Observe the great columns of magnificence in picture 2! Actually, they look quite a lot like Fluffy, but are probably at least three times her size.

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We walked into town yesterday morning to get a few essentials (our multivitamins, my supplies from Grape Tree, chocolate, etc). No difficulty in maintaining physical distance as the place was deserted, and the shops we did visit had very sensible precautions in place (although the chap in the Grape Tree was the only one who gave us hand sanitiser after the transaction). Mind you, there were some oddities: most of the shops were closed, but the leather shop (clothes!) was open, which seemed excessively optimistic to me.

And now, we are much more firmly locked down, so it's just as well we went.

It was actually a lovely morning. Chilly, but the sky was bright blue and the palest pink magnolias were at peak glory (or, in one case, just-past-the-peak). Dark pink magnolias are still only in bud. So much blossom everywhere, so many daffodils. The world is a beautiful place. Also there was a quail in the back garden.

Yesterday evening, I had a long phone conversation with my brother! Bit of a surprise as I have not heard from him in over a year, but it was lovely to talk to him.

My children are both working from home, which is good to know, and their housemates work from home anyway. I just hope they won't all drive each other mad.

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I am trying to figure out how to do a virtual Easter Egg Hunt. My family has had an Easter Egg Hunt every year since they were very tiny, and we always enjoy it, but I don't think we'll be able to do that this year.

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Exercise time was a programme based on the last Double Trouble class I had, which wore me out. Inevitably, FIL wandered in as we were part-way through, but it wasn't too bad a moment since we'd just done some warm-up dance-ish moves and hadn't started on the pyramid yet. Beast went to sort him out, after I had told him very firmly that he could not leave his loaded slow cooker (chicken thighs!) on the worktop for the next twenty four hours but must put it in the fridge. I don't understand why he has started filling the slow cooker a day before he wants to actually cook stuff in it, but I should prefer not to have our lives complicated by a FIL with food poisoning.

The exercise routine worked well! I'm including it under a cut, in case anyone is interested.
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And today, our yoga mats have come!

My posts are going to be *so* boring over the next few weeks.