June 10

We have the tail end of Christobol passing today. It started to come through yesterday afternoon with hard rain and very strong winds. I was a bit worried about the gardens but none of the tall plants and vines are high enough to be badly affected and all of the recently emergent seedlings came through just fine. I had thought to harvest some peppermint and spearmint but I will put that off till tomorrow. We went out for an unscheduled shopping trip yesterday (before the storm) because Mom needed some new slippers--her's are falling apart. We strolled through Walmart, a store we normally don't frequent, and Target, which we do shop at on occasion. The Walmart stop was fortuitous not for the slippers, which it they didn't have, but because they had a sale on sleep t-shirts in both our sizes. Our old ones are falling apart and we couldn't find replacements that weren't absurdly expensive. It was also just as well we stopped at Target though they didn't have the slippers we wanted either. We forgot to get the large size tea bags we wanted at Walmart but Target had them. Summer is here so we will be making tea by the gallon for iced tea.

Both stores had traffic controls (designated entry and exit doors, traffic arrows for one way aisles, and employees making sure the number of customers didn't exceed the allowed maximum) and a majority of customers wore masks as did all the employees. I did notice a sign in Target which told customers not handle the merchandise or try anything on. I didn't see such a sign at Walmart. I am at the point though that anything we can't try on we aren't going to buy. I have been burned too many times in the last few years by buying something labeled in my size only to find it didn't fit when I got it home. Target had a sign at the entrance noting items they were short of or even out of. Most of those items were cleaning/disinfecting supplies.

A random thought about the handling of the pandemic: all the advice from the experts fail to take into account human nature and social/economic realities of our lives. In a society/economy when a large majority of people don't even have $400 cash reserve for an emergency, most of us can't afford to be out of work for two weeks much less two months (or longer). Schools and daycares shut down leaving parents scrambling for child care. And many of those parents worked in low income jobs which suddenly were deemed "essential" and faced the likelihood of being terminated if they took off to take care of the kids. And people are social creatures for whom isolation is something akin to torture. Little wonder then that some protested the stay-at-home orders.

Random thought about the effects of the pandemic: I have seen a number of stories about what actions/habits people intend to maintain when the pandemic is over. I will let you look those up if you want to. Thinking about it I realize that we haven't really changed our patterns much at all. We will probably keep wearing some kind of face covering. Given our ages a bad case of the flu would not be a good thing and masks would be as much protection (for ourselves and others) against regular flu as against coronavirus.