by Judy Handley | Sep 25, 2021 | 2021 Life Logs |
2021 Life Logs, Day 268: Soccer, Wampanoag Celebration, Kid Sitting
Date: Saturday, September 25, 2021
Weather: Mostly Cloudy with Some Rain; High Temp 71, Low Temp 62 degrees F
Location: At Home in The Cottage, East Falmouth, MA
I need to start with a correction to last night’s log. In the first paragraph I announced that Jonah’s PCR test came back positive and I meant to say negative. He does NOT have Covid.
Ollie played in his first soccer game of the fall season this morning. He missed the first game last Saturday as he was camping with his Scout troop, but he made up for it today by playing a great game.
He switched back and forth between being goalie and center forward and gave his best effort in both positions. His team won and he scored the last goal of the game. He was a happy kiddo.
After the soccer game, we went to Heather and Jed’s to regroup. Heather and Jed were going to meet friends at my house and go kayaking for the afternoon while Sam, Jonah, Ollie, and I were going to Highfield Hall for a Wampanoag Celebration and then come home for an afternoon of play. The threat of rain was constant, but up to this point in the day we had just had a few sprinkles here and there. So, on we went. We grabbed a lunch for Jonah as he was not anxious to try any of the Native American food being served at the celebration, but Sam loved the venison stew served over roasted potatoes and Ollie loved the Quahog chowder. I ate a little of both and found both to be delicious. 
Jonah and Ollie made ring and stick toys that all three boys enjoyed. Then Jonah and Ollie decided they each wanted to make a Quahog shell pendant necklace. Quahog is the Native American name for a hard-shelled clam. The boys had to sand the edges of the shell they chose by wetting it with water and rubbing it on a rock. No sandpaper. 
Then they had to drill a hole in the shell with a stick and string drill. Jonah commented that he was sure glad we have electric drills these days. The process took a while, but both boys were proud of the necklaces.
All too soon it was time to get home as Jonah and Sam both had friends coming over for an afternoon playdate. We left Highfield just in time as it started to rain as we got in the car to leave. It rained off and on for the remainder of the afternoon, but just enough at one time to barely keep things outdoors a bit wet. Heather reported that they didn’t have rain on their kayak adventure or maybe they were having so much fun they didn’t notice. They had a wonderful time and while paddling in a hidden cove, they discovered a Great Blue Heron hide out. There were about a half dozen herons and some of them were roosting in a tree. Not a sight you see just every day.
by Judy Handley | Sep 24, 2021 | 2021 Life Logs |
2021 Life Logs, Day 267: Good News, Good News, Good News
Date: Friday, September 24, 2021
Weather: Mostly Cloudy, Some Sun, Some Rain; High Temp 76, Low Temp 62 degrees F
Location: At Home in The Cottage, East Falmouth, MA
Good news all around. Jonah’s PCR test came back positive, so he does not have Covid. The rapid test was just a false positive. Sam’s blood test results came back showing he does not have Lyme disease. And I heard from Justin this morning and he was so excited that they now have reliable electricity. Yay! Yay! And Yay! Heather invited me over for dinner for an end of a tough week collective exhale. Ahhhhhhhhh. And this is only the second week of school. It is inevitable that there are going to be more Covid exposures, so I guess we just have to get used to yet another new norm.
The news about electricity at Finca Maravilla was another piece of wonderful news. Even before Hurricane Maria in September of 2017, Justin and Jo didn’t have totally reliable electricity. But since Maria, it has been a constant uphill battle. First, they had no electricity at all for months. Then when the electricity was restored to the homes in their area, they still did not have full service. Eventually it was determined that there was a problem between the road and their home. Finally, in the last two weeks, that problem has been found and there is now enough light to read by at night and to run two major appliances at one time. As Justin said, “Welcome back to the ‘first’ world.”
by Judy Handley | Sep 23, 2021 | 2021 Life Logs |
2021 Life Logs, Day 266: Covid Frustrations
Date: Thursday, September 23, 2021
Weather: Mostly Cloudy; High Temp 77, Low Temp 70 degrees F
Location: At Home in The Cottage, East Falmouth, MA
I waited all day to hear the results of Sam’s blood test that will determine whether or not he has Lyme disease. But when I got the call from Heather, it was not about Sam’s blood test. It was about the Covid positive result from Jonah’s Covid rapid test. The home rapid test says he has Covid, but that led to a PCR test. We will not know the result of that until tomorrow sometime. In the meantime, we are all waiting and hoping that the rapid test gave a false positive. Heather and Jed are scrambling to figure out how to deal with this. Since Jonah was exposed at school on Monday, Ollie has moved out of their shared bedroom to sleep downstairs. They thought about moving Ollie, who is too young to be vaccinated, outside to sleep in a tent tonight. But after going and back and forth, they are just going to continue their current protocols, masking in the house, eating outside, and distancing as much as possible, until they get the conclusive report tomorrow. They also had to decide whether to send Ollie and Sam to school tomorrow. School policy allows that but neither boy feels right about going to school and possibly infecting more people. All three boys are scared, but especially Jonah. And as Heather said, what parent is not going to hug their crying child who just got a positive Covid test. Oh, the frustrations of this pandemic for parents (and grandparents). Jonah has been vaccinated, so if he does have Covid, we can only hope it will be a mild case and that no one else in the family will get it.
