May 4

Well, it is cloudy with bouts of misty rain. I don't think the temperature broke 60F. The new plants are doing well but haven't been transplanted yet. We should have sun tomorrow so I will wait a day.

We got all our shopping done over the last two days. It is too taxing to put it all on one day especially when one of those days means going to our local big box (but not Wal-Mart or Target) store. We finally got back to our favorite little shop that sells loose tea, coffee, spices, nuts and grains. They had been shut down completely for part of the pandemic. Then to local health department kept them closed because they were self-serve. They managed to do a custom order and curb-side delivery business. Things have changed though. They require masks, ask all customers to wash their hands and wear plastic food service gloves, and have cut hours down. But it was nice to go back there again.

An interesting theme has arisen in the new/talk shows: what if we never reach "herd immunity?" This piece in the New York Times covers the issue nicely. I wasn't surprised by any of it just that it took so long for the possibility to sink into the minds of journalists, epidemiologists and such. Or perhaps it took so long because they didn't want to throw cold water on all the many people who so want to get back to the old normal they long for. About this time last year I wondered if we could really vaccinate our way out of this mess. After all we have a vigorous vaccine skeptic crowd and even for the yearly flu vaccines only about 40-50% of us get the shot in spite of vigorous ads urging us to do so. Then the variants started popping up like zits on a teens face--a new one every time you checked the news. The vaccines finally came to great fanfare and everyone swooned at the blistering pace the companies were going to turn out doses--40 million by the end of December (as reported in early November). Oh, wonderful--and we have a population of 300+million here in the U.S. alone. I figured then that most of the people who wanted to take the "jab(s)" would finally be getting them by June  or July at the earliest. We will be learning to live with this virus and its mutated offspring for a good long while.