2020 Life Logs, Day 133: Enjoying a Beautiful Spring Day
Date: Wednesday, May 13, 2020
Weather: Sunny, Cape Cod Blue Sky Day; High 53, Low 40 degrees F
Location: At Home in The Cottage, East Falmouth, MA
Today was one of those cloudless, Cape Cod blue sky days. No matter what the temperature, I love those days, but we haven’t seen many of them recently. Today was a treat. It was still windy and not super warm, but a light jacket was all that was needed. However, I’m not ready to put my winter coat away. When I get up at 6 am for a puppy potty break, it is cold outside and the winter coat feels just right before the sun has time to warm things up. I spent my morning going to the Falmouth Hospital to get the x-ray and blood test my Primary Care ordered on Monday. The blood test has nothing to do with my back issue, but he felt that since I had to go to the hospital for the x-ray, I might as well get my mid-year blood test at the same time. The hospital experience was okay, just a bit disconcerting. As you enter, your temperature is taken and then you have to walk past a security guard before you get to the registration desk. It was taped off with yellow police tape so you couldn’t get too close. Procedures are mainstreamed and the blood test taken almost immediately. I only had to wait five minutes for the x-ray. They don’t want people undressing to get gowns on, so you just push clothing with snaps and zippers up or down to get them out of the x-ray area. Fast and easy and out of there! On the way home, I stopped by the drug store drive-up window to pick up the prescription for prednisone that my doctor wants me to take. I resist taking medications, but he got me to agree to do this for 10 days to try and relieve the inflammation. And when I got home, I got a call from a third physical therapy possibility. The doctor had told me to contact whomever I wanted, but he evidently made a referral for me as well, and I decided to go with his choice. My online assessment will scheduled and the online therapy sessions will begin next week. In the meantime, I continue to walk and do the sciatica stretches and use those ice packs. This morning was my toughest morning yet, but magically in the afternoon, I was much better. Could the prednisone I took at 11 am work that fast? Feeling like everything that can be done is being done, I put the health issue out of mind and turned to other interests.
In the afternoon, I listened to part of webinar about preserving food hosted by my favorite garden expert, Stacy Murphy. If I heard her right, something like 40 per cent of the food we all buy at the grocery store is never eaten. We either don’t get it cooked before it goes bad or we fix the food and forget to eat the leftovers. Certainly happens to me each week. I hope I don’t waste 40 per cent, but she had a great suggestion to help keep track of what’s in your fridge. She is suggesting that every Sunday when you are doing meal planning for the week (something else she really believes in) you take everything out of your refrigerator and assess what needs to be eaten right away so that can be factored into your weekly plan. If you have children, she believes they should be a part of this process, so you use the kids to empty the fridge and then, with oversight, they put things back in. That way, everyone knows where things are. She suggests that if there are greens that going bad that you dehydrate them to snack on over time. Onions and peppers can be cut up and put in the freezer and other veggies can be put in jars and fermented. I’m going to give this Sunday clean-out and meal planning a try and see if I can reduce the amount of food I throw out. I was doing some baking during this webinar to use up the bananas that were getting a bit too ripe, so I felt good about that. I was then going to watch the Woods Hole Research Center Wednesday afternoon webinar that Heather hosts, but when I went to the Zoom site I was reminded that the program is NEXT Wednesday. I missed the fact that the webinars are now going to be every other week. The program on meltdown and unruly tropical storms is next Wednesday, May 20. Go to https://whrc.org/spring-series/ to sign up for the WHRC webinars. But since there was not a new one today, it gave me the opportunity to watch one of the past webinars that I tried to watch a couple of weeks ago when the Goldpebbles were here. I missed much of it and really wanted the information as it was a program on how our backyard choices impact the environment. It was a very informative webinar and I spent time checking out the National Wildlife Foundation’s Native Plant Finder that was referenced in the webinar. Fantastic tool.
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Then, finally, I got outside with Shadow to do an assessment of my yard. Actually, I have very little yard as The Cottage is surrounded on three sides with woods. My backyard and is mostly moss up to the edge of the woods. On the roadside, there is a narrow strip of moss and then woods. And on the water side there is grassy area just outside the back door that leads into the woods. The forest floor on that side is covered with vinca and lily of the valley dotted right now with grape hyacinth and jonquils. There were daffodils earlier and there will be tulips soon if the rabbits don’t eat them all. As you walk down the hill toward the water on the little path Ollie made for me, you come to the marsh and a strip of land jutting out of the forest and into the water that the Goldpebbles call Cottage Point. Shadow and I spent a long time on Cottage Point today and he explored the marsh and tested the water with his paws. He decided not to go for a swim, maybe because his test told him the water is just still too cold. Back to assessing the yard. I definitely have mostly woods with small areas in front for my raised beds. If I add ornamental plants outside the raised beds, I will make sure they are natives from this point forward. We recently added the red raspberries which are most likely native to Europe, but we’ll pretend ours are native North American red raspberries! Besides, they are not ornamentals. They are edibles. Shadow and I then came back to the front porch where I added potting soil to yogurt containers that I will fill with tomato seedings that are outgrowing their seed starter trays. I hope to do a little more outdoor gardening tomorrow.
I ended my day with another webinar. This was a Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) Ocean Encounters program on sharks. Last week I watched their program on shipwrecks and I have really enjoyed both. If you are interested in watching past webinars or signing up for upcoming ones, go to https://www.whoi.edu/ocean-encounters/ .
Speaking of ocean encounters, Windbird entered the Hudson River on Monday, sailed past the Statue of Liberty, went up the East River, and docked at her new home on City Island in the Bronx. Sam and Dawn chose this location because as they sail out from their dock, they are immediately in the Long Island Sound and can easily enjoy the days sailing when Sam is not flying. They chose to live in New York City before COVID times, as Sam would be close to the Delta Airlines bases at JFK and LaGuardia. Who knows how much he will get to fly in the next year, so he might have more summer and fall days sailing than flying. They arrived in NYC on Monday and Sam immediately took a bus to the airport and flew back to Florida to pick up their truck. He planned to leave Florida last evening and head north. I’ll be anxious to hear that he made it back to the city safely for the second time in four days.
