I’ve been pretty quiet in this space – missing Show Us Your Books and Friday Five check-ins like it’s my job – so wanted to surface momentarily. I am, in fact, alive and kicking and mostly keeping head above water.

(Lots of swimming metaphors there.)

Michigan is experiencing a massive surge in Covid cases so our governor – much hated by the militia and TRUMPERS – is inching us slowly closer to a second lockdown. For the next three weeks we’re on a “pause” to try to get the situation in hand. No indoor dining, schools all at remote, work from home, limited gatherings. It throws our Thanksgiving plans into uncertainty but they were small to begin with – if you were doing a massive gathering during a pandemic maybe you needed to think twice anyway. It is what it is. Maybe if we’d all nut up and wear our masks and quit acting like this GLOBAL pandemic is a liberal hoax to control your toilet paper we could see numbers going down instead of up.

We also had high winds yesterday- the legendary ‘gales of November’ – and we lost a huge chunk of our aged behemoth willow tree. It fell in the neighboring yard and impaled itself about six inches into their immaculate sod but blessedly missed power lines by a whisper. With much effort Brandon and I and the neighbor managed to wrestle it back over the lot line and we’ll just figure out what to do with it from here. And figure out how much I will have to spend in the unlikely event that I can coax some hapless tree service out to prune or remove the standing remainder of the death trap.

One more full week of work and then a short holiday week. I am planning to be back here for Friday Five unless something untoward transpires or I get too tired. In the meantime let’s all swim for shore. (Ugh with the metaphors but I had to bring it home.)

Happy Monday!