Frank has been really busy with work and his business. I feel like I don't see him much. Theoretically, he works from home on Mondays, Thursdays, and Fridays, but it seems like he ends up going into the office or to solve problems at restaurants pretty often. It's good for him to be busy, though, and I appreciate how hard he works.
Seth and I have continued our regular schedule. It's been harder to get him going in the mornings lately...getting through the exercise / breakfast / shower routine takes a lot of nudging from me and he's been starting on his school work later than usual a lot of days this week. He still gets all his work done, though. A few days ago they announced that schools will remain closed and distance learning will continue for the remainder of the school year, so this will be our routine until the last day of the school year. I'm still not sure what day that will be exactly, but I think it will be around June 12th.
We've had a lot of rain and cloudy days this week and this weekend is going to be cold, with record lows, but yesterday was sunny, warm, and beautiful. We had Seth mow the front lawn since there probably won't be a chance to do that again for a while...more rain in the forecast. (He's getting better at it, too!) We went on a walk on Monday evening but haven't been out much otherwise. Hopefully the weather will cooperate more next week, and we'll get out more.
Last Friday I watched a lot of the online BYU Women's Conference, and it was really good. I actually want to listen to a lot of those talks again. Very uplifting!!
Saturday was a pretty busy day; I actually had some things to do for both of my callings. For music, I contacted a couple of the choir directors to work out who was going to be in charge for the next couple of months (currently that just means they choose a song to feature on the choir website, although there's a chance they may actually be leading a song that month if we get to resume church meetings). For the Primary activities, I started going through all the suggested activities the church website lists to see which ones could be used (or adapted) in a virtual setting. I also came up with a few of my own ideas. We are thinking that if church meetings and activities can't resume this summer that we will start doing at least one virtual activity each month (maybe more). Besides working on church callings, I practiced ukulele, cleaned the kitchen floor, and supervised Seth while he mowed both the front and back lawns (at different times, since the battery has to have time to recharge). On Saturday Frank and I also went to the store in search of a few things; we were mostly successful although Clorox wipes are nowhere to be found. (Not too surprising.) I use those pretty regularly for cleaning around the house so I always have them on hand, but we're starting to run out since they haven't been seen on store shelves since mid-March. I understand that a lot of people ran out and bought them when the pandemic broke out, but I don't understand why they haven't been able to replenish the supply since then. (I can say that about a lot of other things, too.) We also tried to recycle our printer ink cartridges but no one is taking them right now so we ended up throwing them out.
On Sunday our ward had a short virtual testimony meeting (they asked for volunteers ahead of time). It was really nice! Then Seth had a virtual Sunday School class right after that. Other than that, we didn't have any other meetings but Frank and I did participate in a "birthday parade" for one of the girls in our ward who was turning 18 (she stood in her front yard and we all drove by her house and waved and called out greetings). She is one of the young women in our ward who is graduating this year; she is also my friend Rebekah's daughter so I got to see Rebekah briefly too. There was a pretty long line of cars, some decorated with balloons and signs, and it was fun to see other members of our ward as they drove by (we had to loop around, since her street ends in a dead end). The parade was a surprise, apparently, and afterwards I got text messages from both the birthday girl and Rebekah thanking us for coming. The birthday girl said "I was so surprised, and I have never felt more loved!".
The rest of the week has been business as usual, with not much to tell you about. Seth had a virtual presidency meeting on Tuesday evening so they could plan some more activities and last night for their activity they played HORSE "trashketball" which is like the regular basketball game except each one had wadded up paper for balls and they were trying to throw them into a trashcan.
I have continued to read the book chat book and have made some progress on my other project although not as much as I should have because I got kind of involved with watching Call the Midwife, so I spent more time on Netflix than I usually do. As a family, we continued our Marvel Movie Marathon by watching Avengers: Age of Ultron, Ant Man, and Captain America: Civil War. That means we've watched 13 of the 23 movies so we're over the half way mark now. Actually, Seth and I watched that last one without Frank because Frank was too busy to watch it with us (he's seen it before, though).
As usual, Seth has already finished his school work for the day (Fridays are always a lighter workload). Frank is doing some work for a client and a while ago I took him something that he forgot; I noticed that my gas tank is down to about a quarter of a tank so I need to fill it soon. However, the last time I filled my gas tank was on March 14th...just shows how few places I've gone in the last few months!
It's encouraging that some of the temples are going to open next week, even if it's very limited (and none of them are anywhere near us). It's a start, right? It looks like Maryland is on track to start phase 1 of its 3 phase reopening plan in another week or two. The number of people hospitalized is starting to go down every day, which is encouraging. The number of cases still goes up every day (by a lot) but I'm sure a lot of that is because more testing is available. Deaths seem to be slowing down a bit. Today Maryland is up to 30,485 confirmed cases with 1,453 deaths. Frederick County has 1,182 cases. Thankfully, we are healthy and doing just fine.
This week was teacher appreciation week. Usually at Seth's school they provide meals for the teachers, encourage the children to write notes of appreciation, and collect donations for a gift (one year they got a massage chair for the teacher's lounge). This year they couldn't do most of that, but they asked us to send in a photo or do a short video clip each day, with a theme for each day. We forgot to do most of them, but I remembered two days so here are the photos I took of Seth. For the first one they were supposed to hold up a book that they've been reading. For the second one they were supposed to be holding wildflowers or standing next to wildflowers:
Here's a couple of other photos I took this week. My iris plant in the front yard bloomed this week--just in time for a possible freeze tonight :(
More wildflowers we saw on one of our walks:
Cinco de Mayo fare (sour cream enchiladas with tomato & guacamole):
And finally, I took these photos from the Walmart parking lot on Wednesday because I thought the sky looked really cool (although stormy); the pictures don't do it justice:
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