Covid-19 Journal - Week 5 Begins

Thanks to what Diane is doing over on Bibliophile by the Sea, I've come to realize that our blogs are a useful tool to keep track of how we coped with this period of isolation, something that we can look back on a few years down the road for a reminder or two of what it was like. So, using Diane's basic format, I plan to start off each new week with a summary of what life is like for me in my Houston suburb. 

Virus Stats from Johns Hopkins:

In the last week,

Worldwide cases increased from 1,272,115 to 1,846,963,
United States cases increased from 337,274 to 555,398, and
Texas cases went from 7,231 with 138 deaths to 13,741 with 286 deaths.

Outside:

I was surprised this morning to find that a mini cold front came through the area sometime during the night. It's almost noon as I write this, and the temperature is only 57 degrees. That's a huge drop from the 90 degrees we reached on Saturday. According to the weather app, we got down to 51 early this morning and the high will be 66. I see that we can expect lows of around 48 degrees the next two mornings - and that just seems weird.

The painters showed up early this morning to prepare the outside of the house for a fresh coat of paint, and it was a bit of a jolt to walk out into this sunny and windy surprise of a morning. It most certainly woke me up. 

Reading/Watching/Listening to:

I'm reading about 60% of the number of pages per day that I was reading before all this started, and part of the reason for the drop is that I'm watching more movies and listening to a whole lot more music than I was before. I've even gone back to just reading one book at a time, something I haven't done for years.

I'm about 25% of the way through Simon the Fiddler by Paulette Jiles, a really good piece of historical fiction set in Texas just after the conclusion of the Civil War. Jiles is a wonderful writer and I'm counting on her to help me break my reading slump. Next up for me is The Case of the Negligent Nymph, a throwback read, something I probably read decades ago when I was really into Erle Stanley Gardner's Perry Mason books. It will be interesting to see if the Gardner books pass the test of time. The Jiles book is to be released tomorrow (April 14), and the Gardner book is from 1950.

I've been searching for "literary" movies a lot lately, and I managed to find a few good ones last week with the help of Epix (we are getting a free preview right now that ends on 4/16), Kanopy, Showtime (recorded from a free preview weekend), and Netflix. A Brilliant Young Mind is a British movie about an autistic child who proves to be a mathematical genius but is suffering emotional problems because of the tragic loss of his father in an automobile accident.

The other three movies are all based on books, two of which I read a few years ago.  Sarah's Key was a huge book for Tatiana de Rosnay back in 2007, and it was followed by a movie version in 2010 that does a good job of representing the novel. The concentration camp scenes are sometimes difficult to watch, but in a way, this is a beautiful movie. The Virgin Suicides is based on the 1993 debut novel by Jeffrey Eugenides, an author who writes some really unusual books. The 1999 movie version seems a little dated but that's not a huge

problem because the movie is set in the 1970s. The Best of Enemies is based on Osha Gray Davidson's 2006 book about a racial confrontation in Durham, North Carolina, over school segregation. Hard as this one may be to believe, it is based on a true story - with video of the actual people involved shown as part of the closing credits to prove it. 

Listening To:

I've listened to the occasional bookish podcast during all of this, but it's also been great fun to revisit some of the music I haven't listened to in way too long. I've been spending time with lots of country classics, including music from George Jones, George Strait, Randy Travis, Dwight Yoakam, and Johnny Cash. Roots music. And for me, just about perfect for the times.

In the Kitchen:

Life goes on. The biggest difference in our lives regarding meals is that I'm cooking more of them outside on the grill than before. Part of that is a function of the better weather we've been having, but we're also finding the grilled meals to be a nice change from the kitchen-cooked ones. It's still hit and miss at the local groceries, but I'm finding about 90% of what we're out of when I make my weekly scavenger hunt to refill the pantry and freezers. It's slowly getting better, however, even though I'm still finding it difficult to find our preferred brands of peanut butter, flour, corn meal, etc. - and some cuts of meat seem to have completely disappeared. 

The Outside World:

No matter that we are all trying to keep our heads down right now in hopes that we are helping the situation, the outside world keeps intruding. We discovered a plumbing problem late Friday night that had to be taken care of on Saturday morning, meaning that a masked plumber spent a couple of hours with us. And today, the painter we contracted with prior to the shutdown began work on the outside of the house - with minimal contact to all. Last week, I also had to pick up the license plates for the car I bought in early March, meaning a trip to the dealer where I had to wait for 15 minutes for someone to figure out where they put them. 

The best laid plans...