On a happier note, I met Jane Woodin for lunch in the outside courtyard at the Senior Center and then we went to the beach for the afternoon. There was not a lot of sunshine and it was windy, but it was warm and beautiful. Very relaxing. And again, no gardening. Maybe tomorrow.
by Judy Handley | Sep 22, 2021 | 2021 Life Logs |
2021 Life Logs, Day 265: It’s Officially Fall
Date: Wednesday, September 22, 2021
Weather: Mix of Sun and Clouds; High Temp 76, Low Temp 68 degrees F
Location: At Home in The Cottage, East Falmouth, MA
Tweet from the National Weather Service: “It’s officially Fall!!! The Fall/Autumnal Equinox was today at 3:20pm EDT. This marks the time when the day-to-night line, called the terminator, is perfectly vertical from pole to pole and the sun is directly over the equator.” There you have it. Now we just have to wait for Winter Solstice for the days to begin getting longer once again.
My celebration of the equinox began with a walk in the woods with my friend Olga and Shadow. Then mid-afternoon, I tuned into a Woodwell Climate Research Center webinar entitled “Internalizing risk: What 1.5 degrees C (and beyond) looks like.” I found each of the four panel members engaging and the moderator was fabulous. (Disclosure—The moderator was my daughter Heather, and I am definitely not biased.) Seriously, I learned so much. Alison Smart from Probable Futures shared their world map that depicts temperature rises that are predicted if the average world temperature rises 1.5 degrees C or more. The hope is that planners can use this tool to make informed decisions. A woman named Wendy Cromwell from Wellington Management talked about how her company is partnering with Woodwell to learn more about climate change and are then using this information to help the financial world to make sustainable investments. Helen Adams, head of Science Engagement for COP26 (Conference of the Parties), helped us look forward to the next major UN climate change conference. The meeting in November of this year will be the 26th meeting of this group of nations, thus called COP26. The final member of the panel was Christopher Schwalm, Risk Program Director at Woodwell. The next webinar takes place in two weeks on October 6 and is entitled, “Tipping Points: Is There a Point of No Return?” If you are interested, you can go to Woodwellclimate.org to learn more.
Staying in the learning mode, tonight I tuned into another Zoom sponsored by libraries across the state in collaboration with the Library of Congress and the National Book Festival 2021. This included a recorded video of an interview with Isabel Wilkerson discussing her book, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents. The following conversation was facilitated by civil rights advocate Byron Rushing and Professor Roopika Risam. I was so glad I participated in this. I am not quite finished reading the book, but I am hoping to find a local group that would like to get together to have our own conversation about this book.
In between all of this, I did a little bit of gardening. Little bit by little bit, I’ll get it done. But I am taking tomorrow off and going to the beach!
by Judy Handley | Sep 21, 2021 | 2021 Life Logs |
2021 Life Logs, Day 264: Scattered
Date: Tuesday, September 21, 2021
Weather: Another Beautiful Day; High Temp 75, Low Temp 66 degrees F
Location: At Home in The Cottage, East Falmouth, MA
Today was supposed to be all about gardening, and gardening did get done, but the day ended up a bit scattered. Not that scattered is bad, but the amount of gardening that needed to be done is still on the ‘to do’ list. A member of my book club named Lori, along with her husband John, came over as planned at 10:30 am. We spent almost two hours picking each other’s brain to get at our best tips for gardening. I think Lori has always grown perennials in her yard, but John started vegetable gardening in retirement and is full of enthusiasm. I saw the beginnings of John’s raised beds in April at one of our book club meetings, but now I want to return to see the end result of this summer’s bounty. It is great to find people who have the same interest in gardening that I do, and I look forward to more sharing.
