Peacock Flock Take II: Just Some Mother Rambling

Health care workers at a nursing home around the corner What day is it?  For me it was just a really hard day. Yep, I said it. These are difficult days... And Tuesday of this week was especially difficult. ~Days full of questions. ~Days full of uncertainty. ~Days where it's difficult to find things to busy our time and minds. ~Days full of running interference between children who have cabin fever. ~Days full of trying to figure out new learning systems for these kids. ~Days full of nagging your children to make sure they have gotten their school work done, and are taking care of themselves. ~Days full of stress and loneliness. ~Days that run together. One of the things that made Tuesday more difficult for me is the fact that I can see many who are NOT heeding the government warnings about social distancing. I take my dogs out for a walk - BY MYSELF. I see groups (of no less than 15) gathering at the track for clearly organized workouts. I see smaller groups at ...

Liquid hand soap that is. It's something I have wanted to try for a while. We happened to have some bar soap scraps laying around so I finally googled a "few" how-to instructions on it so that Thing #2 & I could get to work on our own! First we had to grate the bar soap scraps I had. I had a mixture of soap types & since I wasn't really sure if it would actually work I didn't worry too much about what kind of soap was going into the mix. Thing #2 picked out some essential oils to give it some fragrance. (I didn't micromanage her here; I think she picked grapefruit & orange for our first batch.) The recipe I used calls for 1 Tablespoon soap shavings to 16 ounces of water. We put the shavings, the water & essential oil into a small pot on the simmer burner set to low. The shavings will eventually (be patient, it takes a bit longer than I thought it would) melt into the water creating the soap liquid. I was a little w...

The view of the mountains from her window at Westfall  3/21/2020 Well, it wasn't really said like that... So how is this COVID-19 thing affecting our adult students. I don't have specifics on ALL the Universities across our great country, but I do know that MOST of them are approaching things in a very similar way. Our windshield the morning of her move out Our oldest attends school at Colorado State University (#gorams). We have a nephew & niece at other colleges; all 3 of them are in different states. They are all doing school online. Our daughter WAS living in a dorm at CSU. As you can imagine these dorms run a very high risk of becoming one of these "hot spots" for viral spread. I can also imagine that even if many of the cases were mild; having a large volume of sick kids, professors and other employees would probably affect their semester more than moving out & moving the classes online. The move out process at CSU was very organized....

Well, here we are. A life I, for one, never thought I would see in my lifetime, or my kids' lifetimes. Quarantines, Shelter-in-place Orders, no schools open, no gyms open, college students scrambling to move out of their dorms, classes online for the kids, no vaccine, no immunity, fear, unknown, loneliness... I could go on. But first, let me start... Just a few short weeks ago Americans were hearing the warnings, but really not thinking that they applied to us. We were washing our hands more, using more hand sanitizer, watching the news, but we definitely weren't social distancing. No, not at all. We were still having our fundraisers, kids were still in school and then fast forward just one week. The week of March 9th hit. In a week & a half our lives have changed drastically. We started to take the few, isolated cases we did have in America seriously. But still... We thought, "we need to protect the elderly & immune-compromised, but for the rest of us it...