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Hyssop of Trill
Mar. 22nd, 2020 10:24 pmI was fine enough yesterday, just having a day of feeling irritable and anxious and not like posting about any of my pointless little activities, or my grieving and outrage which have all happened before and will happen again. Sigh. Dr. Anthony Fauci seems in a strangely jovial mood on CNN Global Town Hall tonight. Either the White House security team has had him prophylactically injected with joy juice, or he feels there is good news afoot. Who knows! Here's how Buzz Aldrin says he's handling our current situation: "Lying on my ass and locking the door." Well, if it's good enough for the second man to walk on the Moon, it's good enough for me!
This morning I contributed to morale by replenishing our supply of oatmeal raisin cookies. This time, I tried a recipe that uses oil rather than butter. I made a brown sugar substitute by using white sugar and a couple of tablespoons of molasses, of which I have plenty. I'm saving the butter and the remaining brown sugar for when I make chocolate chip cookies, because it's important to me to have those come out just right, whereas oatmeal cookies are more rough and ready and can handle a lot of variation. Six hellebore plants that I ordered last fall arrived in a package today. I took the package into the mud room, opened the box, washed my hands, cut the packaging off the plants so they could breathe and watered them, threw the packaging out, and then washed my hands again. There are two yellow ones, two purple ones, and two pink ones, or so it says on the labels. Hellebores are very hardy, but I think I will wait a couple of days before trying to plant them. It went down to 19 degrees again last night and was cold and blustery today. The mud room stays pretty cold and gets a bit of sun through the door window, so they should be okay in there for a time. They are nice little plants, and I'm very anxious for them to thrive.
The faces of Buddhist gods and monsters are slowly taking shape around the edges of the jigsaw puzzle. The Sparrowhawk is working on the top part, where the angels and sages dwell among clouds, while I wrestle with the blue-faced demons wreathed in twisty flames at the bottom. This is appropriate, though I think his part is harder because he's looking at it upside down.
At Tron's instigation, we had a wonderful Zoom conference call with all of the kids. I know times are very serious etc. but all I could do was smile because I was so happy to see their faces. They are all pretty well, although the Nipper, the Redhead and Raptor all have cold-like symptoms and are worried that they might have the dread virus. The Nipper is going to call the doctor tomorrow, and will start working at home, just in case, although he's not supposed to. Hopefully his boss will listen to reason. I hope this is just a cold. I'm almost sure that's true, but there is always that little bit of doubt.
This morning I contributed to morale by replenishing our supply of oatmeal raisin cookies. This time, I tried a recipe that uses oil rather than butter. I made a brown sugar substitute by using white sugar and a couple of tablespoons of molasses, of which I have plenty. I'm saving the butter and the remaining brown sugar for when I make chocolate chip cookies, because it's important to me to have those come out just right, whereas oatmeal cookies are more rough and ready and can handle a lot of variation. Six hellebore plants that I ordered last fall arrived in a package today. I took the package into the mud room, opened the box, washed my hands, cut the packaging off the plants so they could breathe and watered them, threw the packaging out, and then washed my hands again. There are two yellow ones, two purple ones, and two pink ones, or so it says on the labels. Hellebores are very hardy, but I think I will wait a couple of days before trying to plant them. It went down to 19 degrees again last night and was cold and blustery today. The mud room stays pretty cold and gets a bit of sun through the door window, so they should be okay in there for a time. They are nice little plants, and I'm very anxious for them to thrive.
The faces of Buddhist gods and monsters are slowly taking shape around the edges of the jigsaw puzzle. The Sparrowhawk is working on the top part, where the angels and sages dwell among clouds, while I wrestle with the blue-faced demons wreathed in twisty flames at the bottom. This is appropriate, though I think his part is harder because he's looking at it upside down.
At Tron's instigation, we had a wonderful Zoom conference call with all of the kids. I know times are very serious etc. but all I could do was smile because I was so happy to see their faces. They are all pretty well, although the Nipper, the Redhead and Raptor all have cold-like symptoms and are worried that they might have the dread virus. The Nipper is going to call the doctor tomorrow, and will start working at home, just in case, although he's not supposed to. Hopefully his boss will listen to reason. I hope this is just a cold. I'm almost sure that's true, but there is always that little bit of doubt.
