Another quiet Sunday. We had virtual church this morning (I posted it in the Stuff I Like section), and We went to the store and got a couple of staples, eggs and so forth, and got three pumpkins for the porch. When Sam was growing up we didn’t carve too many pumpkins, but I am an artist with a sharpie. I remember one year I made particularly fine cat face pumpkins and someone took them and smashed them in the street. I was really disappointed. (More than Sam I think). I haven’t gotten pumpkins for a few years. I decided this year, Since Sam is coming home (Yeeeeeeeeeeee!) I’d get a few. we need to decorate since I am guessing that they will discourage Trick-or-Treating. It’s sad, but yeah I’m not going to encourage a string of virus-y people coming to the door. It’s just one of those things. I’m going to decorate some skulls and maybe make origami bats. This will be the first year I’m not working on Halloween for a long time! I’ll have to write something on that day… maybe another ghost story!

Sam is flying into Chicago next Saturday, and staying overnight with his friend Stu’s folks, then they’ll drive here next Sunday. I’m going to make 3 bean miso chili for them (recipe in recipe section). Sam will be with us until the following Friday, the day before Halloween, then he and Stu are driving back to Olympia. I’m glad he’ll have company. Mom and Dad are going to come by for an outside, socially distanced hello, and then we’ll go out to the farm to see Gary and Sandy and Brian and Jodi and the kids. I hope the weather will cooperate. By this time we’ve usually had at least one snow. I remember trick-or-treating in the snow! Sam has assured us that he will do all the Coronavirus prevention stuff necessary. Wisconsin is a real hotspot right now. Sam is an intelligent man, and I trust him. And I can’t wait to see him! He said he’d help his girlfriend Erica decorate before he goes, and he told me he will vote. Yes! We did some things right bringing that young man up. He is “woke” I think the term is, and he does his civic duty. Nathan and I voted weeks ago, and I like that you can check to see if your ballot has been received. Ours have been. Over to you! Vote vote vote! Whew I can’t wait til it’s all over. Very stressful. I’m tired of it all…

I just looked at the forecast for the week when Sam is going to be here: cool, but not much rain or snow. That’s good!

Well, this is an extremely rambling blog post: sorry for the lack of focus. That kind of says it all for this weekend! I need to sharpen up and work on organizing things. Next week is the first week Nathan will be working from home partly. Two days a week, and he’s chosen Mondays and Tuesdays. I think they’re encouraging it because they’re trying to have less people on the hospital campus (cuts down on risk), and Nathan can work from home, so why not? I’ll be happy. I’ll leave him alone most of the time, except to take him coffee and sandwiches on occasion. I’ll just like knowing he’s around. I kinda like him. LOL

As long as I’m rambling so much, let me recommend an App for your phone, It’s called Audm. It is a streaming service for articles from my favorite magazines and newspapers, like The Atlantic, The New Yorker, Rolling Stone, Wired, but also from periodicals I’m not as familiar with. It has very good narrators read the articles. I like it, because I can set it to play a few articles at night. The Atlantic is my favorite magazine, and they have one of my all time favorite journalists, Ed Yong. Ed Yong mostly writes about medicine and science and society, so for example he’s written a lot about Coronavirus. Last winter I went through a phase when I was reading a lot about microbiology, and I read Ed Yong’s book, “I Contain Multitudes” (which I highly recommend). That was the first thing of his I read, but then I found out he works for The Atlantic, so I got a subscription, and have fallen for its fantastic writing about a variety of subjects.

Ramble, ramble! I’ll leave you with a video of Ed Yong. And I promise to try to gain more focus before I write again!

Here’s Ed Yong talking about microbes.