A Distanced Diary

This is a very dull set of sort-of diary entries. I am going to make it more fun, for me anyway, by adding, quite randomly, some photos that I like.

Saturday

It is a grey sort of day, cool cloudy and still. It is not melting the tired old snow and ice. It is not enticing me to go out and walk. But when I was out, I could hear a robin, cheerful soul that he is, happily singing, interspersing the song with the odd chirp. He couldn’t see me any more than I could spot him, because the last few days when he did see me, he stopped singing and scolded me roundly, I guess for disturbing the concert. He surely does not see me as a competitor for nesting sites and worms.

I am getting somewhat tired of my nesting site, even though we have only been social distancing for ten days or so. I will probably be stir-crazy by the time the restrictions ease up. Ours are voluntary restrictions as we have not travelled or, to our knowledge, been in contact with anyone contagious. But the virus is out there… one of my neighbours (from the regulated distance) told me that our local shopping town had its first hospitalized case yesterday. I can’t imagine how the medical community is coping, waiting for the onslaught that we know will come. I am so amazed at how brave they are. They remind me of my local robin in fact, cheerfully preparing for the season with occasional pauses to scold.

On a winter's day. This set of old buildings is on a farm two down from our land. It actually has some fields that can be tilled and used. If  enough rocks are picked up.

Monday.

Yesterday it rained and rained and misted and thundered off in the distance and rained some more. It was a dark, damp and dismal day all around. A lot of snow got away, though, and there is water running everywhere. I read that the melt has been long enough and early enough that even this amount of rain is unlikely to cause flooding. And a good thing too. I cannot imagine how anyone could cope with a flood on top of everything else that is going on. In vulnerable areas people rely on volunteer sandbaggers and helpers and, at the moment, no one is supposed to get within a shovel length of anyone else, let alone toss them sand bags. Let us hope that the forecasters are right, for once.

JG spent a lot of time this afternoon organizing a comprehensive grocery list and he is going into town tomorrow to get what he can of what is on it. We are well-supplied with most of the items that are hard to get, I believe, so he should do okay. He has been planning this get-away since last week and I do hope he enjoys it.

The remains of an old barn in the middle of a beaver flood on our property. The beaver pond was once a hay field with a stream flowing through it. Then the beaver arrived.

Wednesday

JG came home with everything on his list. The store even had our usually hard to find favourite bread. We did forget to add a couple of things to the list though. I guess we will do without those for the next while. He said that there were some empty spots on the shelves, one being dishwasher pods. It occurs to me that this might be a problem with our local YIG grocery’s ordering patterns, because they are erratic, rather than a run on the soap. But I will never know for sure. I guess if toilet paper is an hoarder's item, so could soap be.

Another view of the same beaver pond. The dam that keeps the water there is at the right, between the two clumps of evergreens.

Thursday

This morning we had our usual first Thursday of the month book club meeting, using Zoom. Or those of us that thought we could cope with it met. Several members emailed to say that their computers or their computer skills were not up to it. It was a bit of a choppy meeting, as we are just learners, and also because the initiator of the Zoom session did not seem to have enough bandwidth to carry her voice and her video properly, making her hard to understand. We spent more time on things peripheral to the book than we did on the book itself. The setting was Russia and two of our members had experience living in a communist country or visiting there. The consensus was that it is a tense place to live in, or even to navigate inside, with fascinating stories to illustrate.

Rain is forecast for tomorrow. It is harder to stay cheerful when it is rainy and dull and muddy and cold. Not impossible, however. It may be impossible, though, to find anything to write about.

Yet more beaver floods. This rather unfocused shot was taken by the sister of the girl pictured, from their punt.