Weekly update - February 3, 2023

• First up, J. found the seed box! It was in the shed all along. I did look in there, but evidently I didn't look carefully enough. I'm going to blame the weather. It was dang cold to be out poking around the shed.
• The weather. I'm tired of cold. Today barely got above zero, but there was a wicked wind chill. We are supposed to get warmer tomorrow and the rest of the week. I'm looking forward to it.
• There will probably be mud. I'm not looking forward to that.
• I was supposed to take a knitting class tomorrow to learn to knit brioche, but it was cancelled due to low enrollment. Bah.
• The younger people all cleaned up the downstairs today... even dusting and vacuuming. It involved much very long music. That is a trade-off I'm more than willing to make.
• Bristol's leg is slowly healing. I was worried it was becoming necrotic, so sent a photo to the vet. It is not and she thinks the leg is healing well. I cannot tell you how relieved I am.
• Because I only have a limited number of standing wraps that I am using to wrap Bristol's leg and because I'm changing the bandage every day, my laundry has never been so caught up for so long. 
• P. is away grooming at a horse show again this week so that means we have Midnight. Midnight is a pathetic cat when P. is not around.
• At teatime we are reading Doomsday Book by Connie Willis. It is one of her time travelling historian books and this time there is a dual storyline with one person in the Middle Ages during the plague with a new pandemic happening in the current timeline. The whole series is excellent and I highly recommend them. But here is what I'm finding interesting this time around. It was published in 1992, so we'll before Covid. In the recent past of the current storyline in the book was a worldwide pandemic. It feels a little prescient. But then I read this bit this afternoon:

[Some background... Oxford has just been put in quarantine because someone has entered the hospital with an unknown virus. Because of the past pandemic, Britain has certain lock down protocols in place. The first speaker is an American visiting Oxford who is caught in the quarantine.]

" 'Explain! Perhaps you'd like to explain it to me, too. I'm not used to having my civil liberties taken away like this. In America, nobody would dream of telling you where you can and can't go.'

And over thirty million Americans died during the Pandemic as a result of that sort of thinking, he [the director of the history department at Balliol] thought." p. 74

There were some quiet chuckles at the very close to the bone generalization about Americans when I read that bit. It really is a very good book which I highly recommend.

• I'm now halfway through another page turner. (It's been a good year for books so far. The book is Project Hail Mary which is a space adventure. It's probably a little more on the sci-fi end of things than I usually read, but it is a well written and compelling story so far. I'll let you know if it stays that way to the end. 

Since I do have a book I'm impatient to get back to, I'm going to end here and get back to reading.