April 26

We have a lovely, sunny Monday for the last week of April. Damn! the year is almost one quarter gone. It is still a bit too cool to do a lot outside but I got out anyway. I loosened the soil around the roses and added a bit of fertilizer. Clipped the dead stalks of lavender and a couple of the longer ones just above the new growth at the bottom. The next two weeks are supposed to be warm with the lowest daytime temperature predicted to be high 50s. Otherwise 60s and 70s with an 80 in the mix. I am thinking about when to put in seeds. Tomorrow is supposed to be warmer than today and I hope to get into the shed and get it cleaned out so I can find things again.

Otherwise I finished the penguin table topper. Also put in a couple of rounds on the crochet table topper--the one I had to completely unravel a couple of months ago. It is doing nicely now and I am well beyond the place where it all went wrong before. I made a couple of notes on the pattern in case I ever get the ambition to make another. It was easy to make the notes since the pattern is on Kindle.

I haven't had much to say about most of the news. It is incredibly repetitive. We have been turning to BBC for some of the news that "escapes" the notice of our news media. However, this is a NY Times story covering what we had already seen on BBC. India provides a cautionary tale for those who think COVID is conquered. The BBC this morning noted that India has a major new variant which is both more communicable and more deadly. I just checked the stats for my state and they say that the case numbers are going down and nearly 2 million residents have had at least one shot. I don't know how many, like us, had the single shot Johnson&Johnson before the pause which has now been reversed.

I saw a news story about this a couple of days ago but this Crooks&Liars piece goes into more detail. I saw a bit of this "Medical Examiner's" testimony during the Chauvin trial and couldn't believe how inept the man was. After the prosecution's medical experts had already explicitly stated that the determining factor in George Floyd's death was Chauvin's knee on his neck and back while handcuffed face down on the pavement. Evidently the state is reviewing all his past reports.