After Lori and John left, I ate lunch and then Shadow and I went outside where I worked on cleaning up the raised beds while Shadow watched. I had hoped to get all three beds cleaned out and ready for fall planting. I did send a text to Heather offering to take Jonah to soccer practice if needed. The message that I got back was not that they needed me to take Jonah to soccer practice, but rather that he would probably not be going because they had been contacted to tell them that he had been exposed to someone with Covid today at school. So now they are dealing with trying to get to the cause of Sam’s ankle problem and figuring out how to deal with Jonah’s exposure. Plus yesterday at recess and split his ‘. Then he hit his lip on his bike handlebars today and resplit it. It is so swollen he can’t eat. Ugh. Nothing I can do about that, however, or about Sam’s ankle, but it did bring up the fact that none of us had purchased any Covid rapid tests. And as I read in the New York Times yesterday, there are very few rapid tests available for purchase in the whole country. I dropped gardening and started a hunt for rapid tests which took the rest of the afternoon. But I was successful in finding 6 test kits. There were none available in Falmouth or Hyannis, at least not that I could find, but I did find the 6 in Mashpee. When I got home, I talked to my sister in North Carolina and found that two people in her assisted living facility have Covid and she is in lockdown. Plus, my nephew’s wife found out today that she has Covid and other family members have been exposed. All have been vaccinated, but the Delta variant doesn’t seem to care. I am so disappointed that we are back to this point again.
When I got home from my Covid rapid test search, I took Shadow for his long walk of the day, fixed dinner, and watched a Woods Hole Oceanographic (WHOI) webinar on the ocean twilight zone and the role it plays in climate change. It was a great conversation. Something the President of WHOI, Peter de Menocal said really stuck with me. “Science isn’t completed until it is communicated.” And tonight the panel did a great job of communicating the importance of the ocean in each of our lives. It was pointed out that this is UN Climate Week, and we got to see some of the light show being projected on the UN building each night this week. 
A deep-sea luminescent creature from the twilight zone called a siphonophore is a crucial agent of carbon removal from the atmosphere. Its beautiful dance is what is being projected. Really beautiful.
Last, but not least, I labeled each of the jars of marinara sauce that are now ready to be delivered to Heather and Jed’s. 
Like I said, it was a scattered day from new gardening friends to tomatoes to Covid issues to siphonophores.
by Judy Handley | Sep 20, 2021 | 2021 Life Logs |
2021 Life Logs, Day 263: Happy Birthday to Shadow
Date: Monday, September 20, 2021
Weather: Beautiful Day; High Temp 72, Low Temp 51 degrees F
Location: At Home in The Cottage, East Falmouth, MA
Tonight we celebrate the full September Harvest Moon AND Sir Shadow’s second birthday. His present form me was a trip to the Pampered Paws ‘dog spa’ to get shampooed and groomed. I dropped him off just after 9 am and headed on across the bridge to the world on the other side. When you live on Cape Cod, crossing one of the two bridges to mainland Massachusetts truly feels to me like entering another reality. I drove an hour north to Newbridge on the Charles in Dedham for a short visit with friends Helaine and Alan Kanegsberg. We spent an hour catching up on life. The biggest revelation for me was that their only grandchild, Torston, is a senior in high school. Torston lives in Reno, Nevada, and I can remember when Alan and Helaine used to call him on Skype to read books together when he was in early elementary school. Time surely does pass quickly.
After visiting for an hour with the Kanegsbergs, I drove to a different part of Dedham to have lunch with my niece Candi. That was the main reason for my trip today. I wanted to visit with Candi and deliver a gift for her upcoming grandchild. Her daughter Amy is due to have a little boy in October. We ate at a place called CAVA that neither of us had ever heard of and it was great. It is a casual fast food chain restaurant serving Mediterranean food. I got a Greek salad with falafels and Candi got the same with chicken. It was so yummy.
I had planned to do some shopping, but just as we were getting up to leave, I got the text saying Shadow was ready to go. So I headed back to the Cape to pick him up and spend some time walking and playing with him. Karen Baranowski came over to deliver some steamers that Peter had bought and wanted to share. Lucky me. And I got Karen to take some birthday photos of me and my Shadow. Then I took more photos while we were playing fetch. He runs so hard and fast that his tongue is always hanging out when he plays. Very cute. Happy birthday to that furry, rambunctious, wild two-year old that I share my life with these days. Don’t know what I’d do without him.
I am listening to the last canner load of marinara sauce jiggling away in the pressure canner. I am going to end up with 57 pints from the 120 pounds of tomatoes. I have one more batch of tomatoes in the garden that are just about ready to pick and process. Then that will be the end of tomato processing for this year. Tomorrow is reserved as gardening day. I have tried to find time to plant arugula and kale for the fall for weeks. Tomorrow is the day!
He switched back and forth between being goalie and center forward and gave his best effort in both positions. His team won and he scored the last goal of the game. He was a happy kiddo.
Jonah and Ollie made ring and stick toys that all three boys enjoyed. Then Jonah and Ollie decided they each wanted to make a Quahog shell pendant necklace. Quahog is the Native American name for a hard-shelled clam. The boys had to sand the edges of the shell they chose by wetting it with water and rubbing it on a rock. No sandpaper. 
Then they had to drill a hole in the shell with a stick and string drill. Jonah commented that he was sure glad we have electric drills these days. The process took a while, but both boys were proud of the necklaces